“Sometimes I felt that joy when I was with you, Ramsay, because you were kind to me, and kindness was a great rarity in my life. You were the only person in my childhood who had treated me as if I were a human creature. I don’t say, who loved me, you notice. My father loved me, but his love was a greater burden, almost, than hate might have been. But you treated me as a fellow-being, because I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you to do anything else. You never ran with the crowd.

“The rape itself was horrible, because it was painful physically, but worse because it was an outrage on another part of my body which I had been told to fear and be ashamed of. Liesl tells me that Freud has had a great deal to say about the importance of the functions of excretion in deciding and moulding character. I don’t know anything about that; don’t want to know it, because all that sort of thinking lies outside what I really understand. I have my own notions about psychology, and they have served me well. But this rape—it was something filthy going in where I knew only that filthy things should come out, as secretly as could be managed. In our house there was no word for excretion, only two or three prim locutions, and the word used in the schoolyard seemed to me a horrifying indecency. It’s very popular nowadays in literature, I’m told by Liesl. She reads a great deal. I don’t know how writers can put it down, though there was a time when I used it often enough in my daily speech. But as I have grown older I have returned to that early primness. We don’t get over some things. But what Willard did to me was, in a sense I could understand, a reversal of the order of nature, and I was terrified that it would kill me.

“It didn’t, of course. But that, and Willard’s heavy breathing, and the flood of filthy language that he whispered as a kind of ecstatic accompaniment to what he was doing, were more horrible to me than anything I have met with since.

“When it was over he pulled my head around so that he could he see my face and said, ‘You O.K., kid?’ I can remember the tone now. He had no idea at all of what I was, or what I might feel. He was obviously happy, and the Mephistophelian smile had given place to an expression that was almost boyish. ‘Go on now,’ he said. ‘Pull up your pants and beat it. And if you blat to anybody, by the living Jesus I’ll cut your nuts off with a rusty knife.’

“Then I fainted, but for how long, or what I looked like when I did it, I of course can’t tell you. Perhaps I was out for a few minutes, because when I became aware again Willard was looking anxious, and patting my cheeks lightly. He had taken the gag out of my mouth. I was crying, but making no noise. I had learned very early in life not to make a noise when I cried. I was still crumpled up on the horrible seat, and now its stench was too much for me and I vomited. Willard sprang back, anxious for his fine trousers and the high polish on his shoes. But he dared not leave me. Of course I had no idea how frightened he was. He felt he could trust in my shame and his threats up to a point, but I might be one of those terrible children who go beyond the point set for them by adults. He tried to placate me.