Did all of this make Netty dear to us? No, it made her a holy terror. People who prate about loyal old servants rarely know the hard-won coin of the spirit in which their real wages are paid. Netty’s terrible silences about things that were foremost in our minds oppressed Caroline and me and were a great part of what seemed to us to be the darkness that was falling over our home.

DR VON HALLER: Did you never ask Netty what happened on Christmas night?

MYSELF: I cannot recall whether I did, but Caroline asked the next day and got Netty’s maddening answer, “Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies.” When Caroline insisted, “But I want to know,” there came another predictable answer, “Then Want will have to be your master.”

DR VON HALLER: And you never asked your mother?

MYSELF: How could we? You know how it is with children; they know there are forbidden areas, charged with intense feeling. They don’t know that most of them are concerned with sex, but they suspect something in the world that would open up terrifying things and threaten their ideas about their parents; half of them wants to know, and half dreads to know.

DR VON HALLER: Did you know nothing of sex, then?

MYSELF: Odds and ends. There was Netty’s insistence about washing “under there,” which conveyed something special. And in Grandfather Staunton’s office I had found a curious students’ aid called Philips’ Popular Manikin, which was a cardboard man who opened up to show his insides, and who had very discreet privy parts like my own. There was also a Popular Manikin (Female) who was partly flayed so that her breasts could only be guessed at, but who had a kind of imperforate bald triangle where the gentleman had ornaments. From some neat spy-work when Caroline was being dressed I knew that Philips had not told the whole story, and as soon as I went to school I was deluged with fanciful and disgusting information, none of which threw much light on anything and which I never dreamed of associating with my mother. I don’t think I was as curious about sex as most boys. I wanted to keep things—meaning the state of my own knowledge—pretty much as it was. I suppose I had an intuition that more knowledge would mean greater complications.

DR VON HALLER: Were you happy at school?

It was a good school, and on the whole I liked it there. Happiness was not associated with it because my real life was with my home and family. I was not bad at lessons and managed well enough at games not to be in trouble, though I never excelled. Until I was twelve I went to the preparatory part of the school by the day, but when I was twelve Father decided I should be a boarder and come home only at weekends. That was in 1940, and the war was getting into its stride, and he had to be away a great deal and thought I ought to have masculine influences in my life that Netty certainly could not have provided and my fading mother didn’t know about.