I had passed thirteen and things were worse even than I had foreseen. I lay in bed in the dormitory of St John's, listening to the footsteps clatter down the stone stairs to early prep and breakfast, and when the silence had safely returned I began trying to cut my right leg open with a penknife. But the knife was blunt and my nerve was too weak for the work.

I was back in the house of my early childhood, but the circumstances had changed. The garden across the road, France across the Channel [as he had called the garden on the other side of the road when he was small], was now closed to me: I could no longer set foot in the chintzy drawing-room where my mother had read aloud to us and where I had wept over the story of the children buried by the birds. In those early days I had not even been aware that there existed in the same house such grim rooms as those I lived in now. Even the door by which I entered the house was a different one, a side door like a service entrance, though no servant would have endured the squalor we lived in. There was a schoolroom with ink-stained nibbled desks insufficiently warmed by one cast-iron stove, a changing-room smelling of sweat and stale clothes, stone stairs, worn by generations of feet, leading to a dormitory divided by pitch-pine partitions that gave inadequate privacy - no moment of the night was free from noise, a cough, a snore, a fart. Years later when I read the sermon on hell in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist I recognized the land I had inhabited. I had left civilization behind and entered a savage country of strange customs and inexplicable cruelties: a country in which I was a foreigner and a suspect, quite literally a hunted creature, known to have dubious associates. Was my father not the headmaster? I was like the son of a quisling in a country under occupation. ...