guide me through the difficulties of life.
Now therefore Lady Fry began to receive the first of many schoolboy letters which she kept neatly tied up in little bundles. Many of them are stained with the juice of wild flowers, and still contain withered buds that Roger picked on his walks and sent home to his botanical parents. From the record of paper-chases and school concerts (at one Roger sang “The Tar’s Farewell”), of cricket and football matches, of sermons and visits from missionaries—“We are going to keep a nigger at Bishop Steer’s School. It will cost I believe £60 per ann…. He seems to be getting on well in most things but his character is only fair”—it would seem that he was tolerably happy at school, and was allowed not merely to have his own garden, but to keep pets—among them two active and adventurous snakes. As far as work went he was successful. He was almost at once at the top of the school. And yet there were certain sentences in the letters that might have made his parents uneasy. Bullying there was of course. A certain Harrison and a certain Ferguson “bully me as much as they can, sometimes by teasing, and sometimes by hitting me about … but their favourite dodge is to try and keep me under water and upset me when we bathe”. But he got on well with the boys for the most part, and liked the games and the work. The disquieting phrases concern the masters. Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley had assured the Frys that there were to be no punishments. Yet “there were two fellows flogged yesterday and there is going to be one flogged tomorrow. He was only playing with another boy at dinner.” Again, “the moon-faced boy” had been flogged because he threw some water on to the wall. Again, “Last night Ferguson went to Kynnersley’s room I don’t know what for, but he was found out and I had to dress and go to the Head’s room … Ferguson was so troublesome that Mr Holmes had to hold him down.” As head of the school Roger had to be present at the floggings. He disliked it very much. “I intend to get leave not to bring the boys up to be whipped, as I don’t like it” he told his mother; but the Head said that “it was the business of the captain of the school, but he hoped not to whip anyone”. In spite of these very plain hints that Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley was not keeping his promise, his parents made no effective protest, and the letters continue their chronicle of treats and paper-chases and measles and chilblains and long walks botanising over Cobham Common as if on the whole life at Sunninghill House was quite a tolerable experience. Years later, however, Roger filled out in greater detail the expurgated version of school life that he had given his parents. It begins with a portrait of Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley himself:
Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley had aristocratic connections, his double name was made even more impressive by an elaborate coat of arms with two crests, one the Sneyd the other the Kynnersley, which appeared in all sorts of places about the house and was stamped in gold on the bindings of the prizes. He was a tall thin loose-limbed man with an aquiline nose and angular features. He was something of a dandy. The white tie and the black cloth were all that marked him as a clergyman—he eschewed the clerical collar and coat. But his great pride and glory was a pair of floating red Dundreary whiskers which waved on each side of his flaccid cheeks like bat’s wings. How much satisfaction they afforded him was evident from the way in which during lessons he constantly fondled them distractedly. He was as high church as was consistent with being very much the gentleman, almost a man of the world. But he spoke of respect for his cloth with unction and felt deeply the superiority which his priesthood conferred on him. He was decidedly vain. His intellectual attainments consisted almost entirely in having as an undergraduate at Cambridge belonged to a Dickens society which cultivated an extreme admiration for the great man, and tested each other’s proficiency in the novels by examination papers, from which he would frequently quote to us. He read Dickens aloud to the whole school every evening before bed-time but I do not remember that we ever got beyond Pickwick and Oliver Twist Dickens and Keble’s Christian Year were I think the only books that he brought to my notice during the years I was under him. I doubt if he read anything else, certainly he read nothing which prevented him from being a bigoted and ignorant high church Tory.
He was however genuinely fond of boys and enjoyed their company. He was always organising expeditions—during a cold winter he took the upper form boys for long afternoons skating on the Basingstoke canal—in summer we went to Eton and always we were treated very lavishly with high teas and strawberries and cream. The school was I think a very expensive one but everything was done in good style and the food a good deal better than what I was accustomed to at home.
As the boys came mostly from rather aristocratic homes they were much easier to get on with than those which I met later at a Public school. They had not to the same extent the idea of good form were much more natural and ready to accept things. Altogether my time at Sunninghill House might have been more than tolerable if it had not been for one thing which poisoned my whole life there.
When my parents told me there were to be no punishments it was quite true that the masters never set lines or kept boys in, but as Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley explained to us with solemn gusto the first morning that we were all gathered together before him he reserved to himself the right to a good sound flogging with the birch rod. How my parents who were extremely scrupulous about verbal inaccuracy reconciled it to their consciences to omit this fact I never made out, but I cannot doubt that they knew or else they would have expressed more surprise than they did when later on I revealed the horrid fact to them.
Anyhow the birch rod was a serious matter to me, not that I dreaded it particularly for myself because I was of such a disgustingly law-abiding disposition that I was never likely to incur it. But as I was from the first and all through either first or second in the school I was bound ex officio to assist at the executions and hold down the culprit. The ritual was very precise and solemn—every Monday morning the whole school assembled in Hall and every boy’s report was read aloud.
After reading a bad report from a form master Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley would stop and after a moment’s awful silence say “Harrison minor you will come up to my study afterwards”. And so afterwards the culprits were led up by the two top boys. In the middle of the room was a large box draped in black cloth and in austere tones the culprit was told to take down his trousers and kneel before the block over which I and the other head boy held him down. The swishing was given with the master’s full strength and it took only two or three strokes for drops of blood to form everywhere and it continued for 15 or 20 strokes when the wretched boy’s bottom was a mass of blood. Generally of course the boys endured it with fortitude but sometimes there were scenes of screaming, howling and struggling which made me almost sick with disgust. Nor did the horrors even stop there. There was a wild red-haired Irish boy, himself rather a cruel brute, who whether deliberately or as a result of the pain or whether he had diarrhoea, let fly. The irate clergyman instead of stopping at once simply went on with increased fury until the whole ceiling and walls of his study were spattered with filth. I suppose he was afterwards somewhat ashamed of this for he did not call in the servants to clean up but spent hours doing it himself with the assistance of a boy who was his special favourite.
I think this fact alone shows that he had an intense sadistic pleasure in these floggings and that these feelings were even excited by the wretched victim’s performance or else he would certainly have put it off till a more suitable occasion.
Monday morning thus was always a dreadful time for us. It nearly always resulted in one or two executions but sometimes no sufficient excuse could be found in the reports. Sunday in spite of its leisure and amusements was spoilt for me by the anticipation of next morning’s session and I lay awake often praying feverishly, and nearly always futilely, that no one would get a swishing. But one was never sure not to be called on to assist. One night just as I was going to sleep the Head, as we called Mr Sneyd-Kynnersley, called me to come to his study. We slept in cubicles, sometimes three or four were arranged in a single large bedroom and the Head had overheard one boy say to another “What a bother, I forgot to pump-ship: I must get out of bed”. This indecent talk merited of course a ferocious flogging and my night’s rest was spoilt by the agitation it had put me into. I won’t deny that my reaction to all this was morbid. I do not know what complications and repressions lay behind it but their connection with sex was suddenly revealed
