LET me begin my account of Charterhouse School by recalling the day that I left, a week before the outbreak of war. I discussed my feelings with Nevill Barbour, then Head of the School. First, we agreed that there were perhaps even more typical public schools than Charterhouse in existence, but that we preferred not to believe it. Next, that no possible remedy could be found, because tradition was so strong that to break it one would have to dismiss the whole school and staff, and start all over again. However, even this would not be enough, the school buildings being so impregnated with what passed as the public school spirit, but what we felt as fundamental evil, that they would have to be demolished and the school rebuilt elsewhere under a different name. Finally, that our only regret at leaving the place was that for the last year we had been in a position, as members of the Sixth Form, to do more or less what we pleased. Now we were both going on to St John’s College, Oxford, which promised to be merely a more boisterous repetition of Charterhouse. We should be freshmen there, but would naturally refuse to be hearty and public schoolish, and therefore be faced with the stupidity of having our rooms raided, and being forced to lose our temper and hurt somebody and get hurt ourselves. There would be no peace probably until we reached our third year, when we should be back again in the same sort of position as now, and in the same sort of position as in our last year at our preparatory school. ‘In 1917,’ said Nevill, ‘the official seal will be put on all this dreariness. We’ll get our degrees, and then have to start as new boys again in some dreadful profession.’
‘Correct,’ I told him.
‘My God,’ he said, turning to me suddenly, ‘I can’t stand the prospect. Something has to be put in between me and Oxford; I must at least go abroad for the whole vacation.’
Three months were not long enough, to my mind. I had a vague thought of running away to sea.
‘Do you realize,’ Nevill asked me, ‘that we have spent fourteen years of our lives principally at Latin and Greek, not even competently taught, and that we’re now going to start another three years of the same thing?’
Yet when we had said our very worst of Charterhouse, I reminded him, or he me, I forget which: ‘Of course, the trouble is that at any given time one always finds at least two really decent masters in the school, among the forty or fifty, and ten really decent fellows among the five or six hundred. We shall always remember them, and have Lot’s feeling about not damning Sodom for the sake of ten persons. And in another twenty years’ time we’ll forget this conversation and think that we were mistaken, and that perhaps everybody, with a few criminal exceptions, was fairly average decent, and say: “I was a young fool then, insisting on impossible perfection,” and we’ll send our sons to Charterhouse for sentiment’s sake, and they’ll go through all we did.’
This must not be construed as an attack on my old school; it is merely a record of my mood at the time. No doubt, I was unappreciative of the hard knocks and character-training that public schools are advertised as providing; and a typical Old Carthusian remarked to me recently: ‘The moral tone of the school has improved out of all recognition since those days.’ But so it always will have.
As a matter of fact I did not go up to Oxford until five years later, in 1919, when my brother Charles, four years younger than myself, was already in residence; and did not take my degree until 1926, by which time my brother John had caught up with me, though eight years younger than myself.
From my first moment at Charterhouse I suffered an oppression of spirit that I hesitate to recall in its full intensity. Something like being in that chilly cellar at Laufzorn among the potatoes, but a potato out of a different sack from the rest. The school consisted of about six hundred boys, whose chief interests were games and romantic friendships. Everyone despised school-work; the scholars were not concentrated in a single dormitory house as at Winchester or Eton, but divided among ten, and known as ‘pro’s’. Unless good at games, and able to pretend that they hated work even more than the non-scholars, and ready whenever called on to help these with their work, they always had a bad time. I happened to be a scholar who really liked work, and the apathy of the class-rooms surprised and disappointed me. My first term, I was left alone more or less, it being a rule that new boys should be neither encouraged nor baited. The other boys seldom addressed me except to send me on errands, or coldly point out breaches of school convention.
In the second term the trouble began. A number of things naturally made for my unpopularity. Besides being a scholar and not outstandingly good at games, I was always short of pocket-money. Since I could not conform to the social custom of treating my contemporaries to tuck at the school shop, I could not accept their treating. My clothes, though conforming outwardly to the school pattern, were ready-made and not of the best-quality cloth that all the other boys wore. Even so, I had not been taught how to make the best of them. Neither my mother nor my father had any regard for the niceties of dress, and my elder brothers were abroad by this time. Nearly all the other boys in my house, except for five scholars, were the sons of businessmen: a class of whose interests and prejudices I knew nothing, having hitherto met only boys of the professional class. Also, I talked too much for their liking. A further disability was that I remained as prudishly innocent as my mother had planned I should. I knew nothing about simple sex, let alone the many refinements of sex constantly referred to in school conversation, to which I reacted with horror. I wanted to run away.
The most unfortunate disability of all was that my name appeared on the school list as ‘R. von R. Graves’. I had hitherto believed my second name to be ‘Ranke’; the ‘von’, encountered on my birth certificate, disconcerted me. Carthusians behaved secretively about their second names, and usually managed to conceal fancy ones. I could no doubt have passed off ‘Ranke’, without the ‘von’, as monosyllabic and English, but ‘von Ranke’ was glaring. Businessmen’s sons, at this time, used to discuss hotly the threat, and even the necessity, of a trade war with the Reich. ‘German’ meant ‘dirty German’. It meant: ‘cheap, shoddy goods competing with our sterling industries.’ It also meant military menace, Prussianism, useless philosophy, tedious scholarship, loving music and sabre-rattling. Another boy in my house with a German name, though English by birth and upbringing, got much the same treatment as I did. On the other hand, a Frenchboy in the house became very popular, though poor at games; King Edward VII had done his entente cordiale work thoroughly. Considerable anti-Jewish feeling worsened the situation: someone started the rumour that I was not only a German, but a German Jew.
Of course, I always claimed to be Irish, but an Irish boy who had been in the house about a year and a half longer than myself resented this claim. He went out of his way to hurt me, not only by physical acts of spite like throwing ink over my school-books, hiding my games-clothes, attacking me suddenly from behind corners, pouring water over my bed at night, but by continually forcing his bawdy humour on my prudishness, and inviting everybody to laugh at my disgust. He also built up a humorous legend of my hypocrisy and concealed depravity. I came near a nervous breakdown. School ethics prevented me from informing the housemaster of my troubles. The house-monitors, though supposed to keep order and preserve the moral tone of the house, never interfered in any case of bullying among the juniors. I tried violent resistance, but as the odds were always heavily against me this merely encouraged the ragging. Complete passive resistance would probably have been wiser. I got accustomed to bawdy-talk only during my last two years at the school, and had been a soldier for some little time before I got hardened and could reply in kind to insults.
G. H. Rendall, the then Headmaster at Charterhouse, is reported to have innocently said at a Headmasters’ Conference: ‘My boys are amorous, but seldom erotic.’ Few cases of eroticism, indeed, came to his notice; I remember no more than five or six big rows during my time at Charterhouse, and expulsions were rare. The housemasters knew little about what went on in their houses, their living quarters being removed from the boys’. Yet I agree with Rendall’s distinction between ‘amorousness’ (by which he meant a sentimental falling in love with younger boys) and eroticism, or adolescent lust. The intimacy that frequently took place was very seldom between an elder boy and the object of his affection – that would have spoiled the romantic illusion – but almost always between boys of the same age who were not in love, and used each other as convenient sex-instruments. So the atmosphere was always heavy with romance of a conventional early-Victorian type, complicated by cynicism and foulness.