As a schoolboy in Barbados Neville was savagely beaten by his schoolmaster for supposedly misquoting scripture ('Take up thy bed and walk' against the master's 'couch'), could not produce a Bible because his brother Cecil had the family's; his brother Victor showed his bleeding to their father, who had to be restrained from going after the man; Neville was taken out of that school the next day and a year later the schoolmaster shot himself.