shambles at Aston; she added things of her own, china, silver, watercolours, poetry books, French literature. Some of the Knox possessions she never managed to get rid of, the Indian bedspread, for example, brought back by Mrs French, embroidered with tigers in gold thread with looking-glass eyes, and a steel engraving of “ God’s Eye Shut Upon the Heart of the Sinner”, which she finally banished to the lavatory. All the Newtons’ prophecies were falsified. The home was reestablished and the whole family reunited. In the evening Ethel coaxed her dreaded charges into the drawing room and read aloud to them—Stevenson’s Will o’ the Mill and The Wrong Box, Edward Lear’s Nonsense Rhymes—undisturbed by the boys who were winding up their clockwork engines behind the sofa. To them it was keenly interesting that one of the main railway lines ran into the station from a tunnel actually underneath the house. Very well, their stepmother accepted this, just as, to begin with, she accepted everything, except the annual seaside lodgings; instead of these, she hired vacant rectories, in different parts of England and Wales, for their summer holidays. Here she adapted gallantly to the demand for high teas and to long cricket matches, during which Dilly was not allowed to make more than a hundred and fifty runs, and little Ronnie, quite ignoring the game, picked bunches of wild flowers in the deep field and brought them, as an admiring tribute, to his new mother.
The little ones, naturally, were the first to be won over and the most dear to her; the girls had begun to turn to her from the first evening at Holmwood. The older boys, Eddie in particular, were a challenge. She saw that the trouble lay partly in names, and told them to call her Mrs K. But a slight barrier remained. She was reluctant, for example, to discuss health matters, her own or anyone else’s. Eddie’s nervous indigestion was dismissed as “the gulps”. He could not quite lower his defences, even when she took him to Glencrippsdale, and taught him to fish.
The civilizing process had to be gradual. In the main, it was assumed in those days that it was sufficient amusement for brothers and sisters simply to be together. So, indeed, it was. But Mrs K. would look into the schoolroom and note that all was well, the girls banging out a duet on the piano, the little boys quietly playing, Eddie and Dilly sarcastically reading to each other out of Smiles’s Self-Help, then be summoned urgently a few minutes later to find Self-Help sailing out of the window, Eddie and Dilly locked in a death grapple, Wilfred and Ronnie cowering in corners with their hands folded over their bellies to protect their most valuable possession, their wind. At other times the boys disappeared completely for long periods to avoid being made to “pay calls”.
On the subject of education—perhaps because her own had been so casual, partly perhaps because of the maniacal scenes in the schoolroom—Mrs K. stood firm. The boys must go to boarding schools. Their father was still doubtful and would have liked to keep them at home, but was induced to agree. Of course, they would have to win scholarships or the fees could not be met, and it would be a mistake for those nearest in age to compete with each other, so Eddie and Wilfred were entered for Rugby, and Dilly and Ronnie for Eton.
Meantime, Eddie was sent to a distant preparatory school, Locker’s Park, in Hemel Hempstead; Dilly went, at the age of eleven, to Summer Fields (then still called Summer Field), near Oxford. Mrs McLaren, the formidable manager, was, it appears, unwilling to admit him at such a late age, for she liked to catch them young, but changed her tune when she heard that Ronnie, already reading Virgil at the age of six, would soon be joining him. Dilly needed only a year’s coaching to take his Eton scholarship. As for Ronnie, the little boy who had been asked at four years old what he liked doing and had replied, “I think all day, and at night I think about the past,” was already a natural philosopher. He made a docile and friendly pupil, saved from any temptation to vanity by his relentless elder brothers.
Neither he nor Dilly remembered Summer Fields with much pleasure, except for the chance to swim in the river under the willow trees on sunny afternoons. In middle age, Ronnie used to recall deliberately what it was like to be beaten for having an untidy locker, to remind himself “how much better it is to be forty than eight”. The preparation of the children for scholarships was so intensive as to be only just over the borderline of sanity. Before the Eton exam Dr Williams, the headmaster, used to take a room in the White Horse Hotel in Windsor and walk the candidates up and down to steady them while he crammed in a few last showy bits of information. Many of them never reached such a high standard of learning again. Fortunately Ronnie’s sparkling intelligence, and Dilly’s dispassionate view of adults, enabled them both to survive.
In 1896, the year that Ronnie arrived at Summer Fields, Eddie won his scholarship to Rugby. Thomas French had been there in the days of Arnold, although he had been quite unmoved by the great Doctor, whose teaching was “not the Gospel as he had been accustomed to receive it.” The headmaster was now Dr H. A. James, known as The Bodger. In comparison with Eton it was a rougher, more countrified, more eccentric, more rigidly classical, less elegant and sentimental establishment. There were the usual bewildering regulations, much more binding than the official rules; only certain boys, the “swells”, could wear white straw hats, all first-year boys must answer to a call of “fag” and run to see what the “swell” required, it was a crime to walk with your hands in your pockets until your fourth year, one hand was allowed in the third year, and so forth, proscriptions being multiplied, as in all primitive societies. The younger boys got up at five forty-five and took turns in the cold baths. Eddie, who was in School House, could consider himself lucky to get a “den” at the end of his first year, overlooking the seventeen green acres of the famous Close.
Divinity was taught by The Bodger himself, a short, squarish man with a luxuriant beard, concealing the absence of a tie. “Dr James walked up and down,” as Eddie remembered him; “if it was the Upper Bench, round and round, because it was a turret room. He walked like a Red Indian, placing one foot exactly in front of the other. He kept a small private notebook in which he put favourable remarks about a boy, but a quotation from the Lays of Ancient Rome would gain at least five marks a go.” This was fortunate for the Knoxes, reared since nursery days on the Lays. The finest scholar on the staff, however, was Robert Whitelaw, Rupert Brooke’s godfather, who taught classics to the Twenty, the form below the VIth. He is described as looking like a bird of prey, and was unable to correct examinations without listening to the music of a barrel organ, which he hired to play underneath his window. “I don’t think I ever felt so grand,” Eddie thought, “as when we were set to translate a poem of Matthew Arnold’s into Latin, and I hit on the same couplet as Whitelaw.” Eccentrics scarcely disturbed the late-Victorian schoolboy, who, however, had a rare sense of quality, and recognized the expert.
Undoubtedly Rugby could claim to “harden”. The boys worked an eleven-hour day, with two hours for prep. Hacking, scragging, mauling and tripping were supposed to have disappeared under The Bodger’s rule, but the prefects punished by making a wrongdoer run past an open door three times while they aimed a kick at him. Ribs got broken that way. At breakfast, rolls flew through the air and butter was flicked onto the ceiling, to fall, when the icy atmosphere had thawed out, onto the masters’ heads. There was a strong faction in favour of the Boers during the South African War, and strikes against the horrible food; to counter them, Dr James was obliged to eat a plateful, in furious indignation, in front of the whole school, but then, furious indignation was his usual attitude. All the notices he put up ended with the words THIS MUST STOP.
The tradition of Arnold was continued with frequent compulsory chapels, but Eddie, and later Wilfred, were less influenced by these than by another boy in School House, “a rotund, ridiculous, good-natured boy, who had from the start the sort of quiet purpose that earned respect—rather grudging, I suppose.” This was Billy Temple, the future Archbishop of Canterbury.
Eddie liked Rugby well enough and accepted its routine, though he particularly enjoyed the moments when it was interrupted. One midday a boy threw a squash ball which exactly struck the hands of the great clock that set the time for the whole school, and stopped it. Masters and boys, drawing their watches out of their pockets as they hurried across the yard, to compare the false with the true, were thrown into utter confusion. It turned out
