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 widow. “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 favor 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 that the boy, who confessed at once, had been practicing the shot for two years. The Bodger called this “un-English.” Eddie did not agree. The patient, self-contained, self-imposed pursuit of an entirely personal solution seemed to him most characteristically English.
At St. Philip’s, Mrs. K. was undismayed by the routine of the diocese. She taught herself shorthand to deal with her husband’s correspondence, gave heart to the shy chaplains, charmed the ordinands, and managed surprisingly well on an inadequate stipend, though the housekeeping was somewhat haphazard, and the wine was cheap and sometimes undrinkable. Perhaps only Mrs. K. could have tamed Alice, the cook (though in those days it was assumed that all cooks were ill-tempered), but charm, energy and devotion carried all before them. With such a wife, it was clear that Edmund Knox would soon be more than a Suffragan Bishop.
The holiday expeditions continued, but now with much wider range, with the advent of bicycles. A Coventry firm presented a machine to the Bishop; Mrs. K., although as a horsewoman she mistrusted the contraption, learned quicker than her portly husband, who was, he said, “an ardent devotee, until, one day, the bar snapped and let me down”; the children all followed, teaching themselves on Raleighs paid for by old Mrs. Knox. Eddie and Dilly were soon rapidly skimming through the Birmingham traffic, the girls pedaling gamely along in hats and white cotton gloves, the little boys doing the best they could, before the days of freewheel, their short legs turning rapidly. Rules were immediately invented, and it became a point of honor among the four brothers never to get off even up the steepest hill. Pale with fatigue, Wilfred and Ronnie toiled upward, Eddie describing wide circles around them, until he brought them to a halt by the wayside, with the words THIS MUST STOP.
Ronnie sometimes stayed behind. He had become fascinated with dictionaries. He threatened, in spite of a rule that no one must speak a language that the others did not understand, to learn Sanskrit and Welsh. “I can still see Ronnie,” Winnie wrote, “on the seat by the Welsh driver of the waggonette which conveyed
