Literature must have seemed a predestined interest for Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, whose father, Arthur Waugh, was an author as well as head of the publishing firm of Chapman and Hall. Born in the London suburb of Hampstead on 28 October 1903, Evelyn Waugh wrote his first short story at the age of seven. Only four printed pages long and titled "The Curse of the Race," it was first published in an anthology called Little Innocents: Childhood Reminiscences by Dame Ethyl Smith and Others (1932). Despite its status as juvenilia, many of its features became characteristic in the mature writer's oeuvre.

The narrative focuses on a man named Rupert, about twenty-five years old, who loses £500 to a friend through a horse racing bet. Rupert decides to kill Tom, the friend to whom he owes the money, but the attempted murder fails when Rupert's sword squeaks in the dark and awakens...