9、Complete the passage by choosing the proper words or phrases in the box. Each word can only be used once. Note that there is one word more than you need.

       I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap year on either side, and I hardly saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely. I had the  1  child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with  2  persons, and I think from the very start my literary  3  was mixed up with the feeling of  4  . I knew that I had a natural ability with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that it  5  

a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

However, the quantity of serious writing which I  6  all through my childhood would not add up to half a dozen pages. I wrote my first poem at the age of four or five, with my mother  7  it down on a piece of paper. I cannot remember anything about it except that it was about a tiger and the tiger had “chair-like teeth”—a good enough expression. At eleven, when the war of 1914-18 broke out, I wrote a poem which was printed in the local newspaper, as was another, two years later, on the death of Kitchener. From time to time, when I was a bit older, I wrote bad and usually unfinished “nature poems”. I also, about twice,  8  a short story which was a  9  . That was the total of the would-be serious work that I actually set down on paper during all those years.