Chapel; and How it Seems to an Old Boy."

Britten and I found it difficult to express to each other with any
grace or precision what we felt about that magazine.



CHAPTER THE FOURTH

ADOLESCENCE


1

I find it very difficult to trace how form was added to form and
interpretation followed interpretation in my ever-spreading, ever-
deepening, ever-multiplying and enriching vision of this world into
which I had been born. Every day added its impressions, its hints,
its subtle explications to the growing understanding. Day after day
the living interlacing threads of a mind weave together. Every
morning now for three weeks and more (for to-day is Thursday and I
started on a Tuesday) I have been trying to convey some idea of the
factors and early influences by which my particular scrap of
subjective tapestry was shaped, to show the child playing on the
nursery floor, the son perplexed by his mother, gazing aghast at his
dead father, exploring interminable suburbs, touched by first
intimations of the sexual mystery, coming in with a sort of confused
avidity towards the centres of the life of London. It is only by
such an effort to write it down that one realises how marvellously
crowded, how marvellously analytical and synthetic those ears must