Potts, one of his tutors who, ironically, White initially 'disliked to the point of rage for about a year.' White faced another hardship, however, when he contracted tuberculosis in 1927 and spent four months in a sanitarium. It was there that he met the man whom he would call 'the great literary influence in my life,' L. White found Cambridge much more to his liking. Because of this, White often attested that he would 'be grateful to him till I die.' In 1923, White's parents obtained a divorce the following year, White left Cheltenham and spent a year doing private tutoring in order to afford the tuition at Cambridge, where he enrolled in 1925. Scott, who praised White's talent and encouraged him to be a writer. The one bright spot of White's time at Cheltenham was his meeting of a master named C. According to White's diary, the housemaster was a 'sadistic middle-aged bachelor with a gloomy suffused face,' while the prefects (senior pupils who helped discipline the younger boys) were 'lithe and brighter copies' of the housemaster who used 'to beat us after evening prayers.'Īs the reader of The Sword in the Stone (the first volume of The Once and Future King) may infer, White realized that education cannot happen if it is only associated with physical punishment - something to which Merlyn, in the novel, never resorts.

White found the school more like a prison than a haven from his awful home life. White stayed with his grandparents and was enrolled in Cheltenham College, a traditional school that dated to the Victorian era. After a year, Garrick returned to India eighteen months later, Constance followed him. White's father's career kept him on the move his often-neglected son became ill at the age of eleven and was ordered, by a doctor, to be removed to England. The only child of Garrick White, a district superintendent of police, and Constance Aston White, the daughter of an Indian judge, he was born eighteen months into what he would later describe as his parents' doomed marriage.

Terrence Hanbury (T.H.) White was born in Bombay, India, on May 29, 1906.

The sword in the stone by th white