Public School Life: Boys, Parents, Masters

by Alec Waugh

It does not last, of course, this intense nostalgia. No young man can live for very long in the past. New interests come to him, he finds new fields for his ambition. He makes friends in his office. He joins a tennis club, he takes dancing lessons. He sets out in search of life. He ceases, at every vacant moment of the day, to compute what he would be doing were he at school instead of at an office. He thinks of the innings he intends to play next Saturday: his eyes pick out on the carpet an imaginary spot ten feet away from him, and he considers what shot he would play to a ball that pitched on it; he also perhaps wonders what exactly that charming lady with whom he had danced the night before, had meant when she had said, with a peculiar inflection in her voice: 'You're growing up.'

His correspondence with his old friends becomes spasmodic. He no longer writes to his house master once a month. The arrival of a letter with the school crest on it ceases to excite him as it did. The school magazine becomes full of names that are meaningless to him. He notes with disgust that Baxter, in his day a miserable little squirt, has got into the Eleven; and that that goggle-eyed ass, Barton, is head of the school. He asks himself at Christmas whether it is worth his while to renew his subscription, and decides that it is not. From time to time he reads in The Sportsman of the feats of his school Fifteen, and remarks without enthusiasm that 'Fernhurst must be pretty strong this year.' His school life has dropped from him as a coat that he has outgrown. It belongs to the past, and he is living in the future. School will not mean much to him for another twenty years, till the time comes, that is to say, when he will have to send his son to school.

Then will he recover his youth, and live again his school days in his son, only more intensely, because he will be living them in his imagination. In the achievements of his son he will recognise the ghost of his old ambitions. His son's career will be more personal to him than his own. He will take more pleasure in his son's successes than the boy will himself. Indeed a great deal of a boy's pleasure in his success lies in his appreciation of the happiness that it will bring to his father. At no time in their lives do father and son come so close to one another as during these years. And it is at first sight surprising that this intimacy should not produce that common ground on which difficulties may be openly discussed and quarrels healed. For in spite of this intimacy, the relations between father and son are very often superficial.

This statement may appear self-contradictory, but a little examination will show that this is not so. We do not necessarily confide in the people we love best. Let any man think of his friends and acquaintances, and he may be surprised to discover that he knows a great deal more about his acquaintances than his friends. I do not lay it down as a fact that he will make this discovery. I merely say that he may make it; certainly a great many will.

At school, where one has a vast number of acquaintances and a few friends, I used to wonder sometimes how best one could draw the dividing line between a friend and an acquaintance. And I decided that the difference lay in silence, that with a friend one could be silent, whereas with an acquaintance one could not. If a friend walked into one's study when one was busy, one smiled and went on with one's work; the friend picked up a book and read. But if an acquaintance came in, one immediately stopped what one was doing; one felt that silence would become embarrassing.

In the same way one does not, in the company of a real friend, feel the need of personal confidences. One likes being with him. That is enough. One sits over a fire and talks spasmodically, with long silences drifting into the conversation. But with a person of whom one is not particularly fond, such desultory conversation is not adequate. An acquaintance is not, in himself, sufficiently interesting—he is interesting in what he has done, or is doing. The need for confidences is essential. And so it is that most of us have acquaintances to whom we recount all our discreditable exploits, our romances, our financial enterprises, with whom we seem, in fact, remarkably intimate, but whose absence, were they to pass out of our lives, we should not greatly regret. The man who knows most about us very often matters least to us. This is not a generalisation. One cannot generalise about an abstraction like friendship, that has a different meaning and a different message for every individual man. But such relationships are a common experience; they are the more common in the degree that their subjects are the more reserved. And there is no more reserved class than that of past and present public school boys.

This is, at any rate, the only explanation that I can find for the superficial relations between son and father that are spread over so deep a trust and intimacy. They accept without appreciating this superficiality. The father comes down at half term, and he goes for a walk arm in arm with his son, along the slopes. They discuss home affairs and the external activities of school: football shop, cricket shop, house politics. They rarely touch on the boy's inner life; the father can only guess at what his boy is doing and thinking. Underneath their love for each other they are strangers.

On the important issues of school life they are both driven to accept the verdict of the house master or head master. And he, although he is working in the dark on both sides of him, is their only intermediary.

But the relationships between parents and children are too intricate for so short a book as this. Indeed, I doubt whether it is possible ever to tackle satisfactorily a subject, the nature of which alters with every individual case. One would be lost at once in a labyrinth of generalisations and exceptions; Lytton Strachey made no attempt to write a history of the Victorian era. He selected and analysed a few specimens; that is, I believe, the only way in which to deal with the complex subject of parenthood. And it can only be thus dealt with by the story-teller, by the man who says: 'I care nothing for general principles. But this is how things went for one family.' In a general study such as this, it is quite impossible to dogmatise from individual cases. But I would submit this facet of the relationship between father and son as an important one in the study of school society. It throws the need for co-operation almost entirely on the schoolmaster. It makes his responsibility greater than he knows.

Now there are three types of men to whom the scholastic profession makes its chief appeal. There is the brilliant scholar, the man with the double first, who will turn out to be either completely incompetent, or will become a head master. There is the athlete who takes a third, or at best a second in mods, and on the strength of a blue, returns as games master to his old school. Lastly, there is the idealist, the man who regards teaching as a calling and not a trade, the man who may be either an impossible crank or, in his own line, a genius.