made of wax, grew soft in my hot little hand, inviting me to roll and mold them into interesting and useful shapes. This suited me fine because I was never satisfied with the shape of a thing as it happened to be. Art begins that way.
I owe one of my “redeeming” features to an accident connected with this urge of mine to change the design of things.
Every boy must have a pocketknife. Not me. My mother would as soon have given me a vial of prussic acid, as a knife. So I decided to make one.... Looking back, sometimes, I feel that my life has been wasted. I ought to have been born before the dawn of civilization, I am so inventive and, once my curiosity is aroused (which doesn’t take much doing), so completely devoid of fear. I might have got myself run over in the process, but I bet I would have invented the wheel; and although I should certainly have become a charred tribal demigod, I believe that I might have discovered fire. Lacking a knife, I say, I invented one. In those days, we used to play a silly game with pins. You take two pins and place them crosswise on a tramline. The tramcar rolls over the crossed pins and flattens them into the likeness of a pair of scissors. Now what is a pair of scissors but two knives fastened with a screw? I reasoned. If two pins make two knives, one pin therefore will make one knife. An ineffectual brass knife, it is true; but a knife notwithstanding. It was not bad for a child of my age, mind you. From pins I went on to nails; and I think I might have made something out of a tenpenny spike if I had not been caught, in the nick of time. The driver braked the tram to a standstill, its front wheels less than a yard from my fingers—other nails having been shaken off by the vibration, I was determined to hold this one down. “Promise me on your honor you will never do a thing like that again!” said my father. “If you do, all your fingers will be cut off and you will be sent to a home.” I promised, and I kept my promise.
But my promise did not include trains. Not far from where we lived there was a railway line along which rushed the giant expresses of the South Western Railway, hurtling past at seventy or eighty miles an hour. We boys used to stand on the bridge and watch them as they passed—the idea being to catch in one swift glimpse the names of the huge locomotives and their serial numbers, which we solemnly entered in little notebooks. This was all very well, but when I said that I was going to make a knife, I made a knife. I found an iron bolt twelve inches long and nearly an inch thick. Knowing better now than to hold this down with my fingers under the Lord Wolseley, which was due to come through at 11:45 that Saturday morning, I fastened the bolt to the nearest rail with adhesive tape (which, God knows why, I soaked with iodine). As I calculated, the great Lord Wolseley and the countless steel wheels of all its carriages should do a real swordsmith’s job for me and turn this bolt into a kind of machete. I had been reading the works of Major Charles Gilson at that time, and felt that this was all I needed to get me to the place where the elephants go to die. I crawled down thebank and waited. My calculations were almost accurate, but not quite. The Lord Wolseley passed dead on time, and its off-front wheel made a spearhead of the end of the bolt, but jibbed at its square head. This, caught in a flange, sent the sharpened bolt whirling away. The point hit me in the right cheek, half an inch away from the corner of my mouth, and came out at the other side. The result was that my poor mother had a nervous breakdown, and I healed with two fascinating dimples which, as a girl once told me, “illuminate” my face when I smile.
As if this were not enough, I lost the little finger of my left hand in the zoo. One of my aunts took me there to cheer me up while the wounds in my cheeks were healing. Slipping past the keeper, I tried to make a hyena laugh by tickling his
I owe one of my “redeeming” features to an accident connected with this urge of mine to change the design of things.
Every boy must have a pocketknife. Not me. My mother would as soon have given me a vial of prussic acid, as a knife. So I decided to make one.... Looking back, sometimes, I feel that my life has been wasted. I ought to have been born before the dawn of civilization, I am so inventive and, once my curiosity is aroused (which doesn’t take much doing), so completely devoid of fear. I might have got myself run over in the process, but I bet I would have invented the wheel; and although I should certainly have become a charred tribal demigod, I believe that I might have discovered fire. Lacking a knife, I say, I invented one. In those days, we used to play a silly game with pins. You take two pins and place them crosswise on a tramline. The tramcar rolls over the crossed pins and flattens them into the likeness of a pair of scissors. Now what is a pair of scissors but two knives fastened with a screw? I reasoned. If two pins make two knives, one pin therefore will make one knife. An ineffectual brass knife, it is true; but a knife notwithstanding. It was not bad for a child of my age, mind you. From pins I went on to nails; and I think I might have made something out of a tenpenny spike if I had not been caught, in the nick of time. The driver braked the tram to a standstill, its front wheels less than a yard from my fingers—other nails having been shaken off by the vibration, I was determined to hold this one down. “Promise me on your honor you will never do a thing like that again!” said my father. “If you do, all your fingers will be cut off and you will be sent to a home.” I promised, and I kept my promise.
But my promise did not include trains. Not far from where we lived there was a railway line along which rushed the giant expresses of the South Western Railway, hurtling past at seventy or eighty miles an hour. We boys used to stand on the bridge and watch them as they passed—the idea being to catch in one swift glimpse the names of the huge locomotives and their serial numbers, which we solemnly entered in little notebooks. This was all very well, but when I said that I was going to make a knife, I made a knife. I found an iron bolt twelve inches long and nearly an inch thick. Knowing better now than to hold this down with my fingers under the Lord Wolseley, which was due to come through at 11:45 that Saturday morning, I fastened the bolt to the nearest rail with adhesive tape (which, God knows why, I soaked with iodine). As I calculated, the great Lord Wolseley and the countless steel wheels of all its carriages should do a real swordsmith’s job for me and turn this bolt into a kind of machete. I had been reading the works of Major Charles Gilson at that time, and felt that this was all I needed to get me to the place where the elephants go to die. I crawled down thebank and waited. My calculations were almost accurate, but not quite. The Lord Wolseley passed dead on time, and its off-front wheel made a spearhead of the end of the bolt, but jibbed at its square head. This, caught in a flange, sent the sharpened bolt whirling away. The point hit me in the right cheek, half an inch away from the corner of my mouth, and came out at the other side. The result was that my poor mother had a nervous breakdown, and I healed with two fascinating dimples which, as a girl once told me, “illuminate” my face when I smile.
As if this were not enough, I lost the little finger of my left hand in the zoo. One of my aunts took me there to cheer me up while the wounds in my cheeks were healing. Slipping past the keeper, I tried to make a hyena laugh by tickling his
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