William Golding Limited Privacy Policy
This privacy policy sets out how William Golding Limited uses
and protects any information that you give it when you use this
website.
William Golding Limited is committed to ensuring that your
privacy is protected. Should we ask you to provide certain
information by which you can be identified when using this website,
then you can be assured that it will only be used in accordance
with this privacy statement.
William Golding Limited may change this policy from time to time
by updating this page. You should check this page from time to time
to ensure that you are happy with any changes. This policy is
effective from 18 July 2010.
What we collect
We may collect the following information:
- name and job title
- contact information
including email address
- demographic information
such as postcode, preferences and interests
- other information
relevant to customer contacts and correspondence
What we do with the information we gather
We require this information to understand your needs and provide
you with a better service, and in particular for the following
reasons:
- Internal record
keeping.
- We may use the
information to improve our products and services.
- From time to time, we
may also use your information to contact you for market research
purposes. We may contact you by email only. We may use the
information to customise the website according to your
interests.
Security
We are committed to ensuring that your information is secure. In
order to prevent unauthorised access or disclosure,we have put in
place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to
safeguard and secure the information we collect online.
How we use cookies
A cookie is a small file which asks permission to be placed on
your computer's hard drive. Once you agree, the file is added and
the cookie helps analyse web traffic or lets you know when you
visit a particular site. Cookies allow web applications to respond
to you as an individual. The web application can tailor its
operations to your needs, likes and dislikes by gathering and
remembering information about your preferences.
We use traffic log cookies to identify which pages are being
used. This helps us analyse data about web page traffic and improve
our website in order to tailor it to customer needs. We only use
this information for statistical analysis purposes and then the
data is removed from the system.
Overall, cookies help us provide you with a better website, by
enabling us to monitor which pages you find useful and which you do
not. A cookie in no way gives us access to your computer or any
information about you, other than the data you choose to share with
us.
You can choose to accept or decline cookies. Most web browsers
automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your
browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer. This may prevent
you from taking full advantage of the website.
Links to other websites
Our website may contain links to other websites of interest.
However, once you have used these links to leave our site, you
should note that we do not have any control over that other
website. Therefore, we cannot be responsible for the protection and
privacy of any information which you provide whilst visiting such
sites and such sites are not governed by this privacy statement.
You should exercise caution and look at the privacy statement
applicable to the website in question.
Controlling your personal information
You may choose to restrict the collection or use of your
personal information in the following ways:
- if you fill in a form on
the website, look for the box that you can click to indicate that
you do not want the information to be used by anybody for direct
marketing purposes
- if you have previously
agreed to us using your personal information for direct marketing
purposes, you may change your mind at any time by emailing us at office@william-golding.co.uk
We will not sell, distribute or lease your personal information
to third parties unless we have your permission or are required by
law to do so. We will not use your personal information to send you
promotional information about third parties.
You may request details of personal information which we hold
about you under the Data Protection Act 1998. A small fee will be
payable. If you would like a copy of the information held on you
please contact us at office@william-golding.co.uk.
If you believe that any information we are
holding on you is incorrect or incomplete, please email us as soon
as possible at the above address. We will promptly correct any
information found to be incorrect.
'Scenes From a Life' (ca. 1992)
There are several autobiographical accounts written during and
just after the war. Then in the early 1960s Golding wrote the two
essays about his childhood 'Billy The Kid' and 'The Ladder and the
Tree' (both published in The Hot Gates (1965). In the
mid-1960s he wrote an unpublished account of his relations with
women, a process which led him to write his novel The
Pyramid (1967). Then from 1971 onwards he kept a daily
journal, as yet unpublished. Its last entry is the evening
before
his death.
In the last few years of his life Golding began to reflect on his
very early childhood in an account he called 'Scenes From a Life'.
Part of this has been published in Arete (Issue Two,
Spring-Summer 2000). Golding was particularly interested in the
distinction between memory and imagination, and throughout this
account he attempts to separate these processes. He is aware that
his story-telling eye can 'see' more than actually happened.
Internal evidence suggests that 'Scenes' was written in 1992. The
opening of his last novel The Double Tongue has a close
relationship with the opening of 'Scenes'.
Copyright © William Golding Limited 2002
Extracts from "Scenes From a Life"
It was awareness, I think, unadulterated sense of self, so pure it
had neither time nor motion
nor process. It was not thought for that implies connection of one
state of awareness with a
similar state before or after. There may have been colour. On the
other hand I may be
colouring a memory as one does. But if so there is little I can do
to get beyond a memory.
Oh yes I can! There are two memories, one monochrome, black and
white, or rather nonlight,
i.e. strange darkness, not like darkness now, but related, as
slate is to ebony. That
surrounds the light which is dull. The other is primary. It is
more important, more living,
and so for those reasons, and qualities I decide that it is
earlier though in the time sense they
occupy the same bit of time, or alternatively are outside time.
There was colour, red mostly,
but everywhere, and a sense of a wind blowing, buffeting, and
there was much light. It is
hard to stop myself importing a sense of glory to the experience;
but the bare fact is that the
fact was bare of all but colour, brightness and buffet. There was
no distance and there were
no shapes and of course something else was present, the awareness.
Was that sufficiently
developed to call it "I"? I do not think so. It, the awareness,
did not recognise time, though
time passed since there was movement in the colour.
Copyright © William Golding Limited 2002
I remember I could read but I don't remember how old I was when I
learnt. I remember
knowing how to read and knowing too that my parents were not aware
of my ability. I tried
to tell them but could not get through to them or convince them,
so I went off, puzzled, and
continued reading. I don't know whether I was preposterously young
for that skill or not. It
would have been easy for me to learn early since there was a
difference of about a yard
between me and anybody else and I had to entertain myself. Many
years later when Ann my
wife came with me to share some leave or holiday, she proposed to
my mother (I think it was
Christmas) that we should play a game of some sort, charades
perhaps. But my mother said,
grimly and sadly "You don't understand this family my dear. The
four of us usually spend
Christmas in separate rooms." It was a shock to Ann, who as one of
ten children was used to
a tribal life. So I must have learned in the awareness of my own
solitude that reading was a
sort of companionship.
Copyright © William Golding Limited 2002
[Later in his childhood]
I swung the bat in a semicircle, missed the ball but hit José with
the wooden bat across the
side of the head. Instantly he turned and ran for home, one hand
holding the side of his head.
I was the one who made a noise, anguished to think of the awful
thing I had done. But he
made not a sound. He always was the silent one. I trundled after
him, whimpering and
wondering what I should tell mam and dad, or what he would.
I trundled back across the Common and down the road to the Green,
my fears growing
deeper. I can just remember them. I ended at the house, terrified
and now as silent as my
brother. I remember no more. But years later my parents told me
that José had described the
whole scene to them. He wasn't really hurt they said. But I crept
in to the house with my
terror and hid from everyone else under the dining room
table.
Copyright © William Golding Limited 2002