His first school was Henley House, the private fee-paying school where his father was headmaster and where H. G. Wells was one of his instructors. At age eleven he went to Westminster School as a scholarship student. In 1900 he was enrolled as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge University, where he was elected editor of
Granta. After leaving Cambridge he became an assistant editor of
Punch, in which some of his essays and poetry had been appearing regularly. On 4 June 1913 he married Dorothy ("Daphne") de Sélincourt, and in 1914 he joined the army as a signaling officer in the Fourth Royal Warwickshire Regiment. While serving in the army in France, he began to write plays and farces for the soldiers. Having contracted a serious fever, he was sent back to England to recuperate. Officially discharged in 1918, he resigned his editorship at
Punch to become a full-time playwright. His plays brought him success in both England and the United States, with
Mr. Pim Passes By (1920) and
The Truth About Blaydes (1921) achieving early critical and popular acclaim. He had already in 1917 tried his hand at writing a fairy story,
Once on a Time, "not for children," but for his wife and himself.
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