Public School Life: Boys, Parents, Masters

by Alec Waugh

In this environment there is nothing unnatural about the attraction exercised by a small boy over an elder one. A small boy is the nearest approach possible to the feminine ideal. Indeed a small boy at a Public School has many of the characteristics that a man would hope and expect to find in a woman. He is small, weak, and stands in need of protection. He is remote as a woman is, in that he moves in a different circle of school life, with different friends, different troubles, different ambitions. He is an undiscovered country. The emotion experienced is genuine, and usually takes the elder boy by surprise. In a man's love for a woman there is often a degree of premeditation. A man looks at a woman and wonders if he could ever come to fall in love with her. As he walks homewards from her drawing-room he asks himself whether or not he is in love with her. He analyses his emotions; very often he persuades himself he is in love with her when in reality he is not. Either way he is prepared.

But the schoolboy is taken off his guard. He has not realised it is possible that he should fall in love with another boy. He has no previous experience which will enable him to recognise the symptoms. He has heard older boys spoken of as being 'keen' on some one or other, but he has associated such an assertion with the references in sermons to the corruption of a young mind. He does not, therefore, know what is happening when he finds himself becoming increasingly interested in some quite small boy. He has noticed him playing a plucky game on the Lower and has congratulated him. They have happened to meet on the way up from hall and have walked across together to the studies. They have smiled when they passed each other as they changed from one class-room to another in break. The elder boy is surprised: he is still more surprised when he finds himself frequently walking into the smaller boy's study on no very necessary errand, to borrow a book he does not want or to return a book he has not borrowed; and that he should stop there to talk for an indefinite period. The day on which he has not seen or spoken to his small friend is empty for him. He does not understand his increasing wish for the company of an admittedly inferior person. But it is all very delightful. He is desperately anxious to appear in his best light. He makes strenuous, and often successful, efforts to abandon certain habits he had contracted. He may even work harder in form, and certainly he will make superhuman efforts on the football field, feeling that success will render him more attractive. He wonders what the small boy thinks of him, and persuades one whose social position lies midway between the two of them to make inquiries. The growing intimacy is a rich enchantment. He becomes curious, and, in a way, jealous of the life that his friend is leading; their standards, their environment, their friends are so different. He knows instinctively that one has more in common with one's contemporaries than with those who lie outside the circle of one's immediate interests, and this knowledge distresses him. There are times when he feels intensely miserable, others when he feels radiantly happy. At any rate he is living more intensely and less selfishly than he did before. He is on a distinctly higher plane of emotional tension.

Indeed in its beginnings such a friendship is certainly good for the elder boy and probably for the younger one; at any rate there is the comfortable knowledge that he has an elder friend to whom he can turn for sympathy and advice; and he is protected thus from many of the dangers to which his good looks might otherwise expose him. The environment of school life does not allow, however, the friendship to retain its first freshness. It becomes conscious of itself. It is noticed by other members of the house: 'Hallo, Jones,' they say, 'seen anything of Morrison this morning?' Jones, being the elder, is embarrassed by what seems to him an accusation of weakness. Morrison is flattered to think that others have recognised and perhaps envied the patronage. Jones begins to make inquiries of his friends, and a series of confidences convinces him that he has reached the condition of being 'keen' on Morrison. This conviction places his friendship on an entirely different and, to a certain extent, official basis. If he had been left alone it is not improbable that he would have made no such discovery. As Morrison would never have more than liked him, his feeling for the smaller boy would not have become defined. Their friendship would have remained in the strictest sense of the word, platonic. But so frail a flower could not hope to flourish for long in the rigid atmosphere of a Public School. Everything in a Public School has to conform to type; there are rules for the proper ordering of every situation. Friendship, like personality, has to pass through the mint.

In order to follow the technique of such relationships, the official point of view towards them has to be understood. The house master on this point finds himself in extreme difficulty. And, indeed, there is no point on which schoolmasters as a whole waver quite so much. They realise, for the most part, that it is natural, if unfortunate, for boys to feel like this. At the same time they have to discountenance such friendships. Where actual misconduct is concerned, they think themselves to be on safe ground. And, as they believe that immorality in schools consists in the main of the corruption of small boys by big boys, they are able to speak with unrestrained violence against the majority of such friendships. They adjure their prefects to suppress at once the least sign of intimacy between a small and a big boy. They, themselves, watch carefully to see whether any of their seniors are evincing an interest in members of the day room. Every one in a school knows that a friendship between two boys of different positions will be viewed seriously by authority. A boy is given to understand that the romantic emotion he feels for a smaller boy is an emotion that is unworthy of him and of its object, and should consequently be suppressed. Such teaching is absolutely wrong. The emotions that a boy has for a smaller boy are as natural as those that he would feel for a girl were he not restrained by an unnatural system. It is wrong to make a boy say to himself: 'I ought not to feel like this.' Such teaching is responsible for many of the mistakes that a boy will make when he becomes a man; it arbitrarily defines the form which the romantic friendship takes.

A boy is surprised by a new, delightful, interesting emotion. He feels strangely happy. Under its inspiration he works better and plays his games harder. He is told it is wrong to feel as he is feeling. But that he cannot believe. The emotions that are condemned in the pulpit and in confirmation addresses must in their essentials be different from those that he is feeling. That must be lust, the mere desire for sensation. This, on the other hand, is love. And so the public school boy of sixteen makes the discovery that love is in its highest form unphysical. The truth of this intuition is established for him by public opinion and by the course of his own experience.

The slightest suggestion of indecent conduct between the big and the small boy is regarded by boys as well as masters as the unforgivable offence.

It is hard to know exactly how important a part these friendships play in the life of a boy. It has often been said that the novelist falsifies life by writing too much about love, that except at certain periods of a man's life love occupies only a small part of his attention; he is caught up by other interests. This argument, however, is no sounder than the objection raised by an old lady against the number of nudes displayed at the Paris Salon. 'It's so absurd,' she said, 'one-half of these portraits are nudes, and think how small a part of our life we spend without any clothes on.' A beautiful woman is most beautiful when she is naked, and a man's life is most interesting when he is in love. The condensation and indeed the actual elimination of whole periods must in a novel always falsify life for those who demand a direct transcription of it. If you were to record one average day of a man's life on gramophone and cinema and exhibit the result at the Alhambra you would empty the theatre in an hour. A story-teller recounts only what is of interest. He is a good or a bad story-teller according to the degree of his ability to discern what is, and what is not, of interest. He merely indicates the passage of the unimportant.

The man, therefore, who draws direct conclusions from a school story, would imagine that a schoolboy spends his entire time in form ragging masters, and, when not ragging, in cribbing, and that the rest of his time is divided between the fierce rivalries of the football field and the intrigues of romantic friendships. Such, it is needless to say, is not the case. The story-teller has only written of what seemed to him to be of interest. He has omitted, and he has expected his reader to realise out of his own experience that he has omitted, the long, tedious hours of good behaviour, the ordered harmony of routine.

The romantic friendship has a modest place in the schoolboy's scale of values, but its nature is curious enough. It has the great charm of the forbidden. It is mixed with fear. Even after the first interest has waned, its setting makes it a delightful toy that no one would willingly throw away. It is the flavouring to the routine. There is usually a 'go between' who carries messages from one to the other. And the glance across a table stating that the intermediary has something of interest to disclose is one of the exciting moments of the day, as exciting as the post is to a recluse or the arrival of rations to a soldier. There are jealousies and intrigues. There is the interchange of notes—the joy of a secret. There are carefully arranged appointments. On Sundays there will be meetings in some prearranged point outside the town, at which each will arrive by a different route, and they will sit in a wood and talk till the afternoon has waned and the chiming of the abbey clock warns them that roll-call is imminent. It is not surprising that such an adventure should appeal irresistibly to a schoolboy. When such a friendship is ended either by the appearance of a rival, or more frequently through the inclination of the smaller boy, who has risen in the school and feels that such a position is beneath his dignity, the elder boy feels an immense gap in his life. The immediate sense of anticipation has gone. There is nothing particular to which he may look forward. He is bored. Often he drifts into such another friendship out of loneliness.

Authority adopts towards these friendships a wavering attitude. It realises that such a friendship does not necessarily imply the least indecency, that it often, on the other hand, has a very salubrious effect on the elder boy, but it still is vividly aware of the danger. Suppose something went wrong; suppose there was a grave scandal, on whose shoulders would the responsibility rest. We can well imagine a resentful father asking a head master why, if he was aware of the existence of such a friendship, he did not take immediate steps to stop it. 'You knew about this,' he would say, 'while my son was still innocent: why did you not protect him? Why should you knowingly subject him to such a risk?' The head master has always to be thinking of what a boy's parents will say.