And what marvellous exciting ...

And what marvellous exciting fun it was! She had the great teacher’s knack of making everything she spoke about come alive to us in that room. - P211

And the result of all this, for me at any rate, was that by the age of thirteen I had become intensely aware of the vast heritage of literature that had been built up in England over the centuries. I also became an avid and insatiable reader of good writing. - P211

The clothes we had to wear at this school made us look like assistants in a funeral parlour. The jacket was black, with a cutaway front and long tails hanging down behind that came below the backs of the knees. The trousers were black with thin grey stripes. The shoes were black. There was a black waistcoat with eleven buttons to do up every morning. The tie was black. Then there was a stiff starched white butterfly collar and a white shirt. - P212

Some of the beatings administered by this Man of God, this future Head of the Church of England, were very brutal. To my certain knowledge he once had to produce a basin of water, a sponge and a towel so that the victim could wash the blood away afterwards. - P213

Unless one was going to become a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, an engineer or some other kind of professional person, I saw little point in wasting three or four years at Oxford or Cambridge, and I still hold this view. Instead, I had a passionate wish to go abroad, to travel, to see distant lands. - P217

There were twenty of us training to be pilots out there in Nairobi. Seventeen of those twenty were killed during the war. - P221

At Habbaniyih, they taught us to fly more powerful aeroplanes with guns in them, and we practised shooting at drogues (targets in the air pulled behind other planes) and at objects on the ground. - P221

Finally, our training was finished, and we were sent to Egypt to fight against the Italians in the Western Desert of Libya. I joined 80 Squadron, which flew fighters, and at first we had only ancient single-seater bi-planes called Gloster Gladiators. The two machine-guns on a Gladiator were mounted one on either side of the engine, and they fired their bullets, believe it or not, through the propeller. The guns were somehow synchronized with the propeller shaft so that in theory the bullets missed the whirling propeller blades. But as you might guess, this complicated mechanism often went wrong and the poor pilot, who was trying to shoot down the enemy, shot off his own propeller instead. - P221

I myself was shot down in a Gladiator which crashed far out in the Libyan desert between the enemy lines. The plane burst into flames, but I managed to get out and was finally rescued and carried back to safety by our own soldiers who crawled out across the sand under cover of darkness. - P221

I was given a Hurricane and told to fly it from Egypt to Greece and join the squadron. Now, a Hurricane fighter was not at all like the old Gladiator. It had eight Browning machine-guns, four in each wing, and all eight of them fired simultaneously when you pressed the small button on your joy-stick. It was a magnificent plane, but it had a range of only two hours’ flying-time. The journey to Greece, non-stop, would take nearly five hours, always over the water. They put extra fuel tanks on the wings. They said I would make it. In the end, I did. But only just. When you are six feet six inches tall, as I am, it is no joke to be sitting crunched up in a tiny cockpit for five hours. - P222

But this couldn’t last long. Soon, we had only five Hurricanes left, and not many pilots still alive. Those five planes were flown to the island of Crete. The Germans captured Crete. Some of us escaped. I was one of the lucky ones. I finished up back in Egypt. The squadron was re-formed and re-equipped with Hurricanes. We were sent off to Haifa, which was then in Palestine (now Israel), where we fought the Germans again and the Vichy French in Lebanon and Syria. - P223

I was invalided back to England and sailed on a troopship from Suez to Durban to Capetown to Lagos to Liverpool, chased by German submarines in the Atlantic and bombed by long-range Focke-Wulf aircraft every day for the last week of the voyage. - P223

I was twenty-six years old when I arrived in Washington, and I still had no thoughts of becoming a writer. - P223

‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Forester. C. S. Forester.’ I nearly fell out of my chair. ‘Are you joking?’ I said. ‘No,’ he said, smiling. ‘That’s me.’ And it was. It was the great writer himself, the inventor of Captain Hornblower and the best teller of tales about the sea since Joseph Conrad. I asked him to take a seat. - P224

But no. And it was then I began to realize for the first time that there are two distinct sides to a writer of fiction. First, there is the side he displays to the public, that of an ordinary person like anyone else, a person who does ordinary things and speaks an ordinary language. Second, there is the secret side which comes out in him only after he has closed the door of his workroom and is completely alone. It is then that he slips into another world altogether, a world where his imagination takes over and he finds himself actually living in the places he is writing about at that moment. I myself, if you want to know, fall into a kind of trance and everything around me disappears. I see only the point of my pencil moving over the paper, and quite often two hours go by as though they were a couple of seconds. - P226

‘Look,’ I said. ‘If you like, I’ll try to write down on paper what happened and send it to you. Then you can rewrite it properly yourself in your own time. Wouldn’t that be easier? I could do it tonight.’ That, though I didn’t know it at the time, was the moment that changed my life. - P227

That night, in the small house I lived in alone in a suburb of Washington, I sat down and wrote my story. I started at about seven o’clock and finished at midnight. I remember I had a glass of Portuguese brandy to keep me going. For the first time in my life, I became totally absorbed in what I was doing. I floated back in time and once again I was in the sizzling hot desert of Libya, with white sand underfoot, climbing up into the cockpit of the old Gladiator, strapping myself in, adjusting my helmet, starting the motor and taxiing out for take-off. It was astonishing how everything came back to me with absolute clarity. Writing it down on paper was not difficult. The story seemed to be telling itself, and the hand that held the pencil moved rapidly back and forth across each page. Just for fun, when it was finished, I gave it a title. I called it ‘A Piece of Cake’. - P228

The next story I wrote was fiction. I made it up. Don’t ask me why. And Mr Matson sold that one, too. Out there in Washington in the evenings over the next two years, I wrote eleven short stories. All were sold to American magazines, and later they were published in a little book called Over to You. - P229

Because of the Gremlins, I was given three weeks’ leave from my duties at the Embassy in Washington and whisked out to Hollywood. - P230

Because of the Gremlins, I was given three weeks’ leave from my duties at the Embassy in Washington and whisked out to Hollywood. - P230

Non-fiction, which means writing about things that have actually taken place, doesn’t interest me. - P232

Had I not been lucky enough to meet Mr Forester, it would probably never have happened. - P233

And so it went on, the ghastl...

And so it went on, the ghastly early-morning inspection. And by the end of it all, when the headmaster had gone away and Mr Pople started marching us into the dining-room by forms, many of us had lost our appetites for the lumpy porridge that was to come. - P207

But no Act of God, neither tornado nor hurricane nor volcanic eruption was ever allowed to stop those ghastly two-hour Saturday morning walks that the seven-, eight- and nine-year-old little boys had to take along the windy esplanades of Weston-super-Mare on Saturday mornings. - P208

A junior master called S. K. Jopp would then poke his head around the door and shout at us with such ferocity that specks of spit would fly from his mouth like bullets and splash against the window panes across the room. - P208

There they would remain until just before lunch, drinking pint after pint of strong brown ale. - P209

Blessed beautiful Mrs O’Connor with her whacky clothes and her grey hair flying in all directions. She was about fifty years old, with a horsey face and long yellow teeth, but to us she was beautiful. She was not on the staff. She was hired from somewhere in the town to come up on Saturday mornings and be a sort of baby-sitter, to keep us quiet for two and a half hours while the masters went off boozing at the pub. - P210

[오늘의 한문장] 이처럼 사소한 것들

크리스마스가 다가오고 있었다. 벌써 멋진 노르웨이 가문비나무가 광장에 섰고 그 옆에는 말 구유와 색을 새로 칠한 예수 탄생 조각상이 있었다. 요셉의 빨간색과 보라색옷이 너무 요란하지 않냐며 못마땅해하는 사람도 있었지만 언제나처럼 파란색과 흰색 옷을 입고 다소곳이 무릎을 꿇은 성모상에는 다들 만족스러워했다. 양 두 마리와 구유 옆을 지키는 갈색 당나귀도 예년과 다르지 않았다. 구유에는 크리스마스이브에 아기 예수가 놓일 예정이었다. - P25

Then came the pain. It was un...

Then came the pain. It was unbelievable, unbearable, excruciating. It was as though someone had laid a white-hot poker across your backside and pressed hard. - P203

The second stroke would be coming soon and it was as much as you could do to stop putting your hands in the way to ward it off. It was the instinctive reaction. But if you did that, it would break your fingers. - P203

That cruel cane ruled our lives. - P204

So we watched our words. And we watched our steps. My goodness, how we watched our steps. We became incredibly alert. - P204

You should be able to write w...

You should be able to write well.
By that I mean you should be able to make a scene come alive in the reader’s mind.
Not everybody has this ability. It is a gift, and you either have it or you don’t. - P201

You must have stamina.
In other words, you must be able to stick to what you are doing and never give up, for hour after hour, day after day, week after week and month after month. - P201

You must be a perfectionist.
That means you must never be satisfied with what you have written until you have rewritten it again and again, making it as good as you possibly can. - P201

You must have strong self-discipline.
You are working alone. No one is employing you. No one is around to give you the sack if you don’t turn up for work, or to tick you off if you start slacking. - P201

It helps a lot if you have a keen sense of humour.
This is not essential when writing for grown-ups, but for children, it’s vital. - P201

You must have a degree of humility.
The writer who thinks that his work is marvellous is heading for trouble. - P201

Let me tell you how I myself slid in through the back door and found myself in the world of fiction. - P201