I became possessed of these expensive luxuries in the following way: –
Having spent my holidays with friends in Germany, I was returning to school when I met an Englishman on the train who seemed a very pleasant fellow. He told me that he had a large number of cigars that he wanted to smuggle into England, and asked me if I would help him. I said I would gladly do so, whereupon he proceeded to fill the double lining of my top-hat box with his cigars, explaining that as I was obviously a schoolboy the Custom officials would not trouble much about examining my things, and I could restore the goods to him when we reached London.
I passed through the customs quite successfully, but I never saw the man again, and as a result I arrived back at school with sufficient material to make a hundred boy bravado-smokers sick for a year.
Nearly all our successes in our various schemes were based on simplicity. Things just seemed to come our way, like the cigars. I never asked for those beastly things or wanted them, and I wanted them less than ever after a few trials. For instance, an examination-paper found its way to us on one occasion in a most guileless way. The papers used to be printed off in copying-ink on a tray of gelatine. A short time after putting the negative on to the gelatine, the ink sank to the bottom and no further impression could be taken.
Beresford, wandering round a form-room one rainy afternoon, found a gelatine tray that had recently been used for the above purpose. The master who set the paper had carelessly left the tray on his table under the impression that the ink had sunk to the bottom. But it had not.
Just for something to do, Beresford applied himself to the task of endeavouring to recover the manuscript before it had entirely disappeared, and by an incredible amount of misplaced patience and assiduity succeeded in securing what proved to be a gem of the first water – a very feeble, but still legible, copy of the English Literature Examination paper.
Only one of us was up for this particular exam., and on his own merits he would have done well, but the opportunity of getting some amusement out of the affair was too good to lose.
The paper consisted of quoting ten or twenty consecutive lines of Milton’s ‘Comus’, commenting on the derivation of words, references touched on, and various matters in the notes appended to the school edition.
The master concerned had a special pet pupil who always got top marks, and the joke was to see whether, when one of us was able to answer every question in full, the pet pupil would still emerge top – and he did.
It was certainly a form of cribbing – but a venial one. Our code of honour held that cribbing in a competitive exam. was a vile form of meanness, but in an ordinary exam. we could take what help the gods gave us.
The Natural History Society, founded by Mr. Evans in 1880, soon attracted our attention, and I think we all three became members. It was not so much the pursuit of butterflies, or the study of birds and plants, that drew us to the Society as the valuable privileges conferred on members, the chief of which was a relaxation of bounds. Places that we could only visit hitherto by stealth we could now walk boldly through, carrying in our hands some hastily-gathered botanical specimens or matchboxes containing beetles or caterpillars. With these we could smilingly confront the sergeant or any prowling master who had ‘stalked’ us with a view to punishment for breaking bounds.
But one’s nature cannot be wholly evil, and a small spark of something good in mine was fired by Evans’ enthusiasm for botany. I interested myself in flowers merely in order to carry out nefarious schemes with greater impunity, but I ended in loving flowers for their own sakes. My slight knowledge of botany has been a source of pleasure to me all my life.
The Literary and Debating Society attracted us in a more genuine way and we extracted quite a lot of amusement out of it. Kipling was made Editor of the School Chronicle, and some of his earliest efforts appeared in that paper. I remember ‘Ave Imperatrix’, written in the style of a poet-laureate congratulating a monarch on escape from peril. This was with reference to an attempt on the life of Queen Victoria about 18 8 1. Poets would not be poets if they could know when the divine frenzy was going to inspire them, and when a poet happens to be also a schoolboy the inspiration is pretty certain to come at an unsuitable moment. So it happened that ‘Ave Imperatrix’ was written in French class at the end of a French textbook.
Looking back on my own school-days, I am filled with an intense sympathy for schoolmasters. What a wearisome and thankless task is theirs! I regarded them as a tyrannical lot of old men (some probably not more than twenty-six years old) who hated boys and wanted to make them miserable. So I, in my turn, tried to make them miserable. I know better now, and I hope that boys of these days are not so stupid as I was, and have a fairer estimate of the relative positions of master and boy than I had.
Kipling must have been a difficult youth. The ordinary boy, however truculent, generally quails before the malevolent glance of a notably fierce master. But I remember Kipling on such occasions merely removing his glasses, polishing them carefully, replacing them on his nose and gazing in placid bewilderment at the thundering tyrant, with a look that suggested ‘There, there. Don’t give way to your little foolish tantrums. Go out and get a little fresh air, and you’ll come back feeling quite another man.’
Kipling’s sight was a great handicap to him in the knockabout life of boyhood. Without his glasses he was practically blind. We fought occasionally, as the best of friends always do. He was quite muscular, but shorter than me, and this gave me some advantage. But as you cannot fight with specs. on, my victory was always an easy affair – taking a mean advantage of an opponent who could not see what he was hitting at.
Like all schools, we had compulsory cricket or football three times a week, but it was foolish to expect a boy with a large pair of specs. on his nose to take much interest in the ‘scrum’ of Rugby football.
Kipling’s only nickname at school was ‘Giglamps’– sometimes shortened to ‘Gigger’– derived from the very strong glasses he was compelled to wear.
When I was about twelve years old my father came home on leave from India, and came down to visit the school and to have a look at his son and heir. I was a little awed by this large gentleman, whom I at once put in the same category as the masters. He was then about forty-nine years of age, and all I can remember of his visit is his rage when I offered to help him over a stile. He was a very active man and a noted shikari, but I thought a person of his age was probably infirm. As he had to return to India before our holidays began, we had no opportunity of learning more about each other.
During my seven years at school I spent my holidays with various people in various places. Sometimes a kind Victorian aunt took me in, sometimes I returned to my guardian at Woolwich, and sometimes I had a good time in London or in the country, with friends.
At Greenway, Luppit, near Honiton in Devon, I spent my most exciting holidays, shooting rabbits with an old converted flint-lock lent me by a farmer – Gaffer Coles. The conversion of this ancient weapon from flint-lock to muzzle-loader with percussion cap had been very imperfectly carried out, and every time I fired a little spurt of flame came out of some leakage very close to my eye – rather a dangerous sort of weapon.
With my guardian at Woolwich I had a very good time. As I mentioned before, she was a kind, tender-hearted soul who never dreamt of exercising any control over us, and we were a gang that ought to have had the strictest control. There were eight of us: myself and my two younger sisters, the guardian’s three sons and two daughters; and the girls were as bad as the boys – they always are when they’re not worse.
We lived at 43, The Common, and our various pranks (which I certainly will not describe) attracted some undesired attention to the house. On more than one occasion the police had to visit the widow and threaten legal action unless she would guarantee our future good behaviour. This rather put a check on our youthful exuberance until I found a way out of the difficulty.
No. 43 was a storey higher than the terrace of houses on its left. I found we could get out of our attic win dows, crawl up to the top of our roof and get down, with the aid of a bit of rope, on to the roof of the next house. From there we could make our