VIII
I still had no friends except among the junior members of the house, to whom I did not disguise my dislike of the seniors; I found the juniors were on the whole a decent lot of fellows. Towards the end of this year, in the annual boxing and gymnastic display, I fought three rounds with Raymond. There is a lot of sex feeling in boxing—the dual play, the reciprocity, the pain not felt as pain. This exhibition match to me had something of the quality that Dr. Marie Stopes would call sacramental. We were out neither to hurt nor win though we hit each other hard.
This public appearance as a boxer improved my position in the house. And the doctor now allowed me to play football again and I played it fairly well. Then things started going wrong in a different way. It began with confirmation, for which I was prepared by a zealous evangelical master. For a whole term I concentrated all my thoughts on religion, looking forward to the ceremony as a spiritual climax. When it came, and the Holy Ghost did not descend in the form of a dove, and I did not find myself gifted with tongues, and nothing spectacular happened (except that the boy whom the Bishop of Zululand was blessing at the same time as myself slipped off the narrow footstool on which we were both kneeling), I was bound to feel a reaction. Raymond had not been confirmed, and I was astonished to hear him admit and even boast that he was an atheist. I argued with him about the existence of God and the divinity of Christ and the necessity of the Trinity. He said, of the Trinity, that anybody who could agree with the Athanasian creed that ‘whoever will be saved must confess that there are not Three Incomprehensibles but One Incomprehensible’ was saying that a man must go to Hell if he does not believe something that is by definition impossible to understand. He said that his respect for himself as a reasonable being did not allow him to believe such things. He also asked me a question: ‘What’s the good of having a soul if you have a mind. What’s the function of the soul? It seems a mere pawn in the game.’ I was shocked, but because I loved him and respected him I felt bound to find an answer. The more I thought about it the less certain I became that he was wrong. So in order not to prejudice religion (and I put religion and my chances of salvation before human love) I at first broke my friendship with Raymond entirely. Later I weakened, but he would not even meet me, when I approached him, with any broad-church compromise. He was a complete and ruthless atheist and I could not appreciate his strength of spirit. For the rest of our time at Charterhouse we were not as close as we should have been. I met Raymond in France in 1917, when he was with the Irish Guards; I rode over to see him one afternoon and felt as close to him as I had ever felt. He was killed at Cambrai not long after.
My feeling for Raymond was more comradely than amorous. In my fourth year an even stronger relationship started. It was with a boy three years younger than myself, who was exceptionally intelligent and fine-spirited. Call him Dick, because his real name was the same as that of another person in the story. He was not in my house, but I had recently joined the school choir and so had he, and I had opportunities for speaking to him occasionally after choir practice. I was unconscious of sexual feeling for him. Our conversations were always impersonal. Our acquaintance was commented on and I was warned by one of the masters to end it. I replied that I would not have my friendships in any way limited. I pointed out that this boy was interested in the same things as myself, particularly in books; that the disparity in our ages was unfortunate, but that a lack of intelligence among the boys of my own age made it necessary for me to find friends where I could. Finally the headmaster took me to task about it. I lectured him on the advantage of friendship between elder and younger boys, citing Plato, the Greek poets, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo and others, who had felt the same way as I did. He let me go without taking any action.
In my fifth year I was in the sixth form and was made a house-monitor. There were six house-monitors. One of them was the house games-captain, a friendly, easy-going fellow. He said to me one day: ‘Look here, Graves, I have been asked to send in a list of competitors for the inter-house boxing competition; shall I put your name down?’ I had not boxed for two terms. I had been busy with football and played for the house-team now. And since my coolness with Raymond boxing had lost its interest. I said: ‘I’m not boxing these days.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘young Alan is entering for the welter-weights. He’s got a very good chance. Why don’t you enter for the welter-weights too? You might be able to damage one or two of the stronger men and make it easier for him.’ I did not particularly like the idea of making things easier for Alan, but I obviously had to enter the competition. I had a reputation to keep up. I knew, however, that my wind, though all right for football, was not equal to boxing round after round. I decided that my fights must be short. The night before the competition I smuggled a bottle of cherry-whisky into the house. I would shorten the fights on that.
I had never drank anything alcoholic before in my life. When I was seven years old I was prevailed on to sign the pledge. My pledge card bound me to abstain by the grace of God from all spirituous liquors so long as I retained it. But my mother took the card from me and put it safely in the box-room with the Jacobean silver inherited from my Cheyne grandmother, Bishop Graves’ diamond ring which Queen Victoria gave him when he preached before her, our christening mugs, and the heavy early-Victorian jewellery bequeathed to my mother by the old lady whom she had looked after. And since box-room treasures never left the box-room, I regarded myself as permanently parted from my pledge. I liked the cherry-whisky a lot.
The competitions started about one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and went on until seven. I was drawn for the very first fight and my opponent by a piece of bad luck was Alan. Alan wanted me to scratch. I said I thought that it would look bad to do that. We consulted the house games-captain and he said: ‘No, the most sporting thing to do is to box it out and let the decision be on points; but don’t either of you hurt each other.’ So we boxed. Alan started showing off to his friends, who were sitting in the front row. I said: ‘Stop that. We’re boxing, not fighting,’ but a few seconds later he hit me again unnecessarily hard. I got angry and knocked him out. This was the first time I had ever knocked anyone out and I liked the feeling. I had drank a lot of cherry-whisky. I rather muzzily realized that I had knocked him out with a right swing on the side of the neck and that this blow was not part of the ordinary school-boxing curriculum. Straight lefts; lefts to body, rights to head; left and right hooks; all these were known, but the swing was somehow neglected, probably because it was not so ‘pretty.’
I went to the changing-room for my coat, and stout Sergeant Harris, the boxing instructor, said: ‘Look here, Mr. Graves, why don’t you put down your name for the middle-weight competition too?’ I cheerfully agreed. Then I went back to the house and had a cold bath and more cherry-whisky. My next fight was to take place in about half an hour for the first round of the middle-weights. This time my opponent, who was a stone heavier than myself but had little science, bustled me about for the first round, and I could see that he would tire me out unless something was done. In the second round I knocked him down with my right swing, but he got up again. I was feeling tired, so hastened to knock him down again. I must have knocked him down four or five times that round, but he refused to take the count. I found out afterwards that he was, like myself, conscious that Dick was watching the fight. He loved Dick too. Finally I said to myself as he lurched towards me again: ‘If he doesn’t go down and stay down this time, I won’t be able to hit him again at all.’ This time I just pushed at his jaw as it offered itself to me, but that was enough. He did go down and he did stay down. This second knock-out made quite a stir. Knock-outs were rare in the inter-house boxing competition. As I went back to the house for another cold bath and some more cherry-whisky I noticed the fellows looking at me curiously.
The later stages of the competition I do not remember well. The only opponent that I was now at all concerned about was Raymond, who was nearly a stone heavier than myself and was expected to win the middle-weights; but he had also tried for two weights, the middle and the heavy, and had just had such a tough fight with the eventual winner of the heavy-weights that he was in no proper condition to fight. So he scratched his fight with me. I believe that he would have fought all the same if it had been against someone else; but he was still fond of me and wanted me to win. His scratching would give me a rest between my bouts. A semifinalist scratched against me in the welter-weights, so I only had three more fights, and I let neither of these go beyond the first round. The swing won me both weights, for which I was given two silver cups. But it had also broken both my thumbs; I had not got my elbow high enough over when I used it.
The most important thing that happened to me in my last I two years, apart from my attachment to Dick, was that I got to know George Mallory. He was twenty-six or twenty-seven then, not long up from Cambridge. He was so young looking that he was often mistaken for a member of the school. From the first he treated me as an equal, and I used to spend my spare time reading books in his room or going for walks with him in the country. He told me of the existence of modern authors. My father being two generations older than myself and my only link with books, I had never heard of people like Shaw, Samuel Butler, Rupert Brooke, Wells, Flecker, or Masefield, and I was greatly interested in them. It was at George Mallory’s rooms that I first met Edward Marsh, who has always been a good friend to me, and with whom, though we seldom see each other now, I have never fallen out: in this he is almost unique among my pre-war friends. Marsh said that he liked my poems, which George had showed him, but pointed out that they were written in the poetic vocabulary of fifty years ago and that, though the quality of the poem was not necessarily impaired by this, there would be a natural prejudice in my readers against work written in 1913 in the fashions of 1863.
George Mallory, Cyril Hartmann, Raymond, and I published a magazine in the summer of 1913 called Green Chartreuse. It was only intended to have one number; new magazines at a public school always sell out the first number and lose heavily on the second. From Green Chartreuse I quote one of my own contributions, of autobiographical interest, written in the school dialect:
My New-Bug’s Exam.
When lights went out at half-past nine in the evening of the second Friday in the Quarter, and the faint footfalls of the departing House-Master were heard no more, the fun began.
The Plead of Under Cubicles constituted himself examiner and executioner, and was ably assisted by a timekeeper, a question-recorder, and a staff of his disreputable friends. I was a timorous ‘new-bug’ then, and my pyjamas were damp with the perspiration of fear. Three of my fellows had been examined and sentenced before the inquisition was directed against me.
‘It’s Jones’ turn now,’ said a voice. ‘He’s the little brute that hacked me in run-about to-day. We must set him some tight questions!’
‘I say, Jones, what’s the colour of the House-Master—I mean what’s the name of the House-Master of the House, whose colours are black and white? One, two, three....’
‘Mr. Girdlestone,’ my voice quivered in the darkness.
‘He evidently knows the simpler colours. We’ll muddle him. What are the colours of the Clubs to which Block Houses belong? One, two, three, four....’
I had been slaving at getting up these questions for days, and just managed to blurt out the answer before being counted out.
‘Two questions. No misses. We must buck up,’ said someone.
‘I say, Jones, how do you get to Farncombe from Weekites? One, two, three....’
I had only issued directions as far as Bridge before being counted out.
‘Three questions. One miss. You’re allowed three misses out of ten.’
‘Where is Charterhouse Magazine? One, two, three, four....’
‘Do you mean The Carthusian office?’ I asked.
Everyone laughed.
‘Four questions. Two misses. I say, Robinson, he’s answered far too many. We’ll set him a couple of stingers.’
Much whispering.
‘What is the age of the horse that rolls Under Green? One, two, three....’
‘Six!’ I said, at a venture.
‘Wrong; thirty-eight. Six questions. Three misses! Think yourself lucky you weren’t asked its pedigree.’
‘What are canoeing colours? One, two, thr ...’
‘There aren’t any!’
‘You’ll get cocked-up for festivity; but you can count it. Seven questions. Three misses. Jones?’
‘Yes!’
‘What was the name of the girl to whom rumour stated that last year’s football secretary was violently attached? One, two, three, four....’
‘Daisy!’ (It sounded a likely name.)
‘Oh really! Well, I happen to know last year’s football secretary; and he’ll simply kill you for spreading scandal. You’re wrong anyhow. Eight questions. Four misses!’
‘You’ll come to my “cube” at seven to-morrow morning. See? Good night!’
Here he waved his hair-brush over the candle, and a colossal shadow appeared on the ceiling.
The Poetry Society died about this time—and this is how it died. Two of its sixth-form members came to a meeting and each read a rather dull and formal poem about love and nature; none of us paid much attention to them. But the following week they were published in The Carthusian, and soon every one was pointing and giggling. Both poems, which were signed with pseudonyms, were acrostics, the initial letters spelling out a ‘case.’ ‘Case’ meant ‘romance,’ a formal coupling of two boys’ names, with the name of the elder boy first. In these two cases both the first names mentioned were those of bloods. It was a foolish act of aggression in the feud between sixth form and the bloods. But nothing much would have come of it had not another of the sixth-form members of the Poetry Society been in love with one of the smaller boys whose names appeared in the acrostics. In rage and jealousy he went to the headmaster and called his attention to the acrostic—which otherwise neither he nor any other of the masters would have noticed. He pretended that he did not know the authors; but though he had not been at the particular meeting where the poems were read, he could easily have guessed them from the styles. Before things had taken this turn I had incautiously told someone who the authors were; so I was now dragged into the row as a witness against them. The headmaster took a very serious view of the case. The two poets were deprived of their monitorial privileges; the editor of The Carthusian, who, though aware of the acrostics, had accepted the poems, was deprived of his editorship and of his position as head of the school. The informer, who happened to be next in school order, succeeded him in both capacities; he had not expected this development and it made him most unpopular. His consolation was a real one, that he had done it all for love, to avenge the public insult done to the boy. And he was a decent fellow, really. The Poetry Society was dissolved in disgrace by the headmaster’s orders. Guy Kendall was one of the few masters who insisted on treating the boys better than they deserved, so I was sorry for him when this happened; it was an ‘I told you so’ for the other masters, who did not believe either in poetry or in school uplift societies. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Kendall; the meetings of the Poetry Society were all that I had to look forward to when things were at their worst for me.
My last year at Charterhouse I devoted myself to doing everything I could to show how little respect I had for the school tradition. In the winter of 1913 I won a classical exhibition at St. John’s College, Oxford, so that I could go slow on school work. Nevill Barbour and I were editing the Carthusian, and a good deal of my time went in that. Nevill, who as a scholar had met the same sort of difficulties as myself, also had a dislike of most Charterhouse traditions. We decided that the most objectionable tradition of all was compulsory games. Of these cricket was the most objectionable, because it wasted most time in the best part of the year. We began a campaign in favour of tennis. We were not seriously devoted to tennis, but it was the best weapon we had against cricket—the game, we wrote, in which the selfishness of the few was supposed to excuse the boredom of the many. Tennis was quick and busy. We asked Old Carthusian tennis internationalists to contribute letters proposing tennis as the manlier and more vigorous game. We even got the famous Anthony Wilding to write. The games-masters were scandalized at this assault on cricket; to them tennis was ‘pat ball,’ a game for girls. But the result of our campaign was surprising. Not only did we double our sales, but a fund was started for providing the school with a number of tennis-courts and making Charterhouse the cradle of public-school tennis. Though delayed by the war, these courts actually appeared. I noticed them recently as I went past the school in a car; there seemed to be plenty of them. I wonder, are there tennis-bloods at Charterhouse now?
Poetry and Dick were now the only two things that really mattered. My life with my fellow house-monitors was one of perpetual discord. I had grudges against them all except the house-captain and the head-monitor. The house-captain, the only blood in the house, spent most of his time with his fellow bloods in other houses. The head-monitor was a scholar who, though naturally a decent fellow, had been embittered by his first three years in the house and was much on his dignity. He did more or less what the other monitors wanted him to do, and I was sorry that I had to lump him in with the rest. My love for Dick provoked a constant facetiousness, but they never dared to go too far. I once caught one of them in the bathroom scratching up a pair of hearts conjoined, with Dick’s initials and mine on them. I pushed him into the bath and turned the taps on. The next day he got hold of a manuscript note-book of mine that I had left on the table in the monitors’ room with some other books. It had poems and essay notes in it. He and the other monitors, except the house-captain, annotated it critically in blue chalk and all signed their initials. The house-captain would have nothing to do with this: he thought it ungentlemanly. I was furious when I found what had been done. I made a speech. I demanded a signed apology. I said that if I were not given it within an hour I would choose one of them as solely responsible and punish him. I said that I would now have a bath and that the first monitor that I met after my bath I would knock down.
Whether by accident or whether it was that he thought his position made him secure, the first monitor I met in the corridor was the head-monitor. I knocked him down. It was the time of evening preparation, which only the monitors were free not to attend. But a fag happened to pass on an errand and saw the blow and the blood; so it could not be hushed up. The head-monitor went to the house-master and the house-master sent for me. He was an excitable, elderly man who had some difficulty in controlling his spittle when angry. He made me sit down in a chair in his study, then stood over me, clenching his fists and crying in his high falsetto voice: ‘Do you realize you have done a very brutal action?’ His mouth was bubbling. I was as angry as he was. I jumped up and clenched my fists too. Then I said that I would do the same thing to anyone who, after scribbling impertinent remarks on my private papers, refused to apologize. ‘Private papers. Filthy poems,’ said the house-master.
I had another difficult interview with the headmaster over this. But it was my last term, so he allowed me to finish my five years without ignominy. He was puzzled by the frankness of my statement of love for Dick. He reopened the question. I refused to be ashamed. I heard afterwards that he had said that this was one of the rare cases of a friendship between boys of unequal ages which he felt was essentially moral. I went through one of the worst quarters of an hour of my life on Dick’s account in this last term. When the master had warned me about exchanging glances with Dick in chapel I had been infuriated. But when I was told by one of the boys that he had seen the master surreptitiously kissing Dick once, on a choir-treat or some such occasion, I went quite mad. I asked for no details or confirmation. I went to the master and told him he must resign or I would report the case to the headmaster. He already had a reputation in the school for this sort of thing, I said. Kissing boys was a criminal offence. I was morally outraged. Probably my sense of outrage concealed a murderous jealousy. I was surprised when he vigorously denied the charge; I could not guess what was going to happen next. But I said: ‘Well, come to the headmaster and deny it to him.’ He asked: ‘Did the boy tell you this himself?’ I said ‘No.’ ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘I’ll send for him here and he shall tell us the truth.’ So Dick was sent for and arrived looking very frightened, and the house-master said menacingly: ‘Graves tells me that I once kissed you. Is that true?’ Dick said: ‘Yes, it is true.’ So Dick was dismissed and the master collapsed, and I felt miserable. He said he would resign at the end of the term, which was quite near, on grounds of ill-health. He even thanked me for speaking directly to him and not going to the headmaster. That was in the summer of 1914; he went into the army and was killed the next year. I found out much later from Dick that he had not been kissed at all. It may have been some other boy.
One of the last events that I remember at Charterhouse was a debate with the motion that ‘this House is in favour of compulsory military service.’ The Empire Service League, or whatever it was called, of which Earl Roberts of Kandahar, V.C., was the President, sent down a propagandist to support the motion. There were only six votes out of one hundred and nineteen cast against it. I was the principal speaker against the motion, a strong anti-militarist. I had recently resigned from the Officers’ Training Corps, having revolted against the theory of implicit obedience to orders. And during a fortnight spent the previous summer at the O.T.C. camp at Tidworth on Salisbury Plain, I had been frightened by a special display of the latest military fortifications, barbed-wire entanglements, machine-guns, and field artillery in action. General, now Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson, whose son was a member of the school, had visited the camp and impressed upon us that war against Germany was inevitable within two or three years, and that we must be prepared to take our part in it as leaders of the new forces that would assuredly be called into being. Of the six voters against the motion Nevill Barbour and I are, I believe, the only ones who survived the war.
My last memory was the headmaster’s good-bye. It was this: ‘Well, good-bye, Graves, and remember this, that your best friend is the waste-paper basket.’
I used to speculate on which of my contemporaries would distinguish themselves after they left school. The war upset my calculations. Many dull boys had brief brilliant military careers, particularly as air-fighters, becoming squadron and flight commanders. ‘Fuzzy’ McNair, the head of the school, won the V.C. as a Rifleman; young Sturgess, who had been my study fag, distinguished himself more unfortunately by flying the first heavy bombing machine of a new pattern across the Channel on his first trip to France and making a beautiful landing (having mistaken the landmarks) at an aerodrome behind the German lines. A boy whom I admired very much during my first year at Charterhouse was the Hon. Desmond O’Brien. He was the only Carthusian in my time who cheerfully disregarded all school rules. He had skeleton keys for the school library, chapel and science laboratories and used to break out of his house at night and carefully disarrange things there. The then headmaster was fond of O’Brien and forgave him much. O’Brien had the key of the headmaster’s study too and, going there one night with an electric torch, carried off a memorandum which he showed me—‘Must expel O’Brien.’ He had a wireless receiving-station in one of the out-of-bounds copses on the school grounds, and he discovered a ventilator shaft down which he could hoot into the school library from outside and create great disturbance without detection. One day we were threatened with the loss of a Saturday half-holiday because some member of the school had killed a cow with a catapult, and nobody would own up. O’Brien had fired the shot; he was away at the time on special leave for a sister’s wedding. A friend wrote to him about the half-holiday. He sent the headmaster a telegram: ‘Killed cow sorry coming O’Brien.’ At last, having absented himself from every lesson and chapel for three whole days, he was expelled. He was killed early in the war while bombing Bruges.
At least one in three of my generation at school was killed. This was because they all took commissions as soon as they could, most of them in the infantry and flying corps. The average life of the infantry subaltern on the Western front was, at some stages of the war, only about three months; that is to say that at the end of three months he was either wounded or killed. The proportions worked out at about four wounded to every one killed. Of the four one was wounded seriously and the remaining three more or less lightly. The three lightly wounded returned to the front after a few weeks or months of absence and were again subject to the same odds. The flying casualties were even higher. Since the war lasted for four and a half years, it is easy to see why the mortality was so high among my contemporaries, and why most of the survivors, if not permanently disabled, were wounded at least two or three times.
Two well-known sportsmen were contemporaries of mine: A. G. Bower, captain of England at soccer, who was only an average player at Charterhouse, and Woolf Barnato, the Surrey cricketer (and millionaire racing motorist), who also was only an average player. Barnato was in the same house as myself and we had not a word to say to each other for the four years we were together. Five scholars have made names for themselves: Richard Hughes as a B.B.C. playwright; Richard Goolden as an actor of old-man parts; Vincent Seligman as author of a propagandist life of Venizelos; Cyril Hartmann as an authority on historical French scandals; and my brother Charles as society gossip-writer on the middle page of The Daily Mail. Occasionally I see another name or two in the newspapers. There was one the other day—M ... who was in the news for escaping from a private lunatic asylum. I remembered that he had once offered a boy ten shillings to hold his hand in a thunderstorm and that he had frequently threatened to run away from Charterhouse.