HALF-WAY through my second year I wrote to tell my parents that they must take me away, because I could not stand life at Charterhouse any longer: the House had made it plain that I did not belong, and was not wanted. I gave them details, in confidence, to make them take my demand seriously; but they failed to respect this confidence, believing that their religious duty would be to inform the housemaster of all I had written them. Nor did they even warn me what they were doing; but contented themselves with visiting me and preaching the power of prayer and faith. I must endure all, they said, for the sake of… I have forgotten what exactly – perhaps my career. Fortunately I had withheld any account of sex-irregularities in the house, so all that the housemaster did was to make a speech that night, after prayers, deterrent of bullying in general. He told us that he had just received a complaint from a boy’s parents; making it plain at the same time how much he disliked informers and outside interference in affairs of the house. My name did not come up, but the visit of my parents on a non-holiday had excited comment. I was obliged to stay on, and be treated as an informer. Being now in the upper school, I had a study of my own. But studies could not be looked, and mine was always being wrecked. I could no longer even use the ordinary house changing-room, so removed my games-clothes to a disused shower-bath. Then my heart went wrong, and the school doctor decided that I must play no more football. My last resource, to sham insanity, succeeded unexpectedly well. Soon nobody troubled except to avoid any contact with me. I got the idea from The Book of Kings, where David had ‘scrabbled on the prison wall’.
This is not to charge my parents with treachery. Their honour is beyond reproach. Next term, I went to Charterhouse by the special train, but arrived at Waterloo too late to take a ticket; I just managed to get into a compartment before the train started. The railway company not having provided enough coaches, I had to stand all the way. At Godalming station, the crowd of boys rushing out into the station yard to secure taxis swept me past the ticket collectors, so I got a very uncomfortable ride free. I mentioned this in my next letter home, just for something to say, and my father wrote to reproach me. He said that he had himself made a special visit to Waterloo station, bought a ticket to Godalming, and torn it up…. My mother could be even more scrupulous. A young couple on their honeymoon once stopped the night with us at Wimbledon, and left behind a packet of sandwiches, two already half-eaten. My mother sent them on.
Thrown entirely on myself, I began to write poems; which the house considered stronger proof of insanity than the formal straws I wore in my hair. On the strength of a poem I had sent to the school magazine, The Carthusian, I was invited to join the school Poetry Society – a most anomalous organization for Charterhouse. It consisted of seven members. The meetings, for the reading and discussion of poetry, were held once a month at the house of Guy Kendall, then a form-master at the school, now headmaster of University College School at Hampstead. The members were four sixth-form boys, and two boys a year and a half older than me. None was in the same house as myself. At Charterhouse, no friendship might exist between boys of different houses or ages (though related, or next-door neighbours at home), beyond a formal acquaintance at work or organized games like cricket and football. Even if they played a friendly game of tennis or squash-rackets together, they would never hear the last of it.
So the friendship that began between me and Raymond Roda-kowski, one of the two younger members, was highly unconventional. Coming home one evening from a meeting of the society, I told Raymond about life in the house. A week or two before my study had been raided, and one of my more personal poems seized and pinned up on the public notice board in ‘Writing School’ – the livingroom for members of the lower school. As a member of the fifth form, I was excluded from Writing School, and therefore could not rescue the poem. Raymond, the first Carthusian to whom I had been able to talk humanly, grew indignant, and took my arm in his. ‘They are bloody barbarians!’ He told me that I must pull myself together and do something positive, because I was a good poet, and a good person. I loved Raymond for that. He said: ‘You’re not allowed to play football; why don’t you box? It’s supposed to improve the heart.’ I laughed and promised that I would. Then Raymond asked: ‘I expect they rag you about your initials?’ ‘Yes, they call me a dirty German.’ ‘I had trouble, too,’ he told me, ‘before I took up boxing.’ Raymond’s mother was Scottish; his father an Austrian Pole, a founder of the Brooklands Racing Track.
Very few boys boxed, and the boxing-room, over the school tuck-shop, made a convenient place to meet Raymond whom, otherwise, I would not have seen, except at Poetry Society meetings. I began boxing seriously and savagely. Raymond said: ‘These cricketers and footballers are all afraid of boxers, almost superstitious. They won’t box themselves for fear of losing their good looks – the annual interhouse competitions are such bloody affairs. But do you remember the Mansfield, Waller, and Taylor show? That’s a useful tradition to keep up.’
Of course, I remembered. Two terms previously, there had been a famous meeting of the school Debating Society, the committee of which consisted of sixth-form boys. Though the debates were pretty dull, what passed for intellectual life at Charterhouse was represented by the Debating Society, and The Carthusian, always edited by two members of this committee – both institutions being free from the control of masters. One Saturday debate-night the usual decorous conventions were broken by a riotous entry of ‘bloods’ – members of the cricket and football elevens. The bloods were the ruling caste at Charterhouse; the eleventh man in the football eleven, though he might be a member of the under-fourth form, enjoyed far more prestige that the most brilliant scholar in the sixth. Even ‘Head of the School’ was an empty title. But the sixth-form intellectuals and the bloods never fought. The bloods had nothing to gain by a clash; the intellectuals were happy to be left alone. So this invasion of the bloods, just returned from winning an ‘away’ match against the Casuals, and full of beer, caused the Debating Society a good deal of embarrassment. The bloods disturbed the meeting by cheers and cat-calls, and slammed the library magazine-folders on the table. Mansfield, as president of the society, called them to order, and when they continued the disturbance, closed the debate.
The bloods thought the incident finished, but they thought wrong. A letter appeared in The Carthusian a few days later, protesting against the bad behaviour in the Debating Society of ‘certain First Eleven babies’. The three sets of initials signed were those of Mansfield, Waller, and Taylor. The school, astonished by this suicidally daring act, waited for Korah, Dathan, and Abiram to be swallowed up. The Captain of Football swore that he’d chuck the three signatories into the fountain in Founder’s Court. But somehow he did not. The fact was that this happened early in the autumn term, and only two other First Eleven colours had been left over from the preceding year; new colours were given gradually as the football season advanced. The other rowdies had been merely embryo bloods. So the matter had to be settled between these three sixth-form intellectuals and the three colours of the First Eleven. But the First Eleven were uncomfortably aware that Mansfield was the heavy-weight boxing champion of the school, Waller the runner-up for the middle-weights, and that Taylor was also a tough fellow to be reckoned with. While they were wondering what on earth to do, Mansfield decided to take the war into his enemies’ country.
The social code of Charterhouse rested on a strict caste system; the caste marks, or post-te’s, being slight distinctions in dress. A new boy had no privileges at all; a boy in his second term might wear a knitted tie instead of a plain one; a boy in his second year might wear coloured socks; the third year gave most of the main privileges – turned down collars, coloured handkerchiefs, a coat with a long roll, and so on; fourth year, a few more, such as the right to get up raffles; but peculiar distinctions were reserved for the bloods. These included light-grey flannel trousers, butterfly collars, jackets slit up the back, and the right of walking arm-in-arm.
So the next Sunday Mansfield, Waller, and Taylor did the bravest deed ever done at Charterhouse. Chapel began at eleven in the morning, but the school had to be in its seats by five minutes to eleven and sit waiting there. At two minutes to eleven the bloods used to stalk up; at one and a half minute to, came the masters; at one minute to, came the choir in their surplices; then the headmaster arrived, and the service began. If any boy, accidentally late, sneaked in between five minutes to, and two minutes to, the hour, six hundred pairs of eyes followed him; he heard whispering and giggling at his apparent foolhardiness in pretending to be a blood. On this Sunday, then, when the bloods had entered with their usual swaggering assurance, an extraordinary thing happened.
The three sixth-formers slowly walked up the aisle, magnificent in light-grey flannel trousers, slit jackets, butterfly collars, and each wore a pink carnation in his lapel. Astonished and horrified by this spectacle, everyone turned to gaze at the Captain of the First Eleven; he had gone quite white. But by this time the masters had entered, followed by the choir, and the opening hymn, though raggedly sung, ended the tension. When chapel emptied, it always emptied according to ‘school order’, that is, according to position in work: the sixth form therefore went out first. The bloods not being at all high in school order, Mansfield, Waller, and Taylor had the start of them. After chapel on Sunday, the custom in the autumn term was for boys to meet and gossip in the library; so to the library Mansfield, Waller, and Taylor went. On the way, they buttonholed a talkative master, drew him in with them and kept him talking until dinnertime. If the bloods had dared to do anything violent they would have had to do it at once, but to make a scene in the presence of a master was impossible. Mansfield, Waller, and Taylor went down to their houses for dinner, still talking to the master. After that, they always went about together in public, and the school, particularly the lower school, which had long chafed under the dress regulations, made heroes of them and began scoffing at the bloods as weak-kneed.
Finally, the captain of the eleven complained to Rendall about this breach of school conventions, asking for permission to enforce the bloods’ rights by disciplinary measures. Rendall, who was a scholar and disliked the games tradition, refused his request, insisting that the sixth form deserved as distinctive privileges as the First Eleven, and were, in his opinion, entitled to hold what they had assumed. The prestige of the bloods declined greatly.
On Raymond’s encouragement, I pulled myself together and when the next school year started found things very much easier. My chief persecutor, the Irishman, had gone away with a nervous breakdown. He wrote me a hysterical demand for forgiveness – saying at the same time that, if I refused it, he still had a friend in the house to give me a bad time. I did not answer the letter.