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In a Class of Their Own

Bored with studying, the schoolboy put aside his books and submitted to his love of writing poetry. He was aware his effort was inadequate, but he was unprepared for the verdict of an unseen witness at his shoulder. ‘You shouldn’t waste your sweetness on the desert air like this, Auden,’ said the master who, in the way of his kind, had silkily materialized when least expected and least wanted. Years after the event at Gresham’s School, a still furious WH wrote: ‘Today, I cannot think of him without wishing him evil.’

This entertaining vignette, typifying the world-weary teacher confronted by the apparently idle enthusiasms of youth – and made more amusing by the identity of the victim – is recalled in The Old School, a collection of classroom memories edited by Graham Greene and published in 1934 when he was 30.

Few experiences remain so solidly imprinted on the mind as those of school. Youthful friends and enemies tend to be remembered for life, along with ancient episodes of teasing and bullying, indiscipline and eccentricity. To this day I cannot recall without a shudder dismal winter afternoons spent in fruitless quest of a soggy ball. I am still amazed at the sheer sadism of a teacher whose brutally enthusiastic use of the cane would today have him in the dock. And the memory of a Latin teacher, baited beyond endurance, bringing down on the head of his young tormentor a weighty classical dictionary, thereby inducing moderate concussion, lives with me still. Yet though school dominates childhood it often makes only a brief appearance in biography or autobiography. This is a pity. The dramas of school may in themselves be minor, but in their variety of experience they provide a fertile soil of recollection.

The Old School is made up of seventeen essays by writers who achieved literary distinction later in life, though some are all but forgotten today. Apart from Auden, still familiar names include Harold Nicolson,

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Bored with studying, the schoolboy put aside his books and submitted to his love of writing poetry. He was aware his effort was inadequate, but he was unprepared for the verdict of an unseen witness at his shoulder. ‘You shouldn’t waste your sweetness on the desert air like this, Auden,’ said the master who, in the way of his kind, had silkily materialized when least expected and least wanted. Years after the event at Gresham’s School, a still furious WH wrote: ‘Today, I cannot think of him without wishing him evil.’

This entertaining vignette, typifying the world-weary teacher confronted by the apparently idle enthusiasms of youth – and made more amusing by the identity of the victim – is recalled in The Old School, a collection of classroom memories edited by Graham Greene and published in 1934 when he was 30. Few experiences remain so solidly imprinted on the mind as those of school. Youthful friends and enemies tend to be remembered for life, along with ancient episodes of teasing and bullying, indiscipline and eccentricity. To this day I cannot recall without a shudder dismal winter afternoons spent in fruitless quest of a soggy ball. I am still amazed at the sheer sadism of a teacher whose brutally enthusiastic use of the cane would today have him in the dock. And the memory of a Latin teacher, baited beyond endurance, bringing down on the head of his young tormentor a weighty classical dictionary, thereby inducing moderate concussion, lives with me still. Yet though school dominates childhood it often makes only a brief appearance in biography or autobiography. This is a pity. The dramas of school may in themselves be minor, but in their variety of experience they provide a fertile soil of recollection. The Old School is made up of seventeen essays by writers who achieved literary distinction later in life, though some are all but forgotten today. Apart from Auden, still familiar names include Harold Nicolson, H. E. Bates, Anthony Powell, Elizabeth Bowen and Stephen Spender. Less well remembered are the South African novelist and poet William Plomer and the novelist and film critic E. Arnot Robertson. The bulk of them deal with grammar or public-school life in the years shortly before, during and immediately after the First World War. Here we have L. P. Hartley looking back with amused tolerance on the stultified absurdities of Harrow, Harold Nicolson still ‘gnashing my teeth’ at being unjustly accused of cheating at Wellington and the publisher and poet Derek Verschoyle railing at the ‘paralysing uniformity’ of Malvern. Here too are memories of a less privileged world. Sean O’Faolain remembers his school outside Cork where ‘every second boy was barelegged, with the mud drying between his toes and zoomorphic tracery on his shins from sitting in the ashes of his laneway home’. Walter Greenwood recalls with horror his Langworthy Road council school in Salford, an establishment in seemingly permanent revolt where ‘the teachers’ disgust for us was only equalled by our disgust for them, and for the school’. Though writing only twenty years after the outbreak of the Great War, Greene is aware that these are reports from a vanishing age. In his preface, he predicts that ‘the system which this book mainly represents, is doomed’ and describes the collection as a ‘premature memorial . . . like a gathering of the staid and unloved hovering, in the most absurd headgear, unconsciously upon the “brink”’. He is right, of course. The colonial attitudes that underpinned the pre-war public-school system have long vanished. But the triumphs and defeats, joys and miseries of any school life are timeless. Hartley (Harrow, b. 1895) entitles his essay ‘The Conformer’, suggesting he was happy with a regime which treated individual eccentricity with tolerance but frowned on any challenge to tradition. Offenders were frequently punished by a beating from older boys, leading to the occasional ‘mild epidemic of flagellation’. Hartley, who claims at the time of writing to be a timorous adult who cannot even utter a rebuke, admits: ‘As Head of House I did not shrink from summoning my subjects to my room, telling them how awful they were and what a thankless and distasteful job it was to have their welfare in my charge; nor did I mind “whopping” delinquents and I occasionally took practice shots against the curtain of my bed to get my hand in.’ Anthony Powell (Eton, b. 1905) languidly admits that he spent his entire school career in ‘well deserved obscurity’, in his leisure time beagling, going to Tap – the drinking room reserved for the College’s senior boys – playing poker, indulging in the occasional Russian cigarette and ‘brooding on romantic agitations of the moment which seem in retrospect so extravagant’. It was assumed by the staff that every boy would at some future time be in some such exalted position as Viceroy of India and was therefore taught accordingly. This, he says, might produce anything from ‘industrious civil servants to megalomaniac noblemen’. The Great War looms darkly over this apparently settled world and is vividly recalled by William Plomer (Rugby, b. 1903). He remembers that while studying at his ‘sour and ugly’ prep school, the windows would be rattled by the ‘interminable thunder’ of the guns in Flanders. In the school holidays, he watched errand boys in khaki being taught by a sergeant to stab straw-filled sacks painted with the likeness of the Kaiser. Moving to Rugby, he found that the attrition on the Western Front was reflected in the competence of his teachers. So many men were serving abroad that those schoolmasters left were ‘either dotards or weaklings’ marked by sadism and lack of warmth, imagination and culture. H. E. Bates (Kettering Grammar, b. 1905) waspishly remembers being ‘suckled at the vinegary breasts of repressed and impossible mistresses’. He is rescued from unhappiness by the arrival in 1919 of a young teacher whose ‘quiet and almost melancholy understanding’ transformed his schooldays and set him on the road to a literary life. Poignantly, the teacher had returned from the front ‘without several of his fingers and with his face atrociously mutilated and his legs and arms stiff from wounds’. The girls have other worrying matters on their minds. The future novelist Theodora Benson (Cheltenham Ladies’ College, b. 1906) says: ‘I believe that hardly anyone knew what are so exclusively called THE facts of life . . . one of the girls asked me once how babies came. I had a sort of hazy idea but was not very sure of my ground, so I benevolently answered that I thought I should only embarrass both of us by telling her.’ With boys and the regrettable temptations they represent safely absent, passions are channelled into calf love between the girls. ‘Amazed and disgusted’ at such behaviour, robust Theodora remembers one victim telling her: ‘It’s so heartless to like Patsy better than me, when you think how I filled her hot water bottle for every night of the winter term. I don’t think Patsy would have filled her hot water bottle for her every night – at least I’m sure she wouldn’t have done it in quite the same way.’ The novelist Eileen Arnot Robertson (Sherborne, b. 1903) observes that an English public school for girls was run on a male system imperfectly adapted for female needs – ‘run about, girls, like boys, and then you won’t think of them! Boys . . . horrid with three stars in the Baedeker of the Nasty which ruled our young lives’. Her peers were the ‘most thoroughgoing prigs imaginable’ who skipped through their schooldays with the ‘slightly hysterical’ attitude of ‘Oh, goody-goody-we-ought-to-do-well-in-lacrosse-this-term. Hurrah-for-the-house-and-I’m-so-glad-I’m-not-pretty!’ She was determined not to conform, most dramatically by refusing to be confirmed. This was so alarming that two prefects walked her round the grounds trying to change her mind. As the best reason they could find in favour of confirmation was that the preparation was ‘simply topping’and religion was ‘so sensible’, it is hardly surprising that their seduction techniques failed. Eileen, whose abundant good humour and common sense shine through her prose, went on to become a regular on the humorous radio show My Word! Disenchanted Derek Verschoyle (Malvern, b. 1911) displays an acid contempt worthy of John Osborne as he heaps abuse on the public-school system. At best, he concludes, it will produce a practical and tolerant man. At worst, the product is a ‘complacent philistine, unable to think for himself . . . lacking in imagination and vision, eager for popularity, emotionally dwarfed and blandly adolescent in sexual matters, insensitive to beauty and confused towards truth’. And so the rant goes on. It is no surprise to learn that Verschoyle, literary editor of the Spectator between 1932 and 1939, is remembered in the ’50s by Diana Athill as a ‘raffish figure’ given to shooting cats with his .22 rifle while lolling before his window with feet on desk. One of the joys of this collection is that we see some of the most talented writers of their generation flexing their early literary muscles. An exception is Harold Nicolson (Wellington, b. 1886) who at the time of writing was in his late forties. Age did not dampen his outrage that his essay ‘upon a piece of coal’ thirty years earlier was considered to be the worst in class. With not a trace of irony, he complains: ‘I presumed that what was required was not so much a discourse upon the Industrial Revolution as an examination of the responses and associations evoked by the contemplation of coal in detail.’ Yet ultimately Nicolson is forgiving of his alma mater. In a lovely phrase, he says of a visit he made to the school as an adult: ‘There was a faint breeze in the air from the olives of Academe; the old pine-laden heartiness had lost its cruel tang.’ And so to Greene himself, who provides the last word with memories of Berkhamsted, where his father was head. ‘It was not a really satisfactory school for sadists,’ he says. ‘Only two sadistic masters come back to mind, and one of them was so openly sadistic, so cheerful a debauchee, that one could not grudge him his pleasure.’ But Greene is disenchanted by the Old School in general, denouncing its excessive code of sexual purity, its rules designed only for the convenience of the authorities and its distrustful attitude that privacy can only be misused. Instead he puts his hopes for the future in the State school, seeing it as an extension of the old village school. He says: ‘It is at least better that he [the pupil] should learn loyalty to a town which includes all classes and both sexes than to an institution consisting only of his own sex and own class.’ This was 1934 and both public and state schools have since changed in ways Greene and his contributors could never have imagined. But, dated as they are, these recollections reflect at heart the same youthful intensities experienced by today’s so much savvier pupils. Everyone has a story about their schooldays: if only they were all so well recounted.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 59 © Patrick Welland 2018


About the contributor

Patrick Welland remembers his B-team public school set in disagreeable countryside with little affection, but he is grateful to it for instilling an enduring dislike of organized activities.

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