- In his later years, he lived alone in a cottage in a remote fastness on the island of Alderney. He was a tall man, with flowing white hair, a deep voice and a big white beard. He answered a knock on his cottage door one afternoon to discover two young Americans, complete strangers to him, who announced that they represented the Jehovah's Witnesses. White immediately responded, "I am Jehovah - how are we doing?" In telling this story, as he often did, White liked to conclude by saying that their response had been to "run like hell".
- His father was a district superintendent with the colonial police, and an alcoholic given to outbursts of aggression. His mother was said to be cold and distant. White was packed off to school in England at an early age. His parents' marriage broke up soon after the end of the First World War. All this may have led to his becoming emotionally isolated from other people; he lived alone and spent most of his life in remote rural areas.
- In his famous novel for children, "The Sword In The Stone", the boy who will grow up to be King Arthur is told that the best cure for being lonely is to learn something. His biographer, Sylvia Townsend Warner, noted that White, who never married and lived mostly in remote areas far way from people, had an enormous fund of detailed knowledge on all kinds of esoteric subjects; all his (few) friends regarded him as a true polymath. From this, she concluded that he must have been an intensely lonely man throughout his life.
- As soon as the Second World War started in 1939, White began professing Irish ancestry (hitherto unmentioned) and immediately took himself to the Republic of Eire, a neutral country where he remained throughout the conflict.
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