ABSTRACT
T. H. White, like Morris and Tolkien, began his life with per-sonal separation and loss. He was born in India, the only child of parents who "loathed each other and were separated," and White adds that he spoke Hindustani before he spoke English.! He was brought to England in 1911, where he was raised by his maternal grandparents; his father, and later his mother, returned to India. He was educated at Cheltenham, an English public school (what would be called a private school in the United States), followed by a year of private tutoring to prepare him for Cambridge University, where he entered Queens' College in 1925. At Cheltenham, one special teacher, C. F. Scott, encouraged White as a writer and introduced him to Marte d'Arthur. At Cambridge he demonstrated his sustained interest in the book by submitting an essay on Malory as part of his Tripos exam, an essay that one of his teachers recalls as "clearly the germ of The Sword in the Stone" (Warner, 38). However, White was diagnosed during this time with TB and given possibly less than a year to live. He postponed his studies and left England for a sustained period of
recovery in the warmer climate of Italy. There he regained his health, both his writing and thinking maturing in the process; he wrote and published a volume of poems and, in 1929, earned a First Class degree with Distinction from Cambridge.
