Public School Life: Boys, Parents, Masters

by Alec Waugh

It would not, perhaps, from the point of view of the moral question, cause a very great diminution in the actual immorality between boys of the same age and the same social position. But it certainly would improve matters. As things are at present, the boy of fifteen and a half occupies a pleasantly irresponsible position. He has left behind him the anxieties of the day room, and the responsibilities of seniority are still far distant. His peccadilloes are not taken seriously. He can rag in form and smash windows in the studies without prejudice to his future. He has imbibed the example of Prince Hal. For a while he may rollick with Falstaff at the Boar's Head. Time enough to settle down when the privileges of power draw nearer him. For a good year and a half he may make merry.

The lowering of the age limit would telescope events; it would reduce the period of revelry to a couple of months. No sooner would a boy have ceased to be a fag than he would be under the eye of authority as a candidate for responsibility. A display of rhodomontade would prejudice his future. He would play for safety; and such considerations would certainly place a check on his moral lapses. He would think twice. If he was discovered he would have no time to recover his position by subsequent good behaviour. He would be passed over in the struggle for promotion.

To a certain extent the lowering of the age limit would prevent that type of immorality that takes place between boys of the same age and same position, but only to a certain extent. There always will be such misconduct in schools; it will never be possible to stamp it out entirely, but it is possible to overrate its seriousness. Certainly the romantic friendship is more important, and it is because of the romantic friendship that I advocate so strongly the lowering of the age limit.

I have said that the romantic friendship is the natural growth of an unnatural system; but even a natural growth develops soon or late, according to the soil in which it is planted and the climate by which it is nourished. The presence of boys of 18 to 19, by their example, force this growth like a hot-house atmosphere. In a boy of eighteen the sexual impulse has become defined. He understands the implications of its symptoms. He is old enough to be married. But the boy of sixteen is not so sure of himself. In him the impulse is wavering and undetermined. He does not understand the nature of the emotions that are moving him. And he only comes to understand it through the example of elder boys. If a boy were told nothing of the existence of romantic friendships, of their technique, of the complicated moral code that allows this and denies that, if his curiosity were not continually quickened by stray references in sermons and addresses, I believe that he would not, at the age of seventeen, have realised that the friendship he felt for a smaller boy was essentially different from that which he was feeling for his contemporaries. It would be a deeper, an intenser friendship, but he would not see that it possessed a different nature. Why should he? The schoolboy has read The Hill. He expects every Verney to find a Desmond. So much has been written about the lasting friendships of school life. Every boy must have his 'special friend.' Why should he be any different from his fellows? There would be moments when he might wish to caress his friend, but he would immediately smother such a wish, feeling it to be foolish, girlish, unworthy of him. He would be too young, he would not have the intellectual independence to be able to say to himself: 'This is what I want. And what I want is natural to me. Damn anything else!' Shadowy imaginings would haunt his reveries, but they would never become defined in action.

For a boy of eighteen it is different. His impulses are strong; he knows now exactly what he wants. And he is prepared to get what he wants. He knows that the emotions he feels for a small boy are of a different nature altogether from the friendship that he feels for his contemporaries, and the fact that there are boys in the school old enough to have defined these emotions, provides a hot-house atmosphere for the development of younger boys.

To most people life comes at second hand. They learn from books, cinemas, and plays what are the appropriate emotions and the correct procedure for any given situation. The public school boy is no less conventional than his elders. He allows his inclinations to be directed into the accepted course. He is surprised, in the first place, by a delightful and unexpected emotion; but the surprise soon passes. He has formed just such another attachment as has been formed by practically every senior boy in his house. He exchanges confidences, he seeks the advice of some older boy, and follows the convention. If there were no senior boys, no example, and no convention, the first surprise of charmed bewilderment would endure. In the course of time it might very well be that out of that first romantic story would grow a deep, mutual, and lasting friendship. But such a development is hardly possible in an unnatural society where children and fully grown men are herded indiscriminately together.

The example of elder boys, moreover, not only defines the nature of half-perceived emotions; it also forces emotions that would otherwise remain a long while in bud. There are many who consider it is the blood thing to have a jeune ami; that such a relationship is the privilege of a house colour. They want to be talked about. They have themselves spoken when juniors with bated breath of supposed 'cases.' They would like to be spoken of like that themselves, to feel themselves moving in an atmosphere of conjecture and intrigue, to gather an added sense of their own importance.

Besides this itch, a natural one, to occupy the limelight by copying the customs of the great, there is the subtle influence of indirect example. In the same way that a boy who goes often to the theatre and the cinema and observes there the charming processes of love, begins to long for tenderness, and caresses, and endearments, so does the schoolboy who hears on all sides romantic confidences, find himself drawn into the glittering circle. This lure would at least be removed by the lowering of the age limit. That it would solve all the difficulties I would not for a moment maintain.

We cannot imagine a world in which men and women will not desert or betray each other; in which husbands will remain faithful and the unmarried chaste. Why should we expect school life, which is the world in little, to be so startlingly different. Parents refuse to believe that their own children are mortal: 'These things,' they say, 'may happen to our neighbour's children. They do not happen to our own.' And schoolmasters are only too anxious to reassure them. Parents have such faith in their sons that they will believe in the most superficial testimonials. They are so anxious to be deceived.

For this reason I believe that a mere statement of facts has value. There is much clamour to-day for reconstruction, and the controversialist who has not a cut and dried scheme for regenerating the world is looked on with disfavour. But on sex questions, which are after all intensely personal questions, which concern the individual in the first place and society in the second, only the superficial will dogmatise.