[Greek text].
From our chapter on the geographical features of our settlement we pass
on to describe how the settlers were housed and organised.
If a school be an institution for teaching purposes, its school-room and
class-rooms should be the most essential portion of its plant. Without
discussing the adequacy of the definition, we will begin with these. We
were not ill provided; with an exception or two, the rooms appropriated
for class-rooms answered the purpose well. Some of them were spacious;
the rest were large enough for the wants of the classes, limited to an
average of twenty. Nor would a Government Inspector have justly measured
this adequacy by the "cubic capacity," if he failed to take into account
the exhilarating five minutes' breathing time upon the beach, at eleven
o'clock. There was a rare pleasure in those moments of escape from Greek
verbs to the sparkle of the tide and the scent of the sea breeze.
What Germans call the "real" subjects, were also provided for. The
modern languages were taught mostly in the class-rooms of the classical
masters. Music took up her quarters in several scattered dwellings.
Wales is the home of song, and our musicians were very welcome to make
the cottage walls resound to violin or key-board. We remember well the
affectionate reverence with which one aged custodian spoke of the
"pianass" she was proud to house; she cherished them as if they had been
tame elephants. Several concerts were given during our stay--but in the
Assembly Rooms of Aberystwith; our wooden school-room was found, on the
first experiment, unfit for the purpose, from the want of resonance. The
makeshift gymnasium and carpentery, in the stables and coach-house, have
been mentioned before. If among "real studies" we may include the
cricket, this was, as we saw, well cared for; while the instructor in
swimming had nothing to complain of, with four miles of good beach, and
the Irish Channel before him.
If the accommodation during school hours was adequate, it was less easy
to find elbow-room for the boys at other times. It was well enough from
May to August under the ample roof of blue summer weather; but in the
rainy season (and at Borth, as elsewhere, that winter was a wet one) we
should have been sorely cramped but for relief afforded by the "studies"
noticed in a previous chapter. It is time we should describe them.
Studies they were not, in the sense in which the word is understood at
Uppingham, where a school law declares that "a boy's study is his
castle," and confers upon him what Aristotle calls the "unspeakable"
delight of the "sense of private property." At Borth this could not be.
In very rare cases was a room the one and indivisible belonging of a
single owner; often as many as six shared the table and fireplace. Some
of these tenements had at least the less solid merit of looking
picturesque. Peeping into a Welsh interior, with its stone
kitchen-floor, polished wainscoting, and oak furniture, its walls hung
with German prints of imaginative battle-pieces and Nonconforming
worthies, and its kitchen-dresser with ranks of ancestral crockery, vivid
in light and colour, which catches the eyes first of all things through
the open door, "This," one was tempted to cry, "were the study for me!
Here would I sit in the shelter of the wooden screen which keeps away
draughts and noisy company, and turn the pages of my Livy for the tale of
Cincinnatus, and deeds of rustic heroes; or hear old Horace descant on
the gracious simplicity of life among the Sabines."
The boys thought quite otherwise. The kitchen was generally the last
room to be chosen. Perhaps the idyllic attractions did not balance the
drawback of living in the thoroughfare of the house. Nor could one fail
to sympathise with those who preferred the garret, a poor thing but their
own, in which two studious souls could hob-nob, or even the austere
whitewash, narrow skylight, and niggard dimensions of some monastic cell,
which held just the one student, his table, and his books. The editor of
the School Magazine, writing a month after our arrival, finds it "a queer
new feeling to do the old work in a strange place, to miss the accustomed
pictures on the walls, the accustomed column of books rising on either
hand--even the familiar table-cloth and carpet, and to sit instead inside
the framework of a six-foot bed, with roof and walls forming the queerest
possible combinations of lines and angles, and hung with three different
patterns of paper." To woo the muses in a garret is the common fate of
genius; but most of the "students" (for so their landladies, misled by a
name, called the occupants of a study) were better off than this literary
gentleman. When fires came to be lighted in the winter, there was a
cheerful domesticity in the sight of the red coals, which is unknown to
the solitude of Uppingham studies, with their hot-water pipe that warms
but not exhilarates. In particular, one cheery well-furnished parlour,
where a blazing hearth threw its light over the well-worn bindings of a
select library brought with us from the Sixth-Form-room, and on the well-
contented faces of its two custodians, burns as a bright spot in our
memory of those winter days.
Thus we managed things even better than if we had listened to another
ingenious writer, with whose proposal we will close this topic. It was
this: "Let two hundred bathing-machines be brought together from
Llandudno and other watering-places within reach, and ranged along the
beach. Let one machine be assigned to each boy, and let them be filled
up with book-shelves, table, chairs, &c. Thus the whole difficulty will
be solved in a moment. And the plan has this further advantage, that
when the time comes for returning to Uppingham, the bathing-machines
would be simply formed in line, and driven across the country to
Rutlandshire, and all further trouble in the way of furniture-vans and
families-removing be cut away at one stroke."