the walls of his study at school. And, so great was man’s desire for a sense of safety and familiarity, that he pinned up one of his study pictures. It was called Dad’s Girl, a rather out-of-date blonde sucking orangeade through a straw. The picture had often been used for target practice by the cads, and it had dart, boot, and kiss marks on it.
He hadn’t taken to the idea of a public school, and rather regretted leaving the smaller pond of a preparatory school. He supposed he was rather feeble about it, and not a little ungrateful, yet somehow when the prospectus arrived from the Bursar that morning, he was far more aware of his silent father’s antics with toast and butter and marmalade, than he was of the contents of the illustrated brochure. There were tough-looking boys swinging on ropes, and there was a large matron standing grinning threateningly in a brown doorway. A huge swimming bath looked singularly cold, and deep, and there was an immensely high diving board.
There was an unnerving picture of the Headmaster, with bull-like features and bulging eyes, with both ears torn to shreds through hearty games of rugger. He seemed to be riddled with learning. Staff: Headmaster (since 1908)—P. H. Quantam, MA, Late Scholar of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; VIth Form Master at Worcester College, Oxford; late Exhibitioner of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
There followed an imposing list of Assistant Masters to the Senior School, only slightly less riddled with learning, and a list of the Assistant Masters to the Junior School, ‘for boys under fourteen’. In small print at the top, The Visitors were mentioned, and they appeared to be Vice-Chancellors, Presidents and Wardens and Chairmen of Governors. Wardens? A mental picture of Dartmoor came, a little mistily. The pater’s scrunching echoed sharply while he was thinking of Mr Quantam’s birch rod, which he would be sure to have, because here it said: ‘… Any boy failing to take part in school games without special permission in advance from the Headmaster, thus spoiling the game for his fellows, is liable to corporal punishment.’ And it said the playing field was the finest in the whole South of England!
He spent all that morning staring glassily at the prospectus, and accusing himself of being dreadfully ungrateful and feeble, and not like other boys. Yet he felt queerly pleased to be ‘different’.
He felt he already knew the school inside out, and it was as chill inside as it was out.
It was also vast. There were five hundred boys.
There were four Houses, called North, South, East and West. He was to go to West House, under Mr and Mrs Deem. The pater had evidently already seen them, and he thought Mr Deem ‘a fine man’, and Mrs Deem ‘extremely sensible’.
There was an OTC, and several vigorous sergeant-majors; there were various quite incomprehensible things printed here and there in Latin, and not only in Latin, but in Roman figures as well; there was a Chapel covered in ivy, lists of places which were out of bounds (penalty—a flogging), lists of Distinguished Old Boys, which appeared to be very broadminded, including abbots, airmen and actors. Nearly all seemed to have been shot in some war or other.
There was a picture of ‘a lecture room’, and ‘the new laboratory’, and ‘a classroom’, and ‘the cloisters leading to Big School (fifteenth century)’.
He felt unsettled and uneasy.
But he liked things to be gentle and settled, he liked reading by the fire better than charging about with heavyweights in the bitter wind. He had never been flogged, and dreaded even meeting Mr Quantam, let alone being flogged by him. He was prepared to loathe everyone. It was a sentence, and he disapproved of prisons.
Also, the town was associated with his sentence of incarceration. He soon hated the trams and the wide congested Broad Street, and saw nothing picturesque about the Old Prison and the Old Castle, which represented to him nothing but a minimum distance for alternative Sunday walks. There was a smelly tannery on the route, and there was the empty shop where somebody had had his head battered in, though nobody had been hanged for it yet. The police knew who it was, but there wasn’t enough proof. This was to be most attractive for a few terms, but soon it was a bore. It wasn’t even fun any more, then, seeing strange men pass the shop, and thinking: ‘Perhaps you’re the murderer himself—walking about free!’ The town was noted for museums and soap. Nearly every big building was either a museum, or else it was a soap factory. There were hundreds of lime trees and horse chestnut trees, and tram lines wandered everywhere, making cycling slightly dangerous. There were rows of big, dull houses, red and grey, with strong drain pipes, and they were one and all studded with brass plates: doctors, dentists, surgeons and psychologists, for there was a well-known hospital just out of the town of vast dimensions.
There was a college of dubious repute, several squalid schools one never played or mentioned, and a theatre which was now given over to the amateurs, when it was not a cinema.
The trams clanged continually through everything, and you could hear them in the distance at night. They made you feel that you were indeed in a cell. The world was very far away, and your sentence was years yet. You were only fourteen or fifteen, and you wouldn’t leave until you were at least seventeen.
These were the years which were supposed to decide what a man was going to be and do in the world.
Queerly, hardly anybody asked Ernest what he was going to be or do.
There was too much routine, too much going on, for masters to ask that.
Each new arrival was the same.
He would reach the school gates and there, up the long lime tree-bordered drive, with the cricket pavilion away over there on the left of School Field, was the school itself spread out in its familiar splendour. You couldn’t see North House or East House, for they were right behind the quadrangle, near the laboratories and the sanatorium. But you could see South House away there on the left, and straight up the drive past ‘porter’s lodge’ was West House. Taxis were going up the drive and down it, and up and down the other drive past the chapel, empty or laden with trunks.
Rooks sat about dismally on the tower of Big School.
Porter’s white cat strolled out of the lodge, licking its chops. Porter and his fat old wife came out as if to sniff the smell of the new term. They were called Mr and Mrs Gray, but when you saw Mrs Gray, which was rarely, you said for some reason or other, ‘Hallo, Mrs Porter,’ and when you saw porter, you said, ‘Hallo, Gray.’ He was very popular and nice, and always on your side, even when he came into the classroom with a note from the Head to be read out. While the master was reading it threateningly out, old Gray always winked slyly, and at a certain point in the recitation rubbed what he liked to call ‘yer bum’, with circular motions of his free hand. ‘Boys are reminded of two things: The new school fields in Elliot Road are out of bounds except for prearranged matches; two boys were severely flogged this morning for removing test tubes from the laboratory without permission.’ The Grays’ little cottage was practically hidden by its own drainage system, which was a sea of pipes, all of which dripped and gurgled behind patchy clusters of dirty-looking ivy. The atmosphere within looked pitch black, and smelt vaguely of tea.
He would say: ‘Hallo, Gray—hallo, Mrs Porter,’ and old Gray would twinkle and call out (he knew absolutely everyone’s name): ‘Ha’r, young Bisham, well, how are we, then, glad to be back? Watch out for yer bum this term, my lad; be sure to do that, sir! I’ve had to get in two dozen new birch rods, ’cos of the way you all went on last term!’
‘Oh, get on, Gray,’ one always called out. ‘I know you’re ragging!’
Mrs Porter would be bending over three square inches of flower border, and revealing parts the size of an elephant.
Ernest
