Leonards, East Sussex, where his maternal grandparents lived. He remained with them when his parents returned to India--his father in 1914, followed by his mother in 1915.
White began his formal education in 1920 at Cheltenham College, a public school with a longstanding Anglo-Indian connection and a strong military program. In the summer of 1923 he received a certificate with credits in English, history, geography, French, and mathematics. In January of that year Constance White had been granted a separation from her alcoholic husband on grounds of cruelty; she returned to England and began, with the help of a cousin and her recently graduated son, to attempt to make a living as a pig and poultry farmer. She later wrote that she found herself unable, because she lacked the penny to pay for a stamp, to respond to a letter from her son's former headmaster saying that she must by "hook or crook . . . manage to send my boy to a University."
"The Man," an autobiographical short story collected in The Maharajah and Other Stories (1981), is based on this period in White's life. White's sense of injustice at being forced to postpone his university education becomes apparent when his alter ego, Nicky, says that though he "hated the muscular man [his mother's cousin], and hated the arid chicken farm, and hated work, and hated his school, where he ought to be a prefect but was not, he hid these feelings and was ashamed of them and did not recognize them." Nicky's impulse--and White's, too, one can imagine--is to "read himself away, into a less real world."
White spent a year tutoring and was able to enter Queens' College, Cambridge, in 1925.
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