My First Travels in Bookland

IN my hobbledehoy stage I devoured many books of a kind with which, I have since been often enough informed, a normal British youth should have nothing to do. But I was not a normal British youth, and didn't want to be. I was a secretly rebellious young Scot, nursing my dreams in a Glasgow tenement. My own life was comfortable and happy, but much of what I saw in Glasgow to me was misery and would not let me rest. I resented the smug narrowness and callous make‐believe of churchy folk, our imprisonment from the life and tradition of the Scots countryside, and the stuffily complacent British insularity which Scotland, once so cosmopolitan in her interests, had adopted from Public‐School England. I did not “glory in the name of Briton.” I was a Scot and a European.