hundred years ago which I used to study for hours. (Mysteriously, it bore in one corner in an ancient hand Uncle Martin’s name — “Fortisquince”.) Because of this interest of mine, my mother arranged for Uncle Martin to send me a map of London and so one day a huge parcel arrived: a vast and fascinatingly detailed map which had been published in twenty-two enormous sheets just the year after I was born.
I pored over it for hours, marvelling at the vastness of London. It became a city of the imagination to me rather than a real place, and my desire to read the hundreds of street-names spurred me on to learn my letters. Soon I devoured DeFoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Strype’s edition of Stow’s Survey of London and followed them on the map, fascinated by the changes I could discern taking place between the different periods. By this means I came to “know” the metropolis and believed I could find my way around at least its central districts.
I suppose I became what is called a queer child. I remember looking out of window at night and thinking how strange it all was, that the trees were just there and the houses, and the stars and the moon above them, and strangest of all that I was there and studying them. I knew God was looking down at me for Bissett and my mother had told me so.
My nurse had told me how if I was good I would go to Heaven for ever and ever and if I was bad I would go to Hell. Once as I lay in bed I tried to imagine “for ever and ever”. I perceived a vast gulph into which I was falling and falling and falling for it had no bottom to it, and the imagination of it made my hair prickle and my heart began to pound for everything I knew — my mother, my nurse, the village — became 30 THE
HUFFAMS
tiny and meaningless and far-away as I plunged on and on into this endless crevice —
until at last I was able to force myself to think of something else.
I was terrified — as I suppose all children are — of things being random and arbitrary.
I wanted everything to have a purpose, to be part of a pattern. It seemed to me that if I behaved unjustly I denied the pattern and by creating something ugly and meaningless, forfeited the right to judge that something unjust had been perpetrated against myself and, even more important, the right to expect that there was any justice or design in the world. I wanted my life to involve the gradual unfolding of a design, and whether I have been successful in this remains to be discovered.
Once I had learned to read, books became a great source of pleasure to me. In the histories and romances that I devoured — lying for hour after hour on the floor of the sitting-room with the light of the window falling over my shoulder — I found a kind of freedom and a richness of experience that I missed in the confined circumstances of my life. And if at times I grew tired of this, then for a diversion I would look out of the great window and watch the villagers pass the house. There went James Fettiplace, the surgeon’s assistant, and then Mr Passant, the post-master, with his little girl. And there in the rain balancing on her pattens was Miss Meadowcroft. And now that it was a sunny day here came the Yallop boys — the sons of the village’s general chandler — with the young curate who tutored them. The adults rarely looked at the house, but the children occasionally did so and it seemed to me that they often smiled and laughed as they glanced towards us. I had spoken to none of these people but their lives intrigued me and I made up stories about them — that Mr Yallop had run away to sea when he was a boy and made a fortune and married Mrs Yallop by elopement. And the curate was a wealthy duke in disguise who had come to the village in order to woo Miss Lætitia Meadowcroft, the Rector’s daughter. I asked Mrs Belflower and Sukey about them and what they told me seemed duller and yet in a way stranger than my inventions.
As the months passed
I pored over it for hours, marvelling at the vastness of London. It became a city of the imagination to me rather than a real place, and my desire to read the hundreds of street-names spurred me on to learn my letters. Soon I devoured DeFoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and Strype’s edition of Stow’s Survey of London and followed them on the map, fascinated by the changes I could discern taking place between the different periods. By this means I came to “know” the metropolis and believed I could find my way around at least its central districts.
I suppose I became what is called a queer child. I remember looking out of window at night and thinking how strange it all was, that the trees were just there and the houses, and the stars and the moon above them, and strangest of all that I was there and studying them. I knew God was looking down at me for Bissett and my mother had told me so.
My nurse had told me how if I was good I would go to Heaven for ever and ever and if I was bad I would go to Hell. Once as I lay in bed I tried to imagine “for ever and ever”. I perceived a vast gulph into which I was falling and falling and falling for it had no bottom to it, and the imagination of it made my hair prickle and my heart began to pound for everything I knew — my mother, my nurse, the village — became 30 THE
HUFFAMS
tiny and meaningless and far-away as I plunged on and on into this endless crevice —
until at last I was able to force myself to think of something else.
I was terrified — as I suppose all children are — of things being random and arbitrary.
I wanted everything to have a purpose, to be part of a pattern. It seemed to me that if I behaved unjustly I denied the pattern and by creating something ugly and meaningless, forfeited the right to judge that something unjust had been perpetrated against myself and, even more important, the right to expect that there was any justice or design in the world. I wanted my life to involve the gradual unfolding of a design, and whether I have been successful in this remains to be discovered.
Once I had learned to read, books became a great source of pleasure to me. In the histories and romances that I devoured — lying for hour after hour on the floor of the sitting-room with the light of the window falling over my shoulder — I found a kind of freedom and a richness of experience that I missed in the confined circumstances of my life. And if at times I grew tired of this, then for a diversion I would look out of the great window and watch the villagers pass the house. There went James Fettiplace, the surgeon’s assistant, and then Mr Passant, the post-master, with his little girl. And there in the rain balancing on her pattens was Miss Meadowcroft. And now that it was a sunny day here came the Yallop boys — the sons of the village’s general chandler — with the young curate who tutored them. The adults rarely looked at the house, but the children occasionally did so and it seemed to me that they often smiled and laughed as they glanced towards us. I had spoken to none of these people but their lives intrigued me and I made up stories about them — that Mr Yallop had run away to sea when he was a boy and made a fortune and married Mrs Yallop by elopement. And the curate was a wealthy duke in disguise who had come to the village in order to woo Miss Lætitia Meadowcroft, the Rector’s daughter. I asked Mrs Belflower and Sukey about them and what they told me seemed duller and yet in a way stranger than my inventions.
As the months passed
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