nuses and Apollos that used to adorn the vast aisle and
huge grey terraces of the Crystal Palace were the first intimations of
the beauty of the body that ever came into my life. As I write of it I
feel again the shameful attraction of those gracious forms. I used to
look at them not simply, but curiously and askance. Once at least in
my later days at Penge, I spent a shilling in admission chiefly for the
sake of them....

The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary upbringing seems to me
now that swathing up of all the splendours of the flesh, that strange
combination of fanatical terrorism and shyness that fenced me about with
prohibitions. It caused me to grow up, I will not say blankly ignorant,
but with an ignorance blurred and dishonoured by shame, by enigmatical
warnings, by cultivated aversions, an ignorance in which a fascinated
curiosity and desire struggled like a thing in a net. I knew so little
and I felt so much. There was indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthful
Pantheon, but instead there was a mysterious and minatory gap. I have
told how at last a new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lamps
and the twilight, a Venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes shining
out of the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, passion-stirring atmosphere
rather than incarnate in a body. And I have told, too, how I bought a
picture.

All this was a thing apart from the rest of my life, a locked avoided
chamber....

It was not until my last year at Trinity that I really broke down the
barriers of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret broodings to
the light of day. Then a little set of us plunged suddenly into what
we called at first sociological discussion. I can still recall even the
physical feeling of those first tentative talks. I remember them mostly
as occurring in the rooms of Ted Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner by
the Trinity great gate, but we also used to talk a good deal at a man's
in King's, a man named, if I remember rightly, Redmayne. The atmosphere
of Hatherleigh's rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke against a background
brown and deep. He professed himself a socialist with anarchistic
leanings--he had suffered the martyrdom of ducking for it--and a huge
French May-day poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and black
on a barricade against a flaring orange sky, dominated his decorations.
Hatherleigh affected a fine untidiness, and all the place, even
the floor, was littered with bo