The Lighter Side of School Life by Ian Hay (important books to read txt) 📗

The most powerful member of the Opposition is the big boy who has not been made a prefect, and is not likely to be made a prefect. He enjoys many privileges—some of them quite unauthorised—and has no responsibilities. He is one of the happiest people in the world. He has reached the age and status at which corporal punishment is supposed to be too degrading to be feasible: this immunity causes him to realise that he is a personage of some importance; and when he is addressed rudely by junior form-masters he frequently stands upon his dignity and speaks to his Housemaster about it. His position in the House depends firstly upon his athletic ability, and [105] secondly upon the calibre of the prefects. Given a timid set of prefects, and an unquestioned reputation in the football world, Master Bullock has an extremely pleasant time of it. He possesses no fags, but that does not worry him. I once knew a potentate of this breed who improvised a small gong out of the lid of a biscuit-tin, which he hung in his study. When he beat upon this with a tea-spoon, all within earshot were expected to (and did) come running for orders. Such as refrained were chastised with a toasting-fork.

Then comes a great company of which the House recks nothing, and of whom House history has little to tell—the Cave-Dwellers, the Swots, the Smugs, the Saps. These keep within their own lurking-places, sedulously avoiding the noisy conclaves which crowd sociably round the Hall fire. For one thing, the conversation there bores them intensely, and for another they would seldom be permitted to join in it. The rôle of Sir Oracle is strictly confined to the athletes of the House, though the Wag and the Oldest Inhabitant are usually permitted to offer observations or swell the chorus. But the Cave-Dwellers, never.

[106] The curious part about it is that not by any means all the Cave-Dwellers are "Swots." It is popularly supposed that any boy who exhibits a preference for the privacy of his study devotes slavish attention therein to the evening's Prep, thus stealing a march upon his more sociable and less self-centred brethren. But this is far from being the case. Many of the Cave-Dwellers dwell in caves because they find it more pleasant to read novels, or write letters, or develop photographs, or even do nothing, than listen to stale House gossip or indulge in everlasting small cricket in a corridor.

They are often the salt of the House, but they have no conception of the fact. They entertain a low opinion of themselves: they never expect to rise to any great position in the world: so they philosophically follow their own bent, and leave the glory and the praise to the athletes and their umbræ. It comes as quite a shock to many of them, when they leave school and emerge into a larger world, to find themselves not only liked but looked up to; while the heroes of their schooldays, despite their hairy arms and club ties, are now dismissed in a word as "hobbledehoys."

Then comes the Super-Intellectual—the [107] "Highbrow." He is a fish out of the water with a vengeance, but he does exist at school—somehow. He congregates in places of refuge with others of the faith; and they discuss the English Review, and mysterious individuals who are only referred to by their initials—as G. B. S. and G. K. C. Sometimes he initiates these discussions because they really interest him, but more often, it is to be feared, because they make him feel superior and grown-up. Somewhere in the school grounds certain youthful schoolmates of his, inspired by precisely similar motives but with different methods of procedure, are sitting in the centre of a rhododendron bush smoking cigarettes. In each case the idea is the same—namely, a hankering after meats which are not for babes. But the smoker puts on no side about his achievements, whereas the "highbrow" does. He loathes the vulgar herd and holds it aloof. He does not inform the vulgar herd of this fact, but he confides it to the other highbrows, and they applaud his discrimination. Intellectual snobbery is a rare thing among boys, and therefore difficult to account for. Perhaps the pose is a form of reaction. It is comforting, for instance, after you have been compelled to dance the can-can in your pyjamas for the delectation [108] of the Lower Dormitory, to foregather next morning with a few kindred spirits and discourse pityingly and scathingly upon the gross philistinism of the lower middle classes.

No, the lot of the æsthete at school is not altogether a happy one, but possibly his tribulations are not without a certain beneficent effect. When he goes up to Oxford or Cambridge he will speedily find that in the tolerant atmosphere of those intellectual centres the prig is not merely permitted to walk the earth but to flourish like the green bay-tree. Under the intoxicating effects of this discovery the recollection of the robust and primitive traditions of his old School—and the old School's method of instilling those traditions—may have a sobering and steadying effect upon him. No man ever developed his mind by neglecting his body, and if the memory of a coarse and ruthless school tradition can persuade the Super-Intellectual to play hockey or go down to the river after lunch, instead of sitting indoors drinking liqueurs and discussing Maupassant with a coterie of the elect, then the can-can in the Lower Dormitory has not been danced altogether in vain.

[109] Then come the rank and file. There are many types. There is the precocious type, marked out for favourable notice by aptitude at games and attractive manners. Such an one stands in danger of being taken up by older boys than himself; which means that he will suffer the fate of all those who stray out of their proper station. At first he will be an object of envy and dislike; later, when his patrons have passed on elsewhere, he may find himself friendless.

At the opposite end of the scale comes the Butt. His life is a hard one, but not without its compensations; for although he is the target of all the practical humour in the House, his post carries with it a certain celebrity; and at any rate a Butt can never be unpopular. So he is safe at least from the worst disaster that can befall a schoolboy. Besides, you require a good deal of character to be a Butt.

And there is the Buffoon. He is distinct from the Butt, because a Butt is usually a Butt malgré lui, owing to some peculiarity of appearance or temperament; whereas the Buffoon is one of those people who yearn for notice at any price, and will sell their souls "to make fellows laugh." You may behold him, the centre of a grinning group, tormenting some shy or awkward [110] boy—very often the Butt himself; while in school he is the bugbear of weak masters. The larger his audience the more exuberant he becomes: he reaches his zenith at a breaking-up supper or in the back benches on Speech Day. One is tempted to feel that when reduced to his own society he must suffer severely from depression.

Then there is the Man of the World. He is a recognised authority on fast life in London and Bohemian revels in Paris. He is a patron of the drama, and a perfect mine of unreliable information as to the private life of the originals of the dazzling portraits which line his study—and indeed half the studies in the House. The picture-postcard, as an educative and refining influence, has left an abiding mark upon the youth of the present day. We of an older and more rugged civilisation, who were young at a period when actresses' photographs cost two shillings each, were compelled in those days to restrict our gallery of divinities to one or two at the most. (Too often our collection was second-hand, knocked down for sixpence at some end-of-term auction, or reluctantly yielded in composition for a long-outstanding debt by a friend in the throes of a financial crisis.) But [111] nowadays, with the entire Gaiety chorus at a penny apiece, the youthful connoisseur of female beauty has emancipated himself from the pictorial monogamy (or at the most, bigamy) of an earlier generation. He is a polygamist, a pantheist. He can erect an entire feminine Olympus upon his mantelpiece for the sum of half-a-crown. And yet, bless him, he is just as unsophisticated as we used to be—no more and no less. The type does not change.

Lastly, comes the little boy—the Squeaker, the Tadpole, the Nipper, what you will. His chief characteristic is terrific but short-lived enthusiasm for everything he undertakes, be it work, play, a friendship, or a private vendetta.

He begins by taking education very seriously. He is immensely proud of his first set of books, and writes his name on nearly every page, accompanied by metrical warnings to intending purloiners. He equips himself with a perfect arsenal of fountain-pens, rubber stamps, blue pencils, and ink-erasers. He starts a private mark-book of his own, to check possible carelessness or dishonesty on the part of his form-master. Then he gets to work, with his books disposed around him and his fountain-pen [112] playing all over his manuscript. By the end of a fortnight he has lost all his books, and having broken his fountain-pen, is detected in a pathetic attempt to write his exercise upon a sheet of borrowed paper with a rusty nib held in his fingers or stuck into a splinter from off the floor.

It is the same with games. Set a company of small boys to play cricket, and their solemnity at the start is almost painful. Return in half an hour, and you will find that the stately contest has resolved itself into a reproduction of the parrot-house at the Zoo, the point at issue being a doubtful decision of the umpire's. Under the somewhat confiding arrangement which obtains in Lower School cricket, the umpire for the moment is the gentleman whose turn it is to bat next; so litigation is frequent. Screams of "Get out!" "Stay in!" "Cads!" "Liars!" rend the air, until a big boy or a master strolls over and quells the riot.

The small boy's friendships, too, are of a violent but ephemeral nature. But his outstanding characteristic is a passion for organising secret societies of the most desperate and mysterious character, all of which come speedily to a violent or humiliating dissolution.

[113] I was once privileged to be introduced into the inner workings of a society called "The Anarchists." It was not a very original title, but it served its time, for the days of the Society were few and evil. Its aims were sanguinary and nebulous; the Rules consisted almost entirely of a list of the penalties to be inflicted upon those who transgressed them. For instance, under Rule XXIV any one who broke Rule XVII was compelled to sit down for five minutes upon a chair into the seat of which a pot of jam had been emptied. (Economists will be relieved to hear that the jam was afterwards eaten by the executioners, the criminal being very properly barred from participating.)

The Anarchists had a private code of signals with which to communicate with one another in the presence of outsiders—in Prep, for instance. The code was simplicity itself. A single tap with a pencil upon the table denoted the letter A; two taps, B; and so on. As may be imagined, Y and Z involved much mental strain; and as the transmitter of the message invariably lost count after fourteen or fifteen taps, and began all over again without any attempt either at explanation or apology, the gentleman who was acting as receiver usually [114] found the task of decoding his signals a matter of extreme difficulty and some exasperation. Before the tangle could be straightened out a prefect inevitably swooped down and awarded both signallers fifty lines for creating a disturbance in Preparation.

However, the Anarchists, though they finished after the manner of their kind, did not slip into oblivion so noiselessly as some of their predecessors. In fact, nothing in their inky and jabbering life became them like their leaving of it.

One evening the entire brotherhood—there were about seven of them—were assembled in a study which would have held four comfortably, engaged