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school. In his last term he and another boy held the school poet in Special Togo while the captain of
the eleven gave him six with a spiked running shoe for being caught writing a sonnet. It was a
formative period.
From that school he went to a cheap, third-rate public school. It was a poor, spurious place. It aped
the great public schools with their traditions of High Anglicanism, cricket and Latin verses, and it had
a school song called ‘The Scrum of Life’ in which God figured as the Great Referee. But it lacked the
chief virtue of the great public schools, their atmosphere of literary scholarship. The boys learned as
nearly as possible nothing. There was not enough caning to make them swallow the dreary rubbish of
the curriculum, and the wretched, underpaid masters were not the kind from whom one absorbs
wisdom unawares. Flory left school a barbarous young lout. And yet even then there were, and he
knew it, certain possibilities in him; possibilities that would lead to trouble, as likely as not. But of
course he had suppressed them. A boy does not start his career nicknamed Monkey-bum without
learning his lesson.
He was not quite twenty when he came to Burma. His parents, good people and devoted to him,
had found him a place in a timber firm. They had had great difficulty in getting him the job, had paid a
premium they could not afford; later, he had rewarded them by answering their letters with careless
scrawls at intervals of months. His first six months in Burma he had spent in Rangoon, where he was
supposed to be learning the office side of his business. He had lived in a ‘chummery’ with four other
youths who devoted their entire energies to debauchery. And what debauchery! They swilled whisky
which they privately hated, they stood round the piano bawling songs of insane filthiness and
silliness, they squandered rupees by the hundred on aged Jewish whores with the faces of crocodiles.
That too had been a formative period.
From Rangoon he had gone to a camp in the jungle, north of Mandalay, extracting teak. The jungle
life was not a bad one, in spite of the discomfort, the loneliness, and what is almost the worst thing in
Burma, the filthy, monotonous food. He was very young then, young enough for hero-worship, and he
had friends among the men in his firm. There were also shooting, fishing, and perhaps once in a year a
hurried trip to Rangoon–pretext, a visit to the dentist. Oh, the joy of those Rangoon trips! The rush to
Smart and Mookerdum’s bookshop for the new novels out from England, the dinner at Anderson’s
with beefsteaks and butter that had travelled eight thousand miles on ice, the glorious drinking-bout!
He was too young to realise what this life was preparing for him. He did not see the years stretching
out ahead, lonely, eventless, corrupting.
He acclimatised himself to Burma. His body grew attuned to the strange rhythms of the tropical
seasons. Every year from February to May the sun glared in the sky like an angry god, then suddenly
the monsoon blew eastward, first in sharp squalls, then in a heavy ceaseless downpour that drenched
everything until neither one’s clothes, one’s bed nor even one’s food ever seemed to be dry. It was
still hot, with a stuffy, vaporous heat. The lower jungle paths turned into morasses, and the paddy
fields were great wastes of stagnant water with a stale, mousy smell. Books and boots were
mildewed. Naked Burmans in yard-wide hats of palm-leaf ploughed the paddy fields, driving their
buffaloes through knee-deep water. Later, the women and children planted the green seedlings of
paddy, dabbing each plant into the mud with little three-pronged forks. Through July and August there