The son of Francis Lawrence and Nora (née Scarlet Hatton) Alloway, Lawrence Reginald Alloway was born on September 17, 1926 in the London suburb of Wimbledon. His father, a Spiritualist Church preacher and Socialist, ran a second-hand bookshop in Rochester, Kent, until the Depression before working in a mail-order office for medical publications; his mother, proud of her distant distinguished ancestry, was Church of England and Tory. Father and son were regularly in opposition to Nora. Lawrence was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1937, a condition that necessitated enforced absence from school for more than two years. He had to spend most of his time in bed and became a voracious reader, borrowing books on a variety of subjects: “I sort of read in a random fashion as I was interested,” he recalled. As he had become increasingly self-taught and used to being independent, a return to school in 1939 was not successful, so he left school and enrolled at Wimbledon School of Art as a part-time student in 1940 but, in addition to the disruption of the War, his health continued to be unstable and his attendance was spasmodic. The following academic year was spent at Pitman's College, Wimbledon, learning secretarial skills, after which he attended the London County Council Day Continuation School in Hammersmith between 1942 and 1944, where he took “commercial examinations.” At the Hammersmith school he “met a teacher with an editorial connection to the London Sunday Times and began to write short book reviews on literature that the Times inserted as filler.” He wrote about forty reviews between May 1944 and December 1945 while aged between just seventeen and nineteen. The subjects of the books were diverse and the length of the reviews ranged from 25 to 200 words, published either anonymously, under the initials “L.A.,” or with his full name. He sought to avoid blandness describing, for example, Richard Perry's I Went a-Shepherding as “a vivid account of sheep farming in Skye and the Western Highlands, [which] makes exciting reading.” Herbert Read, the art writer who would become so important in Alloway's subsequent development, had his A World Within a War book of poetry sympathetically reviewed by Alloway in 1944. A favourable attitude to America also occasionally surfaces in his criticism with references to the “vigour”—a favourite term—of the USA.