The school I went to was the sort of school the Bladesover system
permitted. The public schools that add comic into existence in the
brief glow of the Renascence had been taken possession of by the ruling
class; the lower classes were not supposed to stand in need of schools,
and our middle stratum got the schools it deserved, private schools,
schools any unqualified pretender was free to establish. Mine was kept
by a man who had had the energy to get himself a College of Preceptors
diploma, and considering how cheap his charges were, I will readily
admit the place might have been worse. The building was a dingy
yellow-brick residence outside the village, with the schoolroom as an
outbuilding of lath and plaster.
I do not remember that my school-days were unhappy—indeed I recall a
good lot of fine mixed fun in them—but I cannot without grave risk of
misinterpretation declare that we were at all nice and refined. We
fought much, not sound formal fighting, but “scrapping” of a sincere
and murderous kind, into which one might bring one’s boots—it made us
tough at any rate—and several of us were the sons of London publicans,
who distinguished “scraps” where one meant to hurt from ordered
pugilism, practising both arts, and having, moreover, precocious
linguistic gifts. Our cricket-field was bald about the wickets, and we
played without style and disputed with the umpire; and the teaching was
chiefly in the hands of a lout of nineteen, who wore ready-made clothes
and taught despicably. The head-master and proprietor taught us
arithmetic, algebra, and Euclid, and to the older boys even
trigonometry, himself; he had a strong mathematical bias, and I think
now that by the standard of a British public school he did rather well
by us.
We had one inestimable privilege at that school, and that was spiritual
neglect. We dealt with one another with the forcible simplicity of
natural boys, we “cheeked,” and “punched” and “clouted”; we thought
ourselves Red Indians and cowboys and such-like honourable things, and
not young English gentlemen; we never felt the strain of “Onward
Christian soldiers,” nor were swayed by any premature piety in the cold
oak pew of our Sunday devotions. All that was good. We spent our rare
pennies in the uncensored reading matter of the village dame’s shop, on
the _Boys of England_, and honest penny dreadfuls—ripping stuff, stuff
that anticipated Haggard and Stevenson, badly printed and queerly
illustrated, and very very good for us. On our half-holidays we were
allowed the unusual freedom of rambling in twos and threes wide and far
about the land, talking experimentally, dreaming wildly. There was much
in those walks! To this day the landscape of the Kentish world, with
its low broad distances, its hop gardens and golden stretches of wheat,
its oasts and square church towers, its background of downland and
hangers, has for me a faint sense of adventure added to the pleasure of
its beauty. We smoked on occasion, but nobody put us up to the proper
“boyish” things to do; we never “robbed an orchard” for example, though
there were orchards all about us, we thought stealing was sinful, we
stole incidental apples and turnips and strawberries from the fields
indeed, but in a criminal inglorious fashion, and afterwards we were
ashamed. We had our days of adventure, but they were natural accidents,
our own adventures. There was one hot day when several of us, walking
out towards Maidstone, were incited by the devil to despise ginger
beer, and we fuddled ourselves dreadfully with ale; and a time when our
young minds were infected to the pitch of buying pistols, by the legend
of the Wild West. Young Roots from Highbury came back with a revolver
and cartridges, and we went off six strong to live a free wild life one
holiday afternoon. We fired our first shot deep in the old flint mine
at Chiselstead, and nearly burst our ear drums; then we fired in a
primrose studded wood by Pickthorn Green, and I gave a false alarm of
“keeper,” and we fled in disorder for a mile. After which Roots
suddenly shot at a pheasant in the high road by Chiselstead, and then
young Barker told lies about the severity of the game laws and made
Roots sore afraid, and we hid the pistol in a dry ditch outside the
school field. A day or so after we got in again, and ignoring a certain
fouling and rusting of the barrel, tried for a rabbit at three hundred
yards. Young Roots blew a molehill at twenty paces into a dust cloud,
burnt his fingers, and scorched his face; and the weapon having once
displayed this strange disposition to flame back upon the shooter, was
not subsequently fired.
One main source of excitement for us was “cheeking” people in vans and
carts upon the Goudhurst road; and getting myself into a monstrous
white mess in the chalk pits beyond the village, and catching yellow
jaundice as a sequel to bathing stark naked with three other Adamites,
old Ewart leading that function, in the rivulet across Hickson’s
meadows, are among my _memorabilia_. Those free imaginative afternoons!
how much they were for us! how much they did for us! All streams came
from the then undiscovered “sources of the Nile” in those days, all
thickets were Indian jungles, and our best game, I say it with pride, I
invented. I got it out of the Bladesover saloon. We found a wood where
“Trespassing” was forbidden, and did the “Retreat of the Ten Thousand”
through it from end to end, cutting our way bravely through a host of
nettle beds that barred our path, and not forgetting to weep and kneel
when at last we emerged within sight of the High Road Sea. So we have
burst at times, weeping and rejoicing, upon startled wayfarers. Usually
I took the part of that distinguished general Xenōphen—and please note
the quantity of the ō. I have all my classical names like
that,—Socrates rhymes with Bates for me, and except when the bleak eye
of some scholar warns me of his standards of judgment, I use those dear
old mispronunciations still. The little splash into Latin made during
my days as a chemist washed off nothing of the habit. Well,—if I met
those great gentlemen of the past with their accents carelessly
adjusted I did at least meet them alive, as an equal, and in a living
tongue. Altogether my school might easily have been worse for me, and
among other good things it gave me a friend who has lasted my life out.
This was Ewart, who is now a monumental artist at Woking, after many
vicissitudes. Dear chap, how he did stick out of his clothes to be
sure! He was a longlimbed lout, ridiculously tall beside my more youth
full compactness, and, except that there was no black moustache under
his nose blob, he had the same round knobby face as he has to-day, the
same bright and active hazel brown eyes, the stare, the meditative
moment, the insinuating reply. Surely no boy ever played the fool as
Bob Ewart used to play it, no boy had a readier knack of mantling the
world with wonder. Commonness vanished before Ewart, at his expository
touch all things became memorable and rare. From him I first heard tell
of love, but only after its barbs were already sticking in my heart. He
was, I know now the bastard of that great improvident artist, Rickmann
Ewart; he brought the light of a lax world that at least had not turned
its back upon beauty, into the growing fermentation of my mind.
I won his heart by a version of Vathek, and after that we were
inseparable yarning friends. We merged our intellectual stock so
completely that I wonder sometimes how much I did not become Ewart, how
much Ewart is not vicariously and derivatively me.