What does he gain to compensate for that loss?
He is protected to a large extent from the moral lapses peculiar to a Public School. He will develop through normal channels. Though, as he will in chapel and in his school listen to addresses that are based on the accepted official attitude, it is a little doubtful whether he will find himself in this respect much more satisfactorily educated than the boarder. At any rate he should be saved the disquieting experiences of a romantic friendship, and he will be less of a slave to the partisanship and house feeling. But does he gain anything else?
We hear a great deal about the value of home influence, but what does home mean for the day boy? He rushes home at the end of the day, has his tea, and then settles down to prepare his lessons. By the time he has finished them it is time for him to go to bed. He has had little opportunity for talking either to his father or his mother. In the morning he has only time to rush his breakfast and hurry off to school. It must be remembered also that the parents who send their sons to day schools are usually not particularly well off. It is one thing to come home at the end of a hard day to the quiet seclusion of a warm and cosy study where everything will be quiet and undisturbed. It is another thing to come back to a house that is making strenuous efforts to get things straight before the master of the house returns. Middle-aged business men expect to find things made snug for them; they do not want schoolboys kicking about the place at the end of the day.
Nothing is more uncomfortable than breakfast in the average suburban family. There is the flutter over the post, the opening and shutting of the paper, the constant glances at the clock. There is a banging of doors, and running up of stairs, and the shouting over banisters. A sigh of relief is heard when the front door closes behind the wage-earner.
In a large, well-run house the domestic machinery moves so smoothly that it is unnoticed. In a small suburban villa these moments of arrival and departure provide constant friction, and it is from the small suburban villa that the majority of day boarders are recruited.
In consequence the day boy starts his day's work at a disadvantage. It is like playing a cricket match on an opponent's ground. One arrives a little jaded. The boarder is on the spot. He has twenty-five minutes' leisure between chapel and breakfast. It is possible, of course, that he will pass these twenty-five minutes in a feverish attempt to prepare the 'con' for which he had been allotted an hour on the time-table of the previous night. But that is his own fault. He has every chance of starting the day fresh.
I cannot think that the rush of getting off in the morning and the journey to school can be good for a boy of fifteen. It is a strain for a full-grown man. That twenty minutes' jolt in tubes and lifts is exhausting. No one arrives at the office perfectly fresh. By the time one gets back at night one is really tired. The tube journey at the end of a hard day completes one's weariness. And on top of that weariness the day boarder has to do an hour and a half's preparation. It is not the ideal setting for successful work.
The day boy is also leading two lives at the same time. He cannot shut them away in watertight compartments. They overlap. It is, no doubt, for the business man a great privilege and a great relief to be able to return at the end of the day to a quiet evening in his wife's company. But then he has not got to work at home, and work implies friction. The worker wants an absence of outside influences. He wants the company of quiet folk who make no particular demands on his energy and patience, with whom his relations are superficial and for whom he does not particularly care.
Many writers make a failure of marriage because they put their study too near their nursery. The imaginative worker wants to be alone, not only while he is working, but for an hour before he starts working and for an hour after he has finished working. In many ways the army is the ideal career for a writer. He can do his two hours' writing after tea, have his bath and change, and go down to the ante-room, where he can read his paper quietly and chat superficially with people who make no demands on him. Wherever there is an intimate relationship there is friction. The proper adjustment of his work to his personal life is the most delicate task a man has to tackle. It is beyond the compass of a small boy. For the very reason that a boy loves his parents there will be friction; a strain will be placed, that is to say, upon his energy and patience. The boarder has fewer worries and, in consequence, is happier than the day boy.