Public School Life: Boys, Parents, Masters

by Alec Waugh

In the same way that the head master of a Preparatory School specially coaches a boy for a scholarship, not realising that what for him is the whole race is for the boy but a first lap, so the head master of a Public School regards the preservation of innocence between the years of 13 and 19 as the entire battle. As far as I can make out this attitude is adopted by nearly every unscientific writer on the subject.

If the matter ended there it would, of course, be simple. Rigid policemanship and supervision and a system of spies would probably be effective. They might stamp out impurity to a large extent; they would also destroy the discipline of independence, of trust and of authority that one learns at a Public School. The matter is far less simple. The public school system is unnatural. Through unnatural channels, therefore, a natural impulse has to flow into a natural course.

Let us see, more or less, what happens.

We have assumed that an ignorant and innocent boy arrives at his Public School at the age of thirteen, and, to simplify the matter further, we will assume that the boy is not particularly good-looking, and is not, therefore, likely to win the patronage of his seniors. For the first weeks everything is so strange that he lives in a world of his own fashioning. Later on, as he begins to enter the life of the school, he is puzzled by references to an offence the nature of which he does not understand. He hears some one described as being 'smutty.' He does not in any way connect this with the elaborate address that was delivered to him on the last day at his prep. Indeed I knew of a new boy who informed his parents on a postcard that a rather decent chap in his house had been nearly sacked for 'smut.' 'Is this,' he asked, 'anything serious?' He received in reply a reassuring letter telling him that he need not worry about such things just yet.

It is the fashion nowadays to demand open discussion of all subjects; there must be no secrets. Parents are told that they are guilty of criminal negligence if they do not instruct their sons and daughters in the physiology of sex. And, no doubt, it will be maintained that at this point the father should have written his son a long letter explaining to him the nature of the temptation to which he would be exposed. That is the fashion nowadays. No doubt the Victorians suffered from an excessive reserve. We have gone to the other extreme. We are trying to reduce love to an exact science.

On the whole, I suppose that the instruction of children by parents depends entirely on the individual case. But at such a time it would be very easy for the parents to become embarrassed and lose the boy's sympathy. The number of boys who learn from their parents more than a vague idea of motherhood is probably small. And at a Public School it is the physiology of fatherhood that occupies the boy's attention.

We are given to understand that in the first place a boy must be corrupted by another boy. But this is not generally the case. A boy usually manages to corrupt himself. He has overheard the conversation of older boys, he has discussed different problems with his companions; the atmosphere of school life with its continual references to immorality in sermons and addresses, have made him precociously curious. He evolves for himself the practice of private immorality.

A boy's knowledge of sex necessarily is very fragmentary, and on many points he is actually misinformed. He has a preposterous idea, for instance, of the effects that this habit will have upon his health. Syphilis is not more dangerous. His hair will drop out, he will go blind, his brain will soften. Probably he will go mad. Numerical considerations mean nothing to him: once a thief always a thief. The idea of restrained disorder does not occur to him. He suffers from the misery of an incommunicable grief. He is apart from his fellows. If he told them his secret, he thinks that they would despise him. He becomes morbidly introspective. He makes vows to break himself of the habit, fails, and despises himself. He begins to search for the symptoms of his approaching physical and intellectual collapse. If he makes a duck at cricket, misses a catch in a house game, or fails badly in his repetition, he tells himself that the process has begun. There are times when he wants to steal away by himself like an animal that is sick. There are others in which he wishes at all costs to mix with his companions, to take part in any rag that is afoot; to this cause can be invariably attributed the mingled rowdyism and moodiness of certain boys. The idea that such practices are physically injurious is encouraged by the master. It appears to him the most sure preventative. There are, indeed, occasions when masters are so misinformed that they actually believe in these terrible vengeances of the body. For schoolmasters who, of all people, ought to know most of hygiene and physiology, are, for the most part, woefully ignorant of them. It would be indeed interesting to discover what percentage of public school house masters have read any serious medical writing. They are only too willing to believe that such habits have the disastrous results they prophesy. And of course it has not, unless it is practised to excess and unless the subject is particularly feeble. It is foolish to throw lighted matches about the place, but the habit only becomes dangerous when the matches are flung on inflammable material.

It so happens that the greater part of active immorality in schools takes place between boys of fifteen and sixteen; not, as is more frequently imagined, between junior and senior boys. Such relationships are usually of brief duration. They pass with the dawn of the romantic friendship. And it is here that I feel most acutely the difficulty of my task. It is almost impossible to explain to some one who has not been to a Public School the nature of one of these romantic friendships. In a book called Pleasure I published a story dealing with such a friendship. The majority of old public school boys who read it seemed to like it. But none of the men who had not been to a Public School could make head or tail of it. They told me in their reviews of it that it was absurd, mawkish, and unhealthy. It may be so. It may be that I wrote the story badly. I can only repeat that old public school boys liked it. And indeed it is a difficult thing to explain. For what is a romantic friendship but the falling in love of one boy with another. Such a relationship seems preposterous. I can only repeat that the public school system is unnatural, and that one must expect unnatural results from it. What, after all, is to be expected?

A boy of seventeen is passing through a highly romantic period. His emotions are searching for a focus. He is filled with wild, impossible loyalties. He longs to surrender himself to some lost cause. He hungers for adventures. On occasions he even goes so far as to express himself in verse, an indiscretion that he will never subsequently commit. And what focus does a Public School provide for this eager emotionalism? There are the fierce contests of the football field, but they are, when all is said and done, the business of life, the cause for his existence. They are an enthusiasm he shares with three hundred others. He longs for something more intimate, more personal; he is, in fact, in love with love; he does not see a girl of his own age, of his own class, from one end of the term to the other; it is in human nature to accept the second best.