Such a situation must arise fairly frequently. And at least one instance of it has come within the circle of my own experience. While I was a prisoner in Germany I lent a copy of my school story, The Loom of Youth, to a fellow-prisoner, who had expressed a wish to read it. A few days later he returned it to me with such a flattering display of enthusiasm that, in a moment of unusual generosity I promised to send him a copy on our return. The sequel reached me a few days later. He had returned to his room and remarked that Waugh had promised to give him a copy of that book of his, 'the thing that's all full of oaths. I don't know what I shall do with it,' he said. 'I shall have to be jolly careful that my wife doesn't read it.'
If one may generalise from such an incident, and I believe that one may, for it has its root in the eternal indolence of human nature, then not only schoolmasters and parents, but fathers and mothers are working at cross purposes. And so the boy finds himself alone, stranded in a society the nature of which he has to discover for himself. He never regards his house-master as one working in co-operation with his parents for the welfare of his soul. Schoolmasters will be to him a separate caste. And although he will never reason this out with himself, he will appreciate it intuitively in the natural cunning with which he will exploit one or the other in the furtherance of his own ends. I do not mean that he is deceitful. But he may want to specialise in History, or to abandon German in favour of Greek, and he will think whether he would do better to approach his father or his house-master. There is a sort of dual monarchy, and if one sovereign is opposed to a favourite scheme, it is but natural to try one's fortune with the other.
His parents' interest in his school life must appear to him superficial. When his father comes down at half term, he has to answer innumerable questions as to his prowess on the cricket field; and very often indeed the chief pleasure that his athletic successes brings him is the thought of the delight that his father will experience. But the intimate side of his school life, his thoughts, his friendships, his troubles, his ambitions, do not enter into his relationship with his parents. In the same way his house-master's interest in his home life seems to him superficial. On his return to school he is asked a few questions about the theatres he has visited; whether he is in training for the football; has he done any private work? not a word of his intimate life. The boy ceases to regard his school life as a continuation of his home life. The two are entirely separate, and it depends on the temperament of the individual as to which of the two he will consider the more important. We hear a great deal of talk about the influence of the home; it is, indeed, the stock argument of the pedagogue who would shelve his own responsibility on to other shoulders, but I believe that its influence is greatly overrated. Home and school present to the average boy two watertight compartments. They are different lives, a different technique is required. And human nature has at least one property of the chameleon.
A schoolboy sets out, therefore, to discover school life for himself. He knows what his parents expect him to make of it; he has a fairly shrewd idea of what his schoolmaster expects him to make of it. It remains for him to investigate school life as his companions have made it. Naturally he does not announce his investigations. He lets his parents think what they like and his schoolmasters think what they like. He goes his own way. And it is thus that school life as it is, differs so enormously from the traditional concept of it. There must be always a gulf between the reality and the imagined idea. But in public school life the gulf is between, not the schoolboy reality and his idea of it, but between the schoolboy reality, and the confused idea of it that is held by parents and masters. It is two degrees from the truth. In consequence, when any one does attempt to tell the truth there is an outburst of indignant protest. And the worst of it is that it is an honest outburst. When head masters write to the Press and say 'these accusations are entirely false,' they honestly believe what they say. That is what makes everything so difficult. They have forgotten their own schooldays, and for so long they have been persuading parents of the value of a public school education that they have come to believe in their own advertisements. And yet what they have come to believe is far more remarkable than the truth. In sermons and addresses they assure the boy and his parents that school life is a miniature of the larger world; which is the statement of a fact: yet every subsequent act and utterance is in contradiction to this initial axiom. For, if that larger world did really resemble the official concept of school life, what a bizarre, what an extravagant affair it would be. It would be filled with high lights, with breathless escapades, with impossible heroics. It has been accepted as quite credible that a boy should be capable of the most extreme and loathsome brutalities, that a percentage of every school should spend its life in gambling and heavy drinking, that at least one prefect in every school should contract inconvenient liabilities at the Baron's Arms, and that to extricate himself he should forge his house-master's signature. Indeed, anything may happen provided that the course of life follows a simple process of right and wrong which leads to the triumph of virtue and the downfall of vice. It is something like a Lyceum melodrama. And, though we can all manage to enjoy for a couple of hours the fine sensationalism of The Beggar Girl's Wedding, we should hardly accept its values as a philosophical background for our daily life. And yet that has actually happened in the case of the Public Schools. Mr P. G. Wodehouse, in his delightful Mike, makes Psmith say to a new acquaintance: 'Are you the Bully, the Pride of the School, or the Boy who is led astray and takes to drink in Chapter Sixteen?' Such figureheads exist in the popular imagination. The world believes in bullies, in villains, in straight heroes and in the weak character who goes wrong, but is saved through the influence of either the hero or the head master, or the head master's daughter, or through the sermon of an occasional preacher. It is all very jolly, of course, and no doubt the world would be a far more comfortable place if it were possible to label and pigeonhole all our friends and acquaintances. But life cannot be simplified by any arbitrary process. We have our standards of conduct, but they are shifting and relative. They are the measures that each successive society arranges for what it considers to be its convenience. And we accept them for what they are. At a Public School, however, a traditional conception has formed a code of rules for the convenience of a society that does not exist. Which is confusing: and when Desmond Coke wrote in The Bending of a Twig a very entertaining skit on the behaviour of a boy who had read a number of school stories, and went to Shrewsbury expecting to find bullies behind every cloister, schoolmasters laughed over the book, but did not read into it any criticism of themselves.
And yet there is nothing that we need more than an honest facing of the facts of public school life. Facts are a solid neutral ground on which parents and boys and masters may meet to discuss their ideals and their difficulties. And, in the course of that discussion, they may discover, as likely as not, a way out of their troubles. The hope of this book is to provide that statement of facts. It does not set out as an educational treatise. It accepts the Public Schools as the system best suited to the material with which it deals. It suggests no new system of teaching. It does not advocate co-education. It does not advance any plea for Montessor methods. It will contain no discussion of the advantages of Greek over German. There will be no appendix with time-tables and suggested curriculum. For, as things are now, it does not matter whether Sanscrit is substituted for mathematics: the boy will learn equally little of either. It is intended as a human study of public school life, as an attempt to break down that conspiracy of silence, that relationship of evasion and deceit that exists officially between parents, boys, and masters; and from time to time it will suggest solutions.
It is, of course, only an attempt. For no one person can see more than a side of the truth. However impartial we try to be, we can see in a situation only what the limitations of our personality allow us. We are all at tether. During the last three years many public men have visited Russia; they have been honest men, and we know quite well that they went there with the firm intention of telling nothing but the truth. But, before they went, we could have told them exactly what they would say on their return. Yet the analogy does not quite hold good. For we, too, have gone, each of us, to a Public School with a preconceived idea of what school life would be, and each of us in turn has had that conception destroyed by actuality, and each in turn has had to create for himself his own picture. It follows then that there must in each picture be a certain measure of truth.
CHAPTER II THE PREPARATORY SCHOOL
We hear much of the embarrassed misery of a boy's first week at school. And, certainly, it is pretty wretched. Mr Vachell compared it to the first plunge into an ice-cold swimming bath: the sudden shock, and, afterwards, the glory of a swim. But it is the inaction, the loneliness of the first week that is so difficult. It is more like standing on the edge of the swimming bath on a cold day waiting for the signal that will start the race. And yet the change must have been a great deal more difficult for our parents than it was for us. The preparatory school system is of more or less recent growth, and, when one considers how much one learnt at a Preparatory School, in esprit de corps, in patience, in sportsmanship, in the give and take of a communal life, one wonders how an earlier generation managed to survive the first term. School life by all accounts was a fairly barbarous business in the eighties, and by what strange roads our parents came to those rough waters. Some came straight from home, some from private tutors: the majority from the old-fashioned dame school. It is not surprising that the Preparatory Schools should have so increased in number and improved in quality.