The initiation into the existence of pain and suffering which awaits every child held peculiar terrors for him. Acutely sensitive, his nerves of sympathy responded quickly to the feelings of others. One day he was taken to the workhouse infirmary to visit his wet-nurse who was slowly dying. The old women with their diseases, pale, lame and sorrowing, the long row of beds, the colourless monotony of the ward and its unpleasant odours fixed themselves in his consciousness. When he left he was haunted by a strange sense of unpaid and unpayable debt. For this was the woman who had fed him, whose blood had nourished his. Through poverty she had been forced to give him that which rightfully belonged to her own child. August felt vaguely that he was enjoying stolen life, and he was ashamed of his relief at being taken away from the sights of the sick-room.
When August was seven the family moved to a larger house. The worst days of penury were now over, and, though strict economy had to be practised and every luxury eschewed, there was more freedom from anxiety for the daily bread. His mind had hitherto been fed by daily portions of Kindergarten fare. He was now sent to Klara school for boys, where his sense of the general injustice of things was rapidly developed through the vigour with which the headmaster wielded his cane.
He was awakened at six during the dark winter mornings, and as his home was now far from Klara he had to trudge a long way through deep snow, and arrived at his destination in wet boots and knickerbockers. When late he was paralysed with fright in anticipation of the headmaster's morning exercise on those who were unpunctual. He heard the screams of boys who were already in the dutches of the tyrant.
One morning he was saved by the kindly charwoman, who pleaded for him and pointed out that he had a long way to walk. It is a pity that the charwoman who saved Strindberg from a thrashing has not been given a niche in his gallery of women.
August did not shine in this school, though his knowledge was in advance of his years, and he had, therefore, been admitted before the required age. He was the youngest at school and at home, a position which he vainly resented. This was a school for the children of the upper middle class. August wore knickerbockers of leather, and strong coarse boots, which smelt of blubber and blacking. The boys in velvet blouses avoided him. He observed that the badly dressed boys were more severely beaten than the well-dressed ones, and that nice-looking boys escaped altogether.
Strindberg records his early experiences at school with characteristic vehemence:
"... It was regarded as a preparation for hell and not for life; the teachers seemed to exist in order to torment, not to punish. All life weighed like an oppressive nightmare, in which it was of no avail to have known one's lessons when one left home. Life was a place for punishing crimes committed before one was born, and therefore the child walked about with a permanently bad conscience."
At the age of nine he fell in love for the first time. A roseate shimmer descended over the cane and the Latin grammar through the presence in the class-room of the headmaster's little daughter. She was placed at the back of the room, and the boys were forbidden to look at her. "She was probably ugly," he tells us with his usual realism where love affairs are concerned, "but she was nicely dressed." During the French lessons her soft voice rang out above the grating sound of the boys' answers, and even the hard visage of the teacher melted when he spoke to her.