"I was a younger son, and we lost my mother when I was a child. That meant very long days alone when my father was at work and my brother at boarding school. Alone in a big house full of books. I suppose that fixed a literary bent. I drew a lot, but soon began to write more. My first stories were mostly about mice (influence of Beatrix Potter), but mice usually in armor killing gigantic cats (influence of fairy stories). That is, I wrote the books I should have liked to read if only I could have gotten them. That's always been my reason for writing. People won't write the books I want, so I have to do it myself: no rot about 'self-expression.' I loathed school. Being an infantry soldier in the last war would have been nicer if one had known one was going to survive. I was wounded--by an English shell. (Hence the greetings of an aunt who said, with obvious relief, 'Oh, so that's why you were wounded in the back!') I gave up Christianity at about fourteen. Came back to it when going on for thirty. An almost purely philosophical conversion. I didn't want to. I'm not the religious type. I want to be let alone, to feel I'm my own master: but since the facts seemed to be the opposite I had to give in. My happiest hours are spent with three or four old friends in old clothes tramping together and putting up in small pubs--or else sitting up till the small hours in someone's college rooms talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes. There's no sound I like better than adult male laughter."
(A brief autobiographical sketch composed for his American publisher, 1944)
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