It's Too Late Now

by A. A. Milne

  It is as difficult now, as it was difficult then, to feel any enthusiasm for the practice of tanning. On the other hand, I am not roused to an extreme of indignation at the thought of it. I don’t suppose it did much harm, either to those that gave or those that took. It was not the actual pain but the perpetual fear of it which seems to me now to have been such an unnecessary hardship. Every evening after tea, as one walked back through Cloisters from Hall to College, one was aware that within five minutes the door might slam and a case be called; in which event one’s only guarantee of immunity from tanning would be the fact that one had been tanned earlier in the week; mens conscia recti was of no value. It seems to me now a pity that a small boy’s enthusiasm for life should have had this arbitrary shadow cast over it.

  I was talking the other day to one who bears some degree of responsibility for the good name of that famous school X—. He said: ‘Your boy’s at Stowe, isn’t he? Is it really a fact that new boys are happy at Stowe?’ Something in the tone of his voice made me add a note of apology to mine as I admitted that they were. ‘They aren’t happy at X—’ he said. For a moment I misunderstood him again, thinking that he was claiming this as one of the assets of his great School. But it was not so. He was genuinely anxious to discover Stowe’s secret. One obvious explanation was that at Stowe (as, I suppose, at any good modern school) the rules of conduct are based on reason, not custom. The tabus are the tabus of the preparatory school and the home, already learnt. No shock of apprehension clutches at the new boy’s heart as he realizes that he has turned up his right trouser instead of his left. He goes about his business unconstrained by any artificial code of manners. That is surely to the good. The business of growing-up is complicated enough without adding to it these arbitrary embarrassments.

  6

  There were no baths in College; it was enough that it was built by Christopher Wren. One cannot have everything; probably there are no baths in St Paul’s Cathedral. There was no hot water in College; but in every cubicle (or ‘house,’ as it was called) there was a shallow tin bath, in which one could make cold splashing noises every morning. These noises were about all that Juniors did towards keeping clean. After a muddy game of football in the afternoon, one had a quarter of an hour in which to get the mud off with cold water and change back into a stiff white shirt, Eton collar and white bow-tie. If it was one’s turn to shout ‘Rutherford’s coming’ one had five minutes less. It can be imagined how white and well-tied the ties were. On the rare occasions when Ken and I went out for the week-end, our kind hostess (forewarned by Mother) led us straight to the bathroom, and left us there to soak. We soaked: more out of kindness to her, and in return for the enormous meals we proposed to eat, than from any personal itch for it. Small boys can assimilate comfortably quite a lot of dirt. Luckily, when we were bigger and more ready for it, hot water had reached College. There were still no baths, but there was a divinely hot (if you wanted it hot, and cold if you wanted it cold) spray-and-shower. To-day, so quickly do our old schools move with the times, there are real baths in College. The argument that Warren Hastings did without one (and look at him) is no longer valid.

  It will be seen that life in College was hard, but it was not unhealthy. In my seven years there I was never once ‘out of school’ for illness. On the whole we were as happy as one could expect to be at school. Happiness at school is relative. A boy is happier at his public school than he was at his private school, or happier this term than last. Only at one period was I positively happy, waking up in the morning and saying, ‘Hooray, another day beginning.’ I must have been a Third Election by then, with no College cares and apprehensions; I must have been in the Mathematical Sixth, and free to work or slack as I chose; and I was, as I remember, just beginning to find myself at football, so that, in fact, I was waking up and saying, ‘Hooray, I’m going to play football this afternoon.’ For a Third Election, keen on games, untroubled by work, with a little money (his own or his father’s) in his pocket, College was as good a home from home as could be found. As a Third Election I was certainly untroubled by work.

  My decision at the age of twelve not to be Senior Wrangler was to save me a great deal of anxiety, for Westminster in those days lived only for the Classics. No ardent mathematician could have breathed happily in that atmosphere. The young Newton sat in the corner of a form-room whose natural inhabitants were wrestling with factors or the first book of Euclid, and only when the clamour of these legitimists had been silenced for a moment by the awful shape of an isosceles triangle on the blackboard, was the master free to stroll across to the rebel in the corner, and say, ‘Well, Newton, how are you getting on?’

  One of the pleasant privileges of Westminster, dating, as most of them did, from an earlier Queen Elizabeth, was the disposal to deserving scholars of Maundy money. A complete set of Maundy money consists of a silver penny, a silver twopenny-piece, a silver threepenny-piece and a silver fourpenny-piece. These were distributed, a coin at a time, to the boys who had come out top of their forms or sets over a certain period. The correct marking of our mathematical set in our last year there presented difficulties. If it were the Algebra hour, Ken and I, sitting together, might be doing Indeterminate Equations, the boy next to us The Theory of Probability, and half a dozen others might be no farther on than the Binomial Theorem. Moreover, some of us might be spending the hour on Hall and Knight’s exposition of the theory, and the others, having already studied it, might now be solving problems for themselves. Nevertheless, at the end of the hour each boy would be asked for the record of his work, so that it could be entered up in the mark-book. Half-a-dozen boys doing problems on the Binomial Theorem might be distinguished by the number of problems which each had solved, but it was not easy to see how ‘Six, sir’ from one of these boys could be compared with ‘Two and book-work, sir’ from Ken or me. I didn’t complain of this system of marking, because, whatever the master’s method of reducing us to a common denominator, I always came out top; but it didn’t seem fair to Ken, who was doing the same work as I and the same amount of it. So, for a term, we arranged that he should win the Maundy money. When I said ‘Two and book-work,’ he said ‘Three and book-work,’ when I said ‘Six,’ he said ‘Seven.’ It was no good, I continued to come out top. As soon as I had collected the complete set of Maundy money, I made a point of asking for threepenny bits. These, being just like ordinary threepenny bits, could be shared by us up-Sutts.

  At the end of my third year we had reached the fringe of the Sixth and were ready to become whole-time mathematicians. We said good-bye to Latin, French and Greek. With the English language we had never had any official dealings and the only History we had learnt was the history of Greece and Rome. We now said farewell to Alcibiades and the mother of the Gracchi. We were in the Mathematical Sixth, and almost literally our own masters. I was foruteen.

  Chapter Seven

  l

  Streete Court was ‘an extremely desirable residence, Elizabethan in parts, and enclosed in its own ornamental grounds of upwards of seven acres in extent.’ The main part of the house was L-shaped, but there was an irregular third side which included not only ‘all the usual offices,’ but such unusual ones as a laundry and dairy. We even kept, killed and turned into bacon our own pigs, the architect having provided ‘facilities’ for this which it seemed a pity not to use. There was ‘excellent stabling,’ which housed a pony; an excellent pony as willing to take us for a ride as it was to mow the cricket-field or fetch the luggage from the station. There were two tennis-lawns, a croquet-lawn, a woodland border full of birds’-nests, a kitchen-garden full of fruit, a duck-pond full of ducks and hives full of honey. We loved it all.

  The family’s living-room was now called the library; it seemed more in keeping with our new state. This must have been a billiard-room at one time. There was a high window-seat along one side from which one could look down upon the players; and on the glass borders of these windows were engraved
such helpful aphor­isms as ‘Lookers-on, see most of the game,’ ‘Nothing venture, nothing win.’ The fireplace was Dutch-tiled inside and out, with Biblical scenes not always easy to identify, one prophet in his beard being much like another; but the Whale returning Jonah was unmistakable, and the attention of visitors was always called to it. The big open fireplace in the hall was also Biblical, but more embarrassing. The prospective parent missed it as she was shown in by the maid, but saw it as she was conducted out by Father. ‘Oh, look at all that carving,’ she cried, ‘isn’t that interesting, what is it?’ She went a little closer, Father clearing his throat and saying that Thanet was noted for its invigorating air and that he was quite sure that Geoffrey—Gerald—that her boy— She was now in no doubt. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said in a detached art-gallery voice, ‘how interesting. What were you saying, Mr Milne?’ Potiphar’s wife, a woman of full figure, was telling Joseph that there was no hurry.

  The broad staircase had the broadest rail for sliding down which I have ever felt, but it ended in a lamp, which made it necessary to take the rail side-saddle. Upstairs there was something which I have never seen before nor have seen since, a bathroom with two baths in it, one big and one small, end to end. For a school of little boys, whose baths needed superintendence, this was just what was wanted: the matron could soap three at a time but for ordinary folk one would have thought that two baths of normal size would have given the best combination of comfort and familiarity. However, here it was, one of the less Elizabethan features of the house. Tossing up for the big bath, Ken and I spent many happy hours there, throwing the soap at each other and catching it, with our heads still keeping the sponge in position at the back of the bath—one of the more important rules of the game. I forget what the record was, but at whatever cost to our feelings as loyal Westminsters we would have gone on soaking in those baths until we had achieved a hundred. We were always in pursuit of records at Streete Court. Father built a large play-room, called (how the word clung to him) the gymnasium, and we would spend hours in this, hitting a tennis-ball against one of the walls, until we had kept it up more than six hundred times. We had an outdoor record against the stable-door, but there was too much glass in the neighbourhood for others to be as interested in it as we were, and it was not long before attempts to improve on it were forbidden. Luckily Father had also made a ‘playground’ of the Henley House type, and across this we punted and caught a football until we had ‘done fifty.’

  At the appropriate seasons we spent a good deal of time in the kitchen-garden. There was one summer exeat when we only left our encampment under the gooseberry bushes to come in to meals. The exeat would be in the middle of term: that is, somewhere about the fifteenth of June. It is an odd thing (showing how times change and the world is not what it was) that, though I have my own gooseberry bushes now, the middle of June never finds me beneath them. Every summer as the month reaches its fullness I say to myself, ‘It must have been just about now that Ken and I made such pigs of ourselves,’ and I go to see if there is any chance of recapturing, in a slightly more grown-up way, that first fine careless rapture. But no; the gooseberries are as hard and small as cherry-stones. I return to my deck-chair and meditate upon the legendary days when poetry was music, music was still cool, and gooseberries were ripe in June.

  It was inevitable that we should start a collection of birds’-eggs. We collected the blowpipes, the special bradawl for boring the single hole through which we sucked the egg’s contents—(why were they not called suck­pipes?)—the cabinet of shelves, divided into squares, for storing the eggs, Kearton’s book for recognizing the eggs, the pink cotton-wool, the labels and the gum. Where we got the money for all this I cannot remember. We would spend Father’s money on food, but would have been horrified at the thought of spending it on anything else. Ken’s September birthday was no good for Easter; my January birthday was so close to our return to school that its gleanings would certainly have gone up-Sutts; my first Easter report might have been worth something to us but nothing was to be expected of the later ones. Yet somehow we had the money, and with it obtained all that was necessary for a really good collection. All but the eggs. Blackbird, thrush, missel-thrush, starling, hedge­-sparrow and house-sparrow, we blew and labelled these again and again, but got little further. No matter. We were London boys, and to find any sort of nest with real eggs in it was a thrill to us.

  We discovered now that there were other flowers than geranium, lobelia and calceolaria. Beneath our bedroom windows there was a dahlia bed, whose glory synchronized so steadily with the summer holidays that dahlias have made themselves a place for ever in my heart which their gaiety alone would not have given them. The flowers which Mother would send us through the summer term brought with them a nostalgia almost unbearable, whose sublimation dwelt in those sprays of wistaria which lay, a little crushed, on the top of the box, and conveyed some­how all that I felt, but could not express, of Home and Beauty. Yes, I was happy at school, but only because I had to be at school, and must get therefore what happiness I could out of it.

  2

  One way and another we got a good deal of happiness out of it, if not always in the way expected of us. We sat together now, never to be separated, in the Mathematical Sixth, which meant that we occupied one corner of a room in which some lowly mathematical set was being taught. Since we could not talk without disturbing the master-in­-charge, we wrote letters to each other: long letters detailing our plans for the next holidays. Interest was added to these letters by our custom of omitting every other word, leaving blanks which the addressee had to fill in. Our minds were sufficiently in tune for this to be possible without being easy; one could get the general sense with­out being certain of the exact word. As in my old French set, we then changed papers and marked each other’s mistakes. Sometimes our communications were in initial letters only. During ‘second school,’ for instance, it was certain that one of us would ask the other ‘SWGUSIB?’ This clearly meant ‘Shall we go up-Sutts in break?’ a question which expected the answer ‘Yes’ and got it. Ken would feel in his pockets and decide that, since we already owed Father 15/6, we might as well owe him sixteen shillings. We did.

  Work, conducted on these lines, was pleasant enough.

  Games of any kind we always enjoyed, even when they were compulsory. College in those days did not take part in Senior House Matches, but had the honour of playing the rest of the school (Queen’s Scholars v. Town boys). The honour stopped there, for, with only forty boys to choose from, we did not make much of a show at it. But it was clear that any Q.S. who was any good at all at games was compelled by duty, even when no longer by authority, to persevere with them. Under Elections, of course, had no choice. They had to do what they were told.

  Games play such a large part in a schoolboy’s life, and I have had so much pleasure from them one way and another, that I must make some mention of them here. But I realize that there is nothing so uninteresting to the athletic as the record of some other undistinguished performer’s achievements; nothing so unintelligible to the unathletic. ‘A bore is a man who insists on telling you about his last round when you want to tell him about yours,’ and he is still more of a bore if you are not quite clear whether he is talking about hockey or water-polo. So I shall be as little wearisome as possible.

  We were small and active (I the smaller and the more active) and we played football with enthusiasm, if without much distinction. When Ken left Westminster, which was two years before I did, we were still without honour, even in our own House. Then I began to grow; and in the next year I got my College colours and my second XI’s. In my last year I got my ‘pinks’ or School colours. At cricket Ken was definitely the better of the two; we both had enthusiasm, but he had style. In those days the young cricketer had to look after himself. Age and influence would take him into a ‘House Net,’ skill into a ‘School Net;’ otherwise he played in a succession of pick-up games. Since on an ordinary day
the time available for cricket was, for the first game, 2 to 3, and, for a subsequent game, 5.30 to 7, it followed that a side never had more than three-quarters of an hour’s batting, and, in consequence, that a member of it might go through a whole term without ever getting to the wicket. Form-matches on Wednesday afternoon gave him a little more hope, but in our case only a little, since we were always in a form of boys much bigger and older than ourselves. But if we never became noticeable, we enjoyed what little practice we did get, and could always look forward to a net of our own in the holidays on the Streete Court ground.

  Then, in 1896, the Captain of Cricket hit upon the brilliant idea of encouraging the young. Evening nets in the charge of the school professional were thrown open to ‘promising young cricketers,’ each house nominating two boys. As between Ken and me, Ken had the obvious claim; as between us and half-a-dozen others the College captain had no exact knowledge to guide him. But because, I must suppose, I was so small and looked so young (and promising), because I ran about so actively at football and played so enthusiastically down the long corridor on Saturday evenings, there was a Milne chosen for the net, and it was I not Ken. At the end of that term I was only just outside the College XI—a particularly strong one, with six ‘pinks’ in it–and nearly got my 3rd XI colours. In the following year (Ken’s last) he did get his 3rd XI’s, while I got my College colours and 2nd XI’s. In my last two years I had my ‘pinks.’ Which shows the value of coaching, even from a ‘pro’ who never said more than ‘You should ’ave come out to that one, sir,’ while indicating with a forward movement of the hands how this was to be done.