Black adder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marion, Child Harold, Ragnarök. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leaves. Leaves did to Black adder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Black adder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leaves’s comments on them, and burned them.

Possession