1.

I AM not of those who thoroughly disbelieve in British education. I have seen so much of the foreign product that I have come to feel that our school system, if placed on a wider basis, may yet prove best adapted to our national temperament. It is true, of course, that it standardises character and suppresses originality: that it somewhat ruthlessly subordinates the musical to the gymnastic. I am not convinced, however, that this is a bad thing. It provides society with a mass of standardised entities who, although unintelligent, yet do in fact possess τò βovλεvτɩκóv: upon the individual the effect is only rarely disastrous. The physically gifted enjoy for a short space of years a prominence of which it would be ungracious to deprive them: nor do I think it unfitting that during the same period the intellectuals should very frequently and brutally be snubbed. True originality will by such measures merely be pruned to greater florescence; and sham originality will, thank God, be suppressed.

I admit, however, that my own mental development was checked by my education for a period of some ten years. But the circumstances were exceptional. My home life was so unusually exciting, my school life so unusually dull, that a gulf was formed between myself and my education which it took me a decade to bridge. On the one hand was Morocco, disturbing and aromatic, with wide nights beside the campfire, the smell of gum-cistus, the rootling of wild boar in the swamp behind the hill, the boom of a warmed Atlantic on a distant beach. And on the other were “The Grange “(Folkestone) and subsequently Wellington College; the smell of varnished wood and Sunlight soap, the smell of linseed oil in the pavilion, the white light of acetylene gas upon a Latin grammar. Between these two, sundering them by four days of seasickness, came “the journey”; the heavy P. & O. seething past the light of Ushant and out into the cold wet loneliness beyond. Thirty-six times during those years did I either cross or recross the Bay of Biscay, and thirty-six times did I lie for three days in my cabin while my brothers tried to revive me with exhortations and cheap Médoc and little bits of cake.

I think also that both my private and my public school were exceptionally rigid and restrictive. At the Grange we were cold and underfed: we were incessantly being bothered to live up to our moral tone, which, so they assured us, was higher than that of any school in England. Mr. Hussey, the Head Master, would speak to us of “high endeavour” and kick us if we made the slightest noise. I was puzzled by all this and spent my time dreaming about things to eat, dreaming about warm rooms, dreaming constantly about Morocco. Mr. Moore, the Latin master, had a pair of skis in his sitting-room; Mr. Harrison, the man who taught sums, had only four fingers on his left hand; Mr. Reece one summer gave me a nectarine. I was not in the least unhappy, only absent-minded: they cursed me for being untidy, for laughing in form, for drawing pictures. And the impression arose in me that neither the games nor the lessons nor the high moral tone were things in which, somehow, the masters expected me to share.

At Wellington it was different: one ceased so completely to be individual, to have any but a corporate identity, that the question scarcely arose whether one might or might not be odd. One was just a name, or rather a number, on the list. The authorities in their desire to deprive us of all occasion for illicit intercourse deprived us of all occasion for any intercourse at all. We were not allowed to consort with boys not in our own house: a house consisted of thirty boys, of whom ten at least were too old and ten too young for friendship; and thus during those four years my training in human relationships was confined to the ten boys who happened more or less to be my contemporaries. In addition, one was deprived of all initiative of action or occupation. The masters took a pride in feeling that not only did they know what any given boy should be doing at that particular moment, but that they knew exactly what the said boy would be doing at 3.30 p.m. six weeks hence. We had thus no privacy and no leisure, there was never open to us the choice between two possible alternatives. I entered Wellington as a puzzled baby and left it as a puzzled child. And the vices which this system was supposed to repress flourished incessantly and universally, losing in their furtive squalor any educative value which they might otherwise have

I repeat that I was not unhappy. I took everything for granted: I even took for granted the legend that we were all passionately devoted to the school. It seemed natural to me (it still seems natural to me) that being bad at games I should, although head of the house in work, be debarred from all exceptional privileges. I was not, I think, unpopular: I was on excellent terms with all the other boys: at football even I finally evolved a certain prowess by being able, at crucial moments, unerringly to tumble down. I would drop like a shot rabbit in front of an approaching onslaught: “Well played!” Marstock would shout at me: I would rise and rub myself, κὐδεï γαíωv—all aglow. But until I came into direct contact with Doctor Pollock I learnt nothing serious from Wellington; and even then my enlightenment was blurred by the vestiges of my admiration for J. D. Marstock.

2.

How fortuitous and yet how formative are the admirations which our school life thrusts upon us! With no man have I had less in common than with J. D. Marstock, and yet for years he exercised upon me an influence which, though negative, was intense. How clean he was, how straight, how manly! How proud we were of him, how modest he was about himself! And then those eyes—those frank and honest eyes! “One can see,” my tutor said, “that Marstock has never had a mean or nasty thought.” It took me six years to realise that Marstock, although stuffed with opinions, had never had a thought at all.

I can visualise him best as he appeared when head of the school, when captain of football. A tall figure, he seemed, in his black and orange jersey striped as a wasp. Upon his carefully oiled hair was stuck a little velvet cap with a gold tassel: he would walk away from the field, his large red hands pendant, a little mud upon his large red knees. He would pause for a moment and speak to a group of lower boys. “Yes, Marstock,—no, Marstock,” they would answer, and then he would smile democratically, and walk on—a slight lilt in his gait betraying that he was not unconscious of how much he was observed. Those wide open eyes that looked life straight, if unseeingly, in the face were fixed in front of him upon that distant clump of wellingtonias, upon the two red towers of the college emerging behind. His cheeks, a little purple in the cold, showed traces of that eczema which so often accompanies adolescent worth. But it was not an ugly face. A large and slightly fleshy nose: a thin mouth: a well-formed chin: a younger and a plumper Viscount Grey.

Under the great gate he went and across the quadrangle. He must first look in upon the Sixth form room, a room reserved apparently for prefects who were seldom in the Sixth. He sank into a deck chair by the fire. The other prefects spoke to him about conditions in the Blucher dormitory, and the date of the pancake run. Yes, he would have to tell the Master about the Blucher, and there was no reason why they should not have the run on Tuesday. And then out under the great gate again and across through pine trees to Mr. Kempthorne’s house. There on the floor would be his basin ready for him and a can of hot water beside it. And he had ordered that seed-cake. The smell of cocoa met him as he entered the passage. Seed-cake, and cocoa, and Pears soap, and the soft hum of a kettle on the gas: then work for two hours and then prayers. He would read the roll-call himself that evening. Oh yes! and afterwards there was a boy to be caned. The basket-work of his armchair creaked as he leant forward for the towel.

3.

When I arrived at Wellington, Marstock, who was my senior by some eighteen months, was already prominent. He took particular pains with me since, as he informed me later, I reminded him of a little cousin who had died of scarlet fever. This painful coincidence earned me his protective affection; and I for my part was awed and flattered. He thought me a good little boy with a healthy influence among my fellows: it was his lack of observation, I suppose, or his inference from the little cousin, which placed him under this misapprehension. My behaviour, however, as distinct from my basic morals, caused him many hours of puzzled anguish. He ascertained one day that I knew the names of only eight members of the school XV. He made me write them all out a hundred times, and repeat them to him after luncheon. I had forgotten to put in their initials, and had to do it again. And then next summer he discovered that I was equally weak on the subject of the XI. My incapacity for games, or “exercise” as they were called at Wellington, filled him with pained dismay. I liked games, and it was obvious that I tried: I used to flounder about and get in the way and shout very hard to the forwards. There was a system called “passing the ball”: it meant that one kicked it to someone in front, warning him by shouting out his name: “Hamilton!” I would yell—but no ball...