Terrence Hanbury (T.H.) White was born in Bombay, India, on May 29, 1906. The only child of Garrick White, a district superintendent of police, and Constance Aston White, the daughter of an Indian judge, he was born eighteen months into what he would later describe as his parents' doomed marriage. White's father's career kept him on the move; his often-neglected son became ill at the age of eleven and was ordered, by a doctor, to be removed to England. After a year, Garrick returned to India; eighteen months later, Constance followed him.
White stayed with his grandparents and was enrolled in Cheltenham College, a traditional school that dated to the Victorian era. White found the school more like a prison than a haven from his awful home life. According to White's diary, the housemaster was a "sadistic middle-aged bachelor with a gloomy suffused [blushing] face," while the prefects (senior pupils who helped discipline the younger boys) were "lithe and brighter copies" of the housemaster who used "to beat us after evening prayers."
As the reader of The Sword in the Stone (the first volume of The Once and Future King) may infer, White realized that education cannot happen if it is only associated with physical punishment — something to which Merlyn, in the novel, never resorts.
