CHAPTER VI
ETON
I enjoyed Eton from the first moment I arrived. The surprise and the relief at finding one was treated like a grown-up person, that nobody minded if one had a sister called Susan or not, that all the ridiculous petty conventions of private-school life counted for nothing, were inexpressibly great.
Directly I arrived I was taken up to my tutor in his study, which was full of delightful books. He took me to the matron, Miss Copeman, whom we called MeDame. I was then shown my room, a tiny room on the second floor in one of the houses opposite to the school-yard. As I sat in my room, boy after boy strolled in, and instead of asking one idiotic questions they carried on rational conversation.
The next day I met Broadwood, who was at another house, and we walked up to Windsor in the afternoon. He told me all the things I had better know at once; such as not to walk on the wrong side of the street when one went up town; never to roll up an umbrella or to turn down the collar of one’s greatcoat; how to talk to the masters and how to talk of them; what shops to go to, and what were the sock-shops that no self-respecting boy went to. There were several such which I never entered the whole time I was at Eton, and yet I suppose they must have been patronised by someone.
The day after that came the entrance examination, in which I did badly indeed, only taking Middle Fourth. My tutor said: “You have been taught nothing at all.” I was in the twenty-seventh division—the last division of the school but three, and up to Mr. Heygate. I was in the French division of M. Hua, who directly he put me on to read saw that I knew French, a fact which I had concealed during the whole time I was at my first private school. I messed with Milton and Herbert Scott, and after the first fortnight I became one of the two fags apportioned to Heywood-Lonsdale.
The captain of the House was Charlie Wood, Lord Halifax’s eldest son, and his younger brother, Francis, was a contemporary of mine and in the same house, but Francis, who was the most delightful of boys and the source and centre of endless fun, died at Eton in the Lent half of 1889.
Fagging was a light operation. One had to make one’s fagmaster tea, two pieces of toast, and sometimes boil some eggs, show that one’s hands were clean, and that was all. Then one was free to cook buttered eggs or fry sausages for one’s own tea.
On my first Sunday at Eton I had breakfast with Arthur Ponsonby, who was at Cornish’s, and I was invited to luncheon at Norman Tower, Windsor, where the Ponsonbys lived. There I found my Uncle Henry, my Aunt M’aimée, my cousins, Betty and Maggie and Johnny, and the Mildmay boys, who were also at Eton then.
In the afternoon we went for a walk in the private grounds of the Home Park with Johnny, and he took us to a grotto called the Black Hole of Calcutta, which was supposed to represent the exact dimensions of that infamous prison. It had a small, thick, glazed glass window at the top of it. On the floor was a heap of stones. Johnny suggested our throwing stones at the window, and soon a spirited stone-throwing competition began. The window was already partly shattered when warning was given that someone was coming. We thought it might be the Queen, and we darted out of the grotto and ran for our lives.
The whole of my Eton life was starred with these Sundays at the Norman Tower, which I looked forward to during the whole week. Maggie would take us sometimes into the Library and the State Rooms, and we used sometimes to hear the approaching footsteps of some of the Royal Family, and race for our life through the empty rooms.
One day we came upon the Empress Frederick, who was quietly enjoying the pictures by herself.
Sometimes in the afternoon Betty would take me up to her room and read out books to me, but that was later.
Our house played football with Evans’, Radcliffe’s, and Ainger’s. We had to play four times a week, and though I was always a useless football player, I thoroughly enjoyed these games, especially the changing afterwards (when we roasted chestnuts in the fire as we undressed), and the long teas. Milton, my mess-mate, was an enthusiastic, but not a skilful chemist, and one day he blew off his eyebrows while making an experiment.
At the end of my first half we had a concert in the house, in which I took part in the chorus. I had organ lessons from Mr. Clapshaw, and during my first half I once had the treat of hearing Jimmy Joynes preach in Lower Chapel. He had been lower master for years, and had just left Eton; he came down to pay a visit, and this was the last time he ever preached at Eton. His sermons were of the anecdotal type, full of quaint, pathetic, and dramatic stories of the triumph of innocence. They were greatly enjoyed by the boys. In the evening, after prayers, my tutor used to come round the boys’ rooms and talk to every boy. He used to come into the room saying: “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ci que ça?” My friends were Dunglass, Herbert Scott, Milton, Stewart, and Brackley. After Eton days I never saw Stewart again till 1914, when the war had just begun. I met him then in Paris. He was in the Intelligence. He had been imprisoned in Germany before the war, and he was killed one day while riding through the town of Braisne on the Aisne.
Dunglass was peculiarly untidy in his clothes, and his hat was always brushed round the wrong way. My tutor used to say to him: “You’re covered with garbage from head to foot,” and sometimes to me: “If your friends and relations could see you now they would have a fit.”
In the evenings the Lower boys did their work in pupil room. Boys in fifth form, when they were slack, did the same as a punishment, and this was called penal servitude. While they prepared their lessons or did their verses, my tutor would be taking older boys in what was called private; this in our case meant special lessons in Greek. One night these older boys were construing Xenophon, and a boy called Rashleigh could not translate the phrase, “Τοὺς πρὸς ἐμὲ λέγοντας.”[3] My tutor repeated it over and over again, and then appealed to us Lower boys. I knew what it meant, but when I was asked I repeated exactly what Rashleigh had said, like one hypnotised, much to my tutor’s annoyance.
Sometimes when my tutor was really annoyed he would say: “Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and think what a ghastly fool you are?” Another time he said to a boy: “You’ve no more manners than a cow, and a bad cow, too.” When the word δύναμαι occurred in Greek, my tutor made a great point of distinguishing the pronunciation of δύναμαι and δυνάμει. δύναμαι he pronounced more broadly. When we read out the word δύναμαι we made no such distinction, and he used to say, “Do you mean dunamẏ or dunamai?” It was our great delight to draw this expression from him, and whenever the word δύναμαι occurred we were careful to accent the last syllable as slightly as possible. It never failed.
We did verses once a week. A little later most of these were done in the house by a boy called Malcolm, who had the talent for dictating verses, on any subject, while he was eating his breakfast, with the necessary number of mistakes and to the exact degree of badness needed for the standard of each boy, for if they were at all too good my tutor would write on them, “Who is the poet?” In return for this I did the French for him and a number of other boys. Latin verses both then, and until I left Eton, were the most important event of the week’s work. When one’s verses had been done and signed by one’s tutor one gave a gasp of relief. Sometimes he tore them up and one had to do them again. I was a bad writer of Latin verse. The kind of mistakes I made exasperated my tutor to madness, especially when I ventured on lyrics which he implored me once never to attempt again. In spite of the trouble verses gave one, even when they were partly done by someone else, one preferred doing them to a long passage of Latin prose, which was sometimes a possible alternative. It is a strange fact, but none the less true, that boys can acquire a mechanical facility for doing Latin verse of