THE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS

13 March 23

Aubrey Beardsley

I was lucky enough in my mid-teens to discover writing and literature, pornography and drugs, at around the same time.

My working day would begin in earnest at 4:30 when I arrived home from school, sat at the typewriter my father had given me, put a on record or turned on the radio, and resumed work on the novel I was writing about someone like me slowly drowning in misery at school.

I knew at least that writing had to be my ticket into the funkier world that existed a hour away, ‘up London’.