Read I'll Never Be Young Again for Free Online

make anything of himself.’
    Even the first sentence: ‘Have you spoken to Richard?’ proved in a few words his contempt for his son, so much that it was not worth the trouble of taking him to task, but such a matter was best left to the handling of my mother. For why should he worry, and why should he care?
    Then in a blind frenzy of rage I must run upstairs to the poor forsaken schoolroom and rummage in a dusty drawer, and from beneath the scarce-started manuscript of my Greek play, which rapidly I tore across, flinging it in pieces about the floor, I drew page after page of my own poetry hidden in a thin black exercise-book, poetry that I had not dared read over even to myself, for here were lines of hatred and revolt, bitterness and despair; here were my dreams of women, lust-ridden and obscene, images conjured by the loathing of my father’s simplicity and purity. Pitiful and stark, they expressed no more than a defiance of his beauty. And seizing these I went down to the library, and flung open the door, looking upon him where he sat before his desk, his heavy brown face resting in his hands, and I went to him and threw my poems in front of him, stammering over my words as I spoke.‘Read them, read them, I wrote them because of you,’ and then called out of the window to my mother bending over her flowers: ‘You come too, and listen to my poems.’ Then the horror grew upon me as she came through the long windows, a dawn of a smile on her face, and leant over my father’s shoulder, who, slowly drawing his spectacles from his case, fumbled with my litter of paper.
    So he began to read aloud in his resonant voice, unaware at first of the sense, the pornographic outpourings of his son. This scene I had staged seemed to me so untrue that I was afraid, and even as I shuddered a wave of disgust came upon me for the diabolical cruelty of my action, and in something more than shame and despair I saw the papers fall from my father’s hand and his great eyes turn upon me, while my mother, understanding less than he, would have put some question, for I noticed her puzzled frown and the beginning of a sentence: ‘Why, Richard -’ she said. ‘Why, Richard . . . ?’ But my father never moved, he only kept his eyes upon my face. So then there was no more than my curse, and my stumble from the room, and running away down the drive with the memory of his eyes, and past the deer in the park, and the crying rooks hovering above the woods, and out of the iron gates for the last time, never once looking back over my shoulder. After this, three days and three nights which passed as a dream swiftly forgotten, leaving nothing but a sensation of despair, and then the sight of London friendless, and cold, and feeling hungry and feeling tired and thinking about things, and still thinking, and so standing on the bridge above the river.
    Now I was tired and I leant on the table with my head pillowed on my arms, and waited for Jake to speak to me.
    ‘You’re blaming me, of course,’ I said; ‘I don’t care.’
    I took his silence for a confirmation of my words.
    ‘Even now you don’t understand what I’ve been through,’ I told him; ‘you can’t know what those years have meant to me. Lost and wasted. A misery and a denial of everything that was living. Then you talk of the glory of being young.’
    Jake’s voice sounded gentle coming from out of the shadows.
    ‘I believe you’ve felt all you’ve told me,’ he said; ‘I can understand everything and a little more. But against all this you had things you could have loved.’
    ‘Had things? What do you mean?’ I asked.
    ‘There was a garden,’ he said, ‘and woods and rooks, and the smell of flowers, and the voices of people.’
    I thought he must be mad. I stared at him in amazement.
    ‘A garden? What was that to me? I tell you I was buried; you can’t have any conception of suffering when you say that.’
    He was silent again.
    ‘It’s all very well for you to