Half-way through my second year I wrote to my parents to tell them that
I must leave Charterhouse, because I could not stand life there any
longer. I told them that the house was making it plain that I did not
belong and that it did not want me. I gave them details, in confidence,
to make them take my demand seriously. They were unable to respect this
confidence, considering that it was their religious duty to inform
the house-master of all I had written them. They did not even tell me
what they were doing; they contented themselves with visiting me and
giving me assurances of the power of prayer and faith; telling me that
I must endure all for the sake of ... I have forgotten what exactly.
Fortunately I had not given them any account of sex-irregularities in
the house, so all that the house-master did was to make a speech that
night after prayers deterrent of bullying in general; he told us that
he had just had a complaint from a boy’s parents. He made it plain at
the same time how much he disliked informers and outside interference
in affairs of the house. My name was not mentioned, but the visit of
my parents on a day not a holiday had been noticed and commented on.
So I had to stay on and be treated as an informer. I was now in the
upper school and so had a study of my own. But this was no security;
studies had no locks. It was always being wrecked. After my parents’
visit to the house-master it was not even possible for me to use the
ordinary house changing-room; I had to remove my games-clothes to a
disused shower-bath. My heart went wrong then; the school doctor said I
was not to play football. This was low water. My last resource was to
sham insanity. It succeeded unexpectedly well. Soon nobody troubled
about me except to avoid any contact with me.
I must make clear that I am not charging my parents with treachery;
they were trying to help me. Their honour is beyond reproach.... One
day I went down to Charterhouse by the special train from Waterloo
to Godalming. I was too late to take a ticket; I just got into a
compartment before the train started. The railway company had not
provided enough coaches, so I had to stand up 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 had got my very
uncomfortable ride free. I mentioned this in my next letter home, just
for something to say, and my father sent me a letter of reproach. He
said that he had himself made a special visit to Waterloo Station,
bought a ticket to Godalming, and torn it up.... My mother was even
more scrupulous. A young couple on their honeymoon once happened to
stop the night with us at Wimbledon, and left behind them a packet of
sandwiches, some of which had already been eaten. My mother sent them
on.
Being thrown entirely on myself I began to write poetry. This was
considered stronger proof of insanity than the formal straws I wore
in my hair. The poetry I wrote was not the easy showing-off witty
stuff that all the Graves’ write and have written for the last couple
of centuries. It was poetry that was dissatisfied with itself. When,
later, things went better with me at Charterhouse, I became literary
once more.
I sent one of my poems to the school magazine, _The Carthusian_. On
the strength of it I was invited to join the school Poetry Society.
This was 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 myself, one of whom was called
Raymond Rodakowski. None of them were in the same house as myself. At
Charterhouse no friendship was permitted between boys of different
houses or of different years beyond a formal acquaintance at work
or organized games like cricket and football. It was, for instance,
impossible for boys of different houses, though related or next-door
neighbours at home, even to play a friendly game of tennis or
squash-racquets together. They would never have heard the last of
it. So the friendship that began between me and Raymond was most
unconventional. Coming home one evening from a meeting of the society
I told Raymond about life in the house; I told him what had happened
a week or two before. My study had been raided and one of my more
personal poems had been discovered and pinned up on the public notice
board in ‘Writing School.’ This was the living-room of the members of
the lower school, into which, as a member of the upper school, I was
not allowed to go, and so could not rescue the poem. Raymond was the
first person I had been able to talk to humanly. He was indignant, and
took my arm in his in the gentlest way. ‘They are bloody barbarians,’
he said. He told me that I must pull myself together and do something
about it, because I was a good poet, he said, and a good person. I
loved him for that. He said: ‘You’re not allowed to play football; why
don’t you box? It’s supposed to be good for the heart.’ So I laughed
and said I would. Then Raymond said: ‘I expect they rag you about
your initials.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they call me a dirty German.’ ‘I had
trouble, too,’ he said, ‘before I took up boxing.’ Raymond’s mother was
Scottish, his father was an Austrian Pole.
Very few boys at Charterhouse boxed and the boxing-room, which was over
the school confectionery shop, was a good place to meet Raymond, whom,
otherwise, I would not have been able to see often. I began boxing
seriously and savagely. Raymond said to me: ‘You know these cricketers
and footballers are all afraid of boxers, almost superstitious.
They won’t box themselves for fear of losing their good looks—the
inter-house competitions every year are such bloody affairs. But do you
remember the Mansfield, Waller and Taylor show? That’s a good tradition
to keep up.’
Of course I remembered. Two terms previously there had been a meeting
of the school debating society which I had attended. The committee
of the debating society was usually made up of sixth-form boys; the
debates were formal and usually dull, but in so far as there was any
intellectual life at Charterhouse, it was represented by the debating
society—and by _The Carthusian_, always edited by two members of this
committee; both institutions were free from influence of the masters.
Debates were always held in the school library on Saturday night.
One debate night the usual decorous conventions were broken by an
invasion of ‘the bloods.’ The bloods were the members of the cricket
and football elevens. They were the ruling caste at Charterhouse;
the eleventh man in the football eleven, though a member of the
under-fourth form, had a great deal more prestige than the most
brilliant classical scholar in the sixth. Even ‘Head of the School’ was
an empty title. There was not, however, an open warfare between
the sixth-form intellectuals and the bloods. The bloods were stupid
and knew it, and had nothing to gain by a clash; the intellectuals
were happy to be left alone. So this invasion of the bloods, who had
just returned from winning a match against the _Casuals_, and had
probably been drinking, caused the debating society a good deal of
embarrassment. The bloods disturbed the meeting by cheers and cat-cries
and slamming the library magazine-folders on the table. Mansfield, as
president of the society, called them to order, but they continued
the disturbance; so Mansfield closed the debate. The bloods thought
the incident finished, but it was not. A letter appeared in _The
Carthusian_ a few days later protesting against the bad behaviour in
the debating society of ‘certain First Eleven babies.’ Three sets of
initials were signed and they were those of Mansfield, Waller and
Taylor. The school was astonished by this suicidally daring act; it
waited for Korah, Dathan and Abiram to be swallowed up. The captain of
football is said to have sworn 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 there were only
two other First Eleven colours left over from the preceding year; new
colours were only given gradually as the football season advanced. The
other rowdies had only been embryo bloods. So it was a matter entirely
between these three sixth-form intellectuals and the three colours of
the First Eleven. And 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 person
to be reckoned with (a tough fellow, though not perhaps a boxer—I
forget). While the First Eleven were wondering what on earth to do
their three opponents decided to take the war into the enemy’s country.
The social code of Charterhouse was based on a very strict caste
system; the caste-marks were 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; third year gave most of the 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
very peculiar and unique distinctions were reserved for the bloods.
These included light grey flannel trousers, butterfly collars, coats
slit up the back, and the privilege of walking arm-in-arm. So the next
Sunday Mansfield, Waller and Taylor did the bravest thing that was ever
done at Charterhouse. The school chapel service was at eleven in the
morning, but the custom was for the school to be in its seats by five
minutes to eleven and to sit waiting there. At two minutes to eleven
the bloods used to stalk in; at one and a half minutes to came the
masters; at one minute to came the choir in its surplices; then the
headmaster arrived and the service started. If any boy was accidentally
late and sneaked in between five minutes to and two minutes to the
hour, he was followed by six hundred pairs of eyes; there was nudging
and giggling and he would not hear the last of it for a long time; it
was as though he were pretending to be a blood. On this Sunday, then,
when the bloods had come in with their usual swaggering assurance, an
extraordinary thing happened.
The three sixth-formers slowly walked up the aisle magnificent in grey
flannel trousers, slit coats, First Eleven collars, and with pink
carnations in their buttonholes. It is impossible to describe the
astonishment and terror that this spectacle caused. Everyone looked at
the captain of the First Eleven; he had gone quite white. But by this
time the masters had come in, 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 went out first. The bloods were not
high in school order, so Mansfield, Waller and Taylor had the start of
them. After chapel on Sunday the custom in the winter terms was for
people to meet and gossip in the school library; so it was here that
Mansfield, Waller and Taylor went. They had buttonholed a talkative
master and drawn him with them into the library, and there they kept
him talking until dinnertime. If the bloods had had courage to do
anything desperate they would have had to do it at once, but they
could not make a scene in the presence of a master. Mansfield, Waller
and Taylor went down to their houses for dinner still talking to the
master. After this they kept together as much as possible and the
school, particularly the lower school, which had always chafed under
the dress regulations, made heroes of them, and began scoffing at the
bloods as weak-kneed.
Finally the captain of the eleven was stupid enough to complain to
the headmaster about this breach of school conventions, asking for
permission to enforce First Eleven rights by disciplinary measures. The
headmaster, who was a scholar and disliked the games tradition, refused
his request. He said that the sixth form deserved as distinctive
privileges as the First Eleven. The sixth form would therefore in
future be entitled to hold what they had assumed. After this the
prestige of the bloods declined greatly.
At Raymond’s encouragement I pulled myself together and my third
year found things very much easier for me. My chief persecutor,
the Irishman, had left. It was said that he had had a bad nervous
breakdown. He wrote me a hysterical letter, demanding my forgiveness
for his treatment of me, saying at the same time that if I did not give
this forgiveness, one of his friends (whom he mentioned) was still in
the house to persecute me. I did not answer the letter. I do not know
what happened to him. The friend never bothered.