BEGINNINGS
while the daylight lasted. When this was forbidden, he still managed to hide his pencil and draw on the pillows. In the nursery Arthur was healthily mischievous. He discovered a small hole under the saddle of the large dappled rocking-horse; successive nurses lost their thimbles; and, when the children rode the rocking-horse, a mysterious and increasing rattle sounded from the interior. A note to Arthur from his grandmother Stevenson when he was nine congratulated him on a letter which was ‘very nicely written’ and had obviously been freely illustrated with caricatures. ‘The sketches are from life I suppose. … Well, you have not made any of you very handsome.’ As for one of the girls ‘what a nose she has, and a cap fit for her grandmother’.
He entered the City of London School at the age of twelve, in September 1879. The school was then in Cheapside, and Arthur moved with it to the Victoria Embankment in 1883. Years later (28th June 1929) he wrote of his school days to his friend Howard Angus Kennedy, secretary of the Canadian Authors’ Association:
‘So we come from the same school! I went there first at the end of ’79 so we were never together. Old Joey was still in great form, & was my master before the school moved to the Embankment – and a great master he was. Then at the “New School” – as we then called it, I settled down under Rushy, whose back benches I occupied for a long time – never flying higher. But he & I were friends until his death: & he had a great collection of my drawings done in unorthodox hours & bagged by him. And even Abbott turned a blind eye to my delinquencies of that kind. …’
‘Old Joey’ was the Rev. Joseph Harris; ‘Rushy’ was W. G. Rushbrooke, the senior assistant classical master and a former Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge; and ‘Abbott’ was Edwin A. Abbott, the headmaster. Arthur did not distinguish himself particularly by his25
