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so that he could see well enough. He was contrived a position in which he did not have to be doped very much and spent days and weeks and months in it. But, though the burnt area reckoned as a percentage of the whole made it improbable, hedid in fact survive, to begin a long progress through hospitals of one sort of expertise or another. By the time he had come to speak his occasional word of English it was impossible to discover whether it was his native tongue or whether he had picked up the word in hospital. He had no background but the fire. He was known in successive wards as baby, darling, pet, poppet, sweetie and boo-boo. He was at last given a name because a matron put her foot down, a thing of power. She spoke roundly.
    “We can’t go on calling the child number seven behind his back. It’s most improper and injurious.”
    She was an old-fashioned matron who used that kind of word. She was effective.
    The appropriate office was working through the alphabet in rotation, since the boy was only one among the wreckage of that childhood. The office had just presented a baby girl with the name “Venables”. The young wit who was given the job of using “w” suggested “Windup”, her chief having displayed less than perfect courage in an air raid. She had found she could get married and still keep her job and she was feeling secure and superior. Her chief winced at the name and drew his pen through it, foreseeing a coven of children all shouting “Windup! Windup!” He made his own substitution, though when he looked at what he had written it seemed not quite right and he altered it. There was no obvious reason for doing so. The name had first jumped into his mind with the curious effect of having come out of empty air and of being temporary, a thing to be noticed because you were lucky to be in the place where it had landed. It was as if you had sat silently in the bushes and—My!—there settled in front of you the rarest of butterflies or birds which had stayed long enough to be seen and had then gone off with an air of going for ever, sideways, it might be.
    The boy’s current hospital accepted “Septimus” as a middle name but made no use of it. Perhaps it had overtones of “Septic”. His first name, Matthew, became “Matty”; and as “Seven” was still written on all the relevant papers, no one used his surname. But then, for years of his childhood, all visitors had to peer among sheets and bandages and mechanisms to see any part of him but the right side of his face.
    As the various aids to recovery were removed from him and he began to speak more, it was observed that his relationship tolanguage was unusual. He mouthed. Not only did he clench his fists with the effort of speaking, he squinted. It seemed that a word was an object, a material object, round and smooth sometimes, a golf ball of a thing that he could just about manage to get through his mouth, though it deformed his face in the passage. Some words were jagged and these became awful passages of pain and struggle that made the other children laugh. After his turban came off in the period between the primary work and what cosmetic work was possible, the ruin of his half-raw skull and blasted ear was most unappealing. Patience and silence seemed the greater part of his nature. Bit by bit he learnt to control the anguish of speaking until the golfballs and jagged stones, the toads and jewels passed through his mouth with not much more than the normal effort.
    In the illimitable spaces of childhood, time was his only dimension. Adults who tried to establish contact with him were never successful with words. He accepted words and seemed to think long about them and sometimes he answered them. But it was a dissociated traffic out there. He was, at this time, to be approached by a method beyond conceptual artifice. Thus the nurse who squeezed him with her arms, knowing just where his body could bear the contact, found the relatively good,