A Sort of Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

fear of drowning – I was able to imagine the lungs filling with water.
    There are two stray scatological memories of the time. Forsome reason – it can only have been a convalescence – I found myself at Littlehampton alone with Nora, my mother’s favourite sister, so much gayer, more elegant and popular than poor Maud, who once burst into tears when my German aunt spoke of the beautiful hair she possessed when she was young. I was too embarrassed by her elegance to tell my aunt that I wanted to go to the lavatory and I fouled my knickers. At six too I made, perhaps it was on the same occasion, a coloured drawing of a bit of shit for the School House Gazette , a periodical in manuscript edited by my eldest brother Herbert (I had the rank of office boy). My memory tells me that the drawing was included because it was taken for a cigar, and I was a little annoyed at the misunderstanding, though I put nobody right, and yet recently I have searched in vain for my painting in the pages of the Gazette – perhaps the true meaning of it was understood after all.
    Apart from the corpse of my sister’s pug at the bottom of my pram, the only domestic animal I can remember was a Pekinese called Bicki which also belonged to Molly, for she was the only one of us ever allowed to own a dog. We in the nursery shared a succession of canaries (one broke a blood vessel singing too loud and long), and I once owned two white mice, but when one ate the other and then died of loneliness, I was falsely accused of having starved them, so they were never replaced. My brother Herbert (but that was a long while after) brought home a baby pig which he had won at a fair and lodged it in his bedroom for the night. On the floor below, unable to sleep, I had the strong impression that he was kicking a football around – he was the athlete of the family. The pig was not allowed to stay.
    The Pekinese arrived nailed down in a box. It was in a savage temper after a long railway journey, and it remained consistently unamiable towards my sister who owned it and bit her on many occasions. Bicki and I got on well together. Once it was lost after a walk, the police were warned, and eventually many hours later, when the streets of Berkhamsted had been well scoured and messages sent to Boxmoor and Hemel Hempstead and Chesham, it was found asleep under my bed. My mother was always unfavourably disposed towards dogs, until many years later she became attached to a mongrel of my own called Paddy, and afterBicki had bitten the baby Hugh it was sold quickly into another captivity.
    The toy I remember most clearly was a fort. It was given me on my seventh birthday. It arrived dismantled, and I stuck the portcullis and walls and towers on to green cliffs by nails which fitted into holes. It was more like a medieval castle than the forts of Liège and Verdun which were soon to be so important in our lives and it was a little unsuitable for the Zulus who sometimes guarded it.
    The games we played were: French and English . This was a garden game of conflict, but I can remember none of the rules which must have dated back to the Napoleonic wars. It was played by Charlotte Brontë in her childhood.
    Hunt the Thimble . A special treat in the drawing-room when there were aunts and uncles about. At Christmas there was always an enormous number of Greene aunts and uncles, since my mother and father were first cousins of the same name, and a great many of them were unmarried and available.
    Tom Tiddler’s Ground . Played in the garden on the croquet lawn. A game of trespass. ‘Here I come on Tom Tiddler’s Ground, picking up gold and silver …’
    The Ocean is Agitated . This was played on Christmas Day when the cousins came to tea. It was a kind of musical chairs. One person promenaded round the circle calling out the name of a fish which had then to rise and follow. ‘The ocean is agitated by a shrimp … by a shark … by a sardine’ and finally ‘The ocean is