Dances were held on Saturday nights in the manor farm barn, everything there exactly as in Strindberg’s Miss Julie, the night light, the excitement, the heavy scents of the bird-cherries and lilacs, the squealing fiddle, the rejection and acceptance, the games and the cruelty. Owing to the shortage of male partners at the Saturday dances, I was restored to favour, but dared not touch the girls as I immediately got a hard-on. I also danced badly and was gradually discarded, embittered and furious, hurt and ridiculous, terrified and withdrawn. Puberty, bourgeois style, summer 1932.

I read ceaselessly, often without understanding, but I had a sensitive ear for tone: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac, Defoe, Swift, Flaubert, Nietzsche and, of course, Strindberg.

I no longer had any words. I started stammering and biting my nails. My loathing of myself and life itself was suffocating me. I walked hunched up, my head thrust forward, the cause of constant reprimands. The strange thing was that I never questioned my wretched life. I thought it should be like that.