VII
Half-way through my second year I wrote to my parents to tell them that I must leave Charterhouse, because I could not stand life there any longer. I told them that the house was making it plain that I did not belong and that it did not want me. I gave them details, in confidence, to make them take my demand seriously. They were unable to respect this confidence, considering that it was their religious duty to inform the house-master of all I had written them. They did not even tell me what they were doing; they contented themselves with visiting me and giving me assurances of the power of prayer and faith; telling me that I must endure all for the sake of ... I have forgotten what exactly. Fortunately I had not given them any account of sex-irregularities in the house, so all that the house-master did was to make a speech that night after prayers deterrent of bullying in general; he told us that he had just had a complaint from a boy’s parents. He made it plain at the same time how much he disliked informers and outside interference in affairs of the house. My name was not mentioned, but the visit of my parents on a day not a holiday had been noticed and commented on. So I had to stay on and be treated as an informer. I was now in the upper school and so had a study of my own. But this was no security; studies had no locks. It was always being wrecked. After my parents’ visit to the house-master it was not even possible for me to use the ordinary house changing-room; I had to remove my games-clothes to a disused shower-bath. My heart went wrong then; the school doctor said I was not to play football. This was low water. My last resource was to sham insanity. It succeeded unexpectedly well. Soon nobody troubled about me except to avoid any contact with me.
I must make clear that I am not charging my parents with treachery; they were trying to help me. Their honour is beyond reproach.... One day I went down to Charterhouse by the special train from Waterloo to Godalming. I was too late to take a ticket; I just got into a compartment before the train started. The railway company had not provided enough coaches, so I had to stand up all the way. At Godalming station the crowd of boys rushing out into the station-yard to secure taxis swept me past the ticket collectors, so I had got my very uncomfortable ride free. I mentioned this in my next letter home, just for something to say, and my father sent me a letter of reproach. He said that he had himself made a special visit to Waterloo Station, bought a ticket to Godalming, and torn it up.... My mother was even more scrupulous. A young couple on their honeymoon once happened to stop the night with us at Wimbledon, and left behind them a packet of sandwiches, some of which had already been eaten. My mother sent them on.
Being thrown entirely on myself I began to write poetry. This was considered stronger proof of insanity than the formal straws I wore in my hair. The poetry I wrote was not the easy showing-off witty stuff that all the Graves’ write and have written for the last couple of centuries. It was poetry that was dissatisfied with itself. When, later, things went better with me at Charterhouse, I became literary once more.
I sent one of my poems to the school magazine, The Carthusian. On the strength of it I was invited to join the school Poetry Society. This was a most anomalous organization for Charterhouse. It consisted of seven members. The meetings, for the reading and discussion of poetry, were held once a month at the house of Guy Kendall, then a form-master at the school, now headmaster of University College School at Hampstead. The members were four sixth-form boys and two boys a year and a half older than myself, one of whom was called Raymond Rodakowski. None of them were in the same house as myself. At Charterhouse no friendship was permitted between boys of different houses or of different years beyond a formal acquaintance at work or organized games like cricket and football. It was, for instance, impossible for boys of different houses, though related or next-door neighbours at home, even to play a friendly game of tennis or squash-racquets together. They would never have heard the last of it. So the friendship that began between me and Raymond was most unconventional. Coming home one evening from a meeting of the society I told Raymond about life in the house; I told him what had happened a week or two before. My study had been raided and one of my more personal poems had been discovered and pinned up on the public notice board in ‘Writing School.’ This was the living-room of the members of the lower school, into which, as a member of the upper school, I was not allowed to go, and so could not rescue the poem. Raymond was the first person I had been able to talk to humanly. He was indignant, and took my arm in his in the gentlest way. ‘They are bloody barbarians,’ he said. He told me that I must pull myself together and do something about it, because I was a good poet, he said, and a good person. I loved him for that. He said: ‘You’re not allowed to play football; why don’t you box? It’s supposed to be good for the heart.’ So I laughed and said I would. Then Raymond said: ‘I expect they rag you about your initials.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘they call me a dirty German.’ ‘I had trouble, too,’ he said, ‘before I took up boxing.’ Raymond’s mother was Scottish, his father was an Austrian Pole.
Very few boys at Charterhouse boxed and the boxing-room, which was over the school confectionery shop, was a good place to meet Raymond, whom, otherwise, I would not have been able to see often. I began boxing seriously and savagely. Raymond said to me: ‘You know these cricketers and footballers are all afraid of boxers, almost superstitious. They won’t box themselves for fear of losing their good looks—the inter-house competitions every year are such bloody affairs. But do you remember the Mansfield, Waller and Taylor show? That’s a good tradition to keep up.’
Of course I remembered. Two terms previously there had been a meeting of the school debating society which I had attended. The committee of the debating society was usually made up of sixth-form boys; the debates were formal and usually dull, but in so far as there was any intellectual life at Charterhouse, it was represented by the debating society—and by The Carthusian, always edited by two members of this committee; both institutions were free from influence of the masters. Debates were always held in the school library on Saturday night. One debate night the usual decorous conventions were broken by an invasion of ‘the bloods.’ The bloods were the members of the cricket and football elevens. They were the ruling caste at Charterhouse; the eleventh man in the football eleven, though a member of the under-fourth form, had a great deal more prestige than the most brilliant classical scholar in the sixth. Even ‘Head of the School’ was an empty title. There was not, however, an open warfare between the sixth-form intellectuals and the bloods. The bloods were stupid and knew it, and had nothing to gain by a clash; the intellectuals were happy to be left alone. So this invasion of the bloods, who had just returned from winning a match against the Casuals, and had probably been drinking, caused the debating society a good deal of embarrassment. The bloods disturbed the meeting by cheers and cat-cries and slamming the library magazine-folders on the table. Mansfield, as president of the society, called them to order, but they continued the disturbance; so Mansfield closed the debate. The bloods thought the incident finished, but it was not. A letter appeared in The Carthusian a few days later protesting against the bad behaviour in the debating society of ‘certain First Eleven babies.’ Three sets of initials were signed and they were those of Mansfield, Waller and Taylor. The school was astonished by this suicidally daring act; it waited for Korah, Dathan and Abiram to be swallowed up. The captain of football is said to have sworn that he’d chuck the three signatories into the fountain in Founder’s Court. But somehow he did not. The fact was that this happened early in the autumn term and there were only two other First Eleven colours left over from the preceding year; new colours were only given gradually as the football season advanced. The other rowdies had only been embryo bloods. So it was a matter entirely between these three sixth-form intellectuals and the three colours of the First Eleven. And the First Eleven were uncomfortably aware that Mansfield was the heavy-weight boxing champion of the school, Waller the runner-up for the middle-weights, and that Taylor was also a person to be reckoned with (a tough fellow, though not perhaps a boxer—I forget). While the First Eleven were wondering what on earth to do their three opponents decided to take the war into the enemy’s country.
The social code of Charterhouse was based on a very strict caste system; the caste-marks were slight distinctions in dress. A new boy had no privileges at all; a boy in his second term might wear a knitted tie instead of a plain one; a boy in his second year might wear coloured socks; third year gave most of the privileges—turned down collars, coloured handkerchiefs, a coat with a long roll, and so on; fourth year, a few more, such as the right to get up raffles; but very peculiar and unique distinctions were reserved for the bloods. These included light grey flannel trousers, butterfly collars, coats slit up the back, and the privilege of walking arm-in-arm. So the next Sunday Mansfield, Waller and Taylor did the bravest thing that was ever done at Charterhouse. The school chapel service was at eleven in the morning, but the custom was for the school to be in its seats by five minutes to eleven and to sit waiting there. At two minutes to eleven the bloods used to stalk in; at one and a half minutes to came the masters; at one minute to came the choir in its surplices; then the headmaster arrived and the service started. If any boy was accidentally late and sneaked in between five minutes to and two minutes to the hour, he was followed by six hundred pairs of eyes; there was nudging and giggling and he would not hear the last of it for a long time; it was as though he were pretending to be a blood. On this Sunday, then, when the bloods had come in with their usual swaggering assurance, an extraordinary thing happened.
The three sixth-formers slowly walked up the aisle magnificent in grey flannel trousers, slit coats, First Eleven collars, and with pink carnations in their buttonholes. It is impossible to describe the astonishment and terror that this spectacle caused. Everyone looked at the captain of the First Eleven; he had gone quite white. But by this time the masters had come in, followed by the choir, and the opening hymn, though raggedly sung, ended the tension. When chapel emptied it always emptied according to ‘school order,’ that is, according to position in work; the sixth form went out first. The bloods were not high in school order, so Mansfield, Waller and Taylor had the start of them. After chapel on Sunday the custom in the winter terms was for people to meet and gossip in the school library; so it was here that Mansfield, Waller and Taylor went. They had buttonholed a talkative master and drawn him with them into the library, and there they kept him talking until dinnertime. If the bloods had had courage to do anything desperate they would have had to do it at once, but they could not make a scene in the presence of a master. Mansfield, Waller and Taylor went down to their houses for dinner still talking to the master. After this they kept together as much as possible and the school, particularly the lower school, which had always chafed under the dress regulations, made heroes of them, and began scoffing at the bloods as weak-kneed.
Finally the captain of the eleven was stupid enough to complain to the headmaster about this breach of school conventions, asking for permission to enforce First Eleven rights by disciplinary measures. The headmaster, who was a scholar and disliked the games tradition, refused his request. He said that the sixth form deserved as distinctive privileges as the First Eleven. The sixth form would therefore in future be entitled to hold what they had assumed. After this the prestige of the bloods declined greatly.
At Raymond’s encouragement I pulled myself together and my third year found things very much easier for me. My chief persecutor, the Irishman, had left. It was said that he had had a bad nervous breakdown. He wrote me a hysterical letter, demanding my forgiveness for his treatment of me, saying at the same time that if I did not give this forgiveness, one of his friends (whom he mentioned) was still in the house to persecute me. I did not answer the letter. I do not know what happened to him. The friend never bothered.