Alec Waugh

“ We must all work together, we must work not towards individual prosperity, but towards the prosperity of the community. No longer can we fight our enemies in the field, but we can wage a silent war, we can prepare ourselves so that afterwards we may be triumphant. We must work collectively: we must unite: the life of this camp should be like one machine, in which you are all cogs. And so, gentlemen, I have brought forward my scheme. I have called it the Pitt League, because, well, gentlemen, because it rhymes with grit. ”

“ The boy who leaves without becoming a prefect has missed, we are continually assured, the most important part of his school career. And yet what percentage of an old boys' list, I wonder, reaches the dignity of house prefectship. One gets the impression sometimes that every one, provided he stays on long enough, becomes a prefect. All school stories follow a convention. They open with the new boy closing behind him the green-baize door of the head master's study, gazing wistfully down a long corridor at the end of which is the oak door of the day room. ”

“ He envies the gilded persons whom he bears all day long from one scene of revel to another. It is human to envy the conditions of another’s life. The young girl who looks from her bedroom window on to the street below is wooed by its sense of mystery and adventure, and the inspector of omnibus tickets pauses on the top deck to gaze wistfully at the lighted window. It is the hunger for experience, for variety, for a fuller life. We should all like to live a hundred lives, to enter into the heart of every mystery, to feel every human emotion of happiness and sorrow. ”

“ A wonderful atmosphere of repose hangs over a cricket field in the morning, when the grass is still sparkling with dew, and there is silence and vast emptiness where usually is the sound of shouting and hurrying feet. There was the long luncheon interval, when the members of the Eleven would wander round the field arm in arm, or lounge on the seats lazy and contented. Gordon loved to sit in the pavilion balcony watching the white forms change across between the overs, the red ball bounce along the grass, the wicket-keeper whip off the bails, the umpire's finger go up. ”

“ School life never means so much to a boy as it does during his few months after he has left it. For he sees it transfigured in his imagination; he remembers nothing of the tiresome demands of routine, nothing of the friction between boys and masters, nothing of the long boring hours in form when he watched the patch of sunlight drift across the wall, nothing of the anxieties, the annoyances, the restrictions of a cloistered life. He sees it [Pg 218] purged of the accidental, a city of his own fashioning.
It does not last, of course, this intense nostalgia. ”

“ Perhaps the dreamer has not lost so very much, and he does at any rate carry his own world with him: he is self-sufficient; within the sure citadel of his own soul he can always find those pleasures which alone have any claim to permanence. Flaubert is always the same, behind barbed wire as in the shadow of a Wessex garden: the change of environment makes no difference there. ”

“ The glimpse through a railway-carriage window of a gabled roof, a square church tower, a particular shade of sunlight on red brick will open the pages of a chapter whose existence we had almost forgotten; will reveal in relief, in perspective—with an objective reality that at the time it did not hold for us—a facet of the past. The obvious, the superficial reflection on such occurrences would be an expression of surprise that so trivial an affair as the taste of cocoa, the smell of wet stone, the glimpse of a square-towered church, should become a window opening on childhood. ”

“ The world of ideas was far more attractive. Ferrers, although himself a quarter-mile Blue, looked upon games as a recreation, and upon school life as a mud-heap that had to be washed clean. Poetry, drama, the modern novel, these were what Ferrers loved; and Gordon was glad to find someone who thought like this. He felt uplifted after his talks with Ferrers, he walked back to the House buoyant, as it were on wings. Then as the school gates rose before him, and he heard the sound of a football bouncing in the court, the old routine caught him once more. ”

“ He lives in the standards of his youth. He has had no opportunity of testing those standards in another environment. His whole life has moved within the circle of one school.
He imbibed as a boy the public school spirit, and he did not outgrow that spirit at the university—hardly a proof of mental elasticity. He has no sense of progress or of change in the world for which he is training the young. As things have been, so shall they be. The old boy turned house master is the most powerful force in the common room. He is the chief obstacle that the enthusiast has to face. ”

“ In the time when his enthusiasms had been kept in control by the business of war, he had been an excellent soldier; but once captured, he had no outlet for his temperament. Looking down on the court from the window of his room, he was horrified at the thought of so many subalterns passing out of his hands, out of the hands of discipline back into the individual energies of civilian life. And Colonel Westcott hated individualism: he liked to see humanity moving forward in one compact body, with himself at its head. ”

“ Does he think that a book or a picture or a romantic episode is of less importance than a game of cricket? Does he seriously discuss in the same breath an innings by Knight and a novel by Mackenzie? Cricket and football! what do they matter, anyway?”
Little enough, no doubt; but then in the face of eternity does anything matter so very greatly? What are we and our works, our triumphs, our ambitions, our disasters, but accidents in the long process of effect and cause. We talk of the eternal verities, but the flowering of art is as temporal as the enjoyment we draw from it. ”

“ Gordon had always before looked on the Chief as a figurehead, who at times would unbend most surprisingly and become a man; on the cricket field, for example, when in a master's match he had fielded cleanly a terrific cut at point, and played a sporting innings; at House suppers, and, most surprisingly of all, when a row was on, Gordon had been unable to understand him. He could not dissociate him from his conception of a headmaster—a sort of Mercury, a divine emissary of the gods, sent as a necessary infliction. ”

“ Cricket was to him an art the technique of which could only be mastered after an elaborate apprenticeship. He distrusted the short cut, and we find him the most bitter opponent of the young idea. He is the eternal Tory of yesterday, of to-day and of to-morrow. And he is very human to us as he stands on the brink of change uttering his solemn warning. For it was towards the end of his career that round-arm bowling was introduced, and it is hard to realise the revolution this caused in the world of sport. ”

“ I should have before me the prospect of a hard game and a bath afterwards, and a long, lazy evening in front of the games study fire.' And, at the end of the day, on his return to his home or diggings, he is lonely with the recollection of how often at such a time he has sat in the class-room waiting impatiently for the clock to strike, waiting for the moment of freedom when he can gather his books under his arm and rush back to the house to tea, to the four delightful hours of friendship and discussion that lie in that enchanted period between lock-up and lights out. ”

“ Think of the day when you are going to be a real power, and stand up for the independence of the individual to think as he likes, not as Buller likes; for the independence of the House to run itself. 'The Bull' runs our house to-day. You hear men say, 'We can't do that, Buller would be sick!' You have to free them of Buller's tyranny, if you are going to be a man; and if you do, you can't fight in rusty armour. These masters may be fools, but they have the cards."
Gordon listened to Tester's flow of words. ”

“ Much the same licence is accorded to the courtesan, as long as she is beautiful. She can, if she chooses, be rude to men who ask her for a dance. She can make fun of them in public. She rampages through life in the pride of her youth; she can pick and choose. Her charm and her beauty are her capital. She makes a bargain with the world of routine and wealth, the world that sells cotton and builds empires, the industrious, unflagging world that asks in its spare time to be amused. ”

“ School life is so vast, so varied, so many-coloured that it would be difficult for a boy to relinquish his hold upon the ambition that lies close to him in favour of the shadowy ambitions of the life that lies beyond it. School life is too big a pedestal for the statue that is to be placed on it. It dwarfs what it should present. The boy finds on leaving school that an entirely different technique is required. It is not that the standards are changed, but the whole manner of life is altered. ”

“ For the time being art and literature are dead. Look at the rotten stuff that's being written to-day. At the beginning we were deceived by the tinsel of war; Romance dies hard. But we know now. We've done with fairy tales. There is nothing glorious in war, no good can come of it. It's bloody, utterly bloody. I know it's inevitable, but that's no excuse. So are rape, theft, murder. It's a bloody business. Oh, Caruthers, my boy, the world will be jolly Philistine the next few years. Commercialism will be made a god."
"Do you mean there is going to be nothing for us after the war?" said Gordon. ”

“ You can go when you like, and where you like. And you are appalled by the enormity of your liberation, and hastily begin to form other habits, to fling out fresh feelers, to take up golf, or to join dining clubs that meet on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month; to be once again entangled in the pattern of recurring engagements; once again to be the lackey of custom, the creature of use and wont.
There is always cricket, though; and summer weaves of its four short months a surer, clearer pattern than the winter does. There is cricket every day, and there is the county championship. ”

“ Life was a sham, a mass of muddled evolutions; the world was too slack to find out the truth, or perhaps it was afraid to discover it. For the truth was not pleasant. Gordon did not know what it was; all he saw was that life was built of shams, that no one worshipped anything but the god of things that seem. ”

“ It has been accepted as quite credible that a boy should be capable of the most extreme and loathsome brutalities, that a percentage of every school should spend its life in gambling and heavy drinking, that at least one prefect in every school should contract inconvenient liabilities at the Baron's Arms, and that to extricate himself he should forge his house-master's signature. Indeed, anything may happen provided that the course of life follows a simple process of right and wrong which leads to the triumph of virtue and the downfall of vice. ”

“ It is in the same spirit that the purveyor of cheap fiction finances the publication of his verses.
We are of the same race and the same blood, speaking the same language, having no part in the world’s business, in what is serviceable to the commercial machinery of life. Even if what we produce is a marketable commodity, even if we bring money into the pockets of publishers and promoters and actor managers, we are still the merchants of entertainment. ”

“ He devised a new scheme for avoiding work, thought out an idea for teaching forwards to heel, laughed, discussed athletics and was well content. He tried to analyse his feelings, but could not. He was now two separate persons. At times he was the dreamer, the lover of art and poetry; at another the politician, the fighter who lived every minute of his life deeply to the full, with one fixed aim before him. Gordon wondered if this apparent paradox in himself was in any way an answer of the enigma that an artist's life so frequently was utterly different from the broad outlines of his work. ”

“ He is accepted as being in a higher social position than the rest of the room, which is, of course, flattering to his pride; but it is not nice when every occupant of the room only speaks when he is spoken to. He feels himself apart. The evenings in the dormitory which, with their sing-songs, their football matches, and long talks, provide such delightful material for reminiscence, are for him cheerless. It cannot be too often repeated that the biggest mistake a boy can make at a Public School is to form friendships outside the circle of his contemporaries. ”

“ I felt, after reading it, that I knew Swinburne better than I had before. Routine is, after all, the framework of a man’s life; and it is interesting for a writer to learn how others work; at what time they write; how many words they write a day; whether they work steadily throughout the year, or in short bursts of intense concentration. It may dispel the illusion to watch a play from the wings of a theatre instead of from the stalls. ”

“ It was not till years later that Gordon came to understand the depth of unselfish idealism that burned behind the quiet modesty of the Chief; but even at first sight the least impressionable boy was conscious of being under the influence of an unusual personality. There was nothing of the theatrical pedagogue about him; he surrounded himself with no trappings of a proud authority. His voice was gentle and persuasive; his smile as winning almost as a child's. ”

“ For what little bullying exists nowadays the second and third yearers are in the main responsible. The effect of a new-found freedom is intoxicating. And there is always a boy in every house who is an irresistible butt. There is a compound German word that means 'face-that-invites-a-box-on-the-ear.' And such a physiognomy is the invariable possession of at least one scholar; in its own way the magnetic influence of such ugliness is as irresistible as the charm of a pretty woman. One has only to see that particular brand of face to want to heave a boot at it. One refrains seldom. ”

“ VII WE read Wisden in the winter on cold nights before a leaping fire and it brings back to us the sense of new-mown grass, the feel of a cricket ball and the stir of sunlight. It is a substitute for cricket: and the old harassing doubt creeps up again, the doubt whether any literature is anything beyond a substitute, the focus of an unfulfilled desire. We know how old people drug themselves with novels. ”

“ After this match a new phase in Gordon's life may be said to have begun. He had for the first time felt what it was to be really successful. When he had got his Colts' cap the world had seemed at his feet; but it was nothing to what he experienced now. For he had borne the brunt of the House's battle. He had played a principal part in a wonderful achievement. The House looked on him as one of its chosen defenders. He was in the limelight, and he had no intention of ever drifting out of it. When we have experienced the really great, the things that pleased once charm no more. ”

“ For, as things are now, it does not matter whether Sanscrit is substituted for mathematics: the boy will learn equally little of either. It is intended as a human study of public school life, as an attempt to break down that conspiracy of silence, that relationship of evasion and deceit that exists officially between parents, boys, and masters; and from time to time it will suggest solutions.
It is, of course, only an attempt. For no one person can see more than a side of the truth. However impartial we try to be, we can see in a situation only what the limitations of our personality allow us. ”

“ And he will never leave the city: he will be unfaithful to his dream; he will build a chalet on the hills of Majorstuen. And his youth will pass; and one evening he will stand again alone upon the balcony, and remember how thirty years earlier he had stood there, dreaming of a wider city, and the old ache will rise in him and he will wonder if he has been wise to accept the immediate adventure, the adventure that lay to hand. He will ask himself whether he might not have found elsewhere employment for that faith and energy of which the years have robbed him. ”

“ When a master begs men to own up, it means that he's up the spout. It's much more fun catching a fellow red-handed. And, after all, you two are the last people anyone would think of."
"Of course, it's all right," said Lovelace; "there's only one thing to do. You talk of nothing else but this rotten affair; talk about it in the Toe, in the changing-room, in form, in chapel, if you like. Ask people you meet if they've owned up. Treat the whole thing as a glorious rag."
"Yes," shouted Gordon, "let's go down to Rudd and tell him if he doesn't own up we'll give him hell." ”

“ For manners, as well as morals, relax in the greater freedom of a Public School, and at the age of fifteen one has managed to substitute ease for stiffness.
It is, indeed, impossible to say how much one learns at a Preparatory School. At the age of ten one has not the necessary detachment to view oneself as an objective reality. It is impossible, for instance, to remember where, or when, was learnt the spirit of comradeship and sportsmanship that is, perhaps, the most lovable quality of the old public school boy. ”

“ And you have had enough of the film. It is all very amusing, no doubt, to see one’s life lived backwards, to recover one’s old enthusiasms and prejudices and loyalties. But it is rather a cruel business, with the evening coming before dawn; friendships must end at the hour when they begin; the first kiss must always be the last; and you sit in your chair and draw uncomfortable parallels and wonder whether old age is not rather like that: the reversal of the film. ”

“ But, however a boy is brought up, it is unlikely that he would pass unscathed through adolescence. Curiosity is as irresistible as fear. It is the power of the unknown. The moral offences of a public school boy are disgusting enough, but because they are so entirely physical they have little lasting effect on him. They play indeed a very casual part in his life. Nothing is at stake. The romantic friendship, on the other hand, is the dawn of love; it is a delicate and deep emotion; it is the most exciting thing that up to then has happened to a boy ”