VIII

I still had no friends except among the junior members of the house,

to whom I did not disguise my dislike of the seniors; I found the

juniors were on the whole a decent lot of fellows. Towards the end of

this year, in the annual boxing and gymnastic display, I fought three

rounds with Raymond. There is a lot of sex feeling in boxing—the dual

play, the reciprocity, the pain not felt as pain. This exhibition match

to me had something of the quality that Dr. Marie Stopes would call

sacramental. We were out neither to hurt nor win though we hit each

other hard.

This public appearance as a boxer improved my position in the house.

And the doctor now allowed me to play football again and I played

it fairly well. Then things started going wrong in a different way.

It began with confirmation, for which I was prepared by a zealous

evangelical master. For a whole term I concentrated all my thoughts on

religion, looking forward to the ceremony as a spiritual climax. When

it came, and the Holy Ghost did not descend in the form of a dove, and

I did not find myself gifted with tongues, and nothing spectacular

happened (except that the boy whom the Bishop of Zululand was blessing

at the same time as myself slipped off the narrow footstool on which

we were both kneeling), I was bound to feel a reaction. Raymond had

not been confirmed, and I was astonished to hear him admit and even

boast that he was an atheist. I argued with him about the existence of

God and the divinity of Christ and the necessity of the Trinity. He

said, of the Trinity, that anybody who could agree with the Athanasian

creed that ‘whoever will be saved must confess that there are not Three

Incomprehensibles but One Incomprehensible’ was saying that a man

must go to Hell if he does not believe something that is by definition

impossible to understand. He said that his respect for himself as a

reasonable being did not allow him to believe such things. He also

asked me a question: ‘What’s the good of having a soul if you have a

mind. What’s the function of the soul? It seems a mere pawn in the

game.’ I was shocked, but because I loved him and respected him I felt

bound to find an answer. The more I thought about it the less certain I

became that he was wrong. So in order not to prejudice religion (and I

put religion and my chances of salvation before human love) I at first

broke my friendship with Raymond entirely. Later I weakened, but he

would not even meet me, when I approached him, with any broad-church

compromise. He was a complete and ruthless atheist and I could not

appreciate his strength of spirit. For the rest of our time at

Charterhouse we were not as close as we should have been. I met Raymond

in France in 1917, when he was with the Irish Guards; I rode over to

see him one afternoon and felt as close to him as I had ever felt. He

was killed at Cambrai not long after.

My feeling for Raymond was more comradely than amorous. In my fourth

year an even stronger relationship started. It was with a boy three

years younger than myself, who was exceptionally intelligent and

fine-spirited. Call him Dick, because his real name was the same as

that of another person in the story. He was not in my house, but

I had recently joined the school choir and so had he, and I had

opportunities for speaking to him occasionally after choir practice.

I was unconscious of sexual feeling for him. Our conversations were

always impersonal. Our acquaintance was commented on and I was warned

by one of the masters to end it. I replied that I would not have

my friendships in any way limited. I pointed out that this boy

was interested in the same things as myself, particularly in books;

that the disparity in our ages was unfortunate, but that a lack of

intelligence among the boys of my own age made it necessary for me to

find friends where I could. Finally the headmaster took me to task

about it. I lectured him on the advantage of friendship between elder

and younger boys, citing Plato, the Greek poets, Shakespeare, Michael

Angelo and others, who had felt the same way as I did. He let me go

without taking any action.

In my fifth year I was in the sixth form and was made a house-monitor.

There were six house-monitors. One of them was the house games-captain,

a friendly, easy-going fellow. He said to me one day: ‘Look here,

Graves, I have been asked to send in a list of competitors for the

inter-house boxing competition; shall I put your name down?’ I had not

boxed for two terms. I had been busy with football and played for the

house-team now. And since my coolness with Raymond boxing had lost its

interest. I said: ‘I’m not boxing these days.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘young

Alan is entering for the welter-weights. He’s got a very good chance.

Why don’t you enter for the welter-weights too? You might be able to

damage one or two of the stronger men and make it easier for him.’ I

did not particularly like the idea of making things easier for Alan,

but I obviously had to enter the competition. I had a reputation to

keep up. I knew, however, that my wind, though all right for football,

was not equal to boxing round after round. I decided that my fights

must be short. The night before the competition I smuggled a bottle of

cherry-whisky into the house. I would shorten the fights on that.

I had never drank anything alcoholic before in my life. When I was

seven years old I was prevailed on to sign the pledge. My pledge card

bound me to abstain by the grace of God from all spirituous liquors

so long as I retained it. But my mother took the card from me and put

it safely in the box-room with the Jacobean silver inherited from my

Cheyne grandmother, Bishop Graves’ diamond ring which Queen Victoria

gave him when he preached before her, our christening mugs, and the

heavy early-Victorian jewellery bequeathed to my mother by the old lady

whom she had looked after. And since box-room treasures never left the

box-room, I regarded myself as permanently parted from my pledge. I

liked the cherry-whisky a lot.

The competitions started about one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon

and went on until seven. I was drawn for the very first fight and my

opponent by a piece of bad luck was Alan. Alan wanted me to scratch.

I said I thought that it would look bad to do that. We consulted the

house games-captain and he said: ‘No, the most sporting thing to do

is to box it out and let the decision be on points; but don’t either

of you hurt each other.’ So we boxed. Alan started showing off to

his friends, who were sitting in the front row. I said: ‘Stop that.

We’re boxing, not fighting,’ but a few seconds later he hit me again

unnecessarily hard. I got angry and knocked him out. This was the first

time I had ever knocked anyone out and I liked the feeling. I had drank

a lot of cherry-whisky. I rather muzzily realized that I had knocked

him out with a right swing on the side of the neck and that this blow

was not part of the ordinary school-boxing curriculum. Straight lefts;

lefts to body, rights to head; left and right hooks; all these were

known, but the swing was somehow neglected, probably because it was not

so ‘pretty.’

I went to the changing-room for my coat, and stout Sergeant Harris,

the boxing instructor, said: ‘Look here, Mr. Graves, why don’t you put

down your name for the middle-weight competition too?’ I cheerfully

agreed. Then I went back to the house and had a cold bath and more

cherry-whisky. My next fight was to take place in about half an hour

for the first round of the middle-weights. This time my opponent,

who was a stone heavier than myself but had little science, bustled

me about for the first round, and I could see that he would tire me

out unless something was done. In the second round I knocked him down

with my right swing, but he got up again. I was feeling tired, so

hastened to knock him down again. I must have knocked him down four or

five times that round, but he refused to take the count. I found out

afterwards that he was, like myself, conscious that Dick was watching

the fight. He loved Dick too. Finally I said to myself as he lurched

towards me again: ‘If he doesn’t go down and stay down this time, I

won’t be able to hit him again at all.’ This time I just pushed at his

jaw as it offered itself to me, but that was enough. He did go down and

he did stay down. This second knock-out made quite a stir. Knock-outs

were rare in the inter-house boxing competition. As I went back to the

house for another cold bath and some more cherry-whisky I noticed the

fellows looking at me curiously.

The later stages of the competition I do not remember well. The only

opponent that I was now at all concerned about was Raymond, who

was nearly a stone heavier than myself and was expected to win the

middle-weights; but he had also tried for two weights, the middle and

the heavy, and had just had such a tough fight with the eventual winner

of the heavy-weights that he was in no proper condition to fight. So he

scratched his fight with me. I believe that he would have fought

all the same if it had been against someone else; but he was still fond

of me and wanted me to win. His scratching would give me a rest between

my bouts. A semifinalist scratched against me in the welter-weights, so

I only had three more fights, and I let neither of these go beyond the

first round. The swing won me both weights, for which I was given two

silver cups. But it had also broken both my thumbs; I had not got my

elbow high enough over when I used it.

The most important thing that happened to me in my last I two years,

apart from my attachment to Dick, was that I got to know George

Mallory. He was twenty-six or twenty-seven then, not long up from

Cambridge. He was so young looking that he was often mistaken for a

member of the school. From the first he treated me as an equal, and

I used to spend my spare time reading books in his room or going for

walks with him in the country. He told me of the existence of modern

authors. My father being two generations older than myself and my

only link with books, I had never heard of people like Shaw, Samuel

Butler, Rupert Brooke, Wells, Flecker, or Masefield, and I was greatly

interested in them. It was at George Mallory’s rooms that I first met

Edward Marsh, who has always been a good friend to me, and with whom,

though we seldom see each other now, I have never fallen out: in this

he is almost unique among my pre-war friends. Marsh said that he liked

my poems, which George had showed him, but pointed out that they were

written in the poetic vocabulary of fifty years ago and that, though

the quality of the poem was not necessarily impaired by this, there

would be a natural prejudice in my readers against work written in 1913

in the fashions of 1863.

George Mallory, Cyril Hartmann, Raymond, and I published a

magazine in the summer of 1913 called _Green Chartreuse_. It was only

intended to have one number; new magazines at a public school always

sell out the first number and lose heavily on the second. From _Green

Chartreuse_ I quote one of my own contributions, of autobiographical

interest, written in the school dialect:

My New-Bug’s Exam.

When lights went out at half-past nine in the evening of the second

Friday in the Quarter, and the faint footfalls of the departing

House-Master were heard no more, the fun began.

The Plead of Under Cubicles constituted himself examiner

and executioner, and was ably assisted by a timekeeper, a

question-recorder, and a staff of his disreputable friends. I

was a timorous ‘new-bug’ then, and my pyjamas were damp with the

perspiration of fear. Three of my fellows had been examined and

sentenced before the inquisition was directed against me.

‘It’s Jones’ turn now,’ said a voice. ‘He’s the little brute that

hacked me in run-about to-day. We must set him some tight questions!’

‘I say, Jones, what’s the colour of the House-Master—I mean what’s

the name of the House-Master of the House, whose colours are black

and white? One, two, three....’

‘Mr. Girdlestone,’ my voice quivered in the darkness.

‘He evidently knows the simpler colours. We’ll muddle him. What are

the colours of the Clubs to which Block Houses belong? One, two,

three, four....’

I had been slaving at getting up these questions for days, and just

managed to blurt out the answer before being counted out.

‘Two questions. No misses. We must buck up,’ said someone.

‘I say, Jones, how do you get to Farncombe from Weekites? One, two,

three....’

I had only issued directions as far as Bridge before being counted

out.

‘Three questions. One miss. You’re allowed three misses out of ten.’

‘Where is Charterhouse Magazine? One, two, three, four....’

‘Do you mean _The Carthusian_ office?’ I asked.

Everyone laughed.

‘Four questions. Two misses. I say, Robinson, he’s answered far too

many. We’ll set him a couple of stingers.’

Much whispering.

‘What is the age of the horse that rolls Under Green? One, two,

three....’

‘Six!’ I said, at a venture.

‘Wrong; thirty-eight. Six questions. Three misses! Think yourself

lucky you weren’t asked its pedigree.’

‘What are canoeing colours? One, two, thr ...’

‘There aren’t any!’

‘You’ll get cocked-up for festivity; but you can count it. Seven

questions. Three misses. Jones?’

‘Yes!’

‘What was the name of the girl to whom rumour stated that last year’s

football secretary was violently attached? One, two, three, four....’

‘Daisy!’ (It sounded a likely name.)

‘Oh really! Well, I happen to know last year’s football secretary;

and he’ll simply kill you for spreading scandal. You’re wrong anyhow.

Eight questions. Four misses!’

‘You’ll come to my “cube” at seven to-morrow morning. See? Good

night!’

Here he waved his hair-brush over the candle, and a colossal shadow

appeared on the ceiling.

The Poetry Society died about this time—and this is how it died. Two

of its sixth-form members came to a meeting and each read a rather

dull and formal poem about love and nature; none of us paid much

attention to them. But the following week they were published in _The

Carthusian_, and soon every one was pointing and giggling. Both poems,

which were signed with pseudonyms, were acrostics, the initial letters

spelling out a ‘case.’ ‘Case’ meant ‘romance,’ a formal coupling of two

boys’ names, with the name of the elder boy first. In these two cases

both the first names mentioned were those of bloods. It was a foolish

act of aggression in the feud between sixth form and the bloods. But

nothing much would have come of it had not another of the sixth-form

members of the Poetry Society been in love with one of the smaller

boys whose names appeared in the acrostics. In rage and jealousy he

went to the headmaster and called his attention to the acrostic—which

otherwise neither he nor any other of the masters would have noticed.

He pretended that he did not know the authors; but though he had not

been at the particular meeting where the poems were read, he could

easily have guessed them from the styles. Before things had taken this

turn I had incautiously told someone who the authors were; so I was

now dragged into the row as a witness against them. The headmaster

took a very serious view of the case. The two poets were deprived of

their monitorial privileges; the editor of _The Carthusian_, who,

though aware of the acrostics, had accepted the poems, was deprived

of his editorship and of his position as head of the school. The

informer, who happened to be next in school order, succeeded him in

both capacities; he had not expected this development and it made him

most unpopular. His consolation was a real one, that he had done it

all for love, to avenge the public insult done to the boy. And he was

a decent fellow, really. The Poetry Society was dissolved in disgrace

by the headmaster’s orders. Guy Kendall was one of the few masters

who insisted on treating the boys better than they deserved, so I was

sorry for him when this happened; it was an ‘I told you so’ for the

other masters, who did not believe either in poetry or in school uplift

societies. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Kendall; the meetings of

the Poetry Society were all that I had to look forward to when things

were at their worst for me.

My last year at Charterhouse I devoted myself to doing everything I

could to show how little respect I had for the school tradition. In

the winter of 1913 I won a classical exhibition at St. John’s College,

Oxford, so that I could go slow on school work. Nevill Barbour and

I were editing the _Carthusian_, and a good deal of my time went in

that. Nevill, who as a scholar had met the same sort of difficulties

as myself, also had a dislike of most Charterhouse traditions. We

decided that the most objectionable tradition of all was compulsory

games. Of these cricket was the most objectionable, because it wasted

most time in the best part of the year. We began a campaign in favour

of tennis. We were not seriously devoted to tennis, but it was the

best weapon we had against cricket—the game, we wrote, in which the

selfishness of the few was supposed to excuse the boredom of the

many. Tennis was quick and busy. We asked Old Carthusian tennis

internationalists to contribute letters proposing tennis as the manlier

and more vigorous game. We even got the famous Anthony Wilding to

write. The games-masters were scandalized at this assault on cricket;

to them tennis was ‘pat ball,’ a game for girls. But the result of our

campaign was surprising. Not only did we double our sales, but a fund

was started for providing the school with a number of tennis-courts and

making Charterhouse the cradle of public-school tennis. Though delayed

by the war, these courts actually appeared. I noticed them recently as

I went past the school in a car; there seemed to be plenty of them. I

wonder, are there tennis-bloods at Charterhouse now?

Poetry and Dick were now the only two things that really mattered. My

life with my fellow house-monitors was one of perpetual discord. I had

grudges against them all except the house-captain and the head-monitor.

The house-captain, the only blood in the house, spent most of his time

with his fellow bloods in other houses. The head-monitor was a scholar

who, though naturally a decent fellow, had been embittered by his first

three years in the house and was much on his dignity. He did more or

less what the other monitors wanted him to do, and I was sorry that I

had to lump him in with the rest. My love for Dick provoked a constant

facetiousness, but they never dared to go too far. I once caught one

of them in the bathroom scratching up a pair of hearts conjoined, with

Dick’s initials and mine on them. I pushed him into the bath and turned

the taps on. The next day he got hold of a manuscript note-book of mine

that I had left on the table in the monitors’ room with some other

books. It had poems and essay notes in it. He and the other monitors,

except the house-captain, annotated it critically in blue chalk and all

signed their initials. The house-captain would have nothing to do

with this: he thought it ungentlemanly. I was furious when I found what

had been done. I made a speech. I demanded a signed apology. I said

that if I were not given it within an hour I would choose one of them

as solely responsible and punish him. I said that I would now have a

bath and that the first monitor that I met after my bath I would knock

down.

Whether by accident or whether it was that he thought his position

made him secure, the first monitor I met in the corridor was the

head-monitor. I knocked him down. It was the time of evening

preparation, which only the monitors were free not to attend. But a fag

happened to pass on an errand and saw the blow and the blood; so it

could not be hushed up. The head-monitor went to the house-master and

the house-master sent for me. He was an excitable, elderly man who had

some difficulty in controlling his spittle when angry. He made me sit

down in a chair in his study, then stood over me, clenching his fists

and crying in his high falsetto voice: ‘Do you realize you have done a

very brutal action?’ His mouth was bubbling. I was as angry as he was.

I jumped up and clenched my fists too. Then I said that I would do the

same thing to anyone who, after scribbling impertinent remarks on my

private papers, refused to apologize. ‘Private papers. Filthy poems,’

said the house-master.

I had another difficult interview with the headmaster over this. But

it was my last term, so he allowed me to finish my five years without

ignominy. He was puzzled by the frankness of my statement of love

for Dick. He reopened the question. I refused to be ashamed. I heard

afterwards that he had said that this was one of the rare cases of a

friendship between boys of unequal ages which he felt was essentially

moral. I went through one of the worst quarters of an hour of my

life on Dick’s account in this last term. When the master had warned

me about exchanging glances with Dick in chapel I had been infuriated.

But when I was told by one of the boys that he had seen the master

surreptitiously kissing Dick once, on a choir-treat or some such

occasion, I went quite mad. I asked for no details or confirmation. I

went to the master and told him he must resign or I would report the

case to the headmaster. He already had a reputation in the school for

this sort of thing, I said. Kissing boys was a criminal offence. I was

morally outraged. Probably my sense of outrage concealed a murderous

jealousy. I was surprised when he vigorously denied the charge; I could

not guess what was going to happen next. But I said: ‘Well, come to

the headmaster and deny it to him.’ He asked: ‘Did the boy tell you

this himself?’ I said ‘No.’ ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘I’ll send for him

here and he shall tell us the truth.’ So Dick was sent for and arrived

looking very frightened, and the house-master said menacingly: ‘Graves

tells me that I once kissed you. Is that true?’ Dick said: ‘Yes, it

is true.’ So Dick was dismissed and the master collapsed, and I felt

miserable. He said he would resign at the end of the term, which was

quite near, on grounds of ill-health. He even thanked me for speaking

directly to him and not going to the headmaster. That was in the summer

of 1914; he went into the army and was killed the next year. I found

out much later from Dick that he had not been kissed at all. It may

have been some other boy.

One of the last events that I remember at Charterhouse was a debate

with the motion that ‘this House is in favour of compulsory military

service.’ The Empire Service League, or whatever it was called, of

which Earl Roberts of Kandahar, V.C., was the President, sent

down a propagandist to support the motion. There were only six votes

out of one hundred and nineteen cast against it. I was the principal

speaker against the motion, a strong anti-militarist. I had recently

resigned from the Officers’ Training Corps, having revolted against the

theory of implicit obedience to orders. And during a fortnight spent

the previous summer at the O.T.C. camp at Tidworth on Salisbury Plain,

I had been frightened by a special display of the latest military

fortifications, barbed-wire entanglements, machine-guns, and field

artillery in action. General, now Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson,

whose son was a member of the school, had visited the camp and

impressed upon us that war against Germany was inevitable within two

or three years, and that we must be prepared to take our part in it as

leaders of the new forces that would assuredly be called into being. Of

the six voters against the motion Nevill Barbour and I are, I believe,

the only ones who survived the war.

My last memory was the headmaster’s good-bye. It was this: ‘Well,

good-bye, Graves, and remember this, that your best friend is the

waste-paper basket.’

I used to speculate on which of my contemporaries would distinguish

themselves after they left school. The war upset my calculations.

Many dull boys had brief brilliant military careers, particularly as

air-fighters, becoming squadron and flight commanders. ‘Fuzzy’ McNair,

the head of the school, won the V.C. as a Rifleman; young Sturgess,

who had been my study fag, distinguished himself more unfortunately

by flying the first heavy bombing machine of a new pattern across the

Channel on his first trip to France and making a beautiful landing

(having mistaken the landmarks) at an aerodrome behind the German

lines. A boy whom I admired very much during my first year at

Charterhouse was the Hon. Desmond O’Brien. He was the only Carthusian

in my time who cheerfully disregarded all school rules. He had skeleton

keys for the school library, chapel and science laboratories and used

to break out of his house at night and carefully disarrange things

there. The then headmaster was fond of O’Brien and forgave him much.

O’Brien had the key of the headmaster’s study too and, going there one

night with an electric torch, carried off a memorandum which he showed

me—‘Must expel O’Brien.’ He had a wireless receiving-station in one

of the out-of-bounds copses on the school grounds, and he discovered

a ventilator shaft down which he could hoot into the school library

from outside and create great disturbance without detection. One day

we were threatened with the loss of a Saturday half-holiday because

some member of the school had killed a cow with a catapult, and nobody

would own up. O’Brien had fired the shot; he was away at the time on

special leave for a sister’s wedding. A friend wrote to him about the

half-holiday. He sent the headmaster a telegram: ‘Killed cow sorry

coming O’Brien.’ At last, having absented himself from every lesson and

chapel for three whole days, he was expelled. He was killed early in

the war while bombing Bruges.

At least one in three of my generation at school was killed. This was

because they all took commissions as soon as they could, most of them

in the infantry and flying corps. The average life of the infantry

subaltern on the Western front was, at some stages of the war, only

about three months; that is to say that at the end of three months he

was either wounded or killed. The proportions worked out at about four

wounded to every one killed. Of the four one was wounded seriously and

the remaining three more or less lightly. The three lightly wounded

returned to the front after a few weeks or months of absence and were

again subject to the same odds. The flying casualties were even higher.

Since the war lasted for four and a half years, it is easy to see why

the mortality was so high among my contemporaries, and why most of the

survivors, if not permanently disabled, were wounded at least two or

three times.

Two well-known sportsmen were contemporaries of mine: A. G. Bower,

captain of England at soccer, who was only an average player at

Charterhouse, and Woolf Barnato, the Surrey cricketer (and millionaire

racing motorist), who also was only an average player. Barnato was in

the same house as myself and we had not a word to say to each other

for the four years we were together. Five scholars have made names for

themselves: Richard Hughes as a B.B.C. playwright; Richard Goolden as

an actor of old-man parts; Vincent Seligman as author of a propagandist

life of Venizelos; Cyril Hartmann as an authority on historical French

scandals; and my brother Charles as society gossip-writer on the middle

page of _The Daily Mail_. Occasionally I see another name or two in the

newspapers. There was one the other day—M ... who was in the news for

escaping from a private lunatic asylum. I remembered that he had once

offered a boy ten shillings to hold his hand in a thunderstorm and that

he had frequently threatened to run away from Charterhouse.