The head master had the fiercely sad attitude towards idleness and vice. He would have had us love virtue, yet could not make us love him. Praise of the classics in spite of their commercial uselessness was often on his lips, among boys who seldom got above hate of Caesar and Virgil. Though we all believed that he was a model of virtue he inspired us always with either fear or amusement. Many were the boys he caned in his study, which was near enough to give a certain class-room an envied distinction as an auditorium. He had a rapid, nasal, slightly Irving-ish speech, which was extraordinarily funny when he was trying to show the stages by which the Latin form of a word had passed into the French; funniest of all when he was mingling ordinary words (about leading the horse to the water but not being able to make him drink) with hums and ha’s at the annual prize-giving. He laughed with discomfort. His bearing was phenomenally erect, his square face bald except for a moustache that did not hide his thin lips.
The under-masters came and went, except one. He was a small cleanshaven, bluish-white-faced man, demurely grave in expression, whose breath had a sort of stale dryness that was not quite malodorous. He earned respect and obedience without fear from nearly all his class, by being a just, quiet, serious man, even of speech and kindly. Boys could not put him out or take him off his guard. His small exquisite legible handwriting must have been formed by annotating textbooks with a constant desire not to disgrace the printed page, and by admiration for Greek script. With slow wrinkling his stiff face relaxed now and then into a feminine tender smile. After a time I found myself frequently addressing him as ‘Father’, so naturally did he touch the gentle docile side of me. The one time I ever cried in school was when he blamed me with a severity that seemed to hurt him. He awarded me prizes for essays on the Sicilian Expedition and on Imperial Federation, which I had taken pains with and was proud of. I had a grandiloquent turn. But the master had no insight or no time to exercise it. He had only a momentary power over me, not an influence. Neither a goal nor a love of work could he give me. When I saw him approaching with quick short steps and ‘downcast eyes demure’ in his soft hat and cape, I laughed inwardly.
Through him I became accustomed to the first book of the Aeneid, to Shakespeare’s Richard II and Henry IV and V. To me they remained prose rendered obscure and tedious, in the one case by foreign language, and in the other by archaisms, inversions and other unfamiliar and as yet impotent forms. Often they were worse than obscure. The passages that stuck fast in the ruts which they wore in our brains were bandied about for their comicality. ‘All became silent’, ‘The strawberry grows beneath the nettle’, ‘By thinking on the frosty Caucasus’, ‘Tennis balls, my liege’, and other phrases had to be uttered with a grin and received with a grin. Possibly the master cared nothing for poetry: or he may have despaired of communicating to us anything but a dead knowledge of words. If I remember rightly, the music of Virgil’s hexameters never at the time fell on my ears, whether or not I was capable of knowing it for music. The snake attacking Laocoon and his children was the one vivid thing contributed by those months. Shakespeare meant rather more. He helped me to faint apprehension of certain human heights and depths, as in Henry V’s ardour and Richard II’s dejection; the energy in ‘Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war’ wakened in me the elements of acting and adventure. Blank verse I regarded as a form of prose, licentious in construction and divided wantonly into lines as if it were poetry.
My father probably went over the plays with me when I was doing my home-work, but his taste was for directly elevating philanthropic and progressive literature. Or was it only with a view to inspiring a love of virtue that he read ‘Abou Ben Adhem’ and how he ‘loved his fellow men’? I learnt to recite it myself with a lofty histrionic thrill. Its real effect was equal to that of the gilt ‘Faith’, ‘Hope’ and ‘Charity’ in the Unitarian Chapel. These words and Shakespeare’s plays and Leigh Hunt’s poem did help me to feel that there was something for men besides eating and drinking and getting a living or having it got for you.
But at this period ‘good’, so far as it concerned the world and not me personally, meant chiefly if not solely Liberalism. Through my father’s enthusiastic political talk I learnt that Mr. Gladstone was a glorious, great and good man, greater than Robert Abel. Any Liberal candidate who ventured upon our constituency was, though in a lesser degree, glorious, great and good. I used to distribute handbills of political meetings in the cause, sang a Liberal parody of the ‘Men of Harlech’, and followed the elections as keenly as I did cricket scores. Conservatives I thought were an inferior race, partly because they were wicked, partly because they were stupid. There ought never to be any Conservatives; and as time went on they would become fewer and fewer and at last all would be well. Until then Liberals had to fight to rescue the downtrodden in Ireland, in London slums and elsewhere; and the Conservatives, indifferent to pain and suffering, ambitious to drink beer with no interruptions except from war, had to be attacked. I used to go with my father to the Washington Music-hall on Sunday evenings and hear John Burns, Keir Hardie, and the Socialists. Once there I saw Michael Davitt standing by an iron pillar, dark, straight, and austere with his armless sleeve dangling. I think I knew that he had just come out of prison, and this probably helped him to a place in my mind with the Pathfinder and Milton’s Satan. John Burns was another glorious, great and good man. I honestly admired his look and voice and was proud to shake hands with him and also to have my muddle stump bowled clean out of the ground by him once on Clapham Common. On the contrary, what a ridiculous creature was our Conservative member on his horse, just a rich gentleman who had once been an athlete but could not make a speech as my father could; and his coachman was frequently drunk or half-drunk or not sober or had been drinking or looked like it.
Poetry was nothing to me compared with Home Rule. Or rather Home Rule took the place of Poetry, and was really an equivalent in so far as it lifted me to vaguely magnificent ideas of good and evil. It was on the same level as the signing of Magna Charta, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the beheading of Charles I and dethronement of James II, which to me were splendid Liberal events of the past. Some kind of sense of this splendour gave part of the thrill to my voice when I recited before an adult audience at the chapel:
Ring out the old, ring in the new.
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
The year is dying, let him die.
I was sufficiently stirred by the Home Rule election to declare myself Liberal at school in a form which I think was three-quarters Conservative.
My enthusiasm pleased my father. It must have atoned for my peculiarities and for my bad language among my schoolfellows. This vice was reported to my mother by Henry, who had teased and tormented me one day on the Common and drawn from my lips every filthy word I could muster. I denied the fact passionately and when I saw that my mother did not believeme I gave way and passionately repented. Home life was very largely grumbling, deceiving and repenting, driving my father to anger or sorrow and then being miserable consequently. I stayed out late, or I was unwilling to go to chapel, or I told lies, or I talked nonsense at the Sunday dinner-table. It was almost the only meal as a rule which the whole family had together. There was plenty to eat of the best things known to my mother, such as boiled mutton and caper-sauce, with carrots and turnips, followed by apple tart and custard. Nor did my father despise these things. But he wanted us to talk about the sermon. For I think very often he himself only went to the evening service. We had hated hearing the sermon and now had to improvise an essay on it. It was so loathsome that I could never seriously attempt the task, even to avert the Sunday dinner anger, which became almost a regular thing. Either I showed my loathing too openly or I caught one of my brothers’ eyes and one or another and then both tittered. My father reprimanded us by calling us ‘donkeys’. I made an effort, but his anger and my shame only made me duller than ever. Probably I broke down in the middle of a sentence with, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Then ca
me a lecture from my father, or just a few words of abuse, and then all remained silent for a time. Some days my father, relenting, would choose what he thought a lighter pleasanter subject; everyone would be absurdly eager to keep it going, and my father absurdly pleased with trifles. On other days one of my smaller brothers would let out a titter; another did the same; I felt and looked enormously sad, perhaps too sad. Then one would be sent out of the room, to be followed presently at my mother’s request by his plateful of dinner.
We had very few visitors, none to turn us inside out. Once a lady and a daughter, remote cousins or friends of friends, came, and the girl left me with a yearning heart for some days and a curiosity for years like my curiosity about the lost childish books. Christmas was eagerly waited for, but the day itself meant chiefly watching for the postman, disappointment, chapel, a heavy dinner and crackers, some squabbling comparison of our presents, tea... supper... I think I had always an eager haste to unveil the mystery, always a fluttering look of wonder which always sank dead like an extinguished torch into disgust with the imperfect thing. If it had only been something better or different. It mattered not how many or good were my presents: they fell below an indefinite imagined standard. If they were simply below last year’s it was worse. The disappointment is vivid yet of the Christmas day when the postman arrived at last, hours late, and brought me only a long narrow box of crackers. We children gave no presents to one another or to our parents: we were content to send out a few picture cards paid for by our parents, to people who would send us cards. The faculty for ceremony and festival was not in any of us.
Our boy friends seldom came to the house. Nor were we very anxious that they should, knowing that we should be constrained by the presence of father or mother. For we had one way at home, another abroad. But at the new school I made several friends. There were the boys I sat next to in class, and the other members of the football team. One of these named George lived a hundred yards away from us. Every morning he came whistling past the house for me to join him on the way to school, and he was fairly often in the house. He had a Grecian nose which he had learnt to be proud of, and carried himself carefully, partly because he valued his appearance, partly because a London Scottish volunteer of superb appearance was courting his sister. This Scot was his hero: he never tired of telling me the man’s measurements and how you could strike him as hard as you liked on the chest. Politeness to women, seemliness of speech and behavior, were among his daily ideals. Being more skilful than I and keen to excel, he took a patronizing but genuine interest in my football play, and blamed my slackness. In politics he was a thoroughgoing Conservative. Our intercourse was long, regular, always superficial. He was cold and hard and never came out into the country with me or kept pets. I think we always talked about games and school affairs. At least I know that though we continued to be close neighbours I hardly ever even spoke to him six months after I had left the school, and a few years later was miserably uncomfortable at meeting him and having unavoidably to stop and exchange words.
I was far more intimate with a boy of something like my own nature. As a girl he would have been beautiful, with his plump dimpled cheeks, delicate rosy skin, Cupid lips, perfect features, fine light brown hair, soft grey eyes, smiling timorous expression, head slightly bent. But he had thin legs; he was easily frightened; he played games slackly and awkwardly. We sat together at school. He was always drawing, chiefly faces in profile. I remember his sleek tender way of touching the paper. Pointing out the faults, he drew me. I admired his face as I did my mother’s, and envied them both, and became intensely conscious of my appearance. I used to look at myself in a glass, with eyes for the faults, the coarse nose, the weak chin, the underlip too much behind the upper, the ear without a lobe; always retaining a sort of belief that the faults were not the whole. This boy and I, presuming on our position at or near the top of the class, laughed endlessly in class during lessons, which caused us often to be reprimanded or separated. He lived two miles from us and was never at the house.
I remember other boys with whom my whole intercourse seems to have been exchanging endless jokes, playing football together, and in summer eating ices together bought at the Italian stall outside the school. One boy I remember through one incident only. We were being examined in the De Bello Gallico, and he was shamelessly using his copy of the text. I told him to shut it up and when he refused I loaded my pen and discharged the ink over his shoulder on to the book. Then, because his sister was engaged to the master, he had the effrontery to go and complain, thus compelling me to give him away. Another boy I can still see playing back with me in the football field. He was a sturdy energetic boy with a Roman nose in a freckled red laughing face. Probably he was a year or two older than I, and knew boys and young men older than himself, and the lore he had learned from them used to impress me. One story he told was of a Spanish girl who bit her lover’s chest, one of a man being set upon among the Welsh hills by factory girls and shamefully handled. Others were of the same class. These things he spoke of, as it appeared to me, without indecency. I thought him chivalrous and frank and manly. In fact I had a great respect for him, and after I had left the school I used to wish we could meet again. Several older boys with physical prowess and masterful confident bearing won my admiration.
Other boys I see at some one cardinal moment. One was the idiot of the school, a pale fat round-featured being who talked through his nose and could be persuaded to sit upon a round stone like a hen upon an egg till he was called off. Another, a short square-shouldered boy, lean, pale and square-jawed, with almost waxen hair, screamed like a wild beast on having a window shut hard on his fingers. A third was a leering dark fattish boy whose time went to girls instead of games. His nickname among his admirers and affected despisers was Sally. According to rumour, founded chiefly on his own boastful shameless narratives, his conquests were many and complete. And for a time he stirred me to imitate him. I singled out the most notorious of his alleged paramours, a pale slender black-haired girl several years older than myself, with small features and round dark eyes and a light name that seemed perfectly appropriate, and for some days or weeks pursued her. By day I walked after her at a distance without ever catching her up; I managed to meet her face to face without daring to speak. By night I would say as much as good evening and silently walk alongside her and perhaps her tittering younger sister. My desire was to be with her, to be intimate with her in some unknown degree. In truth, I think I wished to be loved by her. I should have liked to kiss her. I ceased to believe what I had heard Sally tell about her. For many nights I hung outside her house watching the blinds for her shadow and the door for herself, slipping away to a distance if she appeared and only showing myself reluctantly. On this starvation diet of neither encouragement nor rude words my affection died utterly away. The girl herself was but a chance object, or chosen because I had begun by imagining she would meet me half-way. Even while I was after her I was thinking also of another girl, a friend of hers, actually the Mabel of my childhood. Perhaps she had forgotten me; she certainly allowed no rights to the old attachment. Though she smiled to me once from between two others, she passed on. The dark girl speaking of her had said something which made me conceive a faint hope, but we were never to be friends again, and since then I seem never to have seen her. There was a very faintly mysterious sentiment in my thought of her which made me shy of being friendly, as I had a chance of becoming on the football field, with one of her brothers. For a year afterwards I paid little attention to girls. Sally became a distant acquaintance.
The boys who came up with me from the old school remained friendly. The most friendly of all left for a Yorkshire town before the first year was out. Another used to walk with me occasionally in the bird-nesting season. Being from Battersea he could regale me with slang terms of abuse, such as ‘Blinking potherb’. His father, a Liberal, had taught him a poor opinion of the ancients. The Greeks in his opinion must have been poor runners to have dropped
dead in their races. I, however, respected the Greeks, believing where I could not prove.
I had not many friends among the cleverer footballers and cricketers. I think I still preferred chases and fighting games such as I played years before. There were now more violent affrays. The fighters were armed with singlesticks but no masks, and they gave and took good blows before their forts among the gorse bushes were lost and gained. Thus in one of them I and another boy had a long serious duel, until I had my upper lip split and a front tooth or, as I thought at the time, all my teeth, knocked out, thus suffering a slight disfigurement which added to the sorrows of the mirror. My one satisfaction after the incident was the doctor’s compliment when I bore the stitching up without noise. Very few of my tears and glooms at that age were caused by physical pain, unless it was toothache. When I lost my teeth at the dentist’s it was with ostentatious fortitude, encouraged by my father s praises. Both at football and cricket I was good only on rare occasions. There were days when I could shoot a goal from corner and do almost anything I wanted to. There was one day at least when bowling a boy out with my first ball after school gave me a happy irresistible feeling, so that with dangerously fast balls I took several wickets running. And somehow, I suppose through quiet exercise of my will to prevail, I was usually after a time elected to some office in the second eleven. As vice-captain I went up to London with another boy to buy a set of goal-posts in Cheapside. As I said before, my pride in conducting the expedition is all I can remember of what I know was an adventure.
Complete Poetical Works of Edward Thomas Page 56