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beefy minders were known as ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’. If we misbehaved we were not beaten; we were tied into our beds with skilfully knotted bandage bonds for hours on end like berserk patients in strait-jackets.
    Soon after my arrival I became involved with a villainous older boy, whose face was daubed with red antiseptic paint covering an impetigo scab as big as a lobster. One day he invited me to insert my forefinger, after wetting it thoroughly with my spittle, into an empty light socket. He had said to me: ‘D’you wanna see an angel?’ It was a hard way to learn about the power of electricity. Had I enjoyed a precocious gift for irony, I would have seen it as an apt recompense for my knicker-fingering exploits in disused bomb shelters. The experiment nearly killed me and I ended up in bed swaddled in blankets. When I got better I could not wait to try it out on new arrivals. I spent a lot of my time in that place tied into my bed.
    It was in Sussex that I first experienced wonder at the open countryside. One afternoon an ‘aunt’ took a group of us for a walk along footpaths to Chanctonbury Ring, a coppice of trees high on the Downs with distant views of the sea. I stood on the side of the hill intoxicated by the vistas and the fragrantair. The sea was a distant line of fiery light. A small aeroplane was droning high in the sky, wheeling and glinting in the sunlight like a dragonfly. I threw out my arms as if they were wings and ran in circles, wild with delight. Then I threw myself down by ‘aunt’s’ side.
    ‘Well, John, what do you think of the countryside?’ she said. Unusual for the staff in that place, she was young and pretty, red in the cheek and pleasant. She was looking at me expectantly.
    Something got into me. I did not want to give the impression that I had become tame and a softie.
    ‘It’s shitty!’ I whined, making a sour expression. ‘It’s only fit for pigs.’
    She looked away, saddened; and I felt wretched with myself and the world.

11
    I RETURNED HOME to London after three months, full of energy for renewed mischief, fattened out on a diet of unlimited porridge, eggs, bacon and doorsteps of bread and jam. Back at school, my terrible sin against Sister Magdalen still unforgiven, I was banished from the set being prepared for the Eleven Plus examination for entrance into academic grammar schools. I was placed, like a villain in the stocks, in a desk for two out in the corridor with an overgrown lad smelling of stale urine who did not know what a book was for, let alone how to read it.
    The desk was sited where Sister Dolores could keep an eye on us from her office. She sat very still, with an expressionless face like a Buddha. I was trapped for a year in that desk. On the wall behind us was the shrine to Saint Maria Goretti, theItalian virgin, stabbed to death at the age of eleven because she refused to ‘besmirch her chastity’ with the lodger. Details of Maria Goretti’s story, which was intended to promote purity in the Catholic young, prompted a darkly pleasurable excitation in my genitals. It was my special task to keep Saint Maria Goretti’s votive lamps trimmed and lit.
    My formal education in primary school had come to an end the moment I attacked Sister Magadalen, but close to where I sat in the corridor were shelves containing a chaos of battered books: Butler’s Lives of the Saints , outdated Catholic directories, hymnals, an ancient and incomplete edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica , and a set of novels and short stories by Charles Dickens. I spent many undisturbed hours reading about saints like Simeon Stylites who lived at the top of a pole, or devouring encyclopaedia entries on such mysteries as the history, economy and geography of Bulgaria. Best of all I lost myself in the plots of David Copperfield , Great Expectations , and A Christmas Carol.
    At eleven I was released from the corridor and sent, as befitted an academic reject and troublemaker, to a