After I had run away from school, no one knew what to do with me. I sat in my cousin’s London drawing-room, listening to my relations as they talked. I did not know what was going to happen to me.

The week before, instead of catching the train to Derbyshire, where I was at school, I had taken a bus in the opposite direction.

Sitting upstairs on the bus I felt light, as if I were hollow and empty. Something was churning inside me too, like sea-sickness.

I stared down at the crowds and the traffic but I did not really see them. Only half of me seemed to be on top of the bus.

When the conductor called out “Waterloo” I ran down the steps and stood for a moment in the road. A carthorse was pouring out a golden jet of water. I watched it bubbling and hissing into the gutter, then I began to climb the stone stairs between the fat statues.

The trains inside the station were lying close together like big worms. I saw that one was going to Salisbury. I thought, I’ll go there. I had seen it once with my mother; we had been to look at the cathedral. She was dead now. I ran to buy my ticket.

I was small, so I took off my hat, ruffled my hair and asked for a half-fare. The clerk’s glasses glistened and his mouth snapped, “How old are you?” I lied very firmly, and at last he pushed the green ticket through the little window.

I walked past the barrier and up the platform. It was a corridor train, and as it pulled out I went to the lavatory and locked myself in. I knew that nobody could be looking for me yet, but I felt safer there.

I thought of my brother Paul waiting at St. Pancras, then going without me at last.

We had come to London in the morning, from our grandfather’s house in Sussex. We always spent the holidays there. We had both wanted to do different things, so we parted, arranging to meet again at the station in the afternoon.

He was eighteen, two years older than I was. I wondered what he would think if he knew that I was in a train going the opposite way.

I suddenly felt terribly glad. I looked at my face in the glass. I was so anxious and happy that I thought I looked mad. I pulled my hat this way and that, wondering how to disguise myself. I thought I might dress up as a woman if I could get any clothes. I knocked the dent out of my hat, making it look like a girl’s riding-hat. I was so excited that my face was red, with sweat on it.

I sat on the commode lid and began to count my money. I had about five pounds, which was to have been for pocket money and house subscription. I felt rich, but I knew that it wouldn’t last long.

My thoughts got mixed up with the jogging of the train. They hammered along the rails and my head felt hot and seething and cut off from my body.