Читать книгу Stalky's Reminiscences - Lionel Charles Dunsterville - Страница 12

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I cannot remember exactly when Kipling or Beresford came to the school, but I suppose it was in my third year, which would be about 1878.

We eventually shared a study together, but must have formed our first alliance long before that time. The greater part of our ‘study’ period was passed together, but not all. There were changes in the combination at one time or another, the details of which I cannot recall.

From the details I have given of my life up to this point, it will be realized that I had gained some considerable experience, and had probably a good deal of skill in manœuvre, coupled with other traits that might give promising results when combined with the precociously mature mentality of Kipling and the subtle ingenuity of Beresford.

I am sure we were not posing, and we were not setting out merely to defy authority, but almost unconsciously I am afraid that was our attitude. We must have been heartily disliked by both masters and senior boys—and with entire justification.

The first effect the combination had on me was to improve my taste in literature. The period of Ned Kelly and Jack Harkaway was succeeded by Ruskin, Carlyle, and Walt Whitman.

We did a good deal of reading, hidden away in our hut in the middle of the densest patch of furze-bushes, or in a tiny room we hired from one of the cottagers. Our various huts were mostly ‘out of bounds’, but the secret entrance to them was sometimes in bounds, in which case one ran no risk of capture on entering or leaving. And capture in the hut itself was practically impossible. The furze-thicket was on a steep slope, the tunnel of approach between the prickly stems of the bushes was only just wide enough to admit a boy. A grown-up endeavouring to approach from above could only do so (as we did) by pushing through the furze-bushes and moving down backwards. Progress in this way was slow, and grunts and exclamations when contact was obtained with healthy furze-prickles gave notice long before the danger could be at all acute.

Approached from below, things were easier, but for that reason we never made our main road in that direction; the little track there was only an emergency exit and quite impossible for a full-sized man to negotiate.

The joy of a hut was manifold. It was out of bounds; it was one spot in the world out of reach of grown-ups. Then there was the joy of construction. Finally, there was the joy of smoking, often ending in the misery of being sick. Reading to ourselves or out loud was our only recreation, and the hatching of plots against people who had ‘incurred our odium’. The Confessions of a Thug was one of the books we read aloud, and Walt Whitman we thoroughly enjoyed in the same way. You can’t get the real effect out of W. W. in any other way. Fors Clavigera and Sartor Resartus and other works we absorbed in silence, broken only by occasional comments.

I can’t remember why on earth we hired that little room from ‘Rabbit’s-eggs’, but I suppose it was in the winter and our outdoor haunts were damp and uncomfortable. I call it a room, but I fancy it must really have been something more in the nature of a pigsty. But whatever it was, we cleaned it up and had the same joy in its occupancy as we had in our hut—the feeling of security and escape from tyranny. We did some cooking over a methylated spirit-lamp—the usual brews of cocoa and tea, and occasional odds and ends that a kindly fate had put in our way on our travels.

Old Gregory, from whom we hired this room, was a rather dull-witted peasant who was frequently under the influence of drink. His nickname of ‘Rabbit’s-eggs’ was due to his having offered for sale six partridge eggs which he stoutly maintained were ‘rabbut’s aigs’. He genuinely believed them to be so. He was passing a clump of bushes when a rabbit ran out of them, and for some reason or another he peered into the bushes, and there, sure enough, were the six eggs, obviously the produce of the rabbit!

He was inclined to be quarrelsome in his cups and possessed a dreadful vocabulary of the very worst expletives, which gave rise to his secondary nickname of ‘Scoffer’. These were traits that could obviously be used to advantage if handled judiciously.

We were given the privilege of a study about 1880. It was conceded to us rather reluctantly, though, as a matter of fact, we were just the sort of people who could get the greatest advantage out of such a privilege.

We took great pains over the æsthetic adornment of our study, the scheme being based on olive-green, and some grey-blue paint with which we did some remarkable stencilling. Curio shops at Bideford furnished us with quaint fragments of old oak-carving, ancient prints, and some good, but damaged, pieces of old china.

Finance was difficult. We were none of us very plentifully supplied with funds, and after the first month of term bankruptcy generally stared us in the face. On emergency the sale of a suit of clothes filled the gap, and we devised many similar expedients to tide us over a bad time.

At our most severe crisis, when the larder was quite empty, I made a useful discovery. In playing about with the fire I found by chance that used tea-leaves placed on a hot shovel crinkle back into their original shapes and look as if they had never been used. It was easy to turn this discovery to our immediate advantage. I did up about half a pound of tea-leaves in this way and put them back into their original package. Then I visited the study below and exchanged them for about half the proper tea-value of cocoa.

They returned the tea with threats on the following day, but in the meantime we had swallowed the cocoa. Peace was restored by our confession and an offer to regard the cocoa as a loan to be repaid when funds were available.

We did not spend much of our money on tobacco, because our smoking was really more bravado than pleasure. A clay pipe and an ounce of shag last a very long time. During one term we revelled in big cigars, or they revelled in us. We made constant efforts to smoke one to the end, but the attempt was either abandoned or ended in disaster.

I became possessed of these expensive luxuries in the following way:—

Having spent my holidays with friends in Germany, I was returning to school when I met an Englishman on the train who seemed a very pleasant fellow. He told me that he had a large number of cigars that he wanted to smuggle into England, and asked me if I would help him. I said I would gladly do so, whereupon he proceeded to fill the double lining of my top-hat box with his cigars, explaining that as I was obviously a schoolboy the Custom officials would not trouble much about examining my things, and I could restore the goods to him when we reached London.

I passed through the customs quite successfully, but I never saw the man again, and as a result I arrived back at school with sufficient material to make a hundred boy bravado-smokers sick for a year.

Nearly all our successes in our various schemes were based on simplicity. Things just seemed to come our way, like the cigars. I never asked for those beastly things or wanted them, and I wanted them less than ever after a few trials. For instance, an examination-paper found its way to us on one occasion in a most guileless way. The papers used to be printed off in copying-ink on a tray of gelatine. A short time after putting the negative on to the gelatine, the ink sank to the bottom and no further impression could be taken.

Beresford, wandering round a form-room one rainy afternoon, found a gelatine tray that had recently been used for the above purpose. The master who set the paper had carelessly left the tray on his table under the impression that the ink had sunk to the bottom. But it had not.

Just for something to do, Beresford applied himself to the task of endeavouring to recover the manuscript before it had entirely disappeared, and by an incredible amount of misplaced patience and assiduity succeeded in securing what proved to be a gem of the first water—a very feeble, but still legible, copy of the English Literature Examination paper.

Only one of us was up for this particular exam, and on his own merits he would have done well, but the opportunity of getting some amusement out of the affair was too good to lose.

The paper consisted of quoting ten or twenty consecutive lines of Milton’s ‘Comus’, commenting on the derivation of words, references touched on, and various matters in the notes appended to the school edition.

The master concerned had a special pet pupil who always got top marks, and the joke was to see whether, when one of us was able to answer every question in full, the pet pupil would still emerge top—and he did.

It was certainly a form of cribbing—but a venial one. Our code of honour held that cribbing in a competitive exam was a vile form of meanness, but in an ordinary exam we could take what help the gods gave us.

The Natural History Society, founded by Mr. Evans in 1880, soon attracted our attention, and I think we all three became members. It was not so much the pursuit of butterflies, or the study of birds and plants, that drew us to the Society as the valuable privileges conferred on members, the chief of which was a relaxation of bounds. Places that we could only visit hitherto by stealth we could now walk boldly through, carrying in our hands some hastily-gathered botanical specimens or matchboxes containing beetles or caterpillars. With these we could smilingly confront the sergeant or any prowling master who had ‘stalked’ us with a view to punishment for breaking bounds.

But one’s nature cannot be wholly evil, and a small spark of something good in mine was fired by Evans’ enthusiasm for botany. I interested myself in flowers merely in order to carry out nefarious schemes with greater impunity, but I ended in loving flowers for their own sakes. My slight knowledge of botany has been a source of pleasure to me all my life.

The Literary and Debating Society attracted us in a more genuine way and we extracted quite a lot of amusement out of it. Kipling was made Editor of the School Chronicle, and some of his earliest efforts appeared in that paper. I remember ‘Ave Imperatrix’, written in the style of a poet-laureate congratulating a monarch on escape from peril. This was with reference to an attempt on the life of Queen Victoria about 1881. Poets would not be poets if they could know when the divine frenzy was going to inspire them, and when a poet happens to be also a schoolboy the inspiration is pretty certain to come at an unsuitable moment. So it happened that ‘Ave Imperatrix’ was written in French class at the end of a French textbook.

Looking back on my own school-days, I am filled with an intense sympathy for schoolmasters. What a wearisome and thankless task is theirs! I regarded them as a tyrannical lot of old men (some probably not more than twenty-six years old) who hated boys and wanted to make them miserable. So I, in my turn, tried to make them miserable. I know better now, and I hope that boys of these days are not so stupid as I was, and have a fairer estimate of the relative positions of master and boy than I had.

Kipling must have been a difficult youth. The ordinary boy, however truculent, generally quails before the malevolent glance of a notably fierce master. But I remember Kipling on such occasions merely removing his glasses, polishing them carefully, replacing them on his nose and gazing in placid bewilderment at the thundering tyrant, with a look that suggested ‘There, there. Don’t give way to your little foolish tantrums. Go out and get a little fresh air, and you’ll come back feeling quite another man.’

Kipling’s sight was a great handicap to him in the knockabout life of boyhood. Without his glasses he was practically blind. We fought occasionally, as the best of friends always do. He was quite muscular, but shorter than me, and this gave me some advantage. But as you cannot fight with specs on, my victory was always an easy affair—taking a mean advantage of an opponent who could not see what he was hitting at.

Like all schools, we had compulsory cricket or football three times a week, but it was foolish to expect a boy with a large pair of specs on his nose to take much interest in the ‘scrum’ of Rugby football.

Kipling’s only nickname at school was ‘Giglamps’—sometimes shortened to ‘Gigger’—derived from the very strong glasses he was compelled to wear.

When I was about twelve years old my father came home on leave from India, and came down to visit the school and to have a look at his son and heir. I was a little awed by this large gentleman, whom I at once put in the same category as the masters. He was then about forty-nine years of age, and all I can remember of his visit is his rage when I offered to help him over a stile. He was a very active man and a noted shikari, but I thought a person of his age was probably infirm. As he had to return to India before our holidays began, we had no opportunity of learning more about each other.

During my seven years at school I spent my holidays with various people in various places. Sometimes a kind Victorian aunt took me in, sometimes I returned to my guardian at Woolwich, and sometimes I had a good time in London or in the country, with friends.

At Greenway, Luppit, near Honiton in Devon, I spent my most exciting holidays, shooting rabbits with an old converted flint-lock lent me by a farmer—Gaffer Coles. The conversion of this ancient weapon from flint-lock to muzzle-loader with percussion cap had been very imperfectly carried out, and every time I fired a little spurt of flame came out of some leakage very close to my eye—rather a dangerous sort of weapon.

With my guardian at Woolwich I had a very good time. As I mentioned before, she was a kind, tender-hearted soul who never dreamt of exercising any control over us, and we were a gang that ought to have had the strictest control. There were eight of us: myself and my two younger sisters, the guardian’s three sons and two daughters; and the girls were as bad as the boys—they always are when they’re not worse.

We lived at 43, The Common, and our various pranks (which I certainly will not describe) attracted some undesired attention to the house. On more than one occasion the police had to visit the widow and threaten legal action unless she would guarantee our future good behaviour. This rather put a check on our youthful exuberance until I found a way out of the difficulty.

No. 43 was a storey higher than the terrace of houses on its left. I found we could get out of our attic windows, crawl up to the top of our roof and get down, with the aid of a bit of rope, on to the roof of the next house. From there we could make our way along till we were three or four houses down the row, and directing our operations from that point, we had the extreme pleasure of noticing indignant passers-by knocking at No. 39 or 40 to complain to the harmless residents of assault and battery.

Leading such a turbulent life, both at school and during the holidays, and with less check on one’s evil tendencies than the ordinary bad boy gets under normal circumstances, it is hardly to be believed that religion played any part in my life. But it certainly did so in a quite unconscious way. ‘Fear God and Honour the King’ was the school motto, and our pride in this showed that we were not entirely heathen. The second commandment was also firmly rooted in our minds. Not in its true affirmative form of ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’, but in the diluted negative form of ‘Don’t do anything mean. Don’t let anyone down’. And I think that in all our villainies we did try as far as possible to amuse ourselves without injuring others. That’s not much, but it is something.

Owing to my wandering life, my religious education was extremely varied, which was an enormous advantage. Most religious people are shut up in little boxes, and they shut their children up in the same boxes, and they would never dare to peep into other people’s boxes or allow their children to do so.

I received snatches of instruction from many varied Nonconformist sects and from most of the bewildering sects within the Church of England. They each tried to instil their own particular teaching into me, and their efforts produced a contrary result. The one important thing about salvation to each of them was that they were right and all the rest were wrong. And from this I learnt the opposite, and that was that nobody is ever entirely right, and one’s opponents are often very far from wrong.

Later in life I have made a practice of entering every open door and, in this way, have taken part in the services of all the great divisions of the Church in Europe, and I find they all teach the same thing: ‘We are right. The rest are heretics.’ What a lot of hatred is taught in the name of a religion of love!

My kindly guardian’s religious ideas were of the simplest kind. ‘I do not speculate on the number of stars I shall have in my crown, but I do try to love God and to love my neighbour.’ And I am afraid that, in including us under the category of ‘neighbours’, she allowed her love to go to the extent of never saying ‘no’ to anything. If we had been good children we should not have taken advantage of her kindness. But where are these good children? I never meet them.

In touching thus lightly on the only side of life that really matters, I am aware that it is a subject that most well-bred people shy at—till they come to die, and then they make more fuss about it than any of us, as I know from experience. Also, I shall be accused of inconsistency. To be a robber of hen-roosts and ‘the good young man’ at one and the same time is verging on hypocrisy. Well, I plead guilty to the inconsistency, but not to the hypocrisy.

The point is that I am sorry to say I never was ‘the good young man’, but that is not to say that I was not trying, or at any rate wishing to be. Every one who has ideals fails, because as soon as he reaches what he thought was his ideal he finds he has only reached a point from which he can see something better, and he starts again, to fail again. But he is going forward all the time and in the right direction. Experience of life has convinced me that bad people are not so very bad, and good people are not so very good. We expect too much of each other and are disappointed.

From 43, The Common, my guardian moved to London, where I spent instructive holidays in the neighbourhood of Chalk Farm. Tottenham Court Road was not far away, and with complete freedom of action and no restriction as to time of coming home at night, I learnt a good deal more of London life than the ordinary country boy knows as a rule.

Other holidays I spent in Plymouth, the home of my forefathers, where I enjoyed the advantage of learning to handle a sailing-boat. Certainly I cannot complain that my life was lacking in variety.

Living all my childhood and boyhood by the sea has left me with the love for the sea that increases as the years go on. I remember our first house at Sandown. It had no garden on the side facing the sea because the brine made plant life almost impossible. There was just a tiled courtyard and a few tamarisk bushes, and when there was a big south-easterly gale the wind seemed always on the verge of lifting the roof off, while the spray from the big roaring breakers dashed against my bedroom windows. I never want to be farther from the sea than that.

That is probably the result of thwarted desire. I wished to be a sailor, and they made me a soldier. Doubtless, if I had been a sailor, I should have settled in retirement as far from the sea as possible. I not only failed to realize my wish for a seafaring life, but spent most of my life on or near the Indian frontier, a thousand miles from the sea.

Mingled with my childish memories of the wild sea-waves is always an unfading romantic affection for the rugged old red sandstone cliffs of North Devon, with the jackdaws and seagulls nesting in the crevices and the Atlantic rollers roaring at the foot.

The first break-up of our little band was in 1882, when Kipling left for India to take up an appointment with the Civil and Military Gazette at Lahore. Beresford left a short time later to join Cooper’s Hill Engineering College, whence he also eventually found his way to India, in the Public Works Department; and I left at the end of the summer term, 1883, to enter the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.