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PUBLIC SCHOOL LIFE
* * * * * *
COUNTRIES OF THE MIND
MIDDLETON MURRY
Demy 8vo. 10s. 6d. net
IBSEN AND HIS CREATION
Professor JANKO LAVRIN
Cr. 8vo. 7s. 6d. net
THE RETURN
WALTER DE LA MARE
Cr. 8vo. 7s. 6d. net
* * * * * *
PUBLIC SCHOOL LIFE
Boys Parents Masters
by
ALEC WAUGH
Author of 'The Loom of Youth,' 'Pleasure,' etc.
[Illustration: Logo]
London: 48 Pall Mall
W. Collins Sons & Co. Ltd.
Glasgow Melbourne Auckland
Copyright, 1922
Manufactured in Great Britain
A DEDICATORY LETTER TO ARNOLD LUNN
_December 6, 1921_:
MY DEAR ARNOLD,--It was with genuine surprise that I read the other day,
while turning over the pages of _The Harrovians_, the date 1913 upon the
title-page. Only eight years ago, and since then so much has happened.
What a long while it seems since _The Harrovians_ was the most borrowed
book in the house, and we passed the hours of evening hall, that should
have been spent in the study of irregular verbs, in eager discussions on
your book. It was a revelation to us--we schoolboys of 1913. It
explained us to ourselves. We thought then that the last word on the
subject had been said.
But one can never say the last word on such a subject as the Public
Schools, especially in a novel. In a novel one is constrained to tell a
story or to reveal a character. In _The Harrovians_ you dealt with the
Public School System only in as far as it effected the development of
Peter, and in _Loose Ends_ you found yourself equally fettered with
regard to Maurice. It is for this reason that I feel there is still
room for a book such as this, which, though a narrative, has for its
object simply the analysis and presentation of public school life. At
any rate I hope that you may think, when you come to read it, that it
was worth doing. If you do not, well then at least here is your name
after the title-page in grateful tribute to many pleasant hours spent in
the company of yourself and of your books, and in the hope of many more
such hours.
For their sake, if not for its own sake, please accept this book, and
believe me,
As ever, your sincere friend,
ALEC WAUGH.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 1
II. THE PREPARATORY SCHOOL 20
III. THE NEW BOY 38
IV. THE SECOND YEAR 60
V. ATHLETICISM 76
VI. THE TRUE ETHICS OF CRIBBING 91
VII. MORALITY AND THE ROMANTIC FRIENDSHIP 124
VIII. THE MIDDLE YEARS 161
IX. PREFECTSHIP 171
X. THE LAST TERM 198
XI. THE OLD BOY AS SCHOOLMASTER AND PARENT 215
XII. SOME SUGGESTIONS: THE LEAVING AGE WITH
REGARD TO MORALS 231
XIII. THE LEAVING AGE WITH REGARD TO ATHLETICS 256
XIV. CONCLUSION 263
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
Twenty years ago a father said to his son, who had just come down from
Oxford with a batting average of 35.7: 'For ten years, my boy, you have
been playing cricket all through the summer at my expense. You can now
either come into my business and play first-class cricket during your
month's holiday in August, or, if you want to continue to play cricket
all through the season, you can go down to the Oval and apply to be
taken on as a professional.' The moral, the obvious moral, that is to
say, is admirable. And the elderly gentleman whom I overheard repeating
this story in the pavilion, leant back in his seat and affirmed proudly,
though with a deep sense of the passage of good things, that it was in
such a spirit that the game had been played when he was young. 'That's
what cricket meant to the Studds, the Lyttletons, the Fosters. We didn't
have any of these amateur professionals, none of these fine fellows who
get found soft jobs by their county committees. What's the difference, I
should like to know, between the fellow who gets paid five pounds a
match and the fellow who is presented with the directorship of a ladies'
corset factory at a comfortable salary, and who has only to go to the
office once a week to sign his name in the directors' attendance book?'
The elderly gentleman shrugged his shoulders with disgust.
He was quite right, of course. There are too many cricketers who make as
much money out of the game as any professional, yet are entitled to put
initials before their name upon the score card. And the father was quite
right when he insisted on the industry of his son. He was none the less
right because things probably failed to turn out as they had been
planned. They rarely do. We can guess what happened.
For a year the son worked hard. During his month's holiday he made a
couple of centuries in first-class cricket, and various papers
commenting on this achievement expressed their regret that so promising
a cricketer should only be available in August. It is needless to add
that the other members of the family saw to it that these references did
not escape the attention of their father. Next season the county started
so well, that by the end of May it stood at the head of the
championship, and the young financier was entreated to turn out for the
Yorkshire match in the middle of June. On such an occasion parental
discipline was naturally relaxed. And an innings of 87 on a tricky
wicket was followed by an invitation to play for the Gentlemen at Lords.
Parental pride was flattered. Next season the same thing happened, only
more frequently. There was, in fact, an understanding that he was
available for all the important matches, and very soon not only the
fixtures with Middlesex, Kent, and Surrey, came to be regarded as
important, but also those with Hampshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset, and
Worcester. Indeed, in five years' time the son found himself playing
county cricket steadily from May to August and as an amateur. Things
happen like that. Still the pact, as the elderly gentleman in the
pavilion asserted, had been made in the right spirit. And it was, after
all, a family affair.
But the fine distinction between the amateur and the amateur
professional is defined only by the obvious moral to this story, and the
subtler moral had passed unnoticed by the elderly reactionary in the
pavilion. A young man, twenty-three years of age, has been expensively
educated for some ten to twelve years. And he is faced at the end of his
education, when it is assumed, that is to say, that he is equipped with
the knowledge and trained ability that will enable him to take up that
portion of the world's work for which he is best fitted, with two
alternatives. Either he can go into his father's business, or else he
can lose his caste and sign on as a professional cricketer. It occurred
neither to the father nor to the son nor to the elderly gentleman who
repeated the story in the pavilion that any other alternative was
possible, or, indeed, desirable. The son was not in a position to say to
his father: 'Of course I wouldn't become a pro. But I'm really not keen
on your business. I shouldn't be a success at it. I'd rather do
something else.' He could not say that, because there was nothing else
for him to do. Six years earlier he could have gone to Sandhurst. If he
had worked harder at school he might possibly have passed into the
Egyptian civil service. It is possible that his blue would have obtained
for him a schoolmastership, but his gulf in mods, would have limited his
choice of schools. And the prospects of a junior master at a second-rate
Public School are not inviting. So, whatever his own inclinations might
have been, he had to accept his father's offer. It is here that we find
the true moral of the story; and we ask ourselves whether this young man
was, in spite of his ten years at Oxford and at a Public School, really
educated. He had learnt how to make centuries in county cricket, and he
had acquired a certain quantity of uncorrelated information. But he had
not developed the ability to perform properly the type of work for which
he was best fitted, nor, indeed, had he discovered what that type of
work might be. As likely as not his father's business was the last that
he should have chosen. We all react from our surroundings, and he had
probably become heartily sick of his father's particular form of 'shop.'
He had so often sat wearily at the dinner table, fingering his bread,
piling the salt into pyramids on the edge of the cruet, while his father
had explained to his mother the minute details of his latest deal. 'You
see, my dear, I bought in at twenty-six....' Of all hideous employments
the buying and selling of shares had seemed to him the weariest. And yet
there was nothing for him but to accept a desk beside a telephone with
the files of the _Financial News_ spread out before him.
He can have brought no enthusiasm to his work. Out of a sense of duty,
and in order to improve his own position, he may have worked hard during
the winter months, but he must have worked without pleasure, with his
work not as an end but as a means.
Yet nothing in a man's life is of more importance than his profession.
If he does not enjoy his work he values too highly the privileges that
success in it will bring to him. He asks too much of his private life,
and if he is disappointed, he embarks on a desperate search for
pleasure. Half of the discontent of modern life, the discontent that
expresses itself in endless parties, dances, and entertainments, can be
traced to the reactions of men and women engaged in uncongenial
employment. And so we return again to that first question. Can we call a
man educated who has not discovered in what capacity he is most likely
to be of service to society, or who, having discovered it, has not taken
steps to qualify himself for that profession. That, in a sentence, is
the case against the English Public School. A system stands or falls by
its products.
And it is only natural that parents who are not particularly well off,
and who have no private business into which they can draft their
children, should ask themselves whether or not a public school education
is worth the considerable personal sacrifice that will be entailed if
their sons are to be sent to Wellington, Clifton, or Uppingham. 'We
want to do the best for Tommy,' they say. 'But after spending £250 a
year on him for five years what do we get in return? Tommy is not clever
enough to pass into the civil service; he may get a mastership on a
salary only slightly better than that of a Metropolitan policeman. Is it
worth it?' When the head master to whom these doubts are carried,
commences to enlarge on the moral qualities that are revealed and
strengthened by 'the honest give and take of public school life,' the
parent is still unsatisfied. 'Are you quite sure?' they say. 'Of course
we know it's all exaggerated, but where there's smoke, you know, and one
has heard....' Is it surprising that under such circumstances the
mandarins of the public school profession should have erected a
barricade of prejudice between themselves and criticism. Their
maintenance is at stake. They have to persuade the parent that he is
getting his money's worth. Otherwise he will send his son to a day
school, or, worse still, to some pension in Rome or Brussels.
And so it has happened that any critic of the Public Schools is
immediately driven into a false position. For so long the Public Schools
have been accepted with an unquestioning reverence--for so long, that is
to say, the authorities have been able to persuade the world that the
goods they are selling are the best, in fact the only goods upon the
market--that if any one breathes a word against them now he is labelled
a revolutionary; it is assumed that politically he is a Socialist, that
he wishes to substitute co-operation for competition, that he is a
harbinger of red ruin, concealing a bomb intended for William of
Wykeham's Tower or the green sward of Agar's plough; that his programme
involves the complete destruction of the existing fabric, and that he
proposes to erect about its ruins some bizarre construction of eugenics
and modernity. Nothing, as a matter of fact, is further from the truth.
The majority of assailants are anything but socialists. They consider an
enlightened oligarchy the ideal form of government, and their chief
quarrel with the Public Schools is the absence of that enlightened
oligarchy. No one wants to destroy the Public Schools. No one would be
so foolish. But we do maintain that the public school system--a very
old, a very magnificent, a very venerable mansion--stands in drastic
need of repair. It is some years since the drains were attended to;
electric light is more serviceable than gas; the tapestries are a little
moth-eaten; the books in the library are dusty. The house wants to be
spring cleaned.
It is easy, of course, to say that, but it is very difficult to know how
to set about it. Our institutions are mirrors in which are reflected our
personal imperfections. They can be no better than ourselves; and the
merchants of panaceas take for granted a world which has left behind it
envy, greed, malice, and desire. To that degree of perfection we shall
never attain, but we can at any rate be honest with one another. And
there is no side of English life about which rulers and ruled, fathers
and sons, old and young have been so consistently dishonest with one
another in the past as they have been about the standards and ideals of
the English Public Schools.
It is the old trouble of the merchant and his goods, and though the
English Public Schools do not insert double-column advertisements in the
daily papers, they are at least beholden not to prejudice the value of
their stock. The greengrocer does not inform you that, on the whole, his
potatoes are not bad, considering that he bought them from a farmer with
a leaking shed. A head master does not tell a parent that, if he is
going to send his son to a Public School, his own school is not worse
than any other. Yet the same man who views with grave suspicion eulogies
of a patent medicine, accepts complacently the house-master's assurance
that Tommy is improving enormously both morally and intellectually under
his care. A schoolmaster spends a large part of his life boosting the
value of his goods, and in time, of course, he comes to believe that
every word of what he says is true. The commercial traveller of two
years' experience will wink his eye: 'I spun him the tale!' But the
commercial traveller of ten years' experience has a solemn countenance.
'People know good stuff when they see it.'
A few weeks ago I was staying in the country with some friends, and was
taken over by them to the prize-giving of the Preparatory School at
which their sons were being educated. The ceremony was enacted in the
gymnasium. The staff sat at the end of the room on a raised dais, in the
centre of which was a table covered with 'calf-bound mementoes of
industry.' Behind this table stood the head master. He was a large,
genial, middle-aged man, rubicund with a surfeit of golf, and he smiled
down upon the school and upon its parents. 'Well, you boys,' he said, 'I
want to tell you how pleased I am with the way you've backed me up this
term. You've worked hard and you've played hard: I don't really know how
long it is since we've had such a thoroughly satisfactory term: of
course there are one or two young gentlemen'--and at this point a
twinkle appeared in the corner of his eye--'who have been a little,
well, shall we say, difficult; but that's past history, we won't say
anything more about it; and, as a whole, as I've already said, I don't
think I've ever had such a satisfactory set of fellows.' There were a
few more remarks of mutual congratulation, and then he proceeded to the
distribution of the prizes.
Afterwards I had a chat with one of the assistant masters, with whom I
happened to be on fairly intimate terms.
'A wonderful fellow, the Head,' he told me. 'Do you know he's made that
same speech at prize-giving for the last twenty years. Hardly a phrase
different. He wants to send the parents away in a good temper. They'll
get their account to-morrow. Of course he doesn't know that's why he's
doing it. But it's the reason right enough. And how clever that bit is
about the young gentlemen who've been a little troublesome. It makes
every mother feel that her boy is better than her neighbour's.'
I suggested that such an opinion was likely to be revised under the
influence of the terminal report. 'Not a bit of it,' he answered. 'All
our reports are strictly censored. We write them out on a piece of
foolscap and the Head gets them typed; but where we write "lazy and
unintelligent," the parents read "moderate." You can take my word for it
that the boy who gets "moderate" in his report from here is one of
earth's best dunces.'
That was, of course, at a private school; but, even at the most
prosperous Public Schools there is a tacit understanding that parents
should be stroked down after the manner of refractory cats. The
half-term report contains frequently enough a quantity of pungent
critical writing, but the parental visit to the school is invariably the
occasion for much conversational flattery. Freddie, unless he has become
involved in any particularly unfortunate adventure, is the object of
restrained, perhaps qualified, but still potential commendation. The
father is assured by the house-master that everything is going on
splendidly: 'A little low in form, perhaps, rather too boisterous at
times in the day room, but a sound fellow at heart, the sort of fellow
that the house will be proud of one day.' And the mother's qualms are
put at rest by the house-master's wife. 'The tone of the house is so
excellent, you see. No bullying at all, and Freddie's manners are so
charming. Every one likes him.'
It is possible that if the house-master were taken to task in the
privacy of his own study, he might be persuaded to confess himself a
pragmatist. 'One has to keep them quiet,' he might say. 'The young
rascal'll get on all right as long as they don't start meddling with
him.' But it is hard to be honest with oneself. The schoolmaster cannot
help regarding the parent in much the same way that the junior subaltern
regarded the brigadier. We all know what happened when the runner
brought the news that at such an hour the brigadier would visit
Lieutenant Jones's gun emplacements. Lieutenant Jones specially called
the brigadier's attention to what he knew would please him. He put his
smartest men on guard. He assured the brigadier that everything was
going quite all right, that the men were perfectly comfortable and that
the supply of rations was adequate; Lieutenant Jones did everything, in
fact, to get the brigadier into the next trench as soon as possible.
Which was, of course, all very rational. The brigadier's interest in
Lieutenant Jones's gun emplacements was remote and theoretical, and
either way was of small importance. But it is a different thing
altogether when house-masters wave parents out of the way with
comfortable excuses. It establishes at once a dishonest relationship.
The schoolmaster does not trust the parent. He regards him as a nuisance
that periodically has to be appeased. And, as long as things go
smoothly, he is content to leave him in the dark. There is no
co-operation. And that is absolutely fatal. It means that the two people
who are chiefly responsible for the boy's welfare are working at cross
purposes.
The trouble does not end there. For between the parents themselves there
is frequently an incomplete mutual appreciation of the difficulties of
school life. Women, in the nature of things, can only know about Public
Schools what men choose to tell them. That is usually remarkably little.
Many a husband encourages in his wife the illusion that before he met
her his life was a vague, indeterminate, ineffectual thing, the
incidents of which are unworthy to be recorded. And many others on such
matters as public school life consider that a lie that saves friction is
justifiable. It is so easy to see how it happens.
Husband and wife are sitting after dinner on either side of the
fireplace. The wife has just finished reading _The Harrovians_, and she
looks up with a puzzled, unhappy look. 'Harold, dear,' she says, 'it's
not like that really, is it? If it were true I couldn't think of sending
Freddie to such a place.' And what is Harold to say? He has read _The
Harrovians_. He knows that substantially it is true, but equally well he
knows that if he acknowledges this to his wife his domestic life for the
next six years will be complicated by incessant arguments and anxieties.
To begin with he will have to spend many evenings of discussion before
he can persuade his wife of the advisability of sending Freddie to
Rugby. And afterwards there will be constant uneasiness. His wife will
fret. She will want to pay visits to Rugby, to interview the head
master, to ask her son uncomfortable questions. His own life would
become unbearable. And a lie smooths out so much. 'Oh, no, dear, quite
unlike the Rugby of my day. An exaggerated picture of a bad house in a
bad school, that's all it is.'
Such a situation must arise fairly frequently. And at least one instance
of it has come within the circle of my own experience. While I was a
prisoner in Germany I lent a copy of my school story, _The Loom of
Youth_, to a fellow-prisoner, who had expressed a wish to read it. A few
days later he returned it to me with such a flattering display of
enthusiasm that, in a moment of unusual generosity I promised to send
him a copy on our return. The sequel reached me a few days later. He had
returned to his room and remarked that Waugh had promised to give him a
copy of that book of his, 'the thing that's all full of oaths. I don't
know what I shall do with it,' he said. 'I shall have to be jolly
careful that my wife doesn't read it.'
If one may generalise from such an incident, and I believe that one may,
for it has its root in the eternal indolence of human nature, then not
only schoolmasters and parents, but fathers and mothers are working at
cross purposes. And so the boy finds himself alone, stranded in a
society the nature of which he has to discover for himself. He never
regards his house-master as one working in co-operation with his
parents for the welfare of his soul. Schoolmasters will be to him a
separate caste. And although he will never reason this out with himself,
he will appreciate it intuitively in the natural cunning with which he
will exploit one or the other in the furtherance of his own ends. I do
not mean that he is deceitful. But he may want to specialise in History,
or to abandon German in favour of Greek, and he will think whether he
would do better to approach his father or his house-master. There is a
sort of dual monarchy, and if one sovereign is opposed to a favourite
scheme, it is but natural to try one's fortune with the other.
His parents' interest in his school life must appear to him superficial.
When his father comes down at half term, he has to answer innumerable
questions as to his prowess on the cricket field; and very often indeed
the chief pleasure that his athletic successes brings him is the thought
of the delight that his father will experience. But the intimate side of
his school life, his thoughts, his friendships, his troubles, his
ambitions, do not enter into his relationship with his parents. In the
same way his house-master's interest in his home life seems to him
superficial. On his return to school he is asked a few questions about
the theatres he has visited; whether he is in training for the football;
has he done any private work? not a word of his intimate life. The boy
ceases to regard his school life as a continuation of his home life. The
two are entirely separate, and it depends on the temperament of the
individual as to which of the two he will consider the more important.
We hear a great deal of talk about the influence of the home; it is,
indeed, the stock argument of the pedagogue who would shelve his own
responsibility on to other shoulders, but I believe that its influence
is greatly overrated. Home and school present to the average boy two
watertight compartments. They are different lives, a different technique
is required. And human nature has at least one property of the
chameleon.
A schoolboy sets out, therefore, to discover school life for himself. He
knows what his parents expect him to make of it; he has a fairly shrewd
idea of what his schoolmaster expects him to make of it. It remains for
him to investigate school life as his companions have made it. Naturally
he does not announce his investigations. He lets his parents think what
they like and his schoolmasters think what they like. He goes his own
way. And it is thus that school life as it is, differs so enormously
from the traditional concept of it. There must be always a gulf between
the reality and the imagined idea. But in public school life the gulf is
between, not the schoolboy reality and his idea of it, but between the
schoolboy reality, and the confused idea of it that is held by parents
and masters. It is two degrees from the truth. In consequence, when any
one does attempt to tell the truth there is an outburst of indignant
protest. And the worst of it is that it is an honest outburst. When head
masters write to the Press and say 'these accusations are entirely
false,' they honestly believe what they say. That is what makes
everything so difficult. They have forgotten their own schooldays, and
for so long they have been persuading parents of the value of a public
school education that they have come to believe in their own
advertisements. And yet what they have come to believe is far more
remarkable than the truth. In sermons and addresses they assure the boy
and his parents that school life is a miniature of the larger world;
which is the statement of a fact: yet every subsequent act and utterance
is in contradiction to this initial axiom. For, if that larger world did
really resemble the official concept of school life, what a bizarre,
what an extravagant affair it would be. It would be filled with high
lights, with breathless escapades, with impossible heroics. It has been
accepted as quite credible that a boy should be capable of the most
extreme and loathsome brutalities, that a percentage of every school
should spend its life in gambling and heavy drinking, that at least one
prefect in every school should contract inconvenient liabilities at the
Baron's Arms, and that to extricate himself he should forge his
house-master's signature. Indeed, anything may happen provided that the
course of life follows a simple process of right and wrong which leads
to the triumph of virtue and the downfall of vice. It is something like
a Lyceum melodrama. And, though we can all manage to enjoy for a couple
of hours the fine sensationalism of _The Beggar Girl's Wedding_, we
should hardly accept its values as a philosophical background for our
daily life. And yet that has actually happened in the case of the Public
Schools. Mr P. G. Wodehouse, in his delightful _Mike_, makes Psmith say
to a new acquaintance: 'Are you the Bully, the Pride of the School, or
the Boy who is led astray and takes to drink in Chapter Sixteen?' Such
figureheads exist in the popular imagination. The world believes in
bullies, in villains, in straight heroes and in the weak character who
goes wrong, but is saved through the influence of either the hero or the
head master, or the head master's daughter, or through the sermon of an
occasional preacher. It is all very jolly, of course, and no doubt the
world would be a far more comfortable place if it were possible to label
and pigeonhole all our friends and acquaintances. But life cannot be
simplified by any arbitrary process. We have our standards of conduct,
but they are shifting and relative. They are the measures that each
successive society arranges for what it considers to be its convenience.
And we accept them for what they are. At a Public School, however, a
traditional conception has formed a code of rules for the convenience of
a society that does not exist. Which is confusing: and when Desmond Coke
wrote in _The Bending of a Twig_ a very entertaining skit on the
behaviour of a boy who had read a number of school stories, and went to
Shrewsbury expecting to find bullies behind every cloister,
schoolmasters laughed over the book, but did not read into it any
criticism of themselves.
And yet there is nothing that we need more than an honest facing of the
facts of public school life. Facts are a solid neutral ground on which
parents and boys and masters may meet to discuss their ideals and their
difficulties. And, in the course of that discussion, they may discover,
as likely as not, a way out of their troubles. The hope of this book is
to provide that statement of facts. It does not set out as an
educational treatise. It accepts the Public Schools as the system best
suited to the material with which it deals. It suggests no new system of
teaching. It does not advocate co-education. It does not advance any
plea for Montessor methods. It will contain no discussion of the
advantages of Greek over German. There will be no appendix with
time-tables and suggested curriculum. For, as things are now, it does
not matter whether Sanscrit is substituted for mathematics: the boy will
learn equally little of either. It is intended as a human study of
public school life, as an attempt to break down that conspiracy of
silence, that relationship of evasion and deceit that exists officially
between parents, boys, and masters; and from time to time it will
suggest solutions.
It is, of course, only an attempt. For no one person can see more than a
side of the truth. However impartial we try to be, we can see in a
situation only what the limitations of our personality allow us. We are
all at tether. During the last three years many public men have visited
Russia; they have been honest men, and we know quite well that they went
there with the firm intention of telling nothing but the truth. But,
before they went, we could have told them exactly what they would say on
their return. Yet the analogy does not quite hold good. For we, too,
have gone, each of us, to a Public School with a preconceived idea of
what school life would be, and each of us in turn has had that
conception destroyed by actuality, and each in turn has had to create
for himself his own picture. It follows then that there must in each
picture be a certain measure of truth.