I WENT to several preparatory schools, beginning at the age of six. The very first was a dame’s school at Wimbledon, but my father, as an educational expert, would not let me stay there long. He found me crying one day at the difficulty of the twenty-three-times table, and disapproved of a Question and Answer history book that we used, which began:
Question: Why were the Britons so called?
Answer: Because they painted themselves blue.
Also, they made me do mental arithmetic to a metronome; I once wetted myself with nervousness under this torture. So my father sent me to King’s College School, Wimbledon. I was just seven years old, the youngest boy there, and they went up to nineteen. My father took me away after a couple of terms because he heard me using naughty words, and because I did not understand the lessons. I had started Latin, but nobody explained what ‘Latin’ meant; its declensions and conjugations were pure incantations to me. For that matter, so were the strings of naughty words. And I felt oppressed by the huge hall, the enormous boys, the frightening rowdiness of the corridors, and compulsory Rugby football of which nobody told me the rules. From there I went to Rokeby, a preparatory school of the ordinary type, also at Wimbledon, where I stayed for about three years. Here I began playing games seriously, grew quarrelsome, boastful, and domineering, won prizes, and collected things. The main difference between myself and the other boys was that I collected coins instead of stamps. The value of coins seemed less fictitious to me. The headmaster caned me only once: for forgetting to bring my gym-shoes to school, and then gave me no more than two strokes on the hand. Yet even now the memory makes me hot with resentment. My serious training as a gentleman began here.
I seem to have left out one school – Penrallt, right away in the hills behind Llanbedr. I had never been away from home before. I went there just for a term, for my health. Here I had my first beating. The headmaster, a parson, caned me on the bottom because I learned the wrong collect one Sunday by mistake. I had never before come upon forcible training in religion. At my dame’s school we learned collects too, but were not punished for mistakes; we competed for prizes – ornamental texts to take home and hang over our beds. A boy at Penrallt called Ronny was the greatest hero I had ever met. He had a house at the top of a pine-tree which nobody else could climb, and a huge knife, made from the tip of a scythe which he had stolen; and he killed pigeons with a catapult, cooked them, and ate them in the tree-house. Ronny treated me very kindly; he went into the Navy afterwards, deserted on his first voyage, and, we were told, was never heard of again. He used to steal rides on cows and horses which he found in the fields. At Penrallt I found a book that had the ballads of ‘Chevy Chase’ and ‘Sir Andrew Barton’ in it; these were the first two real poems I remember reading. I saw how good they were. But, on the other hand, there was an open-air swimming bath where all the boys bathed naked, and I was overcome by horror at the sight. One boy of nineteen had red hair, real bad, Irish, red hair all over his body. I did not know that hair grew on bothes. Also, the headmaster had a little daughter with a little girl friend, and I sweated with terror whenever I met them; because, having no brothers, they once tried to find out about male anatomy from me by exploring down my shirt-neck when we were digging up pig-nuts in the garden.
Another frightening experience from this part of my life. I once had to wait in the school cloak-room for my sisters, who went to the Wimbledon High School. We were going on to be photographed together. I waited for perhaps a quarter of an hour in a corner of the cloak-room. I must have been ten years old, and hundreds and hundreds of girls went to and fro; they all looked at me and giggled, and whispered to one another. I knew they hated me because I was a boy sitting in the cloak-room of a girls’ school; and my sisters, when they arrived, looked ashamed of me and seemed quite different from the sisters I knew at home. I had blundered into a secret world, and for months and even years afterwards my worst nightmares were of this girls’ school, which was always filled with coloured toy balloons. ‘Very Freudian’, as one says now. My normal impulses were set back for years by these two experiences. In 1912, we spent our Christmas holidays in Brussels. An Irish girl staying at the same pension made love to me in a way that, I see now, was really very sweet. It frightened me so much, I could have killed her.
In English preparatory and public schools romance is necessarily homosexual. The opposite sex is despised and treated as something obscene. Many boys never recover from this perversion. For every one born homosexual, at least ten permanent pseudo-homosexuals are made by the public school system: nine of these ten as honourably chaste and sentimental as I was.
I left the day-school at Wimbledon because my father decided that the standard of work was not high enough to get me a scholarship at a public school. He sent me to another preparatory school at Rugby, where the headmaster’s wife happened to be a sister of an old literary friend of his. I did not like the place. There was a secret about the headmaster which some of the elder boys shared – a somehow sinister secret. Nobody ever let me into it, but he came weeping into the class-room one day, beating his head with his fists, and groaning: ‘Would to God I hadn’t done it! Would to God I hadn’t done it!’ My father took me away suddenly, a week later. The headmaster, having been given twenty-four hours to leave the country, was succeeded by the second master – a good man, who had taught me how to write English by eliminating all phrases that could be done without, and using verbs and nouns instead of adjectives and adverbs wherever possible. And when to start new paragraphs, and the difference between ‘O’ and ‘Oh’. Mr Lush was a very heavy man, who used to stand at his desk and lean on his thumbs until they bent at right angles. A fortnight after taking over the school, he fell out of a train on his head, and that was the end of him; but the school seems to be still in being. I am occasionally asked to subscribe to Old Boys’ funds for memorial windows and miniature rifle ranges and so on.
I first learned rugger here. What surprised me most at this school was when a boy of about twelve, whose father and mother were in India, heard by cable that they had both suddenly died of cholera. We all watched him sympathetically for weeks after, expecting him to die of grief, or turn black in the face, or do something to match the occasion. Yet he seemed entirely unmoved, and because nobody dared discuss the tragedy with him he seemed oblivious of it – playing about and ragging just as he had done before. We found that rather monstrous. But he had not seen his parents for two years; and preparatory schoolboys live in a world completely dissociated from home life. They have a different vocabulary, a different moral system, even different voices. On their return to school from the holidays the change-over from home-self to school-self is almost instantaneous, whereas the reverse process takes a fortnight at least. A preparatory schoolboy, when caught off his guard, will call his mother ‘Please, matron,’ and always addresses any male relative or friend of the family as ‘Sir’, like a master. I used to do it. School life becomes the reality, and home life the illusion. In England, parents of the governing classes virtually lose all intimate touch with their children from about the age of eight, and any attempts on their parts to insinuate home feeling into school life are resented.
Next, I went to Copdiorne, a typically good school in Sussex. The headmaster had been chary of admitting me at my age, particularly since I came from a school with such a bad recent history. However, family literary connexions did the trick, and the headmaster saw that I could win a scholarship if he took trouble over me. The depressed state I had been in ended the moment I arrived. My younger brother Charles followed me to this school, being taken away from the day-school at Wimbledon; and, later, my youngest brother John went there straight from home. How good and typical the school was can be seen in the case of John, a typical, good, normal person who, as I say, went straight there from home. He spent five or six years at Copthorne – played in the elevens – got the top scholarship at a public school, became head-boy with athletic distinctions, won a scholarship at Oxford and further athletic distinctions – and a good degree – and then, what did he do? Because he was such a typically good, normal person he naturally went back as a master to his old, typically good preparatory school, and now that he has been there some years and needs a change, he is applying for a mastership at his old public school. If he gets it, and becomes a housemaster after a few years, he will at last, I suppose, become a headmaster and eventually take the next step as head of his old college at Oxford. That is the sort of typically good preparatory school it was.
There I learned to keep a straight bat at cricket, and to have a high moral sense; and mastered my fifth different pronunciation of Latin, and my fifth or sixth different way of doing simple arithmetic. They put me into the top class, and I got a scholarship – in fact, I got the first scholarship of the year. At Charterhouse. And why at Charterhouse? Because of íστημι and íημι. Charterhouse was the only public school whose scholarship examination did not contain a Greek grammar paper and, though smart enough at Greek Unseen and Greek composition, I could not conjugate íστημι and íημι conventionally. But for these two verbs, I should almost certainly have gone to the very different atmosphere of Winchester.