Читать книгу Long Before Forty - Cecil Louis Troughton Smith - Страница 5

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Some of the infants’ school memories—of a period doubtless antedating my introduction to the Encyclopaedia and Suetonius—are amazingly fresh and clear. There were half a dozen of us little boys who used to play pantomimic games in the playground during the breaks. In one I remember particularly that Tommy Turner used to climb to the top of the railings (he was the only one of us who could) and hang on these, while the rest of us, sitting on the asphalt, chanted, ‘The man in the moon came down too soon’. At the right moment Tommy Turner would slide down the railings (from the moon, presumably), ask his way to Norwich in dumb show, devour cold plum porridge, burn his mouth, and then vomit realistically—that was his star turn, which made us laugh until we were weak.

Then there was the weekly sewing and drawing class, when all the little girls were put on one side of the room and set to sewing or knitting, and all the little boys on the other to draw leaves, or flowers, or watering cans, or allied subjects. Whenever a little girl got into a muddle with her wool she had to stand on her form for the mistress to come round and get her out of it. Invariably (at least, so it appears to me now) every single girl did get into a muddle, so quickly that the mistress could not possibly cope with the demand for her services. Soon twenty or thirty little girls would be standing dolefully waiting their turn, while the mistress went from one to another with ‘Why, you’ve dropped a stitch,’ or ‘Carelessness! Sheer carelessness!’ and giving to each who deserved it what she always described as ‘a good hard smack’ on hand or arm—it was a more drastic punishment to smack the arm. Meanwhile there was no attention to be spared for the twenty or thirty little boys at the other side of the room, and we, forgetting all about our watering cans and daffodils, would revel in a sort of clubbish atmosphere, lolling about in our desks, chatting with each other in a high falutin style, and generally displaying our serene masculine superiority over the woebegone little girls standing dolefully on their forms waiting their turns to be smacked. Those Friday afternoons (or were they Tuesday afternoons? I am doubtful about it) offered splendid opportunities of demonstrating to the girls how hopelessly inferior they were to us lordly males.

For we felt like that about it. Girls were inconsiderable compared with us, although we all of us were very glad of opportunities of attracting their notice.

For courtships and friendships flourished among us six-year-olds. All the horrid things one reads about in psychoanalytic books, and in nasty little studies of the child mind, went on among us. Little intimacies might be laughed at but they were desired and coveted, and were never thought wrong in the least. I do not know whether what went on there is normal in infants’ schools, but now, perhaps, I have come to believe not, but I cannot bring myself to forget some of the things I remember. Probably I should be horrified if I were to find my own child doing the same as I have done. And yet I cannot think that it did us any harm. The craze died away of its own accord, and later on, when we were moved up into classes where boys and girls were separated memory of the old days evaporated to a surprising extent. In most cases no impression was left at all, not even the haziest recollection, as I was surprised to discover when, returning to school after a three weeks’ absence through an injury, I casually referred to previous experiences in conversation with a friend who had shared them with me. He really did not know what I was talking about, and I, too, lapsed into the same sort of condition quite readily.

Before very long I did not care two hoots about Millie (surname forgotten) who had once been about the fifth most important member of my universe. It was she whom I crowned Queen of the May on one memorable occasion of school ceremony, when, dressed in my smart white suit and white socks (much admired by the poorer parents) I laid a wreath upon her head (Dicky Graham, a bosom pal of mine, brought the wreath upon a cushion) and said

Bend thy beautiful head, my dear,

That I may crown thee Queen of the Year.

Spring is the queen of the year

May is the queen of the spring

Thou art the Queen of the May, my dear

Thou art the Queen of the year.

Who wrote those classic lines I don’t know. It might have been our class mistress—but I had to say them, all the same, with the rest of the class in their best pinafores marshalled round by the staff, while an audience of bedazzled parents clapped applause.

That event was like the realisation of a dream and disappointing in consequence. I rather fancy that one of my most usual fantasies had been the picturing of myself posing and making brilliant speeches before an adult audience with Millie (what in the world was her surname?) somewhere associated with me, but the actual event was just rather tiresome and rather boring. I was a disillusioned, rather blasé individual by the time it was all over. I was cured completely for the time of all desire for social prominence—or for Millie Whateverhernamewas too, perhaps. Certainly it was with keen anticipation and with no sense of loss that I passed on to the Big Boys’ school where no girl might set foot, and where pantomime games and maypole dances were eschewed in favour of football and other manly pastimes.

I have found by subsequent inquiry that this particular school (at that particular period, anyway) was rather exceptional in its educational achievements. At many council schools it was (and is) rather unusual for a scholarship to be won by one of the children—such an event often called for a holiday in celebration. With us it was otherwise. Half a dozen scholarships in a year was a poor figure—L.C.C. scholarships to secondary schools mainly, with a few foundation scholarships and a few to trade schools, although no one had succeeded in pulling off a Christ’s Hospital scholarship since my brother’s achievement of several years before. These remarkable results were attained by voluntary hard work on the part of the masters and involuntarily hard work on the part of the dozen or so bright boys who were early picked out for the scholarship class—with me, of course (a year and a half younger than anyone else in the school) among them.

For a year or two we went through the usual curriculum, and then we were moved into a special class, the ex-seventh (missing the fourth and the fifth and the sixth) and crammed in a manner which it hurts me to remember. I believe that nowadays the system is discarded; I honestly hope so. We were not conscious of any particularly severe treatment—it is my firm belief that it is impossible to injure a young boy by overwork because he instinctively refuses to be crammed beyond a certain capacity—but nowadays, looking back, I can realise how drastically we were dealt with. We children of nine or ten (I was only eight at my initiation) were called upon to learn arithmetic as far as arithmetic has ever gone with me, and algebra (fancy children of ten doing quadratic equations, as I well remember doing!) and French. We studied the hard parts of English grammar, we wrote essays for homework, we paraphrased great chunks of The Lady of the Lake, we studied Shakespeare painstakingly (I was inevitably cast for the part of Prince Arthur when we read King John) and we learned everything so thoroughly that later, when I was barely eleven and went to a good secondary school I held my own easily without doing any work in a class where the average age was fourteen.

We learned remarkably thoroughly everything we were taught and for a very good reason. If we did not the cane was called in. A boy will get six sums right out of six (a most unusual circumstance in normal cases) every time if he knows for certain he will get two on each hand if he has one wrong. He will toil for a couple of hours in the evening (if his parents allow it) to put together an essay which will please his master when he knows that if he does not he will be beaten next morning. As one of the army handbooks points out, certainty of speedy punishment is the mainstay of discipline—the certainty of it, not the severity. That was the ruling idea in our scholarship class. We were not caned with exceptional violence, but we were caned every time we were found wanting. It was a cast iron, rigid system, never relaxed on any excuse whatever, one mistake, one caning, and as a result of it we produced work of an inconceivable perfection. But nowadays the bare thought of a ten year old doing two hours’ homework in the evening, or being beaten because he writes the second person plural present of ‘faire’ as ‘vous faisez’ sets all my humanitarian instincts in revolt.

Yet we none of us died, as far as I can remember, and none of us even went weak in the head, or suffered any permanent damage whatever—save for me; my eyesight, what with close school work and hours of daily reading, gave way so that at seven I had to wear spectacles (another blessed distinguishing mark) and I have worn them ever since.

The system, as I said, has been made impossible now. Quadratic equations and the theory of indices are not taught in elementary schools even to boys of fourteen, let alone to children of ten. French, too, has disappeared from the curriculum, I believe, which is much more of a loss. In my time we even had oral French—once a week a dear old white haired lady came and talked French to us, telling us stories of 1870. Thinking about it dispassionately, I cannot believe that the L.C.C. stood for that oral French; my personal theory is that the masters clubbed together and engaged our teacher out of their own pockets and without the knowledge of authority. They were quite capable of it; they were a happy band of fanatics with completely at their mercy a dozen bright boys who not only could be made to win scholarships under sufficient pressure, but could be coerced into learning all sorts of other subjects far more advanced than the scholarship examinations we would have to take. Yet I must repeat that none of us knew we were unhappy, and we were still capable of playing games and of doing things which really deserved caning, and we all of us (as far as I can guess; in this matter I can only speak for myself, of course) maintained flourishing inner lives and well developed fantasies. But it has just occurred to me that perhaps there is an explanation of why I was always so woefully thin in those days, and pasty faced, so that I was always being most unpleasantly tested for worms, with negative results.

I wish I knew what was the eventual destiny of my fellow bright boys in the Ex-seventh. Seeing that they were all a year or more older than me the fate of a large proportion of them can be guessed—killed or mutilated in the war. But the brightest of the lot of them had an unusual Christian name and surname, and several times lately when passing through Camberwell I have noticed that name written on the side of a builder’s and decorator’s carts. It must be the same individual—the same unusual name, the same district. If so, he must be doing well; a builder and decorator with three or four carts must be accounted a successful man. Does he, I wonder, find quadratic equations any use to him now, or does he owe his success to the way he was crammed at elementary school? I wish I had the courage to go into his office and ask him; but it is over twenty years since he saw me last, and I very much doubt if he would recognise in me the skinny bespectacled shrimp with the bristly hair who sat in the desk in front of him.