Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896

by E. F. Benson

His voice choked for a moment.

“I am very glad to hear it,” he said. “I thank God for that. You may go.”

Here was a mysterious affair! I went out wondering about a million things, why Waterfield was crying, why he had sent for me, and above all why those two boys were publicly disgraced. I began to grub in my memory for any clue, and recalled trivial incidents. The elder of the two had been rather kind to a junior like myself: he had nodded good night to me one evening on the stairs, and I think the next night had given me a lump of Turkish delight. Finally, only a few days before, he had by virtue of his first-form privileges taken me for a stroll round the wooded grounds, where the first-form might go at pleasure, and I felt highly honoured at his notice. He had become rather odd: he began questions like, “I say, do you ever——,” and stopped. As I did not know what he was talking about, and only grew puzzled, he remarked rather contemptuously, “I didn’t know you were such a kid. Why, when I was your age....”

Then our privacy came to an abrupt conclusion, for we suddenly met Waterfield, with a large cigar, strolling along a path. He took us both into a greenhouse, and gave us some grapes, and walked back with us, one on each side of him.

There was nothing there at the time which had roused any strong curiosity in me. I had wondered vaguely why these sentences were left unfinished, and why he had only then discovered that I was such a kid. But now, in an intensity of wonder as to why Waterfield had been so glad to know that the reason for this expulsion was incomprehensible to me, and as to what that reason was, I began, with the groping instincts of a young thing, that has either to guess its way, or to be told it, to fit meaningless little pieces of the puzzle together, trying first one pair of fragments and then another, intensely curious and instinctively certain that there was something here which other boys understood, and which Waterfield certainly understood, but which I did not. I supposed that the completed puzzle contained something in which right and wrong were involved, since a transgression such as the two expelled boys had been guilty of was an affair that could not be atoned for by a caning or a birching.

For days after that, hints, fragments, surmises floated as thickly about the school as motes of dust in a sunbeam. We were forbidden to talk about the subject at all, which gave an additional zest to discussion. Some knew a great deal, some knew a little, some knew nothing. Those who knew nothing learned a little, those who knew a little learned more, and we seethed with things that were unsavoury, because the secrecy and the prohibition made the unsavouriness of them.... But in heaven’s name, why could we not all have been given clean lessons in natural history? Is it better that young boys should guess and experiment and be left to find things out for themselves, with the gusto that arises from the notion of forbidden mysteries, than that they should be taught cleanness by their elders, instead of being left to experimentalize in dirtiness? Until there is extracted from boyhood its proper legitimate inquisitiveness which is the reason of its growth, nothing can prevent boys from seeking to learn about those things which its elders cover up in a silence so indiscreet as to be criminal. It is a libellous silence, for it surrounds, in an atmosphere of suspicion, knowledge which is perfectly wholesome and necessary.

Between terms came holidays full of things just as wonderful as the swamping of the furnaces of the Havre boat and “Benson’s lies” generally, and these must be lumped together, to form a general summary as to how we amused ourselves for the next three years or so, when holidays brought us together. About now a joint literary effort of all us children, called (for no known reason) the Saturday Magazine, made its punctual appearance. Already we were such savage wielders of the pen that one issue every holidays no longer contented us, but two or three times between term and term my father and mother were regaled of an evening with a flood of prose and poetry. Arthur would say one morning, “Let’s have a Saturday Magazine next Tuesday,” and straightway we called for a supply of that useful paper known as “sermon paper,” which contains exactly twenty-three lines to a small quarto page, faintly ruled in blue. Dialogues, satirical sketches, tales of adventure, essays, and poems, were poured out in rank profusion, the rule being that each member of the family should contribute “at least” four pages of prose, or one page of verse. There was, after we had all got blooded with the lust of production, little cause for this minimum regulation, and perhaps it would have been better, in view of subsequent fruitfulness, to have substituted for the minimum restriction of “at least” a maximum restriction of “at most.” Yet this habit of swift composition gave us all a certain ease in expressing ourselves if only because we expressed ourselves so freely. The contents of the Saturday Magazine were, since all choice of subject was left to the author, of the most varied description. Arthur would produce (at least) an essay in the style of The Spectator (Addison’s) describing how he threw a cake of yellow soap at a serenading cat, Nellie would refresh us with an imaginary interview with our Scotch coachman on the subject of sore backs, Maggie, whose chief avocation now was to rear an enormous number of guinea-pigs and find names for them, gave a dialogue between Atahualpa and Ixlitchochitl (only she knew how to spell them); poor Fred treated them to a poem on the Devil, which he felt sure solved the very difficult question about the origin of evil, and Hugh, who by reason of his youth was let off with two pages of prose, produced adventures so bloody, that out of sheer reaction his audience rocked with unquenchable laughter. There was a Saturnalian liberty allowed, and my mother’s experiences with a runaway pony, or her fondness for cheese, were treated with sharp-edged mockery, and even my father made a ludicrous appearance in some dialogue, where he was supposed to be worsted by the superior wit of his children....

In lighter mood (save the mark) we played a poetry game called “American nouns,” in which you had to answer, metrically and with rhyme, a question written down at the top of a half-sheet of paper, and bring in a particular word like “unconstitutional” or some stumper of that kind. This particular word was given to my Uncle Henry Sidgwick together with the question, “What do you know of astronomy?” to which in the winking of an eye he produced the following gem:

Phœbus, the glorious king of the sky,
In his unconstitutional way,
Dispenses at will his bounties on high
And royally orders the day.
No starry assembly controls his bright flow,
No critical comet presumes to say “No.”

Or again, my mother having to answer the question, “Does the moon draw the sea?” and to bring in the word “artist,” made a glorious last stanza: