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exam, but, even after he came through that with some distinction and the place at Rugby was his, the final decision to go or stay was left entirely to him. In later life he would wonder at the choice made by this thirteen-year-old self, a boy rooted in his city, happy in his friends, having a good time at school (apart from a little local difficulty with the Marathi language), the apple of his parents’ eye. Why did that boy decide to leave it all behind and travel halfway across the world into the unknown, far from everyone who loved him and everything he knew? Was it the fault, perhaps, of literature (for he was certainly a bookworm)? In which case the guilty parties might have been his beloved Jeeves and Bertie,or possibly the Earl of Emsworth and his mighty sow, the Empress of Blandings. Or might it have been the dubious attractions of the world of Agatha Christie that persuaded him, even if Christie’s Miss Marple made her home in the most murderous village in England, the lethal St. Mary Mead? Then there was Arthur Ransome’s
Swallows and Amazons
series telling of children messing about in boats in the Lake District, and, much, much worse, the terrible literary escapades of Billy Bunter, the “Owl of the Remove,” the fat boy at Frank Richards’s ridiculous Grayfriars School, where, among Bunter’s classmates, there was at least one Indian, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, the “dusky nabob of Bhanipur,” who spoke a bizarre, grand, syntactically contorted English (“the contortfulness,” as the dusky nabob might well have put it, “was terrific”). Was it, in other words, a
childish
decision, to venture forth into an imaginary England that only existed in books? Or was it, alternatively, an indication that beneath the surface of the “nice, quiet boy” there lurked a stranger being, a fellow with an unusually adventurous heart, possessed of enough gumption to take a leap in the dark exactly
because
it was a step into the unknown—a youth who intuited his future adult self’s ability to survive, even to thrive, wherever in the world his wanderings might take him, and who was able, too easily, even a little ruthlessly, to follow the dream of “away,” breaking away from the lure, which was also, of course, the tedium, of “home,” leaving his sorrowing mother and sisters behind without too much regret? Perhaps a little of each. At any rate, he took the leap, and the forking paths of time bifurcated at his feet. He took the westward road and ceased to be who he might have been if he had stayed at home.
    A pink stone set into the Doctor’s Wall, named for the legendary headmaster Dr. Arnold and overlooking the storied playing fields of the Close, bore an inscription that purported to celebrate an act of revolutionary iconoclasm. “This is to commemorate the exploit of William Webb Ellis,” it read, “who, with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first picked up the ball and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the rugby game.” But the Webb Ellis story was apocryphal, and the school was anything but iconoclastic. The sons of stockbrokers and solicitors were being educated here and “a fine disregard for the rules” was not on the curriculum.Putting both your hands in your pockets was against the rules. So was “running in the corridors.” However, fagging—acting as an older boy’s unpaid servant—and beating were still permitted. Corporal punishment could be administered by the housemaster or even by the boy named as Head of House. In his first term the Head of House was a certain R.A.C. Williamson who kept his cane hanging in full view over the door of his study. There were notches in it, one for each thrashing Williamson had handed out.
    He was never beaten. He was a “nice, quiet boy.” He learned the rules and observed them scrupulously. He learned the school slang,
dics
for bedtime prayers in the dormitories (from the Latin
dicere
, to