I had been waiting for a better time but when it came I found that I did not step

I had been waiting for a better time, but when it came I found that I did not step from a cocoon of repressed desire to receive it What had shielded me could not be cast away The impermeability of my skin repelled good and bad alike. It became the place where time could pass by without its shadow falling on me, where life could be felt despite every attempt to make it unfeeling.For a long time afterwards I thought that the way to remember those six years was to honour their detail, their nights and days, their violence, their loneliness, the faces and words and feelings that populated them. Initially unhappy, I might have changed and become someone who liked boarding school; but it seemed to me even then that those sorts of changes were dangerous, that they represented some form of surrender Instead I stuck by my unhappiness It was a private resource, indeed my only privacy. Boarding school presented a challenge even to my understanding of the arithmetic of routine. Instead of days there were terms, periods of submersion too long humanly to be withstood. Some other method of survival would have to be evolved, some air pocket found where the weeks could safely be waited out.This evolution might, of course, have occurred naturally.

When I was 12 I was sent to boarding school, for an internment so lengthy in proportion to my age that the prospect of release lay philosophically beyond my reach. I had always disliked school, mainly because it encouraged counting. From an early age I became aware that imposing enforceable limits on time interfered with one’s natural relationship to it. Since birth I had suffered from asthma, itself an illness of time, an aversion to the military march of breath and hours. To find that life is ultimately parochial, that it comes back again and again to the place where it began, fills me with unease. I have no sense of a story yet, no faith in an ending that will justify its beginning. Increasingly I believe that you can spend only what you have, and that if you spend unwisely at first it is simply because no one has taught you about prudence and pain.I misspent my youth, although not in the traditional way.

And you’ll have some money left over for a few drinks and a taxi home.
Available from Morgan, 393 Oxford Street, London W1 and branches nationwide (enquiries, 0171-499 4101) Sale starts today, with reductions of up to one-third.. Rachel Cusk felt trapped by the interminable misery of boarding school, even after she left But then she learned how to play a trick on time … I wonder whether it is true, as I sometimes feel, that the early part of life assumes more significance the further away from it you are; that rather as the roots of a tree extend to support its growing weight, the vessel of childhood and adolescence is not, as we might think, discarded, but enlarged to contain the volume of years.
It is not that I resent the way time orders experiences, or that the period when someone is most powerless should retrospectively hold the most interest.My sense of an injustice, or at least a deception, lies rather in the youthful belief that the future is superabundant and universal, and will absolve us of the parochialness of childhood. By far the best alternative is the pounds 19.99 version from Morgan. It is the sort of thing you used to hanker after as a child because it is so bright and sparkly. Christian Lacroix, French designer and fan of all things British, is inspired by traditional fabrics; he takes tartans and loosens them up a little to make abstract weaves.The bad boy of French fashion, Jean Paul Gaultier, not only wears a kilt to show off his rugged Gallic knees; he uses tartan in his collections, too.