Terence Hanbury White was born on May 29, 1906, in Bombay, India. The only child of upper-middle-class parents, White spent just five years in the East before returning with his parents to England in 1911. White often remarked, in his later years, that his childhood was unhappy and traumatic because of his parent's stormy marriage.

He was left to his own devices by his feuding parents, and ultimately accepted with resignation and sorrow that he would be neglected while his parents bickered, separated, and reunited, only to bicker again.

However, his biographer, Sylvia Townsend Warner, points out that, far from totally defeating him, this precarious existence helped him to develop a lifelong interest in self-education. White eagerly pursued new skills throughout his life. Intensely curious, he spent many hours of his solitary childhood reading novels of danger and adventure and works of English history, and teaching himself...