Such, Such Were The Joys Essay
Soon after I arrived at St Cyprian's (not immediately, but after a week or two, just when
I seemed to be settling into the routine of school life) I began wetting my bed. I was now
aged eight, so that this was a reversion to a habit which I must have grown out of at least
four years earlier. Nowadays, I believe, bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for
granted. It is normal reaction in children who have been removed from their homes to a
strange place. In those days, however, it was looked on as a disgusting crime which the
child committed on purpose and for which the proper cure was a beating. For my part I
did not need to be told it was a crime. Night after night I prayed, with a fervour never
previously attained in my prayers, ‘Please God, do not let me wet my bed! Oh, please
God, do not let me wet my bed!’, but it made remarkably little difference. Some nights
the thing happened, others not. There was no volition about it, no consciousness. You
did not properly speaking
do
the deed: you merely woke up in the morning and found
that the sheets were wringing wet.
After the second of third offence I was warned that I should be beaten next time,
but I received the warning in a curiously roundabout way. One afternoon, as we were
filing out from tea, Mrs Wilkes the Headmaster's wife, was sitting at the head of one of
the tables, chatting with a lady of whom I knew nothing, except that she was on an
afternoon's visit to the school. She was an intimidating, masculine-looking person
wearing a riding-habit, or something that I took to be a riding-habit. I was just leaving
the room when Mrs Wilkes called me back, as though to introduce me to the visitor.
Mrs Wilkes was nicknamed Flip, and I shall call her by that name, for I seldom
think of her by any other. (Officially, however, she was addressed as Mum, probably a
corruption of the ‘Ma'am’ used by public schoolboys to their housemasters' wives.) She
was a stocky square-built woman with hard red cheeks, a flat top to her head, prominent
brows and deep-set, suspicious eyes. Although a great deal of the time she was full of
false heartiness, jollying one along with mannish slang (‘
Buck
up, old chap!’ and so
forth), and even using one's Christian name, her eyes never lost their anxious, accusing
look. It was very difficult to look her in the face without feeling guilty, even at moments
when one was not guilty of anything in particular.
‘Here is a little boy,’ said Flip, indicating me to the strange lady, ‘who wets his bed
every night. Do you know what I am going to do if you wet your bed again?’ she added,
turning to me, ‘I am going to get the Sixth Form to beat you’.
The strange lady put on an air of being inexpressibly shocked, and exclaimed
‘I-should-
think
-so!’ And here there occurred one of those wild, almost lunatic
misunderstandings which are part of the daily experience of childhood. The Sixth Form
was a group of older boys who were selected as having ‘character’ and were empowered
to beat smaller boys. I had not yet learned of their existence, and I mis-heard the phrase
‘the Sixth Form’ as ‘Mrs Form’. I took it as referring to the strange lady — I thought, that
is, that her name was Mrs Form. It was an improbable name, but a child has no
judgement in such matters. I imagined, therefore, that it was
she
who was to be deputed
to beat me. It did not strike me as strange that this job should be turned over to a casual
visitor in no way connected with the school. I merely assumed the ‘Mrs Form’ was a
stern disciplinarian who enjoyed beating people (somehow her appearance seemed to
bear this out) and I had an immediate terrifying vision of her arriving for the occasion in
full riding kit and armed with a hunting-whip. To this day I can feel myself almost
swooning with shame as I stood, a very small, round-faced boy in short corduroy
knickers, before the two women. I could not speak. I felt that I should die if ‘Mrs Form’
were to beat me. But my dominant feeling was not fear or even resentment: it was
simply shame because one more person, and that a woman, had been told of my
disgusting offence.
A little later, I forget how, I learned that it was not after all ‘Mrs Form’ who would
do the beating. I cannot remember whether it was that very night that I wetted my bed
again, but at any rate I did wet it again quite soon. Oh, the despair, the feeling of cruel
injustice, after all my prayers and resolutions, at once again waking between the clammy
sheets! There was no chance of hiding what I had done. The grim statuesque matron,
Margaret by name, arrived in the dormitory specially to inspect my bed. She pulled back
the clothes, then drew herself up, and the dreaded words seemed to come rolling out of
her like a peal of thunder:
‘REPORT YOURSELF to the Headmaster after breakfast!’
I put REPORT YOURSELF in capitals because that was how it appeared in my
mind. I do not know how many times I heard that phrase during my early years at St
Cyprian's. It was only very rarely that it did not mean a beating. The words always had a
portentous sound in my ears, like muffled drums or the words of the death sentence.
When I arrived to report myself, Flip was doing something or other at he the long
shiny table in the ante-room to the study. Her uneasy eyes searched me as I went past.
Sambo was a round-shouldered, curiously oafish-looking man, not large but shambling
in gait, with a chubby face which was like that of an overgrown baby, and which was
capable of good humour. He knew, of course, why I had been sent to him, and had
already taken a bone-handled riding-crop out of the cupboard, but it was part of the
punishment of reporting yourself that you had to proclaim your offence with your own
lips. When I had said my say, he read me a short but pompous lecture, then seized me by
the scruff of the neck, twisted me over and began beating me with the riding-crop. He
had a habit of continuing his lecture while he flogged you, and I remember the words
‘you dir-ty lit-tle boy’ keeping time with the blows. The beating did not hurt (perhaps, as
it was the first time, he was not hitting me very hard), and I walked out feeling very
much better. The fact that the beating had not hurt was a sort of victory and partially
wiped out the shame of the bed-wetting. I was even incautious enough to wear a grin on
my face. Some small boys were hanging about in the passage outside the door of the
ante-room.
‘D'you get the cane?’
‘It didn't hurt.’ I said proudly.
Flip had heard everything. Instantly her voice came screaming after me:
‘Come here! Come here this instant! What was that you said?’
‘I said it didn't hurt,’ I faltered out.
‘How dare you say a thing like that? Do you think that is a proper thing to say? Go
in and REPORT YOURSELF AGAIN!’
This time Sambo laid on in real earnest. He continued for a length of time that
frightened and astonished me — about five minutes, it seemed — ending up by breaking
the riding-crop. The bone handle went flying across the room.
‘Look what you've made me do!’ he said furiously, holding the broken crop.
I had fallen into a chair, weakly snivelling. I remember that this was the only time
throughout my boyhood when a beating actually reduced me to tears, and curiously
enough I was not even now crying because of the pain. The second beating had not hurt
very much either. Fright and shame seemed to have anaesthetized me. I was crying
partly because I felt that this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but
partly also because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to
convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a
hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was
actually not possible for me to keep them.
I knew the bed-wetting was (a) wicked and (b) outside my control. The second fact
I was personally aware of, and the first I did not question. It was possible, therefore, to
commit a sin without knowing that you committed it, without wanting to commit it, and
without being able to avoid it. Sin was not necessarily something that you did: it might
be something that happened to you. I do not want to claim that this idea flashed into my
mind as a complete novelty at this very moment, under the blows of Sambo's cane: I
must have had glimpses of it even before I left home, for my early childhood had not
been altogether happy. But at any rate this was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood:
that I was in a world where it was
not possible
for me to be good. And the double beating
was a turning-point, for it brought home to me for the first time the harshness of the
environment into which I had been flung. Life was more terrible, and I was more
wicked, than I had imagined. At any rate, as I sat snivelling on the edge of a chair in
Sambo's study, with not even the self-possession to stand up while he stormed at me, I
had a conviction of sin and folly and weakness, such as I do not remember to have felt
before.
In general, one's memories of any period must necessarily weaken as one moves
away from it. One is constantly learning new facts, and old ones have to drop out to
make way for them. At twenty I could have written the history of my schooldays with an
accuracy which would be quite impossible now. But it can also happen that one's
memories grow sharper after a long lapse of time, because one is looking at the past with
fresh eyes and can isolate and, as it were, notice facts which previously existed
undifferentiated among a mass of others. Here are two things which in a sense I
remembered, but which did not strike me as strange or interesting until quite recently.
One is that the second beating seemed to me a just and reasonable punishment. To get
one beating, and then to get another and far fiercer one on top of it, for being so unwise
as to show that the first had not hurt — that was quite natural. The gods are jealous, and
when you have good fortune you should conceal it. The other is that I accepted the
broken riding-crop as my own crime. I can still recall my feeling as I saw the handle
lying on the carpet — the feeling of having done an ill-bred clumsy thing, and ruined an
expensive object.
I
had broken it: so Sambo told me, and so I believed. This acceptance
of guilt lay unnoticed in my memory for twenty or thirty years.
So much for the episode of the bed-wetting. But there is one more thing to be
remarked. This is that I did not wet my bed again — at least, I did wet it once again, and
received another beating, after which the trouble stopped. So perhaps this barbarous
remedy does work, though at a heavy price, I have no doubt.
II
St Cyprian's was an expensive and snobbish school which was in process of becoming
more snobbish, and, I imagine, more expensive. The public school with which it had
special connexions was Harrow, but during my time an increasing proportion of the
boys went on to Eton. Most of them were the children of rich parents, but on the whole
they were the un-aristocratic rich, the sort of people who live in huge shrubberied
houses in Bournemouth or Richmond, and who have cars and butlers but not country
estates. There were a few exotics among them — some South American boys, sons of
Argentine beef barons, one or two Russians, and even a Siamese prince, or someone
who was described as a prince.
Sambo had two great ambitions. One was to attract titled boys to the school, and
the other was to train up pupils to win scholarships at public schools, above all at Eton.
He did, towards the end of my time, succeed in getting hold of two boys with real
English titles. One of them, I remember, was a wretched drivelling little creature, almost
an albino, peering upwards out of weak eyes, with a long nose at the end of which a
dewdrop always seemed to be trembling. Sambo always gave these boys their titles when
mentioning them to a third person, and for their first few days he actually addressed
them to their faces as ‘Lord So-and-so.’ Needless to say he found ways of drawing
attention to them when any visitor was being shown round the school. Once, I
remember, the little fair-haired boy had a choking fit at dinner, and a stream of snot ran
out of his nose on to his plate in a way horrible to see. Any lesser person would have
been called a dirty little beast and ordered out of the room instantly: but Sambo and Flip
laughed it off in a ‘boys will be boys' spirit.
All the very rich boys were more or less undisguisedly favoured. The school still
had a faint suggestion of the Victorian ‘private academy’ with its ‘parlour boarders’, and
when I later read about that kind of school in Thackeray I immediately saw the
resemblance. The rich boys had milk and biscuits in the middle of the morning, they
were given riding lessons once or twice a week, Flip mothered them and called them by
their Christian names, and above all they were never caned. Apart from the South
Americans, whose parents were safely distant, I doubt whether Sambo ever caned any
boy whose father's income was much above £2,000 a year. But he was sometimes
willing to sacrifice financial profit to scholastic prestige. Occasionally, by special
arrangement, he would take at greatly reduced fees some boy who seemed likely to win
scholarships and thus bring credit on the school. It was on these terms that I was at St
Cyprian's myself: otherwise my parents could not have afforded to send me to so
expensive a school.
I did not at first understand that I was being taken at reduced fees; it was only
when I was about eleven that Flip and Sambo began throwing the fact in my teeth. For
my first two or three years I went through the ordinary educational mill: then, soon after
I had stated Greek (one started Latin at eight, Greek at ten), I moved into the
scholarship class, which was taught, so far as classics went, largely by Sambo himself.
Over a period of two or three years the scholarship boys were crammed with learning as
cynically as a goose is crammed for Christmas. And with what learning! This business of
making a gifted boy's career depend on a competitive examination, taken when he is
only twelve or thirteen is an evil thing at best, but there do appear to be preparatory
schools which send scholars to Eton, Winchester, etc. without teaching them to see
everything in terms of marks. At St Cyprian's the whole process was frankly a
preparation for a sort of confidence trick. Your job was to learn exactly those things that
would give an examiner the impression that you knew more than you did know, and as
far as possible to avoid burdening your brain with anything else. Subjects which lacked
examination-value, such as geography, were almost completely neglected, mathematics
was also neglected if you were a ‘classical’, science was not taught in any form — indeed
it was so despised that even an interest in natural history was discouraged — and even
the books you were encouraged to read in your spare time were chosen with one eye on
the ‘English paper’. Latin and Greek, the main scholarship subjects, were what counted,
but even these were deliberately taught in a flashy, unsound way. We never, for
example, read right through even a single book of a Greek or Latin author: we merely
read short passages which were picked out because they were the kind of thing likely to
be set as an ‘unseen translation’. During the last year or so before we went up for our
scholarships, most of our time was spent in simply working our way through the
scholarship papers of previous years. Sambo had sheaves of these in his possession,
from every one of the major public schools. But the greatest outrage of all was the
teaching of history.
There was in those days a piece of nonsense called the Harrow History Prize, an
annual competition for which many preparatory schools entered. It was a tradition for
St Cyprian's to win it every year, as well we might, for we had mugged up every paper
that had been set since the competition started, and the supply of possible questions was
not inexhaustible. They were the kind of stupid question that is answered by rapping out
a name of quotation. Who plundered the Begams? Who was beheaded in an open boat?
Who caught the Whigs bathing and ran away with their clothes? Almost all our
historical teaching ran on this level. History was a series of unrelated, unintelligible but
— in some way that was never explained to us — important facts with resounding
phrases tied to them. Disraeli brought peace with honour. Clive was astonished at his
moderation. Pitt called in the New World to redress the balance of the Old. And the
dates, and the mnemonic devices. (Did you know, for example, that the initial letters of
‘A black Negress was my aunt: there's her house behind the barn’ are also the initial
letters of the battles in the Wars of the Roses?) Flip, who ‘took’ the higher forms in
history, revelled in this kind of thing. I recall positive orgies of dates, with the keener
boys leaping up and down in their places in their eagerness to shout out the right
answers, and at the same time not feeling the faintest interest in the meaning of the
mysterious events they were naming.
‘1587’
‘Massacre of St Bartholomew!’
‘1707?’
‘Death of Aurangzeeb!’
‘1713?’
‘Treaty of Utrecht!’
‘1773?’
‘Boston Tea Party!’
‘1520?’
‘Oo, Mum, please, Mum—’
‘Please, Mum, please Mum! Let me tell him, Mum!’
‘Well! 1520?’
‘Field of the Cloth of Gold!’
And so on.
But history and such secondary subjects were not bad fun. It was in ‘classics’ that
the real strain came. Looking back, I realize that I then worked harder than I have ever
done since, and yet at the time it never seemed possible to made quite the effort that was
demanded of one. We would sit round the long shiny table, made of some very
pale-coloured hard wood, with Sambo goading, threatening, exhorting, sometimes
joking, very occasionally praising, but always prodding, prodding away at one's mind to
keep it up to the right pitch of concentration, as one keeps a sleepy person awake by
sticking pins in him.
‘Go on, you little slacker! Go on, you idle, worthless little boy! The whole trouble
with you is that you're bone and horn idle. You eat too much, that's why. You wolf down
enormous meals, and then when you come here you're half asleep. Go on, now, put your
back into it. You're not
thinking
. Your brain doesn't sweat.’
He would tap away at one's skull with his silver pencil, which, in my memory,
seems to have been about the size of a banana, and which certainly was heavy enough to
raise a bump: or he would pull the short hairs round one's ears, or, occasionally, reach
out under the table and kick one's shin. On some days nothing seemed to go right, and
then it would be ‘ All right, then, I know what you want. You've been asking for it the
whole morning. Come along, you useless little slacker. Come into the study.’ And then
whack, whack, whack, and back one would come, red-wealed and smarting — in later
years Sambo had abandoned his riding-crop in favour of a thin rattan cane which hurt
very much more — to settle down to work again. This did not happen very often, but I do
remember, more than once, being led out of the room in the middle of a Latin sentence,
receiving a beating and then going straight ahead with the same sentence, just like that.
It is a mistake to think such methods do not work. They work very well for their special
purpose. Indeed, I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be
successfully carried on without corporal punishment. The boys themselves believed in
its efficacy. There was a boy named Beacham, with no brains to speak of, but evidently
in acute need of a scholarship. Sambo was flogging him towards the goal as one might
do with a foundered horse. He went up for a scholarship at Uppingham, came back with
a consciousness of having done badly, and a day or two later received a severe beating
for idleness. ‘I wish I'd had that caning before I went up for the exam,’ he said sadly — a
remark which I felt to be contemptible, but which I perfectly well understood.
The boys of the scholarship class were not all treated alike. If a boy were the son of
rich parents to whom the saving of fees was not all-important, Sambo would goad him
along in a comparatively fatherly way, with jokes and digs in the ribs and perhaps an
occasional tap with the pencil, but no hair-pulling and no caning. It was the poor but
‘clever’ boys who suffered. Our brains were a gold-mine in which he had sunk money,
and the dividends must be squeezed out of us. Long before I had grasped the nature of
my financial relationship with Sambo, I had been made to understand that I was not on
the same footing as most of the other boys. In effect there were three castes in the
school. There was the minority with an aristocratic or millionaire background, there
were the children of the ordinary suburban rich, who made up the bulk of the school,
and there were a few underlings like myself, the sons of clergyman, Indian civil servants,
struggling widows and the like. These poorer ones were discouraged from going in for
‘extras’ such as shooting and carpentry, and were humiliated over clothes and petty
possessions. I never, for instance, succeeded in getting a cricket bat of my own, because
‘Your parents wouldn't be able to afford it’. This phrase pursued me throughout my
schooldays. At St Cyprian's we were not allowed to keep the money we brought back
with us, but had to ‘give it in’ on the first day of term, and then from time to time were
allowed to spend it under supervision. I and similarly-placed boys were always choked
off from buying expensive toys like model aeroplanes, even if the necessary money stood
to our credit. Flip, in particular, seemed to aim consciously at inculcating a humble
outlook in the poorer boys. ‘Do you think that's the sort of thing a boy like you should
buy?’ I remember her saying to somebody — and she said this in front of the whole
school: ‘You know you're not going to grow up with money, don't you? Your people
aren't rich. You must learn to be sensible. Don't get above yourself!’ There was also the
weekly pocket-money, which we took out in sweets, dispensed by Flip from a large table.
The millionaires had a sixpence a week, but the normal sum was threepence. I and one
or two others were only allowed twopence. My parents had not given instructions to this
effect, and the saving of a penny a week could not conceivably have made any difference
to them: it was a mark of status. Worse yet was the detail of the birthday cakes. It was
usual for each boy, on his birthday, to have a large iced cake with candles, which was
shared out at tea between the whole school. It was provided as a matter of routine and
went on his parents’ bill. I never had such a cake, though my parents would have paid
for it readily enough. Year after year, never daring to ask, I would miserably hope that
his year a cake would appear. Once or twice I even rashly pretended to my companions
that this time I
was
going to have a cake. Then came tea-time, and no cake, which did
not make me more popular.
Very early it was impressed upon me that I had no chance of a decent future unless
I won a scholarship at a public school. Either I won my scholarship, or I must leave
school at fourteen and become, in Sambo's favourite phrase ‘a little office boy at forty
pounds a year’. In my circumstances it was natural that I should believe this. Indeed, it
was universally taken for granted at St Cyprian's that unless you went to a ‘good’ public
school (and only about fifteen schools came under this heading) you were ruined for life.
It is not easy to convey to a grown-up person the sense of strain, of nerving oneself for
some terrible, all-deciding combat, as the date of the examination crept nearer — eleven
years old, twelve years old, then thirteen, the fatal year itself! Over a period of about two
years, I do not think there was ever a day when ‘the exam’, as I called it, was quite out of
my waking thoughts. In my prayers it figured invariably: and whenever I got the bigger
portion of a wishbone, or picked up a horseshoe, or bowed seven times to the new moon,
or succeeded in passing through a wishing-gate without touching the sides, then the
wish I earned by doing so went on ‘the exam’ as a matter of course. And yet curiously
enough I was also tormented by an almost irresistible impulse
not
to work. There were
days when my heart sickened at the labours ahead of me, and I stood stupid as an
animal before the most elementary difficulties. In the holidays, also, I could not work.
Some of the scholarship bonus received extra tuition from a certain Mr Batchelor, a
likeable, very hairy man who wore shaggy suits and lived in a typical bachelor's ‘den’ —
book-lined wall, over-whelming stench of tobacco — somewhere in the town. During the
holidays Mr Batchelor used to send us extracts from a wad of work once a week.
Somehow I could not do it. The empty paper and the black Latin dictionary lying on the
table, the consciousness of a plain duty shirked, poisoned my leisure, but somehow I
could not start, and by the end of the holidays I would only have sent Mr Batchelor fifty
or a hundred lines. Undoubtedly part of the reason was that Sambo and his cane were
far away. But in term-time, also, I would go through periods of idleness and stupidity
when I would sink deeper and deeper into disgrace and even achieve a sort of feeble,
snivelling defiance, fully conscious of my guilt and yet unable or unwilling — I could not
be sure which — to do any better. Then Sambo or Flip would send for me, and this time
it would not even be a caning.
Flip would search me with her baleful eyes. (What colour were those eyes, I
wonder? I remember them as green, but actually no human being has green eyes.
Perhaps they were hazel.) She would start off in her peculiar, wheedling, bullying style,
which never failed to get right through one's guard and score a hit on one's better
nature.
‘I don't think it's awfully decent of you to behave like this, is it? Do you think it's
quite playing the game by your mother and father to go on idling your time away, week
after week, month after month? Do you
want
to throw all your chances away? You know
your people aren't rich, don't you? You know they can't afford the same things as other
boys’ parents. How are they to send you to a public school if you don't win a
scholarship? I know how proud your mother is of you. Do you
want
to let her down?’
‘I don't think he wants to go to a public school any longer,’ Sambo would say,
addressing himself to Flip with a pretence that I was not there. ‘I think he's given up that
idea. He wants to be a little boy at forty pounds a year.’
The horrible sensation of tears — a swelling in the breast, a tickling behind the
nose — would already have assailed me. Flip would bring out her ace of trumps:
‘And do you think it's quite fair to
us
, the way you're behaving? After all we've done
for you? You
do
know what we've done for you, don't you?’ Her eyes would pierce deep
into me, and though she never said it straight out, I did know. ‘We've had you here all
these years — we even had you here for a week in the holidays so that Mr Batchelor
could coach you. We don't
want
to have to send you away, you know, but we can't keep a
boy here just to eat up our food, term after term.
I
don't think it's very straight, the way
you're behaving. Do you?’
I never had any answer except a miserable ‘No, Mum,’ or ‘Yes, Mum,’ as the case
might be. Evidently it was
not
straight, the way I was behaving. And at some point or
other the unwanted tear would always force its way out of the corner of my eye, roll
down my nose and splash.
Flip never said in plain words that I was a non-paying pupil, no doubt because
vague phrases like ‘all we've done for you’ had a deeper emotional appeal. Sambo, who
did not aspire to be loved by his pupils, put it more brutally, though, as was usual with
him in pompous language. ‘You are living on my bounty’ was his favourite phrase in this
context. At least once I listened to these words between blows of the cane. I must say
that these scenes were not frequent, and except on one occasion they did not take place
in the presence of other boys. In public I was reminded that I was poor and that my
parents ‘wouldn't be able to afford’ this or that, but I was not actually reminded of my
dependent position. It was a final unanswerable argument, to be brought forth like an
instrument of torture when my work became exceptionally bad.
To grasp the effect of this kind of thing on a child of ten or twelve, one has to
remember that the child has little sense of proportion or probability. A child may be a
mass of egoism and rebelliousness, but it as no accumulated experience to give it
confidence in its own judgements. On the whole it will accept what it is told, and it will
believe in the most fantastic way in the knowledge and powers of the adults surrounding
it. Here is an example.
I have said that at St Cyprian's we were not allowed to keep our own money.
However, it was possible to hold back a shilling or two, and sometimes I used furtively
to buy sweets which I kept hidden in the loose ivy on the playing-field wall. One day
when I had been sent on an errand I went into a sweet-shop a mile or more from the
school and bought some chocolates. As I came out of the shop I saw on the opposite
pavement a small sharp-faced man who seemed to be staring very hard at my school
cap. Instantly a horrible fear went through me. There could be no doubt as to who the
man was. He was a spy placed there by Sambo! I turned away unconcernedly, and then,
as though my legs were doing it of their own accord, broke into a clumsy run. But when I
got round the next corner I forced myself to walk again, for to run was a sign of guilt,
and obviously there would be other spies posted here and there about the town. All that
day and the next I waited for the summons to the study, and was surprised when it did
not come. It did not seem to me strange that the headmaster of a private school should
dispose of an army of informers, and I did not even imagine that would have to pay
them. I assumed that any adult, inside the school or outside, would collaborate
voluntarily in preventing us from breaking the rules. Sambo was all-powerful; it was
natural that his agent should be everywhere. When this episode happened I do not think
I can have been less than twelve years old.
I hated Sambo and Flip, with a sort of shamefaced, remorseful hatred, but it did
not occur to me to doubt their judgement. When they told me that I must either win a
public-school scholarship or become an office boy at fourteen, I believed that those were
the unavoidable alternatives before me. And above all, I believed Sambo and Flip when
they told me they were my benefactors. I see now, of course, that from Sambo's point of
view I was a good speculation. He sank money in me, and he looked to get it back in the
form of prestige. If I had ‘gone off; as promising boys sometimes do, I imagine that
would have got rid of me swiftly. As it was I won him scholarships when the time came,
and no doubt he made full use of them in his prospectuses. But it is difficult for a child
to realize that a school is primarily a commercial venture. A child believes that the
school exists to educate and that the school-master disciplines him either for his own
good, or from a love of bullying. Flip and Sambo had chosen to befriend me, and their
friendship included canings, reproaches and humiliations, which were good for me and
saved me from an office stool. That was their version, and I believed in it. It was
therefore clear that I owed them a vast debt of gratitude. But I was
not
grateful, as I very
well knew. On the contrary, I hated both of them. I could not control my subjective
feelings, and I could not conceal them from myself. But it is wicked, is it not, to hate
your benefactors? So I was taught, and so I believed. A child accepts the codes of
behaviour that are presented to it, even when it breaks them. From the age of eight or
even earlier, the consciousness of sin was never far away from me. If I contrived to seem
callous and defiant, it was only a thin cover over a mass of shame and dismay. All
through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that was wasting
my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and
ingratitude — and all this, it seemed, was in escapable, because I lived among laws
which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep.
III
No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether
unhappy.
I have good memories of St Cyprian's, among a horde of bad ones. Sometimes on
summer afternoons there were wonderful expeditions across the Downs to a village
called Birling Gap, or to Beachy Head, where one bathed dangerously among the
boulders and came home covered with cuts. And there were still more wonderful
mid-summer evenings when, as a special treat, we were not driven off to bed as usual
but allowed to wander about the grounds in the long twilight, ending up with a plunge
into the swimming bathe at about nine o'clock. There was the joy of waking early on
summer mornings and getting in an hour's undisturbed reading (Ian Hay, Thackeray,
Kipling and H. G. Wells were the favourite authors of my boyhood) in the sunlit,
sleeping dormitory. There was also cricket, which I was no good at but with which I
conducted a sort of hopeless love affair up to the age of about eighteen. And there was
the pleasure of keeping caterpillars — the silky green and purple puss-moth, the ghostly
green poplar-hawk, the privet-hawk, large as one's third finger, specimens of which
could be illicitly purchased for sixpence at a shop in the town — and, when one could
escape long enough from the master who was ‘taking the walk’, there was the excitement
of dredging the dew-ponds on the Downs for enormous newts with orange-coloured
bellies. This business of being out for a walk, coming across something of fascinating
interest and then being dragged away from it by a yell from the master, like a dog jerked
onwards by the leash, is an important feature of school life, and helps to build up the
conviction, so strong in many children, that the things you most want to do are always
unattainable.
Very occasionally, perhaps once during each summer, it was possible to escape
altogether from the barrack-like atmosphere of school, when Brown, the second master,
was permitted to take one or two boys for an afternoon of butterfly hunting on a
common a few miles away. Brown was a man with white hair and a red face like a
strawberry, who was good at natural history, making models and plaster casts, operating
magic lanterns, and things of that kind. He and Mr Batchelor were the only adults in any
way connected with the school whom I did not either dislike or fear. Once he took me
into his room and showed me in confidence a plated, pearl-handled revolver — his
‘six-shooter’, he called it — which he kept in a box under his bed, and oh, the joy of those
occasional expeditions! The ride of two or three miles on a lonely little branch line, the
afternoon of charging to and fro with large green nets, the beauty of the enormous
dragonflies which hovered over the tops of the grasses, the sinister killing-bottle with its
sickly smell, and then tea in the parlour of a pub with large slices of pale-coloured cake!
The essence of it was in the railway journey, which seemed to put magic distances
between yourself and school.
Flip, characteristically, disapproved of these expeditions, though not actually
forbidding them. ‘And have you been catching
little butterflies
?’ she would say with a
vicious sneer when one got back, making her voice as babyish as possible. From her
point of view, natural history (‘bug-hunting’ she would probably have called it) was a
babyish pursuit which a boy should be laughed out of as early as possible. Moreover it
was somehow faintly plebeian, it was traditionally associated with boys who wore
spectacles and were no good at games, it did not help you to pass exams, and above all it
smelt of science and therefore seemed to menace classical education. It needed a
considerable moral effort to accept Brown's invitation. How I dreaded that sneer of
little
butterflies
! Brown, however, who had been at the school since its early days, had built
up a certain independence for himself: he seemed to handle Sambo, and ignored Flip a
good deal. If it ever happened that both of them were away, Brown acted as deputy
headmaster, and on those occasions instead of reading the appointed lesson for the day
at morning chapel, he would read us stories from the Apocrypha.
Most of the good memories of my childhood, and up to the age of about twenty, are
in some way connected with animals. So far as St Cyprian's goes, it also seems, when I
look back, that all my good memories are of summer. In winter your nose ran
continually, your fingers were too numb to button your shirt (this was an especial
misery on Sundays, when we wore Eton collars), there was the daily nightmare of
football — the cold, the mud, the hideous greasy ball that came whizzing at one's face,
the gouging knees and trampling boots of the bigger boys. Part of the trouble was that in
winter, after about the age of ten, I was seldom in good health, at any rate during
term-time. I had defective bronchial tubes and a lesion in one lung which was not
discovered till many years later. Hence I not only had a chronic cough, but running was
a torment to me. In those days however, ‘wheeziness’, or ‘chestiness’, as it was called,
was either diagnosis imagination or was looked on as essentially a moral disorder,
caused by overeating. ‘You wheeze like a concertina,’ Sambo would say disapprovingly
as he stood behind my chair; ‘You're perpetually stuffing yourself with food, that's why.’
My cough was referred to as a ‘stomach cough’, which made it sound both disgusting
and reprehensible. The cure for it was hard running, which, if you kept it up long
enough, ultimately ‘cleared your chest’.
It is curious, the degree — I will not say of actual hardship, but of squalor and
neglect — that was taken for granted in upper-class schools of the period. Almost as in
the days of Thackeray, it seemed natural that a little boy of eight or ten should be a
miserable, sotty-nosed creature, his face almost permanently dirty, his hands chapped,
his nails bitten, his handkerchief a sodden horror, his bottom frequently blue with
bruises. It was partly the prospect of actual physical discomfort that made the thought of
going back to school lie in one's breast like a lump of lead during the last few days of the
holidays. A characteristic memory of St Cyprian's is the astonishing hardness of one's
bed on the first night of term. Since this was an expensive school, I took a social step
upwards by attending it, and yet the standard of comfort was in every way far lower than
in my own home, or, indeed, than it would have been in a prosperous working-class
home. One only had a hot bath once a week, for instance. The food was not only bad, it
was also insufficient. Never before or since have I seen butter of jam scraped on bread so
thinly. I so not think I can be imagining the fact that we were underfed, when I
remember the lengths we would go in order to steal food. On a number of occasions I
remember creeping down at two or three o'clock in the morning through what seemed
like miles of pitch-dark stairways and passages — barefooted, stopping to listen after
each step, paralysed with about equal fear of Sambo, ghosts and burglars — to steal stale
bread from the pantry. The assistant masters had their meals with us, but they had
somewhat better food, and if one got half a chance it was usual to steal left-over scraps
of bacon rind or fried potato when their plates were removed.
As usual, I did not see the sound commercial reason for this underfeeding On the
whole I accepted Sambo's view that a boy's appetite is a sort of morbid growth which
should be kept in check as much as possible. A maxim often repeated to us at St Cprian's
was that it is healthy to get up from a meal feeling as hungry as when you sat down. Only
a generation earlier than this it had been common for school dinners to start off with a
slab of unsweetened suet pudding, which, it was frankly said, ‘broke the boys appetites.’
But the underfeeding was probably less flagrant at preparatory schools, where a boy was
wholly dependent on the official diet, than at public schools, where he was allowed —
indeed, expected — to buy extra food for himself. At some schools, he would literally not
have had enough to eat unless he had bought regular supplies of eggs, sausages,
sardines, etc.; and his parents had to allow him money for this purpose. At Eton, for
instance, at any rate in College, a boy was given no solid meal after mid-day dinner. For
his afternoon tea he was given a miserable supper of soup or fried fish, or more often
bread and cheese, with water to drink. Sambo went down to see his eldest son at Eton
and came back in snobbish ecstasies over the luxury in which the boys lived. ‘They give
them fried fish for supper!’ he exclaimed, beaming all over his chubby face. ‘There's no
school like it in the world.’ Fried fish! The habitual supper of the poorest of the working
class! At very cheap boarding schools it was no doubt worse. A very early memory to
mine is of seeing the boarders at a grammar school — the sons, probably, of farmers and
shopkeepers — being fed on boiled lights.
Whoever writes about his childhood must beware of exaggeration and self-pity. I
do not claim that I was a martyr or that St Cyprian's was a sort of Dotheboys Hall. But I
should be falsifying my own memories if I did not record that they are largely memories
of disgust. The over crowded, underfed underwashed life that we led was disgusting, as I
recall it. If I shut my eyes and say ‘school’, it is of course the physical surroundings that
first come back to me: the flat playing field with its cricket pavilion and the little shed by
the rifle range, the draughty dormitories, the dusty splintery passages, the square of
asphalt in front of the gymnasium, the raw-looking pinewood chaplet at the back. And at
almost every point some filthy detail obtrudes itself. For example, there were the pewter
bowls out of which we had our porridge. They had overhanging rims, and under the
rimes there were accumulations of sour porridge, which could be flaked off in ling strips.
The porridge itself, too, contained more lumps, hairs and unexplained black things than
one would have thought possible, unless someone were putting them there on purpose.
It was never safe to start on that porridge without investigating it first. And there was
the slimy water of the plunge bath — it was twelve or fifteen feet long, the whole school
was supposed to go into it every morning, and I doubt whether the water was changed at
all frequently — and the always-damp towels with their cheesy smell: and, on occasional
visits in the winter, the murky sea-water of the local Baths, which came straight in from
the beach and on which I once saw floating a human turd. And the sweaty smell of the
changing-room with its greasy basins, and, giving on this, the row of filthy, dilapidated
lavatories, which had no fastenings of any kind on the doors, so that whenever you were
sitting there someone was sure to come crashing in. It is not easy for me to think of my
schooldays without seeming to breathe in a whiff of something cold and evil-smelling —
a sort of compound of sweaty stockings, dirty towels, faecal smells blowing along
corridors, forks with old food between the prongs, neck-of-mutton stew, and the
banging doors of the lavatories and the echoing chamber-pots in the dormitories.
It is true that I am by nature not gregarious, and the W.C. and dirty handkerchief
side of life in necessarily more obtrusive when great numbers of human beings are
crushed together in a small space. It is just as bad in an army, and worse, no doubt, in a
prison. Besides, boyhood is the age of disgust. After one has learned to differentiate, and
before one has become hardened — between seven and eighteen, say — one seems
always to be walking the tight-rope over a cesspool. Yet I do not think I exaggerate the
squalor of school life, when I remember how health and cleanliness were neglected, in
spite of the hoo-ha about fresh air and cold water and keeping in hard training. It was
common to remain constipated for days together. Indeed, one was hardly encouraged to
keep one's bowels open, since the only aperients tolerated were castor oil or another
almost equally horrible drink called liquorice powder. One was supposed to go into the
plunge bath every morning, but some boys shirked it for days on end, simply making
themselves scarce when the bell sounded, or else slipping along the edge of the bath
among the crowd, and then wetting their hair with a little dirty water off the floor. A
little boy of eight or nine will not necessarily keep himself clean unless there is someone
to see that he does it. There was a new boy named Hazel, a pretty, mother's darling of a
boy, who came a little while before I left. The first thing I noticed about him was the
beautiful pearly whiteness of his teeth. By the end of that term his teeth were an
extraordinary shade of green. During all that time, apparently, no one had taken
sufficient interest in him to see that he brushed them.
But of course the differences between home and school were more than physical.
That bump on the hard mattress, on the first night of term, used to give me a feeling of
abrupt awakening, a feeling of: ‘This is reality, this is what you are up against.’ Your
home might be far from perfect, but at least it was a place ruled by love rather than by
fear, where you did not have to be perpetually on your guard against the people
surrounding you. At eight years old you were suddenly taken out of this warm nest and
flung into a world of force and fraud and secrecy, like a gold-fish into a tank full of pike.
Against no matter what degree of bullying you had no redress. You could only have
defended yourself by sneaking, which, except in a few rigidly defined circumstances, was
the unforgivable sin. To write home and ask your parent to take you away would have
been even less thinkable, since to do so would have been to admit yourself unhappy and
unpopular, which a boy will never do. Boys are Erewhonians: they think that misfortune
is disgraceful and must be concealed to all cost. It might perhaps have been considered
permissible to complain to your parents about bad food, or an unjustified caning, or
some other ill-treatment inflicted by masters and not by boys. The fact that Sambo never
beat the richer boys suggests that such complaints were made occasionally. But in my
own peculiar circumstances I could never have asked my parents to intervene on my
behalf. Even before I understood about the reduced fees, I grasped that they were in
some way under an obligation to Sambo, and therefore could not protect me against
him. I have mentioned already that throughout my time at St Cyprian's I never had a
cricket bat of my own. I had been told this was because ‘your parents couldn't afford it’.
One day in the holidays, by some casual remark, it came out that they had provided ten
shillings to buy me one: yet no cricket bat appeared. I did not protest to my parents, let
alone raise the subject with Sambo. How could I? I was dependent on him, and the ten
shillings was merely a fragment of what I owed him. I realize now, of course, that it is
immensely unlikely that Sambo had simply stuck to the money. No doubt the matter
had slipped his memory. But the point is that I assumed that he had stuck to it, and that
he had a right to do so if he chose.
How difficult it is for a child to have any real independence of attitude could be
seen in our behaviour towards Flip. I think it would be true to say that every boy in the
school hated and feared her. Yet we all fawned on her in the most abject way, and the
top layer of our feelings towards her was a sort of guilt-stricken loyalty. Flip, although
the discipline of the school depended more on her than on Sambo, hardly pretended to
dispense strict justice. She was frankly capricious. An act which might get you a caning
one day might next day be laughed off as a boyish prank, or even commended because it
‘showed you had guts’. There were days when everyone cowered before those deep-set,
accusing eyes, and there were days when she was like a flirtatious queen surrounded by
courtier-lovers, laughing and joking, scattering largesse, or the promise of largesse (‘And
if you win the Harrow History Prize I'll give you a new case for your camera!’), and
occasionally even packing three or four favoured boys into her Ford car and carrying
them off to a teashop in town, where they were allowed to buy coffee and cakes. Flip was
inextricably mixed up in my mind with Queen Elizabeth, whose relations with Leicester
and Essex and Raleigh were intelligible to me from a very early age. A word we all
constantly used in speaking of Flip was ‘favour’. ‘I'm in good favour;’ we would say, or
‘I'm in bad favour.’ Except for the handful of wealthy or titled boys, no one was
permanently in good favour, but on the other hand even the outcasts had patches of it
from time to time. Thus, although my memories of Flip are mostly hostile, I also
remember considerable periods when I basked under her smiles, when she called me
‘old chap’ and used my Christian name, and allowed me to frequent her private library,
where I first made acquaintance with
Vanity Fair.
The high-water mark of good favour
was to be invited to serve at table on Sunday nights when Flip and Sambo had guests to
dinner. In clearing away, of course, one had a chance to finish off the scraps, but one
also got a servile pleasure from standing behind the seated guests and darting
deferentially forward when something was wanted. Whenever one had the chance to
suck up, one did suck up, and at the first smile one's hatred turned into a sort of cringing
love. I was always tremendously proud when I succeeded in making Flip laugh. I have
even, at her command, written
vers d'occasion
, comic verses to celebrate memorable
events in the life of the school.
I am anxious to make it clear that I was not a rebel, except by force of
circumstances. I accepted the codes that I found in being. Once, towards the end of my
time, I even sneaked to Brown about a suspected case of homosexuality. I did not know
very well what homosexuality was, but I knew that it happened and was bad, and that
this was one of the contexts in which it was proper to sneak. Brown told me I was ‘a
good fellow’, which make me feel horribly ashamed. Before Flip one seemed as helpless
as a snake before the snake-charmer. She had a hardly-varying vocabulary of praise and
abuse, a whole series of set phrased, each of which promptly called forth the appropriate
response. There was ‘
Buck
up, old chap!’, which inspired one to paroxysms of energy;
there was ‘Don't
be
such a fool!’ (or, ‘It's path
et
ic, isn't it?’), which made one feel a born
idiot; and there was ‘It isn't very straight of you, is it?’, which always brought one to the
brink of tears. And yet all the while, at the middle of one's heart, there seemed to stand
an incorruptible inner self who knew that whatever one did — whether one laughed or
snivelled or went into frenzies of gratitude for small favours — one's only true feeling
was hatred.
IV
I had learned early in my career that one can do wrong against one's will, and before
long I also learned that one can do wrong without ever discovering what one has done or
why it was wrong. There were sins that were too subtle to be explained, and there were
others that were too terrible to be clearly mentioned. For example, there was sex, which
was always smouldering just under the surface and which suddenly blew up into a
tremendous row when I was about twelve.
At some preparatory schools homosexuality is not a problem but I think that St
Cyprian's may have acquired a ‘bad tone’ thanks to the presence of the South American
boys, who would perhaps mature a year or two earlier than an English boy. At that age I
was not interested, so I so not actually know what went on, but I imagine it was group
masturbation. At any rate, one day the storm suddenly burst over our heads. There were
summonses, interrogations, confessions, floggings, repentances, solemn lectures of
which one understood nothing except that some irredeemable sin known as
‘swinishness’ or ‘beastliness’ had been committed. One of the ringleaders a boy named
Horne, was flogged, according to eye-witnesses, for a quarter of an hour continuously
before being expelled. His yells rang through the house. But we were all implicated,
more or less, or felt ourselves to be implicated. Guilt seemed to hang in the air like a pall
or smoke. A solemn, black-haired imbecile of an assistant master, who was later to be a
Member of Parliament took the older boys to a secluded room and delivered a talk on
the Temple of the Body.
‘Don't you realize what a wonderful thing your body is?’ he said gravely. ‘You talk
of your motor-car engines, your Rolls-Royces and Dainlers and so on. Don't you
understand that no engine ever made is fit to be compared with your body? And then
you go and wreck it, ruin it — for life!’
He turned his cavernous black eyes on me and added quite sadly:
‘And you, whom I'd always believed to be quite a decent person after your fashion
— you, I hear, are one of the very worst.’
A feeling of doom descended upon me. So I was guilty too. I too had done the
dreadful thing, whatever it was, that wrecked you for life, body and soul, and ended in
suicide or the lunatic asylum. Till then I had hoped that I was innocent, and the
conviction of sin which now took possession of me was perhaps all the stronger because
I did not know what I had done. I was not among those who were interrogated and
flogged, and it was not until the row was well over that I even learned about the trivial
accident that had connected my name with it. Even then I understood nothing. It was
not till about two years later that I fully grasped what that lecture on the Temple of the
Body had referred to.
At this time I was in an almost sexless state, which is normal, or at any rate
common, in boys of that age; I was therefore in the position of simultaneously knowing
and not knowing what used to be called the Facts of Life. At five or six, like many
children, I had passed though a phase of sexuality. My friends were the plumber's
children up the road, and we used sometimes to play games of a vaguely erotic kind. One
was called ‘playing at doctors’, and I remember getting a faint but definitely pleasant
thrill from holding a toy trumpet, which was supposed to be a stethoscope, against a
little girl's belly. About the same time I fell deeply in love, a far more worshipping kind
of love than I have ever felt for anyone since, with a girl named Elsie at the convent
school which I attended. She seemed to me grown up, so I suppose she must have been
fifteen. After that, as so often happens, all sexual feelings seemed to go out of me for
many years. At twelve I knew more than I had known as a young child, but I understood
less, because I no longer knew the essential fact that there is something pleasant in
sexual activity. Between roughly seven and fourteen, the whole subject seemed to me
uninteresting and, when for some reason I was forced to think of it, disgusting. My
knowledge of the so-called Facts of Life was derived from animals, and was therefore
distorted, and in any case was only intermittent. I knew that animals copulated and that
human beings had bodies resembling those of animals: but that human beings also
copulated I only knew as it were, reluctantly, when something, a phrase in the Bible,
perhaps, compelled me to remember it. Not having desire, I had no curiosity, and was
willing to leave many questions unanswered. Thus, I knew in principle how the baby
gets into the woman, but I did not know how it gets out again, because I had never
followed the subject up. I knew all the dirty words, and in my bad moments I would
repeat them to myself, but I did not know what the worst of them meant, nor want to
know. They were abstractly wicked, a sort of verbal charm. While I remained in this
state, it was easy for me to remain ignorant of any sexual misdeeds that went on about
me, and to be hardly wiser even when the row broke. At most, through the veiled and
terrible warnings of Flip, Sambo and all the rest of them, I grasped that the crime of
which we were all guiltily was somehow connected with the sexual organs. I had noticed,
without feeling much interest, that one's penis sometimes stands up of its own accord
(this starts happening to a boy long before he has any conscious sexual desires), and I
was inclined to believe, or half-believe, that
that
must be the crime. At any rate, it was
something to do with the penis — so much I understood. Many other boys, I have no
doubt, were equally in the dark.
After the talk on the Temple of the Body (days later, it seems in retrospect: the row
seemed to continue for days), a dozen of us were seated at a long shiny table which
Sambo used for the scholarship class, under Flip's lowering eye. A long desolate wail
rang out from a room somewhere above. A very small boy named Ronalds, aged no more
than about ten, who was implicated in some way, was being flogged, or was recovering
from a flogging. At the sound, Flip's eyes searched our faces, and settled upon me.
‘
You see
,’ she said.
I will not swear that she said ‘You see what you have done,’ but that was the sense
of it. We were all bowed down with shame. It was
our
fault. Somehow or other we had
led poor Ronalds astray:
we
were responsible for his agony and his ruin. Then Flip
turned upon another boy named Heath. It is thirty years ago, and I cannot remember for
certain whether she merely quoted a verse from the Bible, or whether she actually
brought out a Bible and made Heath read it; but at any rate the text indicated was: ‘Who
so shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it were better for him that a
millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the
sea.’
That, too, was terrible. Ronalds was one of these little ones, we had offended him;
it were better that millstone were hanged about our necks and that we were drowned in
the depth of the sea.
‘Have you thought about that, Heath — have you thought what it means?’ Flip said.
And Heath broke down into snivelling tears.
Another boy, Beacham, whom I have mentioned already, was similarly
overwhelmed with shame by the accusation that he ‘had black rings round his eyes’.
‘Have you looked in the glass lately, Beacham?’ said Flip. ‘Aren't you ashamed to go
about with a face like that? Do you think everyone doesn't know what it means when a
boy has black rings round his eyes?’
Once again the load of guilt and fear seemed to settle down upon me. Had
I
got
black rings round my eyes? A couple of years later I realized that these were supposed to
be a symptom by which masturbators could be detected. But already, without knowing
this, I accepted the black rings as a sure sign of depravity,
some
kind of depravity. And
many times, even before I grasped the supposed meaning, I have gazed anxiously into
the glass, looking for the first hint of that dreaded stigma, the confession which the
secret sinner writes upon his own face.
These terrors wore off, or became merely intermittent, without affecting what one
might call my official beliefs. It was still true about the madhouse and the suicide's
grave, but it was no longer acutely frightening. Some months later it happened that I
once again saw Horne, the ringleader who had been flogged and expelled. Horne was
one of the outcasts, the son of poor middle-class parents, which was no doubt part of the
reason why Sambo had handled him so roughly. The term after his expulsion he went on
to Eastbourne College, the small local public school, which was hideously despised at St
Cyprian's and looked on as ‘not really’ a public school at all. Only a very few boys from St
Cyprian's went there, and Sambo always spoke of them with a sort of contemptuous pity.
You had no chance if you went to a school like that: at the best your destiny would be a
clerkship. I thought of Horne as a person who at thirteen had already forfeited all hope
of any decent future. Physically, morally and socially he was finished. Moreover I
assumed that his parents had only sent him to Eastbourne College because after his
disgrace no ‘good’ school would have him.
During the following term, when we were out for a walk, we passed Horne in the
street. He looked completely normal. He was a strongly-built, rather good-looking boy
with black hair. I immediately noticed that he looked better than when I had last seen
him — his complexion, previously rather pale, was pinker — and that he did not seem
embarrassed at meeting us. Apparently he was not ashamed either of having been
expelled, or of being at Eastbourne College. If one could gather anything form the way
he looked at us as we filed past, it was that he was glad to have escaped from St
Cyprian's. But the encounter made very little impression on me. I drew no inference
from the fact that Horne, ruined in body and soul, appeared to be happy and in good
health. I still believed in the sexual mythology that had been taught me by Sambo and
Flip. The mysterious, terrible dangers were still there. Any morning the black rings
might appear round your eyes and you would know that you too were among the lost
ones. Only it no longer seemed to matter very much. These contradictions can exist
easily in the mind of a child, because of its own vitality. It accepts — how can it do
otherwise? — the nonsense that its elders tell it, but its youthful body, and the sweetness
of the physical world, tell it another story. It was the same with Hell, which up to the age
of about fourteen I officially believed in. Almost certainly Hell existed, and there were
occasions when a vivid sermon could scare you into fits. But somehow it never lasted.
The fire that waited for you was real fire, it would hurt in the same way as when you
burnt your finger, and
for ever
, but most of the time you could contemplate it without
bothering.
V
The various codes which were presented to you at St Cyprian's — religious, moral social
and intellectual — contradicted one another if you worked out their implications. The
essential conflict was between the tradition of nineteenth-century asceticism and the
actually existing luxury and snobbery of the pre-1914 age. On the one side were
low-church Bible Christianity, sex puritanism, insistence on hard work, respect for
academic distinction, disapproval of self-indulgence: on the other, contempt for
‘braininess’, and worship of games, contempt for foreigners and the working class, an
almost neurotic dread of poverty, and, above all, the assumption not only that money
and privilege are the things that matter, but that it is better to inherit them than to have
to work for them. Broadly, you were bidden to be at once a Christian and a social
success, which is impossible. At the time I did not perceive that the various ideals which
were set before us cancelled out. I merely saw that they were all, or nearly all,
unattainable, so far as I was concerned, since they all depended not only on what you
did but on what you
were
.
Very early, at the age of only ten or eleven, I reached the conclusion — no one told
me this, but on the other hand I did not simply make it up out of my own head:
somehow it was in the air I breathed — that you were no good unless you had £100,000.
I had perhaps fixed on this particular sum as a result of reading Thackeray. The interest
on £100,000 would be £4,000 a year (I was in favour of a safe 4 per cent), and this
seemed to me the minimum income that you must possess if you were to belong to the
real top crust, the people in the country houses. But it was clear that I could never find
my way into that paradise, to which you did not really belong unless you were born into
it. You could only
make
money, if at all by a mysterious operation called ‘going to the
city’, and when you came out of the City, having won you £100,000, you were fat and
old. But the truly enviable thing about the top-notchers was that they were rich while
young. For people like me, the ambitious middle class, the examination-passers, only a
bleak, laborious kind of success was possible. You clambered upwards on a ladder of
scholarships into the Civil Service or the Indian Civil Service, or possibly you became a
barrister. And if at any point you ‘slacked’ or ‘went off’ and missed one of the rungs in
the ladder, you became ‘a little office boy at forty pounds a year’. But even if you climbed
to the highest niche that was open to you, you could still only be an underling, a
hanger-on of the people who really counted.
Even if I had not learned this from Sambo and Flip, I would have learned it from
other boys. Looking back, it is astonishing how intimately, intelligently snobbish we all
were, how knowledgeable about names and addresses, how swift to detect small
differences in accents and manners and the cut of clothes. There were some boys who
seemed to drip money from their pores even in the bleak misery of the middle of a
winter term. At the beginning and end of the term, especially, there was naпvely
snobbish chatter about Switzerland, and Scotland with its ghillies and grouse moors,
and ‘my uncle's yacht’, and ‘our place in the country’. And ‘my pony’ and ‘my pater's
touring car’. There never was, I suppose, in the history of the world a time when the
sheer vulgar fatness of wealth, without any kind of aristocratic elegance to redeem it,
was so obtrusive as in those years before 1914. It was the age when crazy millionaires in
curly top-hats and lavender waistcoats gave champagne parties in rococo house-boats
on the Thames, the age of diabolo and hobble skirts, the age of the ‘knut’ in his grey
bowler and cut-away coat, the age of
The Merry Widow
, Saki's novels,
Peter Pan
and
Where the Rainbow Ends
, the age when people talked about chocs and cigs and ripping
and topping and heavenly, when they went for divvy week-ends at Brighton and had
scrumptious teas at the Troc. From the whole decade before 1914 there seems to breathe
forth a smell of the more vulgar, un-grown-up kind of luxury, a smell of brilliantine and
crème-de-menthe
and soft-centred chocolates — an atmosphere, as it were, of eating
everlasting strawberry ices on green lawns to the tune of the Eton Boating Song. The
extraordinary thing was the way in which everyone took it for granted that his oozing,
bulging wealth of the English upper and upper-middle classes would last for ever, and
was part of the order of things. After 1918 it was never quite the same again.
Snobbishness and expensive habits came back, certainly, but they were self-conscious
and on the defensive. Before the war the worship of money was entirely unreflecting and
untroubled by any pang of conscience. The goodness of money was as unmistakable as
the goodness of health or beauty, and a glittering car, a title or a horde of servants was
mixed up in people's minds with the idea of actual moral virtue.
At St Cyprian's, in term-time, the general bareness of life enforced a certain
democracy, but any mention of the holidays, and the consequent competitive swanking
about cars and butlers and country housed, promptly called class distinctions into being.
The school was pervaded by a curious cult of Scotland, which brought out the
fundamental contradiction in our standard of values. Flip claimed Scottish ancestry, and
she favoured the Scottish boys, encouraging them to wear kilts in their ancestral tartan
instead of the school uniform, and even christened her youngest child by a Gaelic name.
Ostensibly we were supposed to admire the Scots because they were ‘grim’ and ‘dour’
(‘stern’ was perhaps the key word), and irresistible on the field of battle. In the big
schoolroom there was a steel engraving of the charge to the Scots Greys at Waterloo, all
looking as though they enjoyed every moment of it. Our picture of Scotland was made
up of burns, braes, kilts, sporrans, claymores, bagpipes and the like, all somehow mixed
up with the invigorating effects of porridge, Protestantism and a cold climate. But
underlying this was something quite different. The real reason for the cult of Scotland
was that only very rich people could spend their summers there. And the pretended
belief in Scottish superiority was a cover for the bad conscience of the occupying
English, who had pushed the Highland peasantry off their farms to make way for the
deer forests, and then compensated them by turning them into servants. Flip's face
always beamed with innocent snobbishness when she spoke of Scotland. Occasionally
she even attempted a trace of Scottish accent. Scotland was a private paradise which a
few initiates could talk about and make outsiders feel small.
‘You going to Scotland this hols?’
‘Rather! We go every year.’
‘My pater's got three miles of river.’
‘My pater's giving me a new gun for the twelfth. There's jolly good black game
where we go. Get out, Smith! What are listening for? You've never been to Scotland. I
bet you don't know what a blackcock looks like.’
Following on this, imitations of the cry of a blackcock, of the roaring of a stag, of
the accent of ‘our ghillies’, etc. etc.
And the questionings that new boys of doubtful social origin were sometimes put
through — questionings quite surprising in their mean-minded particularity, when one
reflects that the inquisitors were only twelve or thirteen!
‘How much a year has your pater got? What part of London do you live in? Is that
Knightsbridge or Kensington? How many bathrooms has you house got? How many
servants do your people keep? Have you got a butler? Well, then, have you got a cook?
Where do you get your clothes made? How many shows did you go to in the hols? How
much money did you bring back with you?’ etc. etc.
I have seen a little new boy, hardly older than eight, desperately lying his way
through such a catechism:
‘Have your people got a car?’
‘Yes.’
‘What sort of car?’
‘Daimler.’
‘How many horse-power?’
(Pause, and leap in the dark.) ‘Fifteen.’
‘What kind of lights?’
The little boy is bewildered.
‘What kind of lights? Electric or acetylene?’
(A longer pause, and another leap in the dark.) ‘Acetylene.’
‘Coo! He says his pater's car's got acetylene lamps. They went out years ago. It
must be as old as the hill.’
‘Rot! He's making it up. He hasn't got a car. He's just a navvy. Your pater's a navvy.’
And so on.
By the social standards that prevailed about me, I was no good, and could not be
any good. But all the different kinds of virtue seemed to be mysteriously interconnected
and to belong to much the same people. It was not only money that mattered: there were
also strength, beauty, charm, athleticism and something called ‘guts’ or ‘character’,
which in reality meant the power to impose your will on others. I did not possess any of
these qualities. At games, for instance, I was hopeless. I was a fairly good swimmer and
not altogether contemptible at cricket, but these had no prestige value, because boys
only attach importance to a game if it requires strength and courage. What counted was
football, at which I was a funk. I loathed the game, and since I could see no pleasure or
usefulness in it, it was very difficult for me to show courage at it. Football, it seemed to
me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a ball about, but is a species of
fighting. The lovers of football are large, boisterous, nobbly boys who are good at
knocking down and trampling on slightly smaller boys. That was the pattern of school
life — a continuous triumph of the strong over the weak. Virtue consisted in winning: it
consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant,
more unscrupulous than other people — in dominating them, bullying them, making
them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. Life
was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved
to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always
did lose, everlastingly.
I did not question the prevailing standards, because so far as I could see there were
no others. How could the rich, the strong, the elegant, the fashionable, the powerful, be
in the wrong? It was their world, and the rules they made for it must be the right ones.
And yet from a very early age I was aware of the impossibility of any
subjective
conformity. Always at the centre of my heart the inner self seemed to be awake, pointing
out the difference between the moral obligation and the psychological
fact.
It was the
same in all matters, worldly or other-worldly. Take religion, for instance. You were
supposed to love God, and I did not question this. Till the age of about fourteen I
believed in God, and believed that the accounts given of him were true. But I was well
aware that I did not love him. On the contrary, I hated him, just as I hated Jesus and the
Hebrew patriarchs. If I had sympathetic feelings towards any character in the Old
Testament, it was towards such people as Cain, Jezebel, Haman, Agag, Sisera: in the
New Testament my friends, if any, were Ananias, Caiaphas, Judas and Pontius Pilate.
But the whole business of religion seemed to be strewn with psychological
impossibilities. The Prayer Book told you, for example, to love God and fear him: but
how could you love someone whom you feared? With your private affections it was the
same. What you
ought
to feel was usually clear enough but the appropriate emotion
could not be commanded. Obviously it was my duty to feel grateful towards Flip and
Sambo; but I was not grateful. It was equally clear that one ought to love one's father,
but I knew very well that I merely disliked my own father, whom I had barely seen
before I was eight and who appeared to me simply as a gruff-voiced elderly man forever
saying ‘Don't’. It was not that one did not want to possess the right qualities or feel the
correct emotions, but that one could not. The good and the possible never seemed to
coincide.
There was a line of verse that I came across not actually while I was at St Cyprian's,
but a year of two later, and which seemed to strike a sort of leaden echo in my heart. It
was: ‘The armies of unalterable law’. I understood to perfection what it meant to be
Lucifer, defeated and justly defeated, with no possibility of revenge. The schoolmasters
with their canes, the millionaires with their Scottish castles, the athletes with their curly
hair — these were the armies of unalterable law. It was not easy, at that date, to realize
that in fact it
was
alterable. And according to that law I was damned. I had no money, I
was weak, I was ugly, I was unpopular, I had a chronic cough, I was cowardly, I smelt.
This picture, I should add, was not altogether fanciful. I was an unattractive boy. St
Cyprian's soon made me so, even if I had not been so before. But a child's belief in its
own shortcomings is not much influenced by facts. I believed, for example, that I ‘smelt’.
But this was based simply on general probability. It was notorious that disagreeable
people smelt, and therefore presumably I did so too. Again, until after I had left school
for good I continued to believe that I was preternaturally ugly. It was what my
schoolfellows had told me, and I had no other authority to refer to. The conviction that it
was
not possible
for me to be a success went deep enough to influence my actions till far
into adult life. Until I was about thirty I always planned my life on the assumption not
only that any major undertaking was bound to fail, but that I could only expect to live a
few years longer.
But this sense of guilt and inevitable failure was balanced by something else: that
is, the instinct to survive. Even a creature that is weak, ugly, cowardly, smelly and in no
way justifiable still wants to stay alive and be happy after its own fashion. I could not
invert the existing scale of values, or turn myself into a success, but I could accept my
failure and make the best of it. I could resign myself to being what I was, and then
endeavour to survive on those terms.
To survive, or at least to preserve any kind of independence, was essentially
criminal, since it meant breaking rules which you yourself recognized. There was a boy
named Johnny Hale who for some months oppressed me horribly. He was a big,
powerful, coarsely handsome boy with a very red face and curly black hair, who was
forever twisting somebody's arm, wringing somebody's ear, flogging somebody with a
riding-crop (he was a member of the Sixth Form), or performing prodigies of activity on
the football field. Flip loved him (hence the fact he was habitually called by his Christian
name) and Sambo commended him as a boy who ‘had character’ and ‘could keep order’.
He was followed about by a group of toadies who nicknamed him Strong Man.
One day, when we were taking off our overcoats in the changing-room, Hale picked
on me for some reason. I ‘answered him back’. Whereupon he gripped my wrist, twisted
it round and bent my forearm back upon itself in a hideously painful way. I remember
his handsome, jeering red face bearing down upon mine. He was, I think, older than I,
besides being enormously stronger. As he let go of me a terrible, wicked resolve formed
itself in my heart. I would get back on him by hitting him when he did not expect it. It
was a strategic moment, for the master who had been ‘taking’ the walk would be coming
back almost immediately, and then there could be no fight. I let perhaps a minute go by,
walked up to Hale with the most harmless air I could assume, and then, getting the
weight of my body behind it, smashed my fist into his face. He was flung backwards by
the blow, and some blood ran out of his mouth. His always sanguine face turned almost
black with rage. Then he turned away to rinse his mouth at the wash-basins.
‘
All right!
’ he said to me between his teeth as the master led us away.
For days after this he followed me about, challenging me to fight. Although
terrified out of my wits, I steadily refused to fight. I said that the blow in the face had
served him right, and there was an end of it. Curiously enough he did not simply fall
upon me there and then, which public opinion would probably have supported him in
doing. So gradually the matter tailed off, and there was no fight.
Now, I had behaved wrongly, by my own code no less than his. To hit him
unawares was wrong. But to refuse afterwards to fight knowing that if we fought we
would beat me — that was far worse: it was cowardly. If I had refused because I
disapproved of fighting, or because I genuinely felt the matter to be closed, it would have
been all right; but I had refused merely because I was afraid. Even my revenge was made
empty by that fact. I had struck the blow in a moment of mindless violence, deliberately
not looking far ahead and merely determined to get my own back for once and damn the
consequences. I had had time to realize that what I did was wrong, but it was the kind of
crime from which you could get some satisfaction. Now all was nullified. There had been
a sort of courage in the first act, but my subsequent cowardice had wiped it out.
The fact I hardly noticed was that though Hale formally challenged me to fight, he
did not actually attack me. Indeed, after receiving that one blow he never oppressed me
again. It was perhaps twenty years before I saw the significance of this. At the time I
could not see beyond the moral dilemma that is presented to the weak in a world
governed by the strong: Break the rules, or perish. I did not see that in that case the
weak have the right to make a different set of rules for themselves; because, even if such
an idea had occurred to me, there was no one in my environment who could have
confirmed me in it. I lived in a world of boys, gregarious animals questioning nothing,
accepting the law of the stronger and avenging their own humiliations by passing them
down to someone smaller. My situation was that of countless other boys, and if
potentially I was more of a rebel than most, it was only because, by boyish standards, I
was a poorer specimen. But I never did rebel intellectually, only emotionally. I had
nothing to help me except my dumb selfishness, my inability — not, indeed, to despise
myself, but to
dislike
myself — my instinct to survive.
It was about a year after I hit Johnny Hale in the face that I left St Cyprian's for
ever. It was the end of a winter term. With a sense of coming out from darkness into
sunlight I put on my Old Boy's tie as we dressed for the journey. I well remember the
feeling of emancipation, as though the tie had been at once a badge of manhood and an
amulet against Flip's voice and Sambo's cane. I was escaping from bondage. It was not
that I expected, or even intended, to be any more successful at a public school than I had
been at St Cyprian's. But still, I was escaping. I knew that at a public school there would
be more privacy, more neglect, more chance to be idle and self-indulgent and
degenerate. For years I had been resolved — unconsciously at first, but consciously later
on — that when once my scholarship was won I would ‘slack off’ and cram no longer.
This resolve, by the way, was so fully carried out that between the ages of thirteen and
twenty-two or three I hardly ever did a stroke of avoidable work.
Flip shook hands to say good-bye. She even gave me my Christian name for the
occasion. But there was a sort of patronage, almost a sneer, in her face and in her voice.
The tone in which she said good-bye was nearly the tone in which she had been used to
say
little butterflies.
I had won two scholarships but I was a failure, because success was
measured not by what you did but by what you
were
. I was ‘not a good type of boy’ and
could bring no credit on the school. I did not possess character or courage or health or
strength or money, or even good manners, the power to look like a gentlemen.
‘Good-bye,’ Flip's parting smile seemed to say; ‘its not worth quarrelling now. You
haven't made much of a success of your time at St Cyprian's, have you? And I don't
suppose you'll get on awfully well at a public school either. We make a mistake, really, in
wasting our time and money on you. This kind of education hasn't much to offer to a boy
with your background and your outlook. Oh, don't think we don't understand you! We
know all about those ideas you have at the back of your head, we know you disbelieve in
everything we've taught you, and we know you aren't in the least grateful for all we've
done for you. But there's no use in bringing it all up now. We aren't responsible for you
any longer, and we shan't be seeing you again. Let's just admit that you're one of our
failures and part without ill-feeling. And so, good-bye.’
That at least was what I read into her face. And yet how happy I was, that winter
morning, as the train bore me away with the gleaming new silk tie (dark green, pale blue
and black, if I remember rightly) round my neck! The world was opening before me, just
a little, like a grey sky which exhibits a narrow crack of blue. A public school would be
better fun than St Cyprian's, but at bottom equally alien. In a world where the prime
necessities were money, titled relatives, athleticism, tailor-made clothes, neatly-brushed
hair, a charming smile, I was no good. All I had gained was a breathing-space. A little
quietude, a little self-indulgence, a little respite from cramming — and then, ruin. What
kind of ruin I did not know: perhaps the colonies or an office stool, perhaps prison or an
early death. But first a year or two in which one could ‘slack off’ and get the benefit of
one's sins, like Doctor Faustus. I believed firmly in my evil destiny, and yet I was acutely
happy. It is the advantage of being thirteen that you can not only live in the moment, but
do so with full consciousness, foreseeing the future and yet not caring about it Next term
I was going to Wellington. I had also won a scholarship at Eton, but it was uncertain
whether there would be a vacancy, and I was going to Wellington first. At Eton you had a
room to yourself — a room which might even have a fire in it. At Wellington you had
your own cubicle, and could make yourself cocoa in the evenings. The privacy of it, the
grown-upness! And there would be libraries to hang about in, and summer afternoons
when you could shirk games and mooch about the countryside alone, with no master
driving you along. Meanwhile there were the holidays. There was the 22 rifle that I had
bought the previous holidays (the Crackshot, it was called, costing twenty-two and
sixpence), and Christmas was coming next week. There were also the pleasures of
overeating. I thought of some particularly voluptuous cream buns which could be
bought for twopence each at a shop in our town. (This was 1916, and food-rationing had
not yet started.) Even the detail that my journey-money had been slightly miscalculated,
leaving about a shilling over — enough for an unforeseen cup of coffee and a cake or two
somewhere on the way — was enough to fill me with bliss. There was time for a bit of
happiness before the future closed in upon me. But I did know that the future was dark.
Failure, failure, failure — failure behind me, failure ahead of me — that was by far the
deepest conviction that I carried away.
VI
All this was thirty years ago and more. The question is: Does a child at school go through
the same kind of experiences nowadays?
The only honest answer, I believe, is that we do not with certainty know. Of course
it is obvious that the present-day
attitude
towards education is enormously more
humane and sensible than that of the past. The snobbishness that was an integral part of
my own education would be almost unthinkable today, because the society that
nourished it is dead. I recall a conversation that must have taken place about a year
before I left St Cyprian's. A Russian boy, large and fair-haired, a year older than myself,
was questioning me.
‘How much a year has your father got?’
I told him what I thought it was, adding a few hundreds to make it sound better.
The Russian boy, neat in his habits, produced a pencil and a small note-book and made
a calculation.
‘My father has over two hundred times as much money as yours,’ he announced
with a sort of amused contempt.
That was in 1915. What happened to that money a couple of years later, I wonder?
And still more I wonder, do conversations of that kind happen at preparatory schools
now?
Clearly there has been a vast change of outlook, a general growth of
‘enlightenment’, even among ordinary, unthinking middle-class people. Religious belief,
for instance, has largely vanished, dragging other kinds of nonsense after it. I imagine
that very few people nowadays would tell a child that if it masturbates it will end in the
lunatic asylum. Beating, too, has become discredited, and has even been abandoned at
many schools. Nor is the underfeeding of children looked on as a normal, almost
meritorious act. No one now would openly set out to give his pupils as little food as they
could do with, or tell them that it is healthy to get up from a meal as hungry as you sat
down. The whole status of children has improved, partly because they have grown
relatively less numerous. And the diffusion of even a little psychological knowledge has
made it harder for parents and schoolteachers to indulge their aberrations in the name
of discipline. Here is a case, not known to me personally, but known to some one I can
vouch for, and happening within my own lifetime. A small girl, daughter of a clergyman,
continued wetting her bed at an age when she should have grown out of it. In order to
punish her for this dreadful deed, her father took her to a large garden party and there
introduced her to the whole company as a little girl who wetted her bed: and to
underline her wickedness he had previously painted her face black. I do not suggest that
Flip and Sambo would actually have done a thing like this, but I doubt whether it would
have much surprised them. After all, things do change. And yet — !
The question is not whether boys are still buckled into Eton collars on Sunday, or
told that babies are dug up under gooseberry bushes. That kind of thing is at an end,
admittedly. The real question is whether it is still normal for a school child to live for
years amid irrational terrors and lunatic misunderstandings. And here one is up against
the very great difficulty of knowing what a child really feels and thinks. A child which
appears reasonably happy may actually be suffering horrors which it cannot or will not
reveal. It lives in a sort of alien under-water world which we can only penetrate by
memory or divination. Our chief clue is the fact that we were once children ourselves,
and many people appear to forget the atmosphere of their own childhood almost
entirely. Think for instance of the unnecessary torments that people will inflict by
sending a child back to school with clothes to the wrong pattern, and refusing to see that
this matters! Over things of this kind a child will sometimes utter a protest, but a great
deal of the time its attitude is one of simple concealment. Not to expose your true
feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards. Even
the affection that one feels for a child, the desire to protect and cherish it, is a cause of
misunderstanding. One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love
another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return. Looking
back on my own childhood, after the infant years were over, I do not believe that I ever
felt love for any mature person, except my mother, and even her I did not trust, in the
sense that shyness made me conceal most of my real feelings from her. Love, the
spontaneous, unqualified emotion of love, was something I could only feel for people
who were young. Towards people who were old — and remember that ‘old’ to a child
means over thirty, or even over twenty-five — I could feel reverence respect, admiration
or compunction, but I seemed cut off from them by a veil of fear and shyness mixed up
with physical distaste. People are too ready to forget the child's
physical
shrinking from
the adult. The enormous size of grown-ups, their ungainly, rigid bodies, their coarse,
wrinkled skins, their great relaxed eyelids, their yellow teeth, and the whiffs of musty
clothes and beer and sweat and tobacco that disengage from them at every movement!
Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually
looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below. Besides, being
fresh and unmarked itself, the child has impossibly high standards in the matter of skin
and teeth and complexion. But the greatest barrier of all is the child's misconception
about age. A child can hardly envisage life beyond thirty, and in judging people's ages it
will make fantastic mistakes. It will think that a person of twenty-five is forty, that a
person of forty is sixty-five, and so on. Thus, when I fell in love with Elsie I took her to
be grown-up. I met her again, when I was thirteen and she, I think, must have been
twenty-three; she now seemed to me a middle-aged woman, somewhat past her best.
And the child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some
mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are
joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive
without so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.
The schoolmaster who imagines that he is loved and trusted by his boys is in fact
mimicked and laughed at behind his back. An adult who does not seem dangerous
nearly always seems ridiculous.
I base these generalizations on what I can recall of my own childhood out look.
Treacherous though memory is, it seems to me the chief means we have of discovering
how a child's mind works. Only by resurrecting our own memories can we realize how
incredibly distorted is the child's vision of the world. Consider this, for example. How
would St Cyprian's appear to me now, if I could go back, at my present age, and see it as
it was in 1915? What should I think of Sambo and Flip, those terrible, all-powerful
monsters? I should see them as a couple of silly, shallow, ineffectual people, eagerly
clambering up a social ladder which any thinking person could see to be on the point of
collapse. I would no more be frightened of them than I would be frightened of a
dormouse. Moreover, in those days they seemed to me fantastically old, whereas —
though of this I am not certain — I imagine they must have been somewhat younger
than I am now. And how would Johnny Hale appear with his blacksmith's arms and his
red, jeering face? Merely a scruffy little boy, barely distinguishable from hundreds of
other scruffy little boys. The two sets of facts can lie side by side in my mind, because
those happen to be my own memories. But it would be very difficult for me to see with
the eyes of any other child, except by an effort of the imagination which might lead me
completely astray. The child and the adult live in different worlds. If that is so, we
cannot be certain that school, at any rate boarding school, is not still for many children
as dreadful an experience as it used to be. Take away God, Latin, the cane, class
distinctions and sexual taboos, and the fear, the hatred, the snobbery and the
misunderstanding might still all be there. It will have been seen that my own main
trouble was an utter lack of any sense of proportion or probability. This led me to accept
outrages and believe absurdities, and to suffer torments over things which were in fact
of no importance. It is not enough to say that I was ‘silly’ and ‘ought to have known
better’. Look back into your own childhood and think of the nonsense you used to
believe and the trivialities which could make you suffer. Of course my own case had its
individual variations, but essentially it was that of countless other boys. The weakness of
the child is that it starts with a blank sheet. It neither understands nor questions the
society in which it lives, and because of its credulity other people can work upon it,
infecting it with the sense of inferiority and the dread of offending against mysterious,
terrible laws. It may be that everything that happened to me at St Cyprian's could
happen in the most ‘enlightened’ school, though perhaps in subtler forms. Of one thing,
however, I do feel fairly sure, and that is that boarding schools are worse than day
schools. A child has a better chance with the sanctuary of its home near at hand. And I
think the characteristic faults of the English upper and middle classes may be partly due
to the practice, general until recently, of sending children away from home as young as
nine, eight or even seven.
I have never been back to St Cyprian's. Reunions, old boys’ dinners and such-like
leave me something more than cold, even when my memories are friendly. I have never
even been down to Eton, where I was relatively happy, though I did once pass through it
in 1933 and noted with interest that nothing seemed to have changed, except that the
shops now sold radios. As for St Cyprian's, for years I loathed its very name so deeply
that I could not view it with enough detachment to see the significance of the things that
happened to me there. In a way it is only within the last decade that I have really
thought over my schooldays, vividly though their memory has always haunted me.
Nowadays, I believe, it would make very little impression on me to see the place again, if
it still exists. (I remember hearing a rumour some years ago that it had been burnt
down.) If I had to pass through Eastbourn I would not make a detour to avoid the
school: and if I happened to pass the school itself I might even stop for a moment by the
low brick wall, with the steep bank running down from it, and look across the flat
playing field at the ugly building with the square of asphalt in front of it. And if I went
inside and smelt again the inky, dusty smell of the big schoolroom, the rosiny smell of
the chapel, the stagnant smell of the swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I
think I should only feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood:
How small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in myself! But it
is a fact that for many years I could hardly have borne to look at it again. Except upon
dire necessity I would not have set foot in Eastbourne. I even conceived a prejudice
against Sussex, as the country that contained St Cyprian's, and as an adult I have only
once been in Sussex, on a short visit. Now, however, the place is out of my system for
good. Its magic works no longer, and I have not even enough animosity left to make me
hope that Flip and Sambo are dead or that the story of the school being burnt down was
true.