About Charterhouse. Let me begin by recalling my feelings on the day
that I left, about a week before the outbreak of war. I discussed them
with a friend who felt much as I did. First we said that there were
perhaps even more typical public schools than Charterhouse at the
time, but that this was difficult to believe. Next, that there was no
possible remedy, because tradition was so strong that if one wished
to break it one would have to dismiss the whole school and staff and
start all over again. But that even this would not be enough, for the
school buildings were so impregnated with what was called the public
school spirit, but what we felt as fundamental badness, that they
would have to be demolished and the school rebuilt elsewhere and its
name changed. Next, that our only regret at leaving the place was that
for the last year we had been in a position as members of Sixth Form
to do more or less what we pleased. Now we were both going on to St.
John’s College, Oxford, which seemed by reputation to be merely a more
boisterous repetition of Charterhouse. We would be freshmen there, and
would naturally refuse to be hearty and public school-ish, and there
would be all the stupidity of having our rooms raided and being forced
to lose our temper and hurt somebody and be hurt ourselves. And there
would be no peace probably until we got into our third year, when we
would 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 out on all this
dreariness. We’ll get our degrees, and then we’ll have to start as new
boys again in some dreary profession. My God,’ he said, turning to
me suddenly, ‘I can’t stand the idea of it. I must put something
in between me and Oxford. I must at least go abroad for the whole
vacation.’ I did not feel that three months was long enough. I had a
vague intention of running away to sea. ‘Do you realize,’ he said to
me, ‘that we have spent fourteen years of our life principally at Latin
and Greek, not even competently taught, and that we are going to start
another three years of the same thing?’ But, when we had said our very
worst of Charterhouse, I said to him or he said to me, I forget which:
‘Of course, the trouble is that in the school at any given time there
are always at least two really decent masters among the forty or fifty,
and ten really decent fellows among ♦the five or six hundred. We
will remember them, and have Lot’s feeling about not damning Sodom for
the sake of ten just 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 we’ll say “I was a young fool then, insisting on impossible
perfection,” and we’ll send our sons to Charterhouse sentimentally,
and they’ll go through all we did.’ I do not wish this to be construed
as an attack on my old school, but merely as a record of my feelings
at the time. No doubt I was unappreciative of the hard knocks and
character-training that public schools are supposed to provide, and as
a typical Old Carthusian remarked to me recently: ‘The whole moral tone
of the school has improved out of all recognition since those days.’
♦ “the the” replaced with “the”
As a matter of fact I did not go up to Oxford until five years later,
in 1919, when my brother, four years younger than myself, was already
in residence, and I did not take my degree until 1926, at the same time
as the brother who was eight years younger than myself. Oxford was
extraordinarily kind to me. I did no Latin or Greek there, though
I had a Classical Exhibition. I did not sit for a single examination.
I never had rooms at St. John’s, though I used to go there to draw
a Government grant for tuition fees. I lived outside the University
three-mile radius. For my last two undergraduate years I did not even
have a tutor. I have a warm feeling for Oxford. Its rules and statutes,
though apparently cast-iron, are ready for emergencies. In my case, at
any rate, a poet was an emergency.
Whenever I come to the word ‘Charterhouse’ in this story I find myself
escaping into digressions, but I suppose that I must get through with
it. From the moment I arrived at the school I suffered an oppression
of spirit that I hesitate now to recall in its full intensity. It
was something like being in that chilly cellar at Laufzorn among the
potatoes, but being a potato out of a different bag from the rest.
The school consisted of about six hundred boys. The chief interests
were games and romantic friendships. School-work was despised by every
one; the scholars, of whom there were about fifty in the school at
any given time, were not concentrated in a single dormitory-house as
at Winchester, but divided among ten. They were known as ‘pro’s,’ and
unless they were good at games and willing to pretend that they hated
work as much as or more than the non-scholars, and ready whenever
called on to help these with their work, they usually had a bad
time. I was a scholar and really liked work, and I was surprised and
disappointed at the apathy of the class-rooms. My first term I was
left alone more or less, it being a school convention that new boys
should be neither encouraged nor baited. The other boys seldom spoke
to them except to send them on errands, or to inform them of breaches
of school convention. But my second term the trouble began. There
were a number of things that naturally made for my unpopularity.
Besides being a scholar and not outstandingly good at games, I was
always short of pocket-money. I could not conform to the social custom
of treating my contemporaries to food at the school shop, and because
I could not treat them I could not accept their treating. My clothes
were all wrong; they conformed outwardly to the school pattern, but
they were ready-made and not of the best-quality cloth that the other
boys all 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 modern dress, and my elder brothers were abroad by this time. The
other boys in my house, except for five scholars, were nearly all the
sons of business men; it was a class of whose interests and prejudices
I knew nothing, having hitherto only met boys of the professional
class. And I talked too much for their liking. A further disability was
that I was as prudishly innocent as my mother had planned I should be.
I knew nothing about simple sex, let alone the many refinements of sex
constantly referred to in school conversation. My immediate reaction
was one of disgust. 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 only known hitherto that my
second name was Ranke; the ‘von,’ discovered on my birth certificate,
was disconcerting. Carthusians were secretive about their second names;
if these were fancy ones they usually managed to conceal them. Ranke,
without the ‘von’ I could no doubt have passed off as monosyllabic and
English, but ‘von Ranke’ was glaring. The business class to which most
of the boys belonged was strongly feeling at this time the threat and
even the necessity of a trade war; ‘German’ meant ‘dirty German.’ It
meant ‘cheap shoddy goods competing with our sterling industries,’
and it also meant military menace, Prussianism, sabre-rattling. There
was another boy in my house with a German name, but English by birth
and upbringing. He was treated much as I was. On the other hand a
French boy in the house was very popular, though he was not much good
at games; King Edward VII had done his _entente_ work very thoroughly.
There was also considerable anti-Jewish feeling (the business prejudice
again) and the legend was put about that I was not only a German but a
German-Jew.
Of course I always maintained that I was Irish. This claim was resented
by an Irish boy who had been in the house about a year and a half
longer than myself. 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, setting on me suddenly from behind corners, pouring
water over me 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 sort of humorous legend of my hypocrisy and concealed
depravity. I came near a nervous breakdown. School morality prevented
me from informing the house-master of my troubles. The house-monitors
were supposed to keep order and preserve the moral tone of the house,
but at this time they were not the sort to interfere 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 better. I only got
accustomed to bawdy-talk in my last two years at Charterhouse, and it
was not until I had been some time in the army that I got hardened to
it and could reply in kind to insults.
A former headmaster of Charterhouse, an innocent man, is reported
to have said at a Headmasters’ Conference: ‘My boys are amorous but
seldom erotic.’ Few cases of eroticism indeed ever came to his notice;
there were not more than five or six big rows all the time I was at
Charterhouse and expulsions were rare. But the house-masters knew
little about what went on in their houses; their living quarters
were removed from the boys’. There was a true distinction between
‘amorousness,’ by which the headmaster meant a sentimental falling
in love with younger boys, and eroticism, which was adolescent lust.
The intimacy, as the newspapers call it, that frequently took place
was practically never between an elder boy and the object of his
affection, for that would have spoilt the romantic illusion, which was
heterosexually cast. It was between boys of the same age who were not
in love, but used each other coldly as convenient sex-instruments. So
the atmosphere was always heavy with romance of a very conventional
early-Victorian type, yet complicated by cynicism and foulness.