Aged nine, Hitchcock was sent away to Salesian College in Battersea, a boarding school at which the discipline was apparently so harsh and the food so awful that his parents removed him after just one week. From there, he attended Howrah House, a convent school run by the Sisters of the Faithful Companions of Jesus. At the age of eleven, he entered St Ignatius College, a Jesuit school in Stamford Hill, north London, named in honor of the founder of the Society of Jesus, the sixteenth-century diplomat and soldier St Ignatius of Loyola, who wrote a hugely influential handbook of spiritual direction, advocating a chivalric vision of Christianity in which men poured all their mortal energy into fighting for the glory of God. Jesuit schools gained a reputation for austerity and discipline, a reputation that Hitchcock thought just. Punishment at St Ignatius College, as was common in Jesuit schools of the time, included strokes on the hand with a ferule, a foot-long leather-covered rubber strap. The ferule ritual was “highly dramatic,” remembered Hitchcock, as “it was left to the pupil to decide when to go, and he would keep putting it off and then he would go at the end of the day to a special room where there would be a priest or a lay brother who would administer the punishment—like sort of, in a minor way, going for execution.” When the moment of punishment eventually arrived, the pain was intense. If a boy had been sentenced to twelve strokes of the strap, he would need to “spread it over two days because each hand could only take three strokes” at a time.
The experience contributed to his reverence for ritual and his dread of authority. Those of Hitchcock’s generation might have countered that similar acts of corporal punishment were familiar to senior schools of all varieties in England, and those educated in other denominations—Christian Brothers, for example—endured more severe, and more arbitrary, discipline. Even so, it’s evident that the experience left a lasting mark. He told some that his fear of the priests and their methods was the “root” of his work. Wittingly or not, Hitchcock would one day pass on the fear of violent chastisement to a little boy in his care. The actor Bill Mumy was seven years old when he played the central role in “Bang! You’re Dead,” an episode in the seventh series of Hitchcock’s highly popular television series of the fifties and sixties, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. By the end of a long day filming, Mumy was losing concentration, and fidgeting when he was asked to stay still, prompting Hitchcock to rise from his chair and cross the floor. Mumy recalls Hitchcock’s frame, huge to a small child, clad in priestly black and white, descending on him, sweating, and breathing heavily as he whispered into the boy’s ear: “If you don’t stop moving about, I’m going to get a nail and nail your feet to your mark, and the blood will come pouring out like milk—so stop moving.” Mumy was petrified, and years later when he worked in the same building as Hitchcock at Universal, he avoided even walking past his office. “It has been a big deal for me for over fifty years,” he said in 2013, “tattooed on my id,” in the very way that Hitchcock’s own encounters with authority figures clung to him throughout his life.
Hitchcock left school a few weeks ahead of his fourteenth birthday, as was the norm for children of his background. From there, he pursued his interest in science, technology, and engineering by enrolling at the London County Council School of Marine Engineering and Navigation. After a year of study, he entered the world of work, in November 1914, at W.T. Henley’s Telegraph Works Company, where he was initially employed in the dull task of estimating the sizes and voltages of electrical cable. Eventually he was moved into the advertising department, and he took evening classes in art at Goldsmiths College, University of London. It was at this point, in his late teens, that his creative life began.
Upon this skeleton of facts, Hitchcock’s experience of childhood is fleshed out largely by stories that emanate from his own memories. In his mind’s eye, he was a timid, solitary, though not unhappy child who sat on the sides, watching rather than participating. Sports, and rough and tumble games, were not for him. “I don’t remember ever having a playmate,” he recalled, and he was too young to hang on the coattails of his siblings. He thought himself agreeable enough, though, according to one biographer, schoolmates tended to think him strange and teased him for smelling of fish. Lacking friends, he retreated (perhaps contentedly so) into books and maps, indulging a fascination with travel, learning train timetables by heart and tracking the journeys of ships across the oceans. By the age of eight, so he insisted, he had traveled every route on the London General Omnibus Company.
His most vivid memories—or, at least, the ones he publicly declared—were concerned with fear, the fuel on which the Hitchcock juggernaut ran. He claimed to be scared of just about everything: policemen, strangers, driving, solitude, crowds,
