The Kite [antikvár]

omerset maugham was born in 1874. He lived in Paris until he was ten, by which time both his mother and his father had died. With no proper home for him in Francé, he was sent to Whitstable in Kent to live with his uncle, who was vicar thcre. Lonely, shy and often unwell, he missed in the vicarage the affectionate atmosphere his parents had created for him. At The King's School, Canterbury, he was no happier, but a year spent at Heidelberg University with brief visits to Italy and Switzerland was more successful. Itgave him a sense of freedom. a love of travel which was never to leave him, and a determination to become a writer. The idea of a literary career did not appeal to his uncle, who agreed however to his studying medicine. At St Thomas's Hospitál the eighteen-year-old student gave more time to reading and writing than to his medical studies, and he filled notebooks with ideas for stories and plays. Later on he found the outpatients' department and alsó the maternity work in the slums of Lambeth more interesting. He felt he was now in contact with what he most wanted, life in the raw, and this gave him somé knowledge of humán nature. 'In those years,' he wrote, 'I must have witnessed pretty well every emotion of which man is capable. It appealed to my dramatic instinct. It excited the novelist in me/ His first növel, Liza of Lambeth, published in his final year at medical school, reflected somé of these experiences. Though he did not make much money out of it, he nevertheless decided against practising as a doctor, and after wandering through