Hitch Read Online Free

candlesticks. One day he begged the head acolyte to let him do this. ‘What will you give me?’ asked the boy. ‘Got any Sexton Blakes?’ He had never come into direct contact with Sexton Blake—even in detection his tastes were a cut above that. But he went out and bought ten or a dozen Sexton Blake stories to bribe the master of ceremonies and get his way. The trouble was, he did not realize until the moment came that he did not know the necessary responses to the priest. There was an awful silence, then he saw the priest irritably motion the head acolyte to get him off the scene, like a music-hall turn that had outstayed its welcome, and that was the end of his moment in the limelight.
    Understandably, he preferred in general to keep a low profile, to watch rather than actually join in games whenever they could be avoided. Nor was he very noticeable academically, remaining safely neither top nor bottom of his class—his best subject being geography. Here too he tended to be solitary, more given to observation than participation, and pursuing his own slightly eccentric private interests whenever he could. He became fascinated, for example, by the London omnibus system, collected maps and timetables, and eventually realized his ambition of travelling everyyard of the London General Omnibus Company’s routes. By the age of sixteen he knew the geography of New York by heart from maps; his favourite reading was railway timetables and Cooks’ travel folders, and he prided himself on being able to recite from memory all the stops on the Orient Express.
    At this time he did not appear to have any strong artistic interests, though in tune with his particular interest in geography he enjoyed drawing maps, real and imaginary. He invented for himself games with ship routes on maps of the world, marking them out with coloured pins and planning imaginary journeys—always by himself, for he recalls no playmate to share his childish enthusiasms. Indeed, there is no escaping a feeling that there was something curiously desolate about Hitchcock’s childhood. It does not seem to have been particularly unhappy, but all his memories are of being alone (though by choice, it seems), separated by age from his brother and sister, curiously distant from his parents because they, for all their evident concern over their youngest child, obviously had difficulty in expressing their emotions, frightened of his teachers, the police, authority figures of all sorts. It is not for nothing that the characteristic subject of his art, often taken to be suspense, is more accurately anxiety. He himself admits, even as an adult, to endless irrational anxieties, such as a terror of getting into trouble with the police so intense that he has scarcely driven a car since his arrival in America and on one occasion had a prolonged anxiety spasm as a result of merely throwing a cigar butt that might not have been totally extinguished out of a car during a drive to northern California. The story of his token incarceration by the police seems to be no joke, and it is difficult not to see the origin of much in the mature man’s character—deviousness, shyness, impassivity, insistence on total control of his environment and all possible circumstances of his existence, personal and professional—as lying somewhere in the plump, secretive, watchful child, convinced that if he stepped out of line in any way, if he revealed anything of what he thought and felt, betrayed his emotions to anyone else, THEY (the harsh, rationalistic, disapproving ‘they’ of Edward Lear’s nonsense poems) would somehow come and get him. As Norman Bates says at the end of
Psycho
, ‘I want just to sit here and be quiet just in case they suspect me. They are probably watching me—well, let them. Let them see what kind of person I am—not even going to swat that fly.’
    And as Hitchcock moved into his teens things hardly