On a damp Sunday in September 1949, 11-year-old Hopkins arrived at West Mon, a foreboding Gothic boarding school in Monmouthshire with the motto “SERVE AND OBEY” (1). His mother wanted him to receive a proper education; his father reluctantly agreed despite the cost. Hopkins had been academically dismissed by previous teachers—one labeled him “Dennis the Dunce” (2)—and neighborhood children mocked him as “Elephant Head” due to his disproportionately large head. A specialist, Dr. Bray, assured his parents he was normal and simply needed fattening up.

Being abandoned at the school planted what Hopkins calls “a seed of indifference” (2). He resolved never to become emotionally close to his parents or anyone else again, declaring his childhood over. After a brief meeting with the headmaster, Mr. Harrison, and his wife, his parents departed. His mother waved from their Ford Model C 10, but his father kept his eyes forward. Hopkins didn’t wave back and obsessively muttered their license plate number: “BTX 698” (3).

A cold, military-type housemaster whom Hopkins nicknamed “Lob” told him that his prospects were “nothing but rags and tatters” (3). Hopkins responded by clowning around with imitations and voices. When Lob assigned the class to copy out a Tennyson quote 20 times as punishment, Hopkins bleated like livestock while writing, earning repeated slaps. He discovered a useful defense mechanism: a gaze of passive indifference that showed no reaction or pain, driving adults to frustration.

One Saturday evening, the school screened Laurence Olivier’s film adaptation of Hamlet. The headmaster delivered a lengthy introduction, and Hopkins dreaded the experience. But when the film began with William Walton’s music and Olivier’s opening soliloquy, he was transfixed. The performance spoke to something ancient within him—grief, betrayal, haunting memories. He wept, overwhelmed by the depiction of damaged families, too young to grasp the language but moved by its emotional force.

After Hopkins’s failure at West Mon, his parents sought help getting him into Cowbridge Grammar School. They turned to a wealthy relative, Uncle Eddie James, who was part of the Welsh elite (the “crachach”) and had connections to the Welsh board of education.

Hopkins reflects on his family history. His paternal grandfather, Arthur Richard Hopkins, was a tough, self-made man who ran away from home, worked in a London bakery, and became a master confectioner, winning baking trophies. An industrial agitator who claimed to have met Lenin, he believed in the “survival of the fittest” (8) and once told Hopkins’s mother that the boy had a large head with “nothing much in it” (8). He returned to Wales with his wife, Emmy, and three children: Miriam, Richard Arthur (Hopkins’s father), and Lorna. At 14, Hopkins’s father was pulled from school to work unpaid in the family bakery.

His maternal grandfather, Frederick Thomas Yeats, a railway worker from Wiltshire, married Sophia Phillips and settled in South Wales. They had two daughters: Muriel (Hopkins’s mother) and Jenny. When Jenny died of diphtheria at nine, Grandpa Yeats wept at her funeral but returned to work the next day and never mentioned her again, embodying stoic acceptance of loss.

On a Sunday afternoon, the family visited Aunt Patty’s house to meet Uncle Eddie. The imposing, silver-haired man questioned Hopkins, who was prompted to discuss astronomy. He impressed everyone by reciting facts from Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia, a 10-volume set that his father had bought him at age six after a painful dental visit. He further astonished them by listing his favorite literary characters (villains like Abel Magwitch, Fagin, and Bill Sikes) and reciting passages from Hamlet and Julius Caesar. Uncle Eddie concluded that the boy was a “dreamer” who needed extra tuition but promised to contact the headmaster of Cowbridge, Idwal Rees. His intervention succeeded, and at 13, Hopkins entered Cowbridge for the summer term of 1951.

At Cowbridge Grammar School, the strict headmaster, J. Idwal Rees (whom Hopkins nicknamed “the Crow”) was a Cambridge-educated classics scholar and former international rugby player. One morning, the Crow publicly humiliated him, calling him a “totally inept” player with “shovel hands” and a “brainless cart horse” (21-22). Following his grandfather Yeats’s advice to stay mute, Hopkins embraced “inept” as his identity. He looked up the word in the library’s Webster’s dictionary, taking comfort in its synonyms: incompetent, unfit, incapable. He carried a small notebook that his grandfather gave him to record facts and observations.

Hopkins withdrew completely from school life, refusing even to attend his own birthday parties. He found perverse satisfaction in victimhood, thinking “then they’d be sorry” (23).

He was summoned twice to the Crow’s office, first for possessing Covenant with Death, a World War I photograph book his father gave him, showing the horrors of trench warfare. The Crow confiscated it, declaring war “glorious.” The second summons was for reading Leon Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed (1936), which he borrowed from the Port Talbot Library and never returned. The Crow questioned his interest in Communism but ultimately returned the book, instructing him not to read it in class.

Later, the Crow told Hopkins’s parents that their son was “a bit of a dreamer, head in the clouds” (25) and amusedly shared that the boy had criticized the school production of Twelfth Night for having a weak cast. In English class, Mr. Codling mockingly invited “our resident critic” (25) to read John Masefield’s “The West Wind” aloud from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. The poem’s evocative imagery of home and belonging moved Hopkins nearly to tears. The class fell silent, and Mr. Codling quietly told him that his reading was “rather good.”

On April Fools’ Day, 17-year-old Hopkins stood in his family’s cramped kitchen as his father opened another damning school report. The letter, from Cowbridge headmaster J. Idwal Rees, detailed academic failure and social isolation. His father launched into a familiar tirade, calling him “bloody hopeless” and a “complete bloody waste of money” (31), while his mother defended him.

Hopkins reflects on his parents’ shared tendency toward depression. His father drank heavily, fueling his emotionality; Hopkins once heard him weeping in the garden. As a child, he would sit beside his father during bread delivery rounds, seeing only his left profile, which gave rise to nightmares that his father wasn’t real—just a walking profile.

Flashbacks punctuate the narrative. As a toddler, he played a game with his father, who would lift him toward the ceiling’s gas mantle. He remembered wartime evenings when his father chatted with a neighbor, Bert John, over victory garden vegetables and Woodbine cigarettes. In first grade, Miss Thomas had Hopkins recite the Lord’s Prayer and 23rd Psalm perfectly—his first good review—but when he performed for his father, the atheist scoffed at the “fairy-tale nonsense” (34)—his first bad review.

In another flashback, his mother bought deer antlers and a painting from an old man, Mr. Williams, in a ruined cottage. On the walk home, she asked her son what he would do if she ran away forever—a question that haunted him for years, making him fear that she might actually leave.

A neighbor, artist Bernice Evans, gave him drawing lessons. One evening in 1947, her boyfriend arrived: Richard Burton, then an unknown actor. Years later, Hopkins got Burton’s autograph. Burton teased him for not speaking Welsh, and as he drove away in his gray Jaguar, Hopkins decided that he wanted to become an actor.

Back in the present kitchen, something shifted within Hopkins. He told his parents calmly: “One day I’ll show you. I’ll show both of you” (35). He felt an “inner click,” a moment of certainty. His father tore up the report and tossed it into the fireplace. Later, Hopkins retrieved and preserved the torn pages. His father said, “Well, I hope you do show us” (36). His mother expressed faith in him. They went to see Woman’s World at the Plaza cinema. Walking through Port Talbot, Hopkins felt detached, as if the familiar town had become stage scenery and he no longer truly knew his parents.

Following the April Fools’ Day incident, Jack Edwards, a kind neighbor and YMCA board member, agreed to the author’s father’s request to introduce the 17-year-old to other young people. At the YMCA, Jack introduced him to Mr. Nicholas, an elderly man. While the adults discussed complaints about rugby practice, Hopkins calmed his anxiety by counting the black and white terrazzo floor tiles, reminiscent of his mother’s kitchen floor.

Jack took him to the upstairs games room, where he saw Donald Price playing snooker. Left alone, Hopkins wandered and discovered a rehearsal in progress. The producer, Cyril Jenkins, invited him to watch the YMCA Players rehearse The Easter Play. Hopkins saw Duncan Miles, the town sanitary inspector, performing a line about Golgotha. Cyril offered him a small role—a saint with one line: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (50). He accepted. Cyril’s daughter, Marilyn, praised his voice when he read the line.

Walking home, Jack reassured him repeatedly: “You’ll be fine” (51). Hopkins suddenly saw Port Talbot as scenery for a performance. His parents were pleased, though his father made a cynical crack about Hollywood.

At the dress rehearsal, stage lights and Wagner’s Lohengrin transformed the makeshift theater. Hopkins wore a costume made from a bed sheet with a golden star. On opening night, his parents and maternal grandparents attended. He delivered his line.

That night, his mother revealed that his father had cried with pride during the performance—an emotional display she hadn’t seen from him in years. His father came in and confirmed that others thought the performance was good.

The chapter concludes with a final memory. One evening, an Indian traveler in a turban arrived at the closed shop. Hopkins’s mother gave him bread and doughnuts, then purchased scarves, ties, and a miniature silver elephant. The traveler predicted the mother would become ill but recover, told the father he was a sad, lonely man whose life would end soon if he didn’t believe, and told Hopkins that he had “snake eyes” but would become famous worldwide and live in a castle. The father scoffed. Years later, Hopkins noted that every prediction came true, including his mother’s near-fatal peritonitis, from which she was saved by a surgeon from Punjab named Dr. Sabir.