Corelli, with ever broadening smile, nodded appreciatively.
“Me… tempore… dulcis alebat…”
Corelli seemed surprised but did not allow it to disturb his composure. It was a lovely morning. Dyer fell silent. Corelli continued to smile. At length, “Don’t know it Dyer?”
“No, sir… oh, yes sir! ‘Carmina qui lusi… pastorum…’ It’s all coming to me now. Something about ‘te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi’” Dyer stopped, triumphant.
Corelli, smiling sadly, said, “Just stand aside boy, so I can see the green leaves.” He stared out of the window, still smiling. “Sub tegmine fagi”, he repeated, but I thought he sounded a little stern. “Not done your homework, eh Dyer?”
“Well, I had to…”
“Never mind, Dyer. Better luck next time”, and he dismissed him. No impot, nothing. But I was sure he was angry. Then why did he not take work seriously?
14
WITH the exception of religion—which seemed to offer alternations of blue skies and dark, the latter being both threatening and exciting—I entered into relative calm. I was free of prep-school bullying; the horror of Sundays, half holidays, nighttime, remained lively ghosts. Morgan in the main school was a physical representation only of himself; he was a non-entity; his relationship with all his prep school contemporaries had altered. Whether the change was located in himself or us, or both, I did not know. From the little I saw I did not think he had changed: his friend Pickett had—he was more intelligent, more cruel. The continuation of that friendship was one respect in which Morgan showed his lack of change.
The morale of the main school was powerful enough to show up clearly the defects of the prep school and the disastrous cancer of Hirst’s tragedy. What was done to him by the laws of his time seems to me to be the outcome of the unspeakable cruelty of a nation dominated by a prep-school mentality.
The main school, which I have no intention of sparing from criticism, was well disciplined, extremely enlightened. It can stand comparison with any other known to me since. It was lively intellectually and emotionally, and therefore not a comfortable place to live in for any of us, but particularly uncomfortable for bullies like Pickett and Morgan. For whatever reason, these two left before they were sixteen. What happened to them I do not know. It was right, for the good of the school as a whole, that they were removed. The question posed by their presence or absence loomed large in my mind. I can see now that it repeated itself with variations many times in the course of my life. It resembled a mathematical problem set in examinations. The mathematician can see it is the ‘same’ problem; not so the student who either cannot recognize it in its new formulation, or thinks of it as ‘disguised’ simply to make things difficult. I did not recognize the underlying pattern when I became aware of H. N. Browne and ‘Bilge’ Browne.
They were two Sixth Formers who shared the same study. H.N. came of a wealthy family, though I did not know this at the time. ‘Bilge’ was intelligent, tiresome and, as his nickname indicated, disliked. I knew nothing of either because both occupied exalted positions, but from time to time there were certain curious emotional flurries. ‘C’mon”, said an excited contemporary, “watch the fun!” “Why, what’s the matter?” But he had gone and I immediately followed, unwilling to miss an exciting adventure.
Some forty or fifty boys were collected at the cinder track which surrounded the Old Field. It was in full view of the School House, but some fifty yards of track were on a slope sufficient to afford concealment if a boy undergoing a customary punishment of having to run ten or sixteen tracks wished to evade the supervising prefect’s scrutiny. The boys had collected at the part nearest the School House and therefore least concealed from observation. Here a curious scene was being enacted.
H. N. had used pliers to cut holes in the wire fencing and through these holes he had, presumably with some assistance, inserted the wrists of his victim so that Bilge was held captive in the figure of a Saint Andrew’s cross, his feet being similarly held at the other extremity. Having achieved his purpose H.N. had walked off leaving Bilge to be scrutinized by anyone who chose. As the wire had been repaired by H.N. he could not release himself. No one took advantage of his helpless position; he was finally released by two moderately senior but otherwise undistinguished boys.
On another occasion I was present early enough to see the start. It took place in an old hut which served as a gymnasium and contained various pieces of apparatus suitable for the purpose. The crowd of boys was of much the same proportion but this time, since it was indoors, the chances of secrecy were greater—though owing to the number of spectators, still slight. This time H.N. was tying Bilge, face downward, to the rungs of a ladder which spanned the width of the gymnasium horizontally. As far as I know the story followed the same course: H.N. walked off; Bilge was not molested after he had been secured; in time someone else released him.
Some time after this H.N. must have been reprimanded; the Headmaster announced to the school that it was wrong for one boy to ill-treat another. I gathered that it was particularly wrong for this to be done to a senior boy. As far as I was concerned I did not want it to happen to me.
Subsequently H.N. went to Cambridge. He was a good athlete, a fast runner, and blossomed out as a ‘blood’ who entertained in some style though without extravagance. Spotless napery, distinguished silverware is what I remember of a lunch party at which I was a guest. H.N. cannot have invited me from choice. I had been taken to see the University team play Newport at rugger and as I knew no one at Cambridge he, hearing of my plight, asked me to “come along” and join his groups of friends from school. Retrospectively I think he was being extremely tolerant and long-suffering; I cannot imagine anyone more gauche or less rewarding than I as an addition to a social event.
Had I been asked about bullying I should have denied any knowledge of it outside prep school; some ragging perhaps, but all good-hearted harmless fun. Many years later I met a man whom I recognized as a contemporary of mine. He had not become distinguished at work or games as I had before I left; I thought of him as a nice though somewhat uninteresting person. I felt that I, as was natural to me, was being friendly to him despite his colourless personality and lack of distinction. We had business to transact and I went out of my way to make these occasions social with some references, to which he made a limited response, to the ‘old days’—1 did not call them the ‘good’ old days. I did not think he was pleased to see me, but I attributed this to his being somewhat overawed by me.
It took me time to understand that in fact he hated me. It is the more surprising that I was unaware of this because his feelings were not just active dislike and repulsion, but thorough going deep hatred not unmixed with fear and contempt. Yet I could remember nothing that I had ever done against him or any of his friends. There was, however, no doubt about it—I was the address to which the hate was properly directed.
While expressing freely my dislike of others whom I feared and hated, it seems to me that I failed to see activities of my own. These were obscured for me by my own efficient methods of camouflage. I do not now expect to evade my own capacity for self-deception and self-admiration; my discovery, though unpleasant, stimulated my curiosity.
At first I tried to remember instances in which I had set out to overpower another physically. I at once recalled an occasion which was more terrifying in retrospect than at the time. Three or four of us were indulging in horseplay with a boy called Greene. I had a piece of string looped about his throat, untied and loose. I pulled the ends together and at once he lost consciousness; I let go and he recovered. The event was so sudden and such my ignorance that I thought he was pretending, but I did not require much persuasion that he was not; my own observations convinced that some disaster had nearly occurred. The game stopped; an older boy told me I should never have played with string around his throat—”it might have killed him”. I was too frightened by this time to admit it and laughed the idea to scorn. Later, ho
wever, I asked a master—without admitting any personal concern other than biological curiosity. I was not reassured. The next morning at nine o’clock, the regular hour for seeing the Headmaster, I went and made a clean breast of the matter, showing how guilty and anxious I had become. He reassured me but told me that if the string had been knotted and I had not been able to loosen it Greene would have been dead in thirty seconds. He dismissed me saying he would make an announcement to the school; he added that he was glad I had come to him. The next day in front of the whole school, but without mentioning names or any particulars, he issued a general warning that boys should never, in playing or wrestling, use string and certainly not in the vicinity of the throat, as this could be highly dangerous. I was glad he said no more—I had had my lesson. Greene, I think, had not really known anything about it—or is this; one of those ideas of ‘the fox likes it’ type?
The next of my heart-searchings brought to mind an occasion when I was playing water polo in a pre-breakfast practice game. H. N. Browne, my immediate opponent, swung his arm and hit me in the eye. I was aware instantly of intense pain. I crawled out and began to vomit. I was too crazed with pain to know what was happening. A master was fetched and I was removed to the sick room to await the surgeon, as it was found that a piece of the white of my eye was hanging from the eyeball by a thread of connective tissue. From half past six that morning I lay till half past two in the afternoon when the surgeon arrived; I must have been only on the edge of consciousness all that time. He injected cocaine in the eye, replaced the displaced piece and put in a couple of stitches. The cocaine had stopped the pain but I could see the needle and hear a tearing as it entered my eye.
I remember waking in a confused way to see my mother by my bedside; I could not think why she was there when she should have been in London. She told me that the doctor had said it was “all right now”. A week or two later I went to the doctor’s surgery to have the stitches removed. I dreaded more pain but it turned out to be of no importance—a slight prick and it was all over.
I was incredulous but vaguely gratified to be assured that I had been the subject of an announcement to the whole school. The Headmaster had said I had nearly lost the sight of my eye and he urged players to be more careful in future. I could not imagine how we were to be ‘more careful’; I still believe the same thing might have happened the very next day to yet another boy.
There was at school a boy, slightly bigger than I, who was shortsighted to an extent that compelled the use of thick lenses which gave him a noticeably owl-like appearance so that he came into the class of those whose physical defects made them helpless and vulnerable. He always looked miserable and this stimulated the impulse to exploit his ‘miserable’ resources, included amongst which was his inability to play games. As there was no outlet, as today there would be, for playing any game such as chess which might have revealed his intellectual capacity, he was reduced to working. Unfortunately for him he appeared to be as ‘hopeless’ at that as at everything else. One afternoon I found myself with nothing to do—a situation in which, I had been trained to believe, Satan could be relied upon to find work for my idle hands. Nor, from my experience, was this an implausible belief. And there, asking for trouble—presumably at Satan’s prompting—was Maynard. He was applying his short sight to trying to read; it took but a moment to snatch his book. I did not even have to think; there was no interval between the desire and the appropriate action. To my surprise I found my wrists firmly grasped; I could not free them. I was extremely indignant; I was stronger than he, being by this time a successful games player with considerable prestige. I told him to let go. He took no notice. Luckily there was no one to see my predicament, but at any moment someone might have come in. I remembered that I had been told by friends of his parents that at his previous school he had been bullied and forced to kiss his tormentors’ boots. I had been asked to befriend him and save him from similar ill treatment. In my helpless position I could not think of any way in which I could turn this to good account. He did not have to say anything; he had only to wait till someone came in to witness my humiliation.
I said, “Let me go.” He tightened his grip. So—he could not read; I could not get loose. He said, “You thought I was too weak to hold your hands.” This was a remark I could not refute. Finally he let go. He said nothing more and I cannot think what face-saving ritual I discovered—probably none at all.
I do not remember learning anything from that experience, but I do remember avoiding the temptation offered by weakness and helplessness; I avoided not only Maynard but any emotional situation which might precipitate another such experience. I should say it was my intention to avoid such a situation, but I soon forgot what I was intending to avoid. I retained only an incomprehensible vestige of the experience. I can now think only of a sense of disaster, past and impending, in which either my companion, or more probably I, was being shaken by sobs.
Misery at school had a dynamic quality. That is where Dean Farrar was baffling. In the prep school Eric or Little by Little seemed false. In my imagination the characters were always miserable and dying, but in my experience school was not passive depression. Eric was a part of the misery of school—not a good story about it.
Night in the dormitory was a time when things happened. Boys talked in their sleep, they sobbed, they cried out. In the morning, as likely as not, they knew nothing about it.
“I say Richards, you were making a row last night!”
“Really? What sort of row?”
“Oh, yelling and shouting. You kept on saying ‘Don’t’ as if someone was strangling you.”
“Funny! Don’t remember a thing about it.”
There were horrific stories of sleep-walking which were part of the saga not only of my school but, as I discovered, of school life in general. I told my cousin about the occasion when a boy had been swinging on a gas-bracket and his weight had caused it to pull out of its ball and socket joint. A master had, with great presence of mind—
“I know”, said my bored and sophisticated cousin, “he rushed to the bathroom, got a cake of soap and plugged the gas pipe till it could be mended”.
“How did you know?”, I said indignantly.
“Why, that old chestnut is as old as the hills!”
“But I know for a fact it happened because it was the master himself who told me.”
“It always is”, said Roy, “Beaks never wash because they use up all the soap plugging gas pipes.”
15
IN those pre-Freudian days sex, nurtured and cosseted and titillated by the segregation of boys in public schools, was a PROBLEM. At considerable expense of mental pain, money and time, this problem was then all set for solution. The machinery for its solution was, by a happy coincidence, the same as that used for its creation—religion and law—so that I never thought that religion had any other function than the regulation of my and other people’s sexual activities. My increasing development ran parallel with increasing loathing and hatred of sex and religion and rules—all equally fatuous. It did not occur to me that there might be something wrong with a creator who created sex and did not allow you to exercise it till some unspecified date in the distant future, or that there was something wrong with sex and its rules.
There were words which were associated with the domain of ‘self-abuse’. We did not use the term ‘masturbation’, and were too ‘refined’ to use others available to ‘rough’ boys. Even when I came to know it later, ‘masturbation’ had much of the same Hellish Grandeur of ‘expelled’. Our vocabulary had an iridescence of terror, satanic splendour and Biblical mystery. Onan’s story used to stimulate emotional ripples; the powers of Darkness, still prowling and prowling around, returned with their former glory refurbished; ‘Fight the good Fight/With all thy might’ also seemed to revive the dying embers of sexuality—crushed beneath the load of boredom. It must have been my first experience of the rejuvenating quality of guilt, though at the time I experienced it mor
e as the beneficent glow of Salvation. Saint Paul was a great stand-by with his ‘whole armour’ of Faith.
Jones in the prayer meetings had contributed a warm, cosy, though slightly humid emotion to the sexual orchestra. “Oh God”, he would start. “Oh God indeed”, my sinking heart would respond. “Thou kno west…”
‘Good God, said God, I’ve got my work cut out.’—but there had to be a J. C. Squire and a war before that phrase was available, otherwise I might have had a straw to which I could cling.
I was reminded of Jones years later when the head of a medical unit used to address the assembled medical and surgical staff at regular intervals. “I have an announcement to make. I am sorry to say that Matron has complained to me that the nurses are very shocked—” “Oh Christ” broke in an impatient senior surgeon, “has Kisch been saying ‘fuck’ again?” The Dean of Studies inclined his head reverently, sadly, to admit that indeed it was so.
A great hospital with its obstetric and gynaecological departments had advantages over a public school with its powerful, moral, pre-1914 traditions. We had to do what we could with a veil of modesty worn with the impenetrability of the armour of faith. By 1920, having—as my friend Nokes said—supplemented the education provided by a non-conformist school with experience extended by God’s War, (Holy, soft nations, for the use of) we could go, cleansed as by fire, up to the University with a wisdom which had not been within the reach of our forebears. By 1945 the cleansing qualities of war had become too abrasive; now we are able to try LSD, marijuana (‘bhang’ to you my poor, ignorant, little Indian self) and other fruits of enlightenment. I am surprised to find how rigid, old fashioned, uncomprehending I have become, although I have always been naturally intolerant and self-opinionated; it is only the opinions which have altered.
As I have indicated, bullying which was overt and easily recognizable was rare; what there was of it could be, and was, dealt with adequately. But the cruelty embedded in the school system could not be dealt with because it was not possible in those days to detect it by the tentative groping methods available. What could we do? Masters and boys alike were caught in a web which we did not see even as we struggled to free ourselves. Who could recognize danger in piety, ardent patriotism to school and games heroes? There were those who suspected that the danger was not all confined within the bournes recognized by convention. Corelli was typical both in his strength and his weakness. His protest, and that of such boys as were attracted to him, would have been more likely to engender today’s licence than the Golden Rule. ‘Sublimation’, not yet a Freudian term, was used by some for what in fact was a substitution. Games were substituted for sex; even religion was thought of by the more advanced as if it were some harmless substitute. No one thought that sublimation could mean the reaching for, yearning for games which were sublime, a religion that was sublime and not a stopper that could dam back the noxious matter till it stank, or bury the growth of personality till it turned cancerous.
The Long Week-End 1897-1919 Page 10
