to complete my happiness were in London lining the streets. However,
we were not parted long and we are now just back from the Windsor
Review. That is the most impressive ceremony in which I have ever
taken part. All the Public Schools and Universities paraded before the
King in Windsor Great Park. It was a sweltering hot day and we were
as tired as could be after our long journey and the fatigue of camp,
but no one fell out or fainted except some of the Oxford and Cambridge
contingents. Good for the schools! It was wonderful to get down south
again, if only for one day, to see real trees, civilized people, pretty
girls, the Thames, respectable houses built for comfort, culture and
leisure. We spent all the long hours in the train in rushing up and
down the corridors "debagging" people, "scrumming" forty or fifty
unfortunates into one carriage and then leaping on the top of them. No
wonder we were tired. How any windows remained unbroken is a miracle to
me.
We have had a good term with regard to the Corps--about four of the
best field-days I can remember. The best was in Wensleydale amid
peerless scenery: about ten big schools took part, and I, as usual,
was engaged in scouting most of the time. It is rare fun stalking the
enemy on these lonely moors far from your own people. With a little
imagination you can picture the reality ... and in any case it's a
rotten game to be captured by some other school. I don't know why, but
after you've left the school about ten minutes you feel as if you'd
been soldiering all your life and lived only for food and sleep. No
meals are more acceptable than field-day lunches, usually eaten by the
side of a dusty road in the full glare of a hot sun, but it's hunger
that makes the meal, and marching is the best appetizer I know: the
only thing I object to about these sham fights is the powwow afterwards
and the stupidity of the umpires. Every one knows that umpires can't
be everywhere at once and human nature doesn't admit of one's giving
oneself up unless real force is used; consequently the most ridiculous
decisions are given, for the conditions have always altered by the
time any umpire turns up; the weaker side which has been ambushed
becomes reinforced by a body ten times as big as the ambushing party,
and so turns the tables, and the clever strategist who really brought
off a good coup finds himself a prisoner and harangued by his O.C.
Field-days are very unfair, but they are amusing. It's rare fun chasing
an enemy into a farm-house and forcing an entrance into every room in
pursuit of him: it's good to see a motor-bicycle belonging to some
officer lying by the roadside and to ride away on it. It's worth any
amount of powwow to sit under a hedge within sight of a bridge on
which you have chalked "This bridge is blown up," and watch the enemy
debate whether or no they have a right to advance across it: it's very
like the real thing to be told off to act as guerillas and to keep on
irritating an advancing force by appearing at inconvenient times and
unexpected places, and holding up their plans and then trying to escape
and repeat the experiment farther along the line. Close order drill,
ceremonial and inspection are distinctly boring, but field-days are
red-letter days.
For twelve hours one gets right away, away from work, away from Common
Room, away from games, and it does every one a world of good. We
lose our petty animosities: we become more broad-minded and regain
our ordinary sense of camaraderie: we sing ribald songs, we fill our
lungs with good air, we discuss philosophy or any mortal thing with
our next-door neighbour on the march, not caring whether he listens or
not; we silently form good resolutions about our work, we think upon
great days long past, of famous runs with the beagles, childhood's days
on the moor, tramps across country as undergraduates--all the best
things of life come back to one on the march. It isn't that we take
soldiering very seriously: none of us does that. I hate shooting on the
range; rifle-firing frightens me; I should be a damned fool at _pukka_
fighting, but this make-believe is good sport and I suppose it teaches
us something. At any rate it's amusing.
One of the quaintest things about this term has been my friendship
with Chichester. He is a new boy in my form who speaks but seldom,
not because he is nervous (he is one of the most self-assured people
I ever met) but because he doesn't want to. He writes already bizarre
but quite original verse. He goes his own way in everything. He somehow
became attracted by me, and now we spend all our spare time together.
It's a queer friendship. He's a largish boy for fifteen, with curly
light hair and penetrating blue eyes and a delicate pink and white
complexion.
We lie on a rug together and watch House matches, eating strawberries
and cherries. He borrows all my books and reads them at an astonishing
rate. Masefield bowled him over completely. He has written at least
four poems based on "The Everlasting Mercy." He is about the cleanest
child I have met and yet he employs the foulest metaphors I ever came
across. He is an anomaly. He is in for a bad time here: people won't
understand him and every one will do his best to ruin him.
He appears to be quite fond of me and calls for me daily to go down to
games with him. Common Room is scandalized and I have been warned by
most of my colleagues that such things are not done. It is not good
for a boy to be taken up and made a favourite of by a master. With
that sentiment I entirely agree. I wonder why every one here does it.
But I'm not making a favourite of him: he has honoured me with his
friendship. I have no fast, firm friend; neither has he. He certainly
is not the type of boy to trade upon such a relationship; in form he
works like a "navvy," he plays his games adequately: he is quite
normal except for his gift for writing English. Surely no one can blame
me for fostering that.
At any rate I should prefer to leave rather than break off our
relations, so people must just talk and think what they like. Of course
the school doesn't like it. They hate any boy having much to do with a
master, but Chichester has a will of his own and I rather fancy he will
take his own line right through life. Not that he is self-assertive: he
is quiet and unassuming, but he always contrives to get his own way.
Luckily for me he is in Wade's house, and dear old Wade, who ought to
have been a country squire, never denies any one anything; so when the
boy goes for leave to come to my rooms he gets it every time without a
murmur.
The only blow about camp this year is that Chichester won't be there.
His people are taking him abroad for the whole of August.
I have been bothered a good deal lately about a peculiarly silly habit
of mine. Sometimes, in mathematics especially, I get violently angry at
intervals because I realize that my sets are not working hard enough.
I so rarely punish that of course there is a temptation for boys to
slack in present circumstances: when I find that they take advantage
of my ideals to practise this trick on me I usually "give tongue"
forcibly and "drop on" them as heavily as I can with a quite colossal
punishment. This I take down in a book and--after five minutes I've
forgotten all about it. The boy always looks contrite at the moment,
but I realize that he knows that he won't have to do the punishment at
all.
There is a silly system here by which one has to enter the names of
all the boys one punishes in a book: I simply can't remember to do it.
It's like looking at "roll" lists. I'm always slack about checking the
reasons that my boys give for their absence. I always believe what a
boy tells me. How can you expect boys to tell the truth if you always
verify their statements by outside corroborative evidence? It seems to
me to be asking for trouble.
There seems to be everlasting espionage here. The school sergeant
is known to be in the "secret service" of the Head Master, and is
popularly supposed to wander about with a pair of field-glasses
scouring the countryside for miscreants. This seems a quaint conception
of education. Wherever and whenever we meet boys we are expected to
extract information from them as to their precise occupation.
The only safe place seems to be on the cricket field, and even there
you are surrounded by seniors waiting to lash you if you drop a catch
or (in their opinion) field badly.
I spend most of my afternoons, when I am not wanted to fill up last
place in a Common Room eleven, in coaching the "Rabbits," which is a
league composed entirely of those who are unable to play cricket at
all, the worst two dozen in the school. It is really amusing: no one
could possibly pretend to take it seriously. The only time when it
perhaps gets monotonous is when some elderly fag appears and insists on
playing, and I find him coercing all the others to field for and bowl
to him, while he scores about a hundred and fifty. That only happens
when there is no master about. The House matches this term have been
frenziedly exciting and Chichester and I have spent most afternoons
watching them. It is an Arcadian, simple life in the summer term. Every
morning at 6.30 I pull Dearden out of bed and race him down to the sea
in pyjamas. We have a hasty bathe and arrive just in time for chapel
at 7, unshaven. We there (pernicious custom) have to take a "roll"
of our form. We look down chapel to see the faces of friends and at
some intimate verses in the hymn or psalms we smile as at some hidden
secret between ourselves. 7.25 sees us running to first school. We run
everywhere at Radchester. I hate these dreary lessons before breakfast:
8 o'clock seems an interminable distance ahead. There is supposed to be
cocoa in Common Room between 7.20 and 7.25, but no one ever has time
to drink it, unless he cares to risk being late for form, which is not
a vice masters here are prone to. At 8 o'clock on two days of the week
two of us have to deny ourselves breakfast until the whole school has
finished, for we have to say grace in hall, collect the names of all
absentees, walk round to see that no one cuts the cloth or indulges in
undue ribaldry, and then when all is over we dismiss them. Only then
(at 8.30) do we get our own breakfast. By this time all the best of the
food is gone. Feversham will probably be helping himself to his fourth
egg and sausage and fifth piece of toast, the morning papers will all
have been seized and we shall be thoroughly irritable.
One of the things that makes me loathe the Common Room system is this
herding together for breakfast, a meal that ought to be eaten in
communion with the morning paper and no living soul to interrupt.
From 9 to 9.45 we punish, we practise fielding, we correct work. From
9.45 to 1.15 we rush from subject to subject, from class to class,
attempting to drive some rudiments of mathematics and English into
the heads of boys who don't want to know anything. If only they were
born poor and knew that they had to depend on their wits for their
livelihood, it would be infinitely easier for us. Occasionally one
gets an hour off in the morning (I get three in the week) and this is
spent either in writing letters, taking the illustrated weeklies from
the House Room, or in going for a lonely walk or bathe. Sometimes I
lie on the sand-dunes and eat and read, or try to write a few words
more of an article. At 1.20 we all assemble in hall again, this time
taking our food with the boys. I like this meal; the food is not good
but the conversation is. I love all the clique that sits at my end of
the table. Jimmy Haye, who sits on my right hand, is an argumentative
soul who frequently sulks and refuses to speak to me when he thinks
that I am doing the wrong thing, such as going about with Chichester,
speaking against the classics at a debate, or advocating educational
reform. Jimmy is a boy I should much like to know intimately, but he
rarely comes up to my rooms: he doesn't care to mix with the riff-raff
he finds there. I have occasionally persuaded him to come for a walk;
he spends most of his life in "ragging" in the house and in being
bullied by Naylor, the senior maths. tutor, who is endeavouring to
raise him to the standard required for University scholarship. On my
left sits Montague, Jimmy's greatest friend. He is easy-going, clever,
very good at games, quite wild and irresponsible in the house, with
a temper like a fiend. He has Spanish blood in him and has travelled
all over the world. He treats me as I like to be treated--as a boon
companion: although he doesn't take advantage of my standing invitation
to use my rooms as an hotel he always comes to me for advice when he is
implicated in a row. He likes to take me for walks on Sundays and pour
out his many grievances against life. Sometimes neither he nor Haye
talk to me at all for a month, then they suddenly relent, become their
old gay selves again and chatter away, to my endless enjoyment.
It is at lunch-time that I generally hear the scandal of the day. In
the afternoon immediately after lunch there is punishment drill--some
twenty to fifty miscreants have to run or march round the square under
direction of the drill-sergeant for half an hour, while other people
are changing, going out to nets or playing tennis.
We bowl at nets till 3.30. Not many days pass without an accident. It's
a wonder to me that boys aren't killed at this exercise: all the nets
are very close together and hardly protected at all. Once the House
matches start, of course, nets are "dropped" and we simply lie on rugs
and applaud or groan according to the fortunes of the game. Most of the
masters sit on an elevated mound, Olympians on their dung-hill, near
which sacred spot no boy may approach.
At 3.45 we get a scrappy tea in our own rooms: the old witch of a
bedmaker is supposed to put out the tea-things and the kettle, and
produce the roll and butter provided by the school. She frequently
forgets, just as she forgets to dust the room or wash up the dirty
things. Usually I have to write orders for chocolate, walnut cakes,
and fruit and jams or bananas and cream, and dispatch fags to the
tuck-shop. There are never less than half a dozen urchins clamouring
for tea: at 4.15 the bell rings for afternoon school.
Shall I ever forget in the years to come this hellish bell? It rings
not less than fifty times a day, usually for five minutes at a time:
nothing is so calculated to get on a new-comer's nerves as its
incessant tolling, day and night, calling us to some fresh duty.
At 6 o'clock the school goes into hall for tea. If one is on duty that
means more "calling of rolls" and counting of absentees; if not we have
a blessed half-hour in which to prepare for Common Room dinner at 6.30.
At 7 we hurry off to take prep. The senior men get half a crown a night
for taking prep. in Big School, we poor juniors have to hustle along
to supervise one of the other innumerable preps. for no reward. I hate
this invigilation. It means that one tries to correct work, but has to
interrupt oneself all the time in order to help boys over ridiculous
points about cisterns and pipes, quadratic graphs or a line in Homer.
Of course one can refuse all aid: most men do lest they should be found
ignorant of some department of school study. At 8.45 we again rush to
chapel and at 9 another prep. starts, in studies this time, and juniors
start to turn on baths as a sign of bed. At 10 o'clock work for the day
is over except for masters and the Sixth Form. Shouts and screams come
from all the dormitories, and twenty minutes later we go round to see
that every one is in bed.
By eleven most of the buildings are in darkness. Bridge-parties and
conversations over whisky are kept up till twelve or one, but it isn't
every night that we have time to indulge in these practices. Such is
our normal day, but it's the unusual that finds its chronicling most
frequently in this diary.
_August 1, 1911_
To-morrow we go away to Aldershot for the annual camp; another school
year is over and I now have two years to look back over. I don't know
that my experience has taught me much yet, except a distrust of the
old men. I still love boys as much as ever, though not in the mass. I
hate them at school lectures when they cough in order to make a nervous
lecturer break down, or when they express mock approval by prolonged
ironic laughter and stamping of feet. I hate them most of all when they
choose to "rag" an unfortunate master who can't keep order in hall or
at "roll." I always funk taking both these ceremonies, though I have
never had any trouble except in my dreams. If I did I suppose I should
half-kill the boy nearest to me and let out with my fists all round.
I like boys best singly in my rooms. Chichester makes up to me for
lack of wife or sister or brother. I am never happy when he is out of
my sight. He has shown up a prodigious quantity of good verse and some
short stories, all of which I store away in the hope that some day I
shall have collected enough to publish.
I've got a new idea in English composition with the lower forms. I
take in a copy of a really good picture and get them to describe it:
as a model for this I read Pater's description of the "Mona Lisa" with
a copy staring them in the face as I read. I don't know where I got
this idea from, but I find that it brings out a good deal of latent
talent from boys who can never express themselves on paper in normal
circumstances.
I wish it could be possible to have school without the first and last
days of term: they are never-ending. At the beginning one misses all
the comforts of civilization and mourns the absence of all society:
at the end, after a strenuous turmoil of thirteen weeks there is
nothing whatever left to do. Marks are all added up, examination papers
corrected, reports written, prize sheets made, clothes packed. Boys
besiege one's rooms with requests for photographs, and with a catch
in the throat say good-bye. They are going into the firm, going up to
the University, going abroad--going to the ends of the earth on their
different missions, and Radchester will know them no more. Their office
another will take and one gasps at the handful that will be left to
carry on the glorious traditions of the House and school. The last day
is pitiable.
Most masters are unfeignedly glad to get away. I never am. I sometimes
chafe about the eighth or ninth week, but by the thirteenth I have
become so used to the life that I hate the thought of any change. I
have learnt to do without civilization. I just want my boys by my side
always: I want to go on teaching English. I don't mind a holiday from
mathematics. I wish I could find the soul of algebra and geometry.
It's hard to make a moral lesson out of a circle. I am not Sir Thomas
Browne. I shall miss my daily bickerings with Jimmy Haye and Montagu in
hall. I shall miss the cricket and the bathing; above all, I shall miss
Chichester and the rug. Luckily he is coming to camp this year. Camp
lets one down gently. Gradually the longing for society steals over
one again and the strenuous ten days' soldiering makes one pine for
clean sheets and mufti, ordinary hours and meals at a table, but while
it lasts it's just one great picnic.
VIII
_August 10, 1911_
It's been a good camp in every way. I was battalion scout most of
the time and had the extraordinary luck to outwit a whole section of
Cameronians (regulars) in one field-day while I was investigating
behind the enemy's lines. What an ideal country for fighting this is,
with all the pine-trees and the long stretch of Laffan's Plain and
Cæsar's Camp. I wish that Radchester could be burnt down and rebuilt
somewhere on these Surrey hills. Every evening I used to tramp over to
the Aldershot baths from Farnborough, tired as I was, and then back to
join the riotous "sing-songs." I find that one gets through a good deal
of money at the canteens. I always want to eat like a pig and drink
like a fish at the finish of each day's manœuvres. I have never been
so bronzed as I am this year: my face is almost black with the sun and
the dust. We had some excellent fights during the ten days, not always
as on the programme. We had a first-class row with the Melton corps.
They "swank" as if they owned the whole camp, so we let all their tents
down one night. There was a battle royal and an inquiry the next day,
when about eight Generals all gave tongue and talked about the honour
of the Army. You can't suddenly pretend that a schoolboy ceases to be a
schoolboy because you dress him up in khaki. He will have his "rags,"
whatever Guardsmen say.
There was, too, the usual smoking row. As a matter of fact, the great
majority of fellows don't smoke in camp: they can afford to wait till
the holidays begin. It is an education in itself to meet all the people
from the other schools, to see how those with the great names take it
for granted that they are cock-of-the-walk and "hold up" the canteens,
while members of less well-known schools have to wait.
As a matter of fact, the officers' mess is the place to learn things.
I dined there one night as a guest. I had no idea that Oxford and
Cambridge were, or could be responsible for, such bounders as I met on
that one evening. Good-hearted fellows for the most part, but it was
ludicrous to see them in the same mess with these _pukka_ officers of
the Grenadiers and Coldstreams. They are keen on their job, too, but
without the ghost of an idea how to behave, or how to speak the King's
English. They are indescribably funny to watch as they sidle up to the
Colonels and Generals and try to adopt a sort of Army attitude to life.
There are heaps of men here whom I used to know at Oxford; most of
them, however, are in the regulars and not O.T.C. men at all.
One of the "stunts" is for the boys to get the General or some big
"nut" to go to tea in their tents. They provide a palatial meal and the
wretched old man has to gorge himself nearly sick in order to please
these fifteen-year-olds, who would be tremendously upset if he didn't
eat all that was offered to him. But the man we all stand in dread
of is the Brigade Sergeant-Major, who has a voice of thunder, and
puts the fear of God into every one who comes near him, officer and
man alike. He seems to be a walking encyclopædia; there is nothing he
doesn't know and he requires absolute perfection every time. I must say
ten days of this life make our puny efforts at school to be smart look
pretty cheap. Here we really get the hang of things: at school somehow
we nearly always fail. It's partly competition and the ever-present
fact that we have a reputation to keep up.
_August 15, 1911_
I have just had four days in town as an aftermath. The comparison
between London and camp is extraordinary. I'd no idea my love for
London was so deep-rooted. There hangs over London an ever-present
air of success, of money-making and money-spending. The shops tempt
you, the hotels tempt you, the theatres tempt you, everything tempts
you. I fed well and met all sorts of interesting people, among them
Chichester. He lives at Hampton Court and I had one great afternoon on
the river with his sisters, himself and his mother. They appear to be
very wealthy and at dinner, to which I stayed, there was such a variety
of wines that I got nervous as to which wine to put in which glass. I
believe I got them all wrong, except the liqueurs, but I don't think
they noticed. How Chichester can bear the bleak savagery of Radchester
after the rich comforts of his own home, I can't conceive.
Some day I am to go back and stay with him. He appears to spend his
holidays boating, motoring, riding, playing billiards, going to
theatres, reading and writing. I never met people who put one so
quickly at one's ease. Although they are rich they don't seem to worry
about Society: they do none of the _right_ things, for which Heaven be
praised. They just enjoy life to the full and take each blessing as it
comes. They have less of the snob in them than any people I have ever
met. They appear to be unduly grateful to me for what I have done for
Tony. My hat! The boot's on the other foot: what has Tony not done for
me?
_August 23, 1911_
After a glorious week with my uncle in Dawlish, during which time I
bathed and walked a good deal, I am back in town again. I love Devon:
the coast scenery fills me with ecstatic delight and I thank God every
minute that I am alive and strong to enjoy the good things of life.