"I don't wish to innovate unduly," he used to say.But we ought to get in some German, you know,--for those who like it.The army men will be wanting it some of these days."He referred to the organisation of regular evening preparation for the lower boys in Big Hall as a "revolutionary change," but he achieved it, and he declared he began the replacement of the hacked wooden tables, at which the boys had worked since Tudor days, by sloping desks with safety inkpots and scientifically adjustable seats, "with grave misgivings." And though he never birched a boy in his life, and was, I am convinced, morally incapable of such a scuffle, he retained the block and birch in the school through all his term of office, and spoke at the Headmasters' Conference in temperate approval of corporal chastisement, comparing it, dear soul! to the power of the sword....
I wish I could, in some measure and without tediousness, convey the effect of his discourses to General Assembly in Big Hall.But that is like trying to draw the obverse and reverse of a sixpence worn to complete illegibility.His tall fine figure stood high on the days, his thoughtful tenor filled the air as he steered his hazardous way through sentences that dragged inconclusive tails and dropped redundant prepositions.And he pleaded ever so urgently, ever so finely, that what we all knew for Sin was sinful, and on the whole best avoided altogether, and so went on with deepening notes and even with short arresting gestures of the right arm and hand, to stir and exhort us towards goodness, towards that modern, unsectarian goodness, goodness in general and nothing in particular, which the Zeitgeist seemed to indicate in those transitional years.
7
The school never quite got hold of me.Partly I think that was because I was a day-boy and so freer than most of the boys, partly because of a temperamental disposition to see things in my own way and have my private dreams, partly because I was a little antagonised by the family traditions that ran through the school.Iwas made to feel at first that I was a rank outsider, and I never quite forgot it.I suffered very little bullying, and I never had a fight--in all my time there were only three fights--but I followed my own curiosities.I was already a very keen theologian and politician before I was fifteen.I was also intensely interested in modern warfare.I read the morning papers in the Reading Room during the midday recess, never missed the illustrated weeklies, and often when I could afford it I bought a PALL MALL GAZETTE on my way home.
I do not think that I was very exceptional in that; most intelligent boys, I believe, want naturally to be men, and are keenly interested in men's affairs.There is not the universal passion for a magnified puerility among them it is customary to assume.I was indeed a voracious reader of everything but boys' books--which Idetested--and fiction.I read histories, travel, popular science and controversy with particular zest, and I loved maps.School work and school games were quite subordinate affairs for me.I worked well and made a passable figure at games, and I do not think I was abnormally insensitive to the fine quality of our school, to the charm of its mediaeval nucleus, its Gothic cloisters, its scraps of Palladian and its dignified Georgian extensions; the contrast of the old quiet, that in spite of our presence pervaded it everywhere, with the rushing and impending London all about it, was indeed a continual pleasure to me.But these things were certainly not the living and central interests of my life.
I had to conceal my wider outlook to a certain extent--from the masters even more than from the boys.Indeed I only let myself go freely with one boy, Britten, my especial chum, the son of the Agent-General for East Australia.We two discovered in a chance conversation A PROPOS of a map in the library that we were both of us curious why there were Malays in Madagascar, and how the Mecca pilgrims came from the East Indies before steamships were available.
Neither of us had suspected that there was any one at all in the school who knew or cared a rap about the Indian Ocean, except as water on the way to India.But Britten had come up through the Suez Canal, and his ship had spoken a pilgrim ship on the way.It gave him a startling quality of living knowledge.From these pilgrims we got to a comparative treatment of religions, and from that, by a sudden plunge, to entirely sceptical and disrespectful confessions concerning Gates' last outbreak of simple piety in School Assembly.
We became congenial intimates from that hour.
The discovery of Britten happened to me when we were both in the Lower Fifth.Previously there had been a watertight compartment between the books I read and the thoughts they begot on the one hand and human intercourse on the other.Now I really began my higher education, and aired and examined and developed in conversation the doubts, the ideas, the interpretations that had been forming in my mind.As we were both day-boys with a good deal of control over our time we organised walks and expeditions together, and my habit of solitary and rather vague prowling gave way to much more definite joint enterprises.I went several times to his house, he was the youngest of several brothers, one of whom was a medical student and let us assist at the dissection of a cat, and once or twice in vacation time he came to Penge, and we went with parcels of provisions to do a thorough day in the grounds and galleries of the Crystal Palace, ending with the fireworks at close quarters.We went in a river steamboat down to Greenwich, and fired by that made an excursion to Margate and back; we explored London docks and Bethnal Green Museum, Petticoat Lane and all sorts of out-of-the-way places together.
