The prefect knew, of course, all about this, and therefore whenever you chose to take an extra stroke and kept the dressing gown on, he beat you with every ounce of his strength. But my lovely dressing gown stopped that from happening. To be beaten in pajamas only was a very painful experience, and your skin nearly always got broken. But my own dressing gown was made of thick brown camel’s hair, and there was never any question in my mind that this was the better choice. I’m sorry.” “Which do you want? Four with the dressing gown on, or three with it off.” “Four with it on,” I said. “I don’t like burnt toast.” “I held it too close. So now it was night-time and you were down in the changing room in your dressing gown and pajamas, and the one whose toast you had burnt was telling you about your crime. Then he would frown, and you knew you were for it. You would see your own tormentor sitting up there at the top table, picking up his toast, turning it over, examining it closely as though it were a small and very valuable painting. The prefects were expert at detecting scraped toast. But as we were never allowed to ask for a second slice and start again, the only thing to do was to scrape the burnt bits off with a knife. I usually held it too close and the toast got burnt. But the only fire where toasting was allowed was in the library, and as teatime approached, there were never less than a dozen wretched fags all jostling for position in front of the tiny grate. For this, you used a long three-pronged toasting fork, and you stuck the bread on the end of it and held it up before an open fire, first one side, then the other. That meant you were his servant, and one of your many duties was to make toast for him every day at teatime.

“For the second day running you have burnt my toast!” Let me explain this ludicrous remark. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More But I went on falling, and it was so black that there was nothing anywhere and it was not any use doing anything or caring or thinking because of the blackness and because of the falling.”

Then it became darker because the sun and the day were in the fields far away at the top of the cliff, and as I fell I kept my eyes open and watched the darkness turn from grey-black to black, from black to jet black and from jet black to pure liquid blackness which I could touch with my hands but which I could not see. Several times I managed to catch hold of a branch, but it always broke off at once because I was so heavy and because I was falling so fast, and once I caught a thick branch with both hands and the tree leaned forward and I heard the snapping of the roots one by one until it came away from the cliff and I went on falling. I could see little trees growing out of the face of the cliff, and I grabbed at them with my hands as I went down.

The wonderful henry sugar