Читать книгу Long Before Forty - Cecil Louis Troughton Smith - Страница 7

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The adventure of the big bang had no prolonged effect. The memory of it soon became much less acute even among my awestruck contemporaries. Life soon settled down again with its old routine of schoolwork and homework; of Sunday afternoon battles with ships or armies on the playroom floor; of holidays, and of journeys to the library with both arms full of books to change.

There were the periodical great occasions of my father’s returns from Egypt on leave, when every day one woke with the delicious feeling that anything, simply anything, might happen. For my all-powerful father had only to say the word for wonderful things to take place. He said it so casually and frequently; he was never in the least impressed by the fact that he had merely to decide on a course of action to carry it out. The Tower of London and South Kensington Museum, Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s, the Zoo and Mme Tussaud’s, the portals of each flew open at his words in a manner most impressive. Big brothers could never convey that impression of effortless omnipotence when they took small ones to the Changing of the Guard or to the Oval.

Besides, I had read in some novel or other of a mother being charged ten shillings a week for the support of her child. There were five of us, there were my father and mother, and there was the maid. On a moderate estimate, then, with these data, that made three pounds ten shillings a week for our mere keep. To travel from Egypt to England cost my father (as he told me in reply to my questions) ‘a whole handful of sovereigns’. I heard vaguely of the monstrous sums it cost to pay my brother’s expenses at the hospital where he was a student. The total sum which my father must earn in a year must be simply colossal—hundreds of pounds every year; no small boy to whom sixpence was comfortable wealth could possibly visualise such an amount. For one brief period of my life my father received my unstinted admiration solely on that account, solely because he was able to do something whose magnitude was beyond my imagination—not many things were.

Yet with all that there was in the air of those nineteen-hundreds a hint of rapid and unstable change which even a small sensitive boy could feel. When first my mother and I went to meet my father home from leave we used to drive home the three of us together in a hansom cab. Later came the time when the whole vast echoing station could not produce a hansom cab and we had to use a taxicab—delightful in its way, but not in accordance with long-standing custom, and therefore not to the taste of a small boy. The system of horse trams along Peckham Road suddenly was changed in favour of the electric conduit system; there was a grand ceremonial opening, when the Prince of Wales (the present King) drove along the whole route, taking off his hat to the cheering crowds, on the top deck of a special white painted tramcar, while the little princes sat in the front in white sailor suits, and the massed elementary schools (myself among them) sang ‘God Bless the Prince of Wales’ most discordantly.

Motor cars made their appearance; I cannot remember the first I saw, but I remember most distinctly seeing my first motorbus thundering down Peckham Road, past the horse buses clip-clopping sedately along. There was a railway strike in England, and another in France which caused us much more excitement (presumably because my father was on his way home from Marseilles). All gave some impression of instability, or at least of changing conditions, peculiarly stimulating to a child’s mind.

For it never occurred to me in the least to doubt the possibility of my own success in life. Success was such an easy thing to come by; my family had enjoyed it in huge quantities. There was my father—but no one could dream of thinking that he might sometimes be unsuccessful; my elder brother went through examination after examination in the course of his medical studies with flying colours, eventually qualifying at the age of twenty; the other brother had climbed to the dizzy heights of cricket and football colours at Christ’s Hospital before he made an abdication of his own free will (comparable in my mind with the abdications of Charles V and Diocletian and Sulla) and, turning his back on a possibly brilliant future, retired to the comfort of a City position and a commission in the Territorial Army. I fully believed—I never had the least doubt—that I should combine the successes of these two. I looked upon it as certain that I should win a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, win every sort of colour and prize imaginable there, go on to Cambridge, get my blue for cricket, and my degree in medicine at twenty along with the gold medal of the Royal College of Surgeons, and so enter into a more hazy but none the less positive world of scientific success.

And scholarship examination time came round. I went to the school where the examination was to be held, read and began the papers with never a quickening of the pulse, completed them with philosophic calm, and returned home quite unmoved. Anxious teachers at school next day went through the papers with us to find out how we had succeeded; as far as I was concerned they were bitterly disappointed. There was one nasty sum about a monkey climbing a greasy pole which had tricked me entirely; it was more than doubtful whether I had done various others correctly. I read in their faces their anticipation of my failure, and still I was unmoved. It was not that I remembered having done well in the other papers—an essay and a general knowledge examination; it was solely that I was full of the beliefs first that I could not possibly fail, and second that no member of my family could possibly fail.

Then, long weeks later, results began to drift in. These half dozen boys had won elementary scholarships; that one a scholarship on the foundation of a grammar school; this other a trade scholarship; someone else a scholarship to Bancroft School (we were a good vintage year in that class, as I have said). But still no news that I had won a Christ’s Hospital scholarship. At school the opinion was openly expressed that I had failed; even at home the countenances of the Family began to express doubt. My form master gave up asking me every morning on parade in the playground whether any good news had come—he had asked me every morning for weeks.

The summer term must have been approaching its end when messages began to fly round the school one morning. The sliding partition which divided the largest classroom into two rolled up so that there were two classes sitting together in one big room—my own and another. Other forms began to file in, ushered by their masters, and were ranged round the walls and the back of the room, class after class until two or three hundred small boys were crammed into the limited space, and half a dozen masters were assembled in front of them. Not one of us boys knew what all these elaborate arrangements portended. Then entered the headmaster.

‘Well, boys,’ he began, ‘I have some very good news for you. One of the boys of this school has won a Christ’s Hospital scholarship. You all know how difficult that is to do, and I want you to give this boy a good hearty clap and three cheers for having brought so much honour to this school. No, wait until I give the word. It is eight years since the last scholarship to Christ’s Hospital was won by a boy from this school, and then it was won by the brother of this year’s winner. Now you know who it is—Cecil Forester! Hip, hip, hip—’ Three hundred boys yelled and stamped and hammered on their desks. Half a dozen masters, smiling happily, clapped their hands. Six hundred eyes were turned towards me, the spectacled shrimp in the front row on the right. The business did not embarrass me in the least, the news did not elate me, me the select of twenty thousand entrants. It was something which I had always known was going to happen, which had been expected of me for ten years, ever since the day of my birth, and by me ever since I had expected anything. I sat in my desk and wished that the distressing noise would end, and when it showed no sign of doing so I withdrew into my favourite mental occupation of keeping the Toulon fleet from uniting with the Brest fleet by the manoeuvres of an English fleet weaker than the two in combination. It was no more startling or pleasing to win a scholarship (twenty among twenty thousand) than to find that there was bread and butter for tea, or that the school was at the end of the road. And applause was positively unpleasant when it harassed my eardrums.

So the close of that term marked the end of my stay at an elementary school. Without a doubt it did me a great deal of good, and beyond the damage to my eyesight I did not think that it did me any harm. I had a magnificent grounding in elementary subjects, and thanks to the unsparing use of the cane I had acquired a habit of exactness of work and carefulness of thought which I could not cast off for years afterwards. My morals had no more been corrupted by association with the children of the poor than they had been by the reading of Suetonius. There were many things which I had learned there which I could not possibly have learned at a preparatory. I knew that when the big local engineering works which employed the fathers of most of my school-fellows closed down those school-fellows went short of food and clothing; I had a vicarious introduction, in short, to hunger and cold. Casual conversations had revealed to me the amazing fact (it would never have occurred to me otherwise) that most of the children in London slept two or three in a bed. Observation had shown me that trivial things like nibs and pencils, of which there were dozens to be obtained for the asking at home, were to some people well worth stealing and certainly worth lying for.

In one respect the school may have affected me profoundly, in encouraging me to think of myself as a unique and extraordinary specimen. Because that is exactly what I was at that school—a boy born in Egypt, the son of a father distinguished in his profession, noticeable for the goodness of his clothes and accent, precociously brilliant at schoolwork, a walking reference library to whom even the oldest boys turned for information on recondite subjects such as fortification and secret inks and sexual development.

Not that this last had any prolonged interest for me. By the time I was ten I knew all that Suetonius and the Encyclopaedia between them could tell me; there was a brief period when the matter bulked largely in my thoughts, but as soon as I had grasped the main facts I lost my interest in the subject almost completely, and I was firmly convinced that I would never be interested in it again. I am quite sure that I was far more sexually minded between the ages of three and seven than I was from seven to twelve.

There were plenty of things which I found far more interesting—things which I never think about now. Such as why some pavements are flagged and some asphalted; why some horses in tradesmen’s carts wear a coloured band round their forehead instead of a strap joining their blinkers—they still do, although it is only with a fearful effort that I can bring myself to notice it. Why some telegraph wire insulators are black and some white. Why some boys played one game of marbles and some another.

During the marble season in those days there were all sorts of ways of gambling for marbles. For ten minutes or so before school and during the ten-minute breaks (I can never forget how long those breaks seemed, and what an enormous amount we did during them) about two dozen boys would take up pitches in the playground sitting with their backs to the fence beside the railway. Between their legs they would each set up a screw on its head or else an ‘alley’—a glass marble. The screw merchants would shout ‘ ’It ’im two’ or ‘ ’It ’im three’ or even ‘ ’It ’im four.’ That meant that anyone could come along and roll marbles at their screw from some mark decided upon by the screw owner; a couple of yards away perhaps for ‘ ’It ’im two’ and half a dozen for ‘ ’It ’im four.’ All the marbles one threw became the property of the screw owner, unless you hit the screw, whereupon you were given two, three or four marbles as the case might be. Rolling the marble was always the rule; I never came across ‘knuckle down’ until twenty years later in France and in the North of England.

People who put down ‘alleys’ (how does one spell that word?) worked on another principle. They shouted ‘ ’It ’im ’ave ’im’—if you hit the alley it was yours. But then you had to stand a long way away, twenty yards or so, for alleys were very precious, and ‘ ’It ’im ’ave ’im’ was only practised by people very hard up for marbles.

And wandering through the crowd of people patronising the marble-ranges (I cannot think of a better name for that patch of playground) went boys shouting ‘Two a dip’. You always asked them ‘What’s your highest?’ and they would reply ‘Five’ or possibly ‘ten’. If you deemed the answer satisfactory you handed over two marbles, and the receiver would turn sideways so as to present his trouser pocket to you, and from that you would extract one out of several pieces of paper. It might be a blank, but it might have a figure on it—the highest possible was the number you had been told in reply to your question—and you became entitled to receive from the dip merchant that number of marbles. Those boys were a simple crowd. I fancy I was the only one ever to wonder about the proportion of blanks and prizes.

The most passionate devotees of marbles played a game called ‘sticks’ because you struck at it. One side would put down an alley and the other would throw at it, losing every unsuccessful marble, until he hit it. Then the roles would be reversed, and so on for days perhaps, until one side was completely cleaned out of marbles, ruined, exhausted, out of the game for the season unless the fortunate possession of reserve capital in the form of alleys and some luck at ‘ ’It ’im ’ave ’im’ re-established him.

For no one, as far as I remember, ever bought any marbles except myself. I used to, every season, and I used to give them away, too (and was thought insane for it) when I wearied of ‘ ’It ’im two’. But I never ceased to wonder why some people played one game and some another, and where, after the first five minutes, the attraction lay. My reading had, of course, brought to my notice a craze called a passion for gambling, but it never occurred to me that actually it was that which was activating the marble players. Monte Carlo and the racecourses can boast no superiority over that patch of asphalt beside the fence against the railway.

Some time after the marble season died away all these games would revive again with cherry stones instead of marbles—cherry-oggs (possibly cherry-hogs) was the word always used. Marbles and cherry-oggs and tops were seasonal games, more definitely seasonal even than cricket and football. Others were played all the year round—Jum-jimmy-knacker (I should like to know the etymology of that name) which was a kind of cumulative leapfrog; widdy, which bears the same relation to touch as Contract does to Nap, and whose most glorious feature was the periodical flogging of those who were caught by the uncaught with their rolled up caps; ‘R. White’s’, where two boys linked arms as horses, while another behind them, stooping, ran behind holding their wrists and representing a cart, and a fourth mounted on the cart’s back and tried not to be thrown off however much the horses galloped and wheeled the cart round. R. White’s is the name of a firm which brews gingerbeer—I still wonder what incident it was which led that school to adopt that particular name for this game.

And besides all these peaceful pursuits there were periodical wars—war was endemic in the playground like the plague in India. It only needed a trifle to wake old feuds to life; without more than a minute’s warning the whole playground would suddenly be turned into a battleground, where old scores were paid out literally with tooth and nail, where noses bled and clothes tore and the unlucky ones who fell in the press were tramped and kicked with hobnailed boots until some master noticed the disturbance and broke up the mob, sending all he could recognise inside to be caned. It was in these battles that I was first acquainted with the mad joy of fighting ‘all out’, deliberately flinging away my sanity (and trebling my strength thereby) and plunging into the mass, using head and fists and boots with such a reckless disregard for the consequences that boys twice my size shrank away from before me appalled.

Nowadays, as far as I can ascertain, elementary schools are much more civilised places. In London, at any rate, it is much more unusual to see barefooted children, and the standard of clothing and feeding and cleanliness is very much higher. Children are not so brutal, I fancy—possibly as a result. From what I hear, the standard of knowledge is rather lower—although of course, as I have pointed out before, the school which I attended was very much of a freak school even for that time in the matter of cramming. But nowadays they use ‘intelligence tests’ and similar subtleties, and—most epoch-making change of all—they have tried to minimise the use of the cane. To cane an elementary schoolboy nowadays, I believe, calls for all sorts of formalities and consultations with headmasters and entries in books, which must bring about a state of affairs which I cannot visualise at all. Twenty executions in a lesson was not an unreasonably high figure in my time, and all disciplinary offences were immediately punished with one smack hand. At the present time masters must either endure more, or maintain discipline by sheer force of personality, or else the boys must be more amenable. I shall never know which is the correct explanation.