Lowry rebelled; perhaps he never forgave his parents for christening him Clarence, a name irresistibly comic to British ears, and which he never used. As a teenager he began to drink heavily, and when he was seventeen, he demanded to be allowed to go to sea, a naively romantic ambition derived in part from reading the early plays of Eugene O'Neill. His long-suffering father consented, and in May 1927 Lowry shipped out to Yokohama from Liverpool, working as a deckhand on the S. S.
Pyrrhus. He returned five months later, disillusioned but haunted by the experience. The trip marked the final break with his family.
In later life Lowry was to claim that his childhood had been one of misery and neglect, but such claims seem unfounded. Lowry was fond of fabricating romantic legends about his past, making his life seem somehow the inevitable result of early circumstances. The scar on his leg, which he melodramatically boasted was the result of a gunfight in China, actually came from a childhood mishap with a bicycle, and the benign picture of early adolescence portrayed in his story "Enter One in Sumptuous Armour" is almost certainly an accurate one for him.
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