From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and 【1】______ twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the conscience that I 【2】______ was outraging my true nature and that soon or later I should have to settle 【3】______ down and write books. I was the child of three, but there was a gap of five years on the either 【4】______ side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeing mannerisms which 【5】______ made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginative persons, and 【6】______ I think from the very start my literal ambitions were mixed up with the 【7】______ feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing in unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a 【8】______ sort of private world which I could get my own back for my failure in 【9】______ everyday life. Therefore, the volume of serious—i. e. seriously intended— 【10】______ writing which I produced all through my childhood and boyhood would not amount to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, my mother taking it down to dictation. (51)