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majesty and beauty of her skirt and pulling on common trousers—to see her cut short the lank hair, abandon hair-ribbons! Passionately I implored her not to be a boy. But what could she do, she said? Hesitantly I grasped at the only comfort. Might I perhaps change into a girl, wear skirts and a hair-ribbon? No, she said. It only happened to her. So there I was, on the pavement again.
    I adored Evie. I was grief-stricken and terrified. She nursed this terror as a tribute to the reality of the situation. Next time it happened, she said, she would show me. But that would mean that she would vanish out of my life; for I understood that no boy could possibly take me by the hand and lead me to school. How should I pass the long spoon and her uncle in safety without her? I begged her not to change—knowing all the while that we were powerless in the face of this awful thing yet preserving the faith that Evie of all people could control our world even if no one else could. I watched her closely for symptoms. In the playground, if she vanished into the girls’ lavatory, I stood in anguish, wondering if she had gone to look. I hung about, I pestered her; and at last I bored her. Somehow, in some way that is not clear to me, she detached herself. So there I was, going to school unattended crossing the road to keep away from the long spoon and her uncle, going in the gate to a different world.
    This was my first break with Rotten Row, for Evie’s stories had linked it to school and I was unaware of any transition. But now Rotten Row fell into a geographical context and was no longer the whole world. Yet when I see in popular magazines some excavated plan of dwellings and read the dry précis of conjectured life, I wonderhow Rotten Row will fare under the spade, two thousand years after the V2 hit it. The foundations would tell a story of planned building and regimentation. They would be a bigger, if duller liar than Evie. For Rotten Row was roaring and warm, simple and complex, individual and strangely happy and a world unto itself. It gave me two relationships which were good and for which I am still grateful: one, for my mother, blocking out the backward darkness: two, for Evie, for the excitement of knowing her and for my trust in her. My mother was as near a whore as makes no matter and Evie was a congenital liar. Yet if they would only exist there was nothing more I wanted. I remember the quality of this relationship so vividly that I am almost tempted into an aphorism: love selflessly and you cannot come to harm. But then I remember some things that came after.
    So I moved out of Evie’s shadow and became the inhabitant of two linked worlds. I liked them both. The infants’ school was a place of play and discovery in which the mistresses leaned down like trees. There were new things to do, a tall jangly box out of which one of the trees beat entrancing music. At the end of prayers while we were still standing in rows, the music changed and became marching music. If I heard a brass band in the street today, I should break step, refusing the shame of so simple a reaction; but in those days I stamped and stuck my chest out. I could keep step.
    Minnie could never keep step and no one expected her to. She was lumpy. Her arms and legs were stuck on the corners of her square body and she had a large, rather old face which she carried slightly tilted to one side. She walked with an ungainly movement of the arms and legs.She shared a table desk with me so that I noticed her more than the others. If Minnie wanted to pick up a crayon she would make perhaps three sideways movements at it with one hand while the other was held up in the air and jerked in sympathy. If she reached the crayon she made hard, crushing movements with her fingers until somehow they fastened round it. Sometimes the sharpened end of the crayon would be uppermost; and then Minnie would make scratches on the paper for a moment or two with the blunt end. Usually, a