VI
About Charterhouse. Let me begin by recalling my feelings on the day that I left, about a week before the outbreak of war. I discussed them with a friend who felt much as I did. First we said that there were perhaps even more typical public schools than Charterhouse at the time, but that this was difficult to believe. Next, that there was no possible remedy, because tradition was so strong that if one wished to break it one would have to dismiss the whole school and staff and start all over again. But that even this would not be enough, for the school buildings were so impregnated with what was called the public school spirit, but what we felt as fundamental badness, that they would have to be demolished and the school rebuilt elsewhere and its name changed. Next, that our only regret at leaving the place was that for the last year we had been in a position as members of Sixth Form to do more or less what we pleased. Now we were both going on to St. John’s College, Oxford, which seemed by reputation to be merely a more boisterous repetition of Charterhouse. We would be freshmen there, and would naturally refuse to be hearty and public school-ish, and there would be all the stupidity of having our rooms raided and being forced to lose our temper and hurt somebody and be hurt ourselves. And there would be no peace probably until we got into our third year, when we would be back again in the same sort of position as now, and in the same sort of position as in our last year at our preparatory school. ‘In 1917,’ said Nevill, ‘the official seal will be out on all this dreariness. We’ll get our degrees, and then we’ll have to start as new boys again in some dreary profession. My God,’ he said, turning to me suddenly, ‘I can’t stand the idea of it. I must put something in between me and Oxford. I must at least go abroad for the whole vacation.’ I did not feel that three months was long enough. I had a vague intention of running away to sea. ‘Do you realize,’ he said to me, ‘that we have spent fourteen years of our life principally at Latin and Greek, not even competently taught, and that we are going to start another three years of the same thing?’ But, when we had said our very worst of Charterhouse, I said to him or he said to me, I forget which: ‘Of course, the trouble is that in the school at any given time there are always at least two really decent masters among the forty or fifty, and ten really decent fellows among the five or six hundred. We will remember them, and have Lot’s feeling about not damning Sodom for the sake of ten just persons. And in another twenty years’ time we’ll forget this conversation and think that we were mistaken, and that perhaps everybody, with a few criminal exceptions, was fairly average decent, and we’ll say “I was a young fool then, insisting on impossible perfection,” and we’ll send our sons to Charterhouse sentimentally, and they’ll go through all we did.’ I do not wish this to be construed as an attack on my old school, but merely as a record of my feelings at the time. No doubt I was unappreciative of the hard knocks and character-training that public schools are supposed to provide, and as a typical Old Carthusian remarked to me recently: ‘The whole moral tone of the school has improved out of all recognition since those days.’
As a matter of fact I did not go up to Oxford until five years later, in 1919, when my brother, four years younger than myself, was already in residence, and I did not take my degree until 1926, at the same time as the brother who was eight years younger than myself. Oxford was extraordinarily kind to me. I did no Latin or Greek there, though I had a Classical Exhibition. I did not sit for a single examination. I never had rooms at St. John’s, though I used to go there to draw a Government grant for tuition fees. I lived outside the University three-mile radius. For my last two undergraduate years I did not even have a tutor. I have a warm feeling for Oxford. Its rules and statutes, though apparently cast-iron, are ready for emergencies. In my case, at any rate, a poet was an emergency.
Whenever I come to the word ‘Charterhouse’ in this story I find myself escaping into digressions, but I suppose that I must get through with it. From the moment I arrived at the school I suffered an oppression of spirit that I hesitate now to recall in its full intensity. It was something like being in that chilly cellar at Laufzorn among the potatoes, but being a potato out of a different bag from the rest. The school consisted of about six hundred boys. The chief interests were games and romantic friendships. School-work was despised by every one; the scholars, of whom there were about fifty in the school at any given time, were not concentrated in a single dormitory-house as at Winchester, but divided among ten. They were known as ‘pro’s,’ and unless they were good at games and willing to pretend that they hated work as much as or more than the non-scholars, and ready whenever called on to help these with their work, they usually had a bad time. I was a scholar and really liked work, and I was surprised and disappointed at the apathy of the class-rooms. My first term I was left alone more or less, it being a school convention that new boys should be neither encouraged nor baited. The other boys seldom spoke to them except to send them on errands, or to inform them of breaches of school convention. But my second term the trouble began. There were a number of things that naturally made for my unpopularity. Besides being a scholar and not outstandingly good at games, I was always short of pocket-money. I could not conform to the social custom of treating my contemporaries to food at the school shop, and because I could not treat them I could not accept their treating. My clothes were all wrong; they conformed outwardly to the school pattern, but they were ready-made and not of the best-quality cloth that the other boys all wore. Even so, I had not been taught how to make the best of them. Neither my mother nor my father had any regard for the niceties of modern dress, and my elder brothers were abroad by this time. The other boys in my house, except for five scholars, were nearly all the sons of business men; it was a class of whose interests and prejudices I knew nothing, having hitherto only met boys of the professional class. And I talked too much for their liking. A further disability was that I was as prudishly innocent as my mother had planned I should be. I knew nothing about simple sex, let alone the many refinements of sex constantly referred to in school conversation. My immediate reaction was one of disgust. I wanted to run away.
The most unfortunate disability of all was that my name appeared on the school list as ‘R. von R. Graves.’ I had only known hitherto that my second name was Ranke; the ‘von,’ discovered on my birth certificate, was disconcerting. Carthusians were secretive about their second names; if these were fancy ones they usually managed to conceal them. Ranke, without the ‘von’ I could no doubt have passed off as monosyllabic and English, but ‘von Ranke’ was glaring. The business class to which most of the boys belonged was strongly feeling at this time the threat and even the necessity of a trade war; ‘German’ meant ‘dirty German.’ It meant ‘cheap shoddy goods competing with our sterling industries,’ and it also meant military menace, Prussianism, sabre-rattling. There was another boy in my house with a German name, but English by birth and upbringing. He was treated much as I was. On the other hand a French boy in the house was very popular, though he was not much good at games; King Edward VII had done his entente work very thoroughly. There was also considerable anti-Jewish feeling (the business prejudice again) and the legend was put about that I was not only a German but a German-Jew.
Of course I always maintained that I was Irish. This claim was resented by an Irish boy who had been in the house about a year and a half longer than myself. He went out of his way to hurt me, not only by physical acts of spite, like throwing ink over my school-books, hiding my games-clothes, setting on me suddenly from behind corners, pouring water over me at night, but by continually forcing his bawdy humour on my prudishness and inviting everybody to laugh at my disgust; he also built up a sort of humorous legend of my hypocrisy and concealed depravity. I came near a nervous breakdown. School morality prevented me from informing the house-master of my troubles. The house-monitors were supposed to keep order and preserve the moral tone of the house, but at this time they were not the sort to interfere in any case of bullying among the juniors. I tried violent resistance, but as the odds were always heavily against me this merely encouraged the ragging. Complete passive resistance would probably have been better. I only got accustomed to bawdy-talk in my last two years at Charterhouse, and it was not until I had been some time in the army that I got hardened to it and could reply in kind to insults.
A former headmaster of Charterhouse, an innocent man, is reported to have said at a Headmasters’ Conference: ‘My boys are amorous but seldom erotic.’ Few cases of eroticism indeed ever came to his notice; there were not more than five or six big rows all the time I was at Charterhouse and expulsions were rare. But the house-masters knew little about what went on in their houses; their living quarters were removed from the boys’. There was a true distinction between ‘amorousness,’ by which the headmaster meant a sentimental falling in love with younger boys, and eroticism, which was adolescent lust. The intimacy, as the newspapers call it, that frequently took place was practically never between an elder boy and the object of his affection, for that would have spoilt the romantic illusion, which was heterosexually cast. It was between boys of the same age who were not in love, but used each other coldly as convenient sex-instruments. So the atmosphere was always heavy with romance of a very conventional early-Victorian type, yet complicated by cynicism and foulness.