Читать книгу Long Before Forty - Cecil Louis Troughton Smith - Страница 9

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One of the most important things about the new school was that it was two miles away from my home in a direction which made it necessary to walk to get there. Every day I walked two miles to school and two miles back again, and when a small boy walks four miles a day with unfailing regularity he is getting a fair part of the exercise he needs; compulsory games and incidental games will see to it that he gets the rest. As a result of this exercise—the cessation of overwork must have had something to do with it too—I began to grow. How I grew! The first words any relative ever addressed to me at that period was ‘How you’ve grown!’ Between the ages of twelve (which was when I really began) and sixteen (which was when I left off) I grew from four feet four to six feet—five inches a year on the average for four years. I still have my annual medical inspection slips to prove it.

It made a profound difference to me—as a little boy I was always quarrelsome and violent and ready to fight at the drop of a hat, and I took it for granted that anything anyone told me must be wrong; as a tall boy I grew quite tolerant of other people’s opinions and did not think fighting necessary to my dignity. For some odd reason a boy (as well as lots of men) is far more ready to admit that another is his equal—or even his better if necessary—when the former’s head is on a level with the latter’s head—not with the middle button of his waistcoat.

I gradually came to discard the old ideal one to which I had been striving to attain—a flamboyant, irascible individual on whom everyone’s attention must necessarily be fixed—in favour of a new ideal, tall and elegant and idle, who did things supremely well when he felt he wanted to, but always nonchalantly, unobtrusively, and without troubling in the least about his audience or whether he received his due reward for his efforts, and not caring particularly whether he succeeded or failed. The worst faults I could ever find in myself were sincerity and ambition.

But it was a long time, of course, before this ideal crystallised in my mind. The first year at the secondary school I had small leisure for introspection. There was always too much happening.

One of the happiest institutions at the school was the dinner hour football. Immemorial dinner hour tradition divided the school (or rather, the larger proportion of it which stayed at school and brought its dinner with it) into four quarters, the big boys of three houses, the big boys of the other three, and the two corresponding sections of small boys. Each quarter had a football and a football pitch (association football) and played massed games of forty or so a side. Every boy had his dinner in his hand (wrapped, like the one talent in a napkin, for school rules did not allow of paper which might be scattered on the playing fields) and with this in one hand and a sandwich in the other we all raced up and down the field, kicking the ball, charging into each other, and generally letting off steam. Sometimes a well aimed kick or a vigorous charge would send a small shower of sandwiches over the pitch, for which reason we always ate our meal as rapidly as the game would admit, and when we had eaten and our small insides were as full as they could possibly be we would run about all the harder. We must have had magnificent digestions.

Looking back, I am surprised to realise that we eighty or so small boys would play like this quite happily for an hour without disputes or arguments—rules were of course a little elastic, but such as they were they were adhered to without dissension despite the fact that not a soul on the pitch was over fourteen. They were very happy jolly games; but at first their special attraction for me lay in the fact that on the days when rain or the condition of the turf prohibited play my tormentors, with an hour idle on their hands, would proceed to make my life a burden to me. They could not have been true bullies because they would always far rather play football than bully me—which led me at first to scan the weather every morning with intense anxiety.

There is little need for a detailed study of my life at that school. It was the normal ordinary life of a moderately clever boy at a normal ordinary school; the years after the first one were sincerely happy. It is a stock joke, of course, that men always say that their schooldays were the happiest time of their lives, without really meaning it; I would not say so myself, but I can truthfully say that those later years were really happy, with the additional advantage that I was conscious of the fact that I was happy.

Boxing had something to do with it. The school was not specially attentive to boxing, and it was not one of the compulsory games, but a minority of enthusiasts practised assiduously under the nominal supervision of the boozy old sergeant-major (late of the Coldstream). It was a game which appealed emphatically to my temperament; and the heroes of most of my favourite books had been boxers; and the best book Jack London ever wrote was a long description of a prize fight—The Game. I can remember even now the little thrill of pleased surprise when I first discovered that the straight left properly used did all that the books and the sergeant-major claimed for it, and left helpless the rushing ugly fighter with a bad style. It was one of that sort whom I first encountered in the ring, with my heart going pit-a-pat with excitement. I do not think I was frightened, but I had no confidence in myself at all; most of my life (save for the one great occasion of the slow match and the mine) I had found that however great my book knowledge I had never been able to put it effectively into practice. I was sure that I was going to be badly knocked about, and was resigned to it in a hopeless sort of fashion. I shut my eyes when he made his first rush, but instinct of training brought my left hand out in the way it ought to go, straight for his nose. There was a most satisfactory thump, and when I opened my eyes the rush had been nipped in the bud and my opponent was clearly very surprised indeed—more surprised than I was, even. After three or four rushes had been brought to the same sudden end I gave up shutting my eyes; by the end of the round I was leading off with that feeling of superb confidence which comes when one knows that one’s opponent is an inferior boxer—a new, magnificent sensation to me. There is joy in hitting a screaming drive down the fairway, and more joy still in coming out one step to a fast bowler and sending the ball, a yard out of reach of cover point’s right hand, slipping along to the boundary. There is pleasure in hitting the top of the offstump with a good length ball sent down with just the right amount of break to beat a good batsman. But there is only one joy to compare with the well timed straight left, and that is the mad perverse pleasure of standing up to a better boxer and taking his punches and struggling on despite pain and weakness to the very end.

I won that first bout, of course, and it was a very elated and garrulous small boy who emerged from the ring flushed with the very first victory he had ever won with his own hand and brain; but the next evening I came to know defeat, at the hands of a two-handed boxer, as quick as lightning, who could draw and slip my elementary left hand and could then sail in hitting ferociously with both hands until I wilted away, punched into stupidity—a small boy of the under five stone class cannot knock another out.

Yet I had won a clear, decisive victory in the boxing ring, and it did wonders for me in the way of restoring the self respect which Anderson and company had rather damaged. The new respect with which I was regarded by other small boys (only a small percentage of boys at that school boxed) was grateful, but much more noticeable was the effect upon me. The knowledge that one has proved his worth, and the certainty that one can look after oneself against any reasonable odds is extraordinarily comforting. In later life you can argue with a fighting-drunk man amicably and without qualms and much more effectively when reassured by the solid knowledge that you can always stop him from becoming dangerous, and you feel much more at home when encountering angry crowds or men who meditate robbery with violence. I know this too well, now that I have left thirty behind and am oppressed by the knowledge that my punch has lost its speed and my eye some of its quickness, and that soon I will be shirking such encounters, and selecting with care the railway carriage in which I go home from the races, and going a little out of my way to avoid drunken men.

The boxer’s genuine freedom from nerves is a curious phenomenon. The same man who goes into a drawing-room with limbs of water and a heart of lead will climb into the ring, into the glare of the lights and the gabble of the ringside, with as little concern as he would get into his bath. He can win or lose; he can stand up to a ferocious attack, wear down his man while vigilantly ready for a surprise punch, and then knock his man silly, and turn and lift an inquiring eyebrow at the referee without ever feeling in the least out of his element. It is the memory of that peculiarly comfortable state of mind as much as the memory of past victories which gives the boxer a certain desirable poise in unpleasant situations.

Another very powerful influence at school was friendship. I was never accepted without reserve as a perfectly sane individual, perhaps, but there were a dozen or so good fellows who welcomed me wholeheartedly into their circle after my first year. Those friendships have endured to this day, and from their very beginning they were simply delicious to a child who had felt like a fish out of water—like a white blackbird would be a better simile—during eight or nine years of school life. It was glorious to have friends who would back you up through any trouble you might encounter, and with whom one might gossip and argue during the summer days. Very serious our conversations were—on our side of the school the subjects of study were largely scientific, and so were the subjects we discussed; God, and the reasons for and against believing in His existence; what it is which lies outside everything (those were days before Einstein’s work had become a popular study and we used to talk ourselves weak over the terrifying question of where space ends); the distinction between dead and living matter and the possible existence of a vital element; the evolution of the Dreadnought and the likely course of the European war which we accepted as inevitable. Rather priggish were those conversations, but by the necessity of finding support for our arguments we were driven into odd studies for thirteen year olds—Haeckel and Nietzsche and the rather outmoded people like Max Müller whom we could hunt up in the public libraries.

Our hobbies were grave and scientific too—we made a half inch spark coil one year, an operation calling for the careful and accurate winding of about three miles of wire, and we designed and built a model electric motorboat which unfortunately sank on its trial trip before it could demonstrate to the world its unutterable superiority over all other existing boats. We rather ran to electricity for some reason or other—we were always having accumulators charged, fifteen years before the popularisation of wireless telephony made the charging of accumulators commonplace.

Yet we had some redeeming characteristics. In those days Green Lane, Dulwich, really was a lane—we walked along it twice a day to and from school—and down one side ran a little stream, brown with iron, one of the mineral springs which once nearly made the district a popular watering place. To dam that ditch was a usual pastime; as the water banked up behind the dam, and threatened to turn its flank, we would extend it feverishly at each end, scrabbling up mud with our hands to fill the interstices between the stones, and growing magnificently wet and muddy in the process. We were all of us boxers, mostly champions of the school at various weights, and we carried side enough in consequence to have outfitted an international team. I can remember how we used to elbow our way with superb insolence through the crowds of lesser fry at school, caps on one side, hands in our pockets, and none dared say us nay. We exploited our exalted position with all the overbearing haughtiness of medieval potentates. We bullied ruthlessly when we considered our prestige demanded it—the self-same railings which saw me ‘racked’ as a pitiful small boy were now often adorned by my own writhing victims.

We discovered a sensuous pleasure in smacking boys’ heads with thin exercise books. It had to be the right kind of head—a rounded one, rather close cropped; I was as fussy then about the shape of the head I smacked as I am nowadays about the temperature of my Burgundy. The half dozen individuals in our class whose heads conformed nearest to the ideal had a harassing time while the craze lasted. Their heads were slapped with exercise books every possible moment; not a particularly painful ordeal, but an annoying one when maintained for weeks on end. The finest head in the whole collection occupied the desk in front of mine, a beautiful spherical head with cropped fair hair—Maynard, its owner’s name was; he was a bovine, overgrown individual—and during the tedium of lessons I would feel the old itch in my fingers just as a dramdrinker feels the old thirst in his throat, and I would surreptitiously take hold of my Blue English Essay Book, or my Mottled Physics Note Book, and brace myself ready for an opportunity until the master’s attention was distracted, and then—slam! Instantly putting down the book I would be as innocent in appearance as the rest of the form, my craving temporarily satisfied. No one, save of course masters (who were not consulted) dared dispute our right to slap any head we chose even at a time when we were very junior members of the school, and we swaggered along the primrose path with an arrogance which would have suited half a dozen Charlemagnes or Kings of Dahomey.

Our precious dignity was liable all the same to nasty shocks occasionally. When all was said and done, masters and prefects when sufficiently roused could call up a weight of authority which no one could withstand. We were always in some disciplinary trouble or other, which is hardly surprising. Those days when the state of the weather prohibited dinner-time football were usually fatal. Half a dozen high-stomached louts with a whole hour idle on their hands are absolutely certain to get into mischief. There was the day when we discovered that an inconspicuous manhole in a secluded corner of the playing fields led by a long iron ladder down to a most amazing sewer some forty feet below; further, that sewer, when one had the courage (and strength of stomach) to brave its noisome darkness led for a long way underground (bent double, we could just proceed along it with one foot on each side of the channel) to another manhole in a street far from the school. The police stopped our exploitation of this highly convenient back door, and the school authorities backed them up. For our benefit a new punishment was invented. Every dinner-time we had to sally forth to the playing fields carrying each a wastepaper basket as a badge of shame, under orders not to return until we had filled them with the paper which even the strictest of school rules could not prevent being scattered in small quantity over the playing fields. It was an effective punishment until some ingenious mind realised that a small boy’s pockets could be crammed with paper in the morning before leaving home, and that paper, well fluffed out, sufficed to fill a wastepaper basket in two minutes, leaving a precious remainder of fifty-eight minutes of leisure for good or evil—usually evil of course.

The sin of which we were most usually guilty was that of libel. To my doubtless distorted memory we were always starting unofficial school magazines, hectographically reproduced, which sold like hot cakes as long as they lasted. To fill their pages recourse was had, inevitably, to personalities of a pungent kind, which was all very well as long as only schoolboys were mentioned, but caused no end of trouble when we began to refer to masters. Inevitably a copy would reach our arch-enemies’ hands. More than once boys who ate the school dinner in the dining-hall would emerge with the joyous news that they had seen a copy of the last number passed from master to master at the high table—not reaching those masters whom we had more grossly libelled until the end. Then there would be half an hour of suspense before afternoon school began, and then, in first period, the school porter would arrive with the expected summons to the headmaster, or an infuriated committee of the libelled staff would descend upon us showering punishments like rain, and extorting reluctant apologies and promises of reform from us under threat of otherwise insisting on our expulsion.

But somehow crises of that sort were welcome in a perverse sort of way. I verily believe that as we progressed up the school and wearied of our placid existence we went out of our way to make trouble for ourselves. The unassailability of our united strength tended towards peace—no one would willingly make war on us—and peace bored us inexpressibly. We made horrid nuisances of ourselves. Suggestions were taken up with alacrity. We soon found that a little ferrous sulphide dropped into inkwells, and just a drop or two of hydrochloric acid poured on top, roused such a stench of sulphuretted hydrogen as to make any classroom uninhabitable, and to cause indignant messages to be sent (usually by the mouth of one of those responsible) to the chemistry laboratories asking whether the master there would be kind enough to limit the enthusiasm of his class—usually to the complete bewilderment of that individual, who was probably supervising a series of perfectly odourless experiments in Titration or the Proportionate Loss in Weight of Mercuric Oxide when Heated.

It was amusing, though not specially dangerous, to smear the merest trace of cycle oil on the blackboard so that writing upon it became impossible; it was always a good joke to conceal a parcel of fish far within the desk of some boy who was absent through illness—we had the floorboards taken up on one occasion before the origin of the stench was discovered; it was splendid fun to get at every single French textbook the form possessed and tear out of each the page we were to study in our next lesson. Notions of this sort came as a welcome change from the minor trivial round of annoying masters with musical instruments made from pen-nibs, and sticking boys to their seats with liquid glue, or passing round notes saying ‘At 3.15 exactly everyone blow their noses’—the latter is an idea quite to be recommended, as puzzling to the master in charge and quite spectacular in execution. The ideas I personally contributed were usually the more involved ones which called for some expenditure of money—the fish idea was mine. One term, with remarkable pertinacity, we managed to smear the classroom door handle with liquid glue immediately before every entrance of one particular master we disliked; it was during that term that he acquired the mannerism (which I believe he still displays) of continually wiping his hands with his handkerchief. The brute had sworn that he would teach me tidiness and good handwriting, and kept me in every blessed evening for a quarter of an hour for months to do copy book writing, so that on matchdays I had to put on my games clothes under my others and rush down to the playing fields peeling off my outer garments as I ran, for matches began a quarter of an hour after afternoon school.

The money for these pastimes of ours—for the purchase of fish and liquid glue and accumulators—we used for the most part to obtain at the expense of our stomachs. Most of us found it easy to compound with our parents to be given money (sixpence a day was my allowance) in lieu of sandwiches. Nominally the money was to be spent in the Buttery—the school tuckshop—and we would always solemnly assure our credulous parents that we would not buy useless things like chocolate cream or ginger beer. Nor did we, save when our grosser appetites overcame us—we rarely spent very much in the Buttery, having much more important things to do with our money. Often and often I (and others too) have left home at eight fifteen in the morning, walked two miles to school, done something resembling a day’s work there, played a dinner hour football game, and a serious match in the evening, and then walked home again long after six without having eaten anything at all since breakfast at seven-thirty. But it never did me any harm at all—my physical development was remarkably rapid.

School work occupied as small a part in our interests as it had done in these last few pages. We learned a good deal, being well taught, but we worked as little as we possibly could. I think that our attitude towards work was that any fool could do it, but it took a clever chap to avoid it. Not to do any homework at all—we had three moderate portions set us every evening—meant living dangerously in the way which was our ideal; besides, it had the advantage of leaving us our evenings free for other amusements. It was an ideal hard of attainment, for the well-worn lies about having left one’s book at home or about being prevented from working by a sudden attack of illness which left no trace next day and was not accounted for by a parental note could not be repeated week in, week out, for a period of years, and they were best reserved for the more desperate emergencies. But the ideal to which we could attain was never to do any work in time which could be devoted to more interesting pursuits, and to maintain things even on that level meant a continuous excitement sufficient to satisfy the most fire-eating schoolboy. Twenty lines of Shakespeare to learn by heart was nothing—you could do that while walking to school. A page of Virgil or Ovid to prepare for construing was also easily managed; you got that up while standing about in the bustle of the cloakrooms during the five minutes before school, and could apply the finishing touches during prayers, holding the book as though it were a hymn book.

It was the writing subjects which offered a difficulty. If an essay had to be handed in at second lesson it meant much excitement to have to write it during first lesson, which might be Trigonometry or Physics; and during the second lesson, while the essays were being debated, or the difference between a simile and a metaphor explained, it would be necessary to draw ready for the third lesson an Isothermal map of Asia in colours, or something—a most horribly difficult achievement, however cunning one might be at piling the front of the desk up with books to conceal exactly what you were up to. Some masters had the pleasing habit of working through last night’s homework on the blackboard before collecting up the books. That was perfectly splendid, because you could simply write it up as he did it, and hand in perfectly magnificent work for that subject as a counter balance for the scamped, untidy work handed in for the others. It made no difference if the master told everyone to change books with his neighbour before starting—the master does not live who can see that every boy in a class of thirty really does exchange books.

Every master’s habits and whims were studied with an attention which would have surprised him if he knew of it. Those of a garrulous habit or possessed with enthusiasm for their subject could sometimes be led astray by a tactful question or two just at the moment when he was intending to ask for the homework so that this last vital matter would slip from his memory. The class team work in this respect was astonishing; the instant the master stopped to sniff at the trail of the red herring everyone would join in to halloo him on with an apparent interest which was obviously and pathetically gratifying to him.

I really do not think that it was sheer laziness which inspired us to go to all this trouble. It was much more likely that we looked on avoiding work as a game, masters versus boys, so to speak. You scored a point if you only did your homework when it suited you; the master scored a point if he caught you out. A run of luck might enable you to go for weeks without ever opening a school book out of school hours, and take you to the top of the averages, in a manner of speaking; on the other hand, you might experience a run of bad luck which would land you in hot water for weeks together—I can remember a period when for half a term I was never out of punishment school.

The year I was in the Fifths was marked by a succession of pleasing interludes which was a great help in keeping me out of this sort of trouble. For a couple of terms I was periodically absent for a day or two every fortnight or so, which meant that after each absence I could turn up at school with no homework done and no excuse needed and a resultant clean sheet which it would take a week or two to dirty again. What I was doing was hunting scholarships at the larger public schools. I realise now that it was rather a hopeless task, for those scholarships are tried for by the very pick and cream of the preparatory schools, trained all their young lives solely for this purpose. For the past two or three years I had been spending most of my time on subjects which, while destined to be ultimately useful, were no more good to me than a sick headache at Public School scholarship examination—things like Chemistry, and Electricity, and Mechanics, while on the other hand the examinations most needed a scholar’s knowledge of Latin. The prep school competitors had of course been taught Latin for the last seven years or so, and had been coached by masters who had devoted a lifetime to the study and dissection of examination papers.

Yet I had a few scholarships offered me—Rossall offered me forty pounds a year, Charterhouse twenty, and so on; I was never successful however in obtaining one of the big scholarships which I would have accepted—my father’s means were never sufficiently in advance of his expenses at that time to justify his laying out two hundred a year or so on his youngest child. My Latin was only good enough to enable me to struggle through an examination paper with difficulty, my Greek—not part of the school curriculum and only taught me in spasms after school by a kindly master—was not of that standard. My strong suits were the ability to write a competent essay and an extensive knowledge of classical history and mythology derived from a diligent study of Gibbon and Lemprière and Bury and Mommsen and such-like favourite reading at that time. Examinations which included a paper on ancient history were the ones which offered me most chance of success; and I remember that one of the essays was on ‘Your Favourite Character in History’, and I chose Hamilcar Barca in all sincerity. He was the father of the much more famous Hannibal, but it would puzzle me now to write a dozen lines about him; in those days I covered two pages of foolscap with ease. What I cannot picture is the feelings of the examiner, who after reading essays (I suppose) about General Gordon or King Harold or Nelson suddenly had his eyes gladdened by the sight of an essay on Hamilcar. I cannot help thinking that I am the only scholarship candidate who ever wrote an essay on Hamilcar Barca of his own free will.

The end of all this scholarship hunting was curious, and dates from prize day that year at school. I had already been up to the dais for my prizes, and shaken hands with whatever major general or viscount was presenting them, and bowed to the assembled parents in the hall, and had returned to the side of my own gang tucked away in an obscure corner. Then, just when I had burrowed comfortably in among them to doze through the concluding speeches, my name was read out again—in what connection I did not catch, but the Major General was clearly waiting for me. I struggled out through the press (the mischievous blighters hung on to my coat tails and held out legs for me to trip over) and scuttled up to the platform again, recalling my prize drill as well as I might—shake hands, turn and bow, walk off right. It was an envelope addressed to my father which the Major General gave me, and I took it home rather puzzled and quite ignorant of the contents. My father opened it—he had reached home on leave only half an hour before my return—and was amazingly pleased. The school was offering me a spontaneous sort of scholarship, free tuition for two years more if only I would stay there.

I must apologise for having devoted such length to such a trivial subject, but the incident looms large in my mind because it was the very last scholastic achievement of which I could ever boast. Beyond scraping through a few examinations I have never since accomplished anything in the least noteworthy. Incidentally, it may be worth mentioning that the next four termly reports which arrived contained the threat that ‘If his conduct and work do not improve it may be found necessary to terminate his scholarship.’ The school seemed to regret having made its generous offer within three months of making it—and remembering my behaviour I am not in the least surprised.