Pugh was a great, strong, ‘hefty’ fellow with very large feet and a very kind heart. He would have been a very good house-master if he had not made the mistake of prowling and prying, which all boys resent and which made it extremely easy for us to entrap him. Kipling, Beresford, and myself enjoyed the privilege of being in his house and under his care, but I am not sure that he enjoyed the privilege of guiding our infant footsteps.
Of Haslam I remember little except that he was the only married master, and his good wife prevented him from getting into trouble.
Green was a house-master who wore a thick black beard which helped him to keep order. He was rather inclined to bark at us, which accounted for his nickname of ‘Barky’.
Stevens, a parson, was a good, sensible fellow, popular with the boys and I should think equally so with the masters.
Evans, nicknamed ‘Punch’ because of a rather large and curved nose, I best remember as the founder and organizer of the ‘Bug-and-tick’ or ‘Natural History Society’. His enthusiasm for this Society led him sometimes a little astray, but he understood us and I do not think any of us could have anything but pleasant recollections of his dealings with us – even though the ‘dealings’ sometimes involved the use of the cane. He had the additional attraction of being a good actor and won our affections by his performance in many comic pieces.
Bode, who later took Orders, is the only survivor of the group – still in harness at Beechmont, Haywards Heath. I am indebted to him for early training in singing, which, as far as I remember, was a hobby of his. He had nothing to do with the teaching of singing, but in some capacity or another I can recall him waving a bâton and persuading me to sing glees.
I have given, with some diffidence, a few notes on the characters of the various masters who composed the staff of the old college in the days of my youth, chiefly with a view of appreciating Cormell Price’s difficulties, but I think the greatest difficulty he had to contend with was our lack of tradition, which is the main stand-by for control. In our case there was no tradition, and as each master brought with him fragments of traditions of other schools, the Head was confronted with an almost hopeless task: and as regards the 200 boys we were equally heterogeneous and lacking school tradition.
Another difficulty was probably caused by the absence of selection. At the start of a new school financial considerations are of primary importance, and the chief thing to do is to get the school filled up to its fullest complement. Under such circumstances, and with no ‘waiting list’, selection is almost impossible. So among us were many rather tough characters.
The Headmaster had come to us from Haileybury and brought a small nucleus of boys with him. The great majority of the rest were little innocents like myself, sons of hard-up officers. But there must have been quite a large proportion of boys that no one else wanted, possibly even quite a fair number who had been already tried elsewhere, and had been, to use an euphemistic term, ‘rejected’.
I mention all this because so many people have taken a deep interest in Rudyard Kipling’s inimitable Stalky & Co., and have often expressed their inability to understand how ‘things should have been so’.
Soon after the issue of that book I read frequent letters in the papers from old boys of various famous public schools, informing the world that their schools were not in the least like that. Of course they weren’t. The above may help to explain why they were not.
Stalky & Co. is a work of fiction, and not a historical record. Stalky himself was never quite so clever as portrayed in the book, and the book makes no mention of the many times when he was let down. But he represents, not an individual – though his character may be based on that of an individual – but the medium of one of the prevailing spirits of this most untypical school.
I joined the school about 1875 and my number was 10. I owed that early number not to the date of my joining but to the date of registration at the time of the foundation of the college.
Kipling did not join till several years later – I cannot tell when, but one can form some estimate of the period from the fact that his number was 264. During those troublous years I had to develop my character, without his shrewd guidance, from artless simplicity to artful guile, and by the time that he and Beresford united with me in the occupancy of a study I was in the passive condition of a bundle of Chinese firecrackers to which his fertile brain eagerly applied the torch.
Beresford added to the combination an extraordinarily mature judgment combined with a malicious ingenuity. It is difficult really to score off masters in the long run, and in most cases when we were triumphant, it was due to his placid subtlety.
Our paths in life have proved the wide divergence of our characters, but this divergence made the youthful combination all the more dangerous. What one lacked the other had, and we really must have been a very difficult trio to tackle.
Beresford and I had our fair share of brains, but Kipling had a great deal more than his fair share, and added to it the enormous asset of knowledge – intuitive and acquired.
Our earlier escapades were on the lines of simple buffoonery, but we soon evolved on to a higher plane of astute plotting on more intellectual lines, the essence of each plot being that it should leave our adversaries nothing to hit back at.
The culmination of the plot was the appearance of the elusive criminals in the pleasing pose of injured innocence.
In spite of our many drawbacks there was a splendid spirit in the school, and a very strong sense of loyalty pervaded both masters and boys when confronting the outside world.
And I may say, finally, that Westward Ho was a notably ‘clean’ school, in every sense of that word.
CHAPTER II
SCHOOLDAYS
I MUST now deal with the first year of my school career, a rather trying period of life for any boy, but especially so for me under peculiar circumstances.
To begin with, I was much the youngest boy in the school. There were a few not much older than I was, but the majority began at the usual public-school age of fourteen. As the college had no preparatory school at this period and my father was anxious to send me as soon as possible to any school where I would get well smacked and kept in order, I was launched to begin the battle of life – in a rather literal way – at the early age of ten.
We numbered about 200, and, as I have mentioned, among the elder boys there were several who had started elsewhere, but had come to us because their previous institutions had not regarded them as particularly desirable.
I had no previous knowledge of the little points of etiquette common to all schoolboys. I was not altogether a ‘little innocent’, but I was extraordinarily ignorant of boys’ ways – coming as I did straight from the mild tutelage of sisters and governesses.
I dare say Christian names are no longer ‘taboo’. I seem to hear them used sometimes among modern schoolboys. But at Westward Ho we guarded ours with jealous secrecy.
My ignorance of this, and my fat cheeks, were the chief causes of my early sorrows.
I was a ‘fat little beast’ or a ‘bloated mass of blubber’ to scornful elders, and these epithets caused me great agony of mind.
My first recollection of events on the day of my arrival begins with my appearance in the corridor on a wet, cold, dark afternoon. Details of my journey from London up to that point have faded from my mind. I seemed to have dropped from the skies into a howling pandemonium.
A new boy always excites some little interest and I soon found myself surrounded by a group of boys clamouring to know my name. To their appeal I responded ‘Lionel’.
This was received with delighted applause and yells of derision. I could not see why. And being again appealed to I once more responded