Our Family Affairs, 1867-1896

by E. F. Benson

Outside the College buildings there were two or three small boarding-houses and three large ones containing forty to fifty boys each, into one of which I should have gone if I had got the famous “House Scholarship.” As it was, I was put into B House, a square brick building of three stories, each of which constituted an in-college house. The edifice itself was like a penitentiary: a big open space from the skylight to the basement occupied the centre of it, with two class-rooms and a boot-room in the basement. Round this open space ran three floors of stone passages, connected by stone stairs; these passages were lit by arches opening on to the central space, and defended from it by tall iron bars; and out of these three tiers of passages opened four dormitories on each floor, a class-room, one bathroom with three baths, a sitting and bedroom belonging to the house-master of each house, with corresponding accommodation for a second house-master at the opposite corner, and a study next to the bathroom for the head of the house. Ten to fifteen boys slept in each of these dormitories, which were lit by day from three or four small windows, and for purposes of going to bed and getting up in the dark from one small gas-jet. Down the centre of each dormitory stood a board punctuated with basins, one for each boy, and furnished with a corresponding number of crockery mugs to hold water for tooth-washing. A narrow shelf ran round the room above the beds, where brushes and combs were kept. There was a chest of drawers underneath the gas-jet belonging to the prefect of the dormitory, and he had a chair by his bedside where he could put his clothes. As half the beds were directly below the windows, the occupants naturally objected to having their immediate windows open during inclemencies, so on cold or rainy nights they were all shut. There were no partitions between the beds; all operations were conducted in wholesome publicity, and there was no objection to anybody saying his prayers. Each dormitory was known by a letter of the alphabet; the houses were called B 1, B 2, B 3, and every boy had his school number. Thus my dry description was Benson, E. F., 234, B 1, L.

The day was a strenuous one. A clanging bell perambulating the passages murdered sleep at half-past six, and there was chapel at seven. If you chose to get up at half-past six, you had time for a cup of water-cocoa on the ground floor and for a bath. Usually you got up on the first sound of chapel-bell at 6:50, and, cocoa-less and with bootlaces flying, sped down the stairs and across the court to get within the gates outside chapel before a single fateful stroke of the bell announced that you were late. By the gate were stationed two masters who on the stroke put their arms across the entrance and prevented further ingress. If there were many boys outside at that critical moment they used to charge the masters and get in somehow, bearing down all opposition, and it was delightful on such occasions to be safely and legitimately inside and see a sort of football scrimmage going on. Usually, however, there would only be a few stragglers, who attempted no violence. Punishments for being late varied: on the first occasion there was no penalty, but if you persevered in tardiness, the penalties became unpleasantly heavy. But if you were late, you could at least do up your bootlaces and get a cup of cocoa.

There was a lesson from about a quarter-past seven on the conclusion of chapel till a quarter-past eight. A wholly insufficient breakfast was then provided, consisting of tea ready mixed out of a tin can, a circular inch of butter, and bread; on certain mornings there was porridge. If you wanted anything beyond this fare, you had to buy it yourself at school-shop. But you took your private milk-jug in to breakfast and were given, I suppose, about a quarter of a pint of milk, which you kept for a purpose. During the morning there were two hours’ school and one hour’s preparation and an hour and a half leisure. There was meat and pudding for dinner at half-past one, and thereafter the total provender provided was another inch of butter, with tea and bread, at six, and supper consisting of hard biscuits, a piece of cheese, and a glass of beer after evening chapel, about 8.45. I had an allowance, originally, of sixpence a week, which was soon increased to a shilling; and, quite rightly, the whole of that used to be spent in getting things to eat. These were consumed at that daily love-feast called “brewing,” which was a joyful affair and merits its own paragraph.

“Brewing” was a social function; you brewed in your class-room with your friend, for everybody had a friend of some kind, and nobody brewed alone. This function took place at varying hours in the afternoon, as dictated by the hours of school, and rendered unnecessary the scanty affair called “tea” provided by the college commissariat. In fact, as a rule, nobody went into college tea at all, so bloated was he with liquid when poor, and with liquid mixed with cake when rich. Brewing had never anything to do with beer, for in winter you brewed tea or coffee, and in summer lemonade in large earthenware bowls, with straws or india-rubber pipes to drink it from. The tea itself you certainly brought from home (and when that was used up Beth would send me some more), sometimes you had sugar, and sometimes you hadn’t, and the milk was provided, as aforesaid, by the college commissariat, and thus the whole of your money could be devoted to cake. And there we sat each fellow by his friend, when football was over, with kettles interminably filled at the college pump, and put to boil on public gas-stoves, jealously watched in turn by you or your friend, and the fresh kettle-full of water was poured on the tea-leaves, and the last crumb of cake was devoured, and the last drop of milk was coaxed out of the jug, and you enjoyed the full fellowship of not quite enough to eat, scrupulously divided, and the romance of being fourteen or fifteen thickened and fructified. You quarrelled and made it up, and indeed there was very little quarrelling, and you looked round the class-room, and intrigued and wondered and loved, and spliced a broken squash-racket, and uncurled the interminable folds of felt of a burst fives-ball, down to the heart of cork that lay in the centre of it, and made fresh plans. Then if you were very prudent you washed out the teapot and the cups and saucers, and especially the milk-jug, because if you didn’t, it stank appallingly next morning, and in the morning you could not get any hot water. Cold water was of no use with a milk-jug: it had to be rinsed with hot water, unless you wanted to find dreadful curds when, next day, the fresh milk was poured into it. Bloated with tea you went to chapel again, and didn’t want any beer or cheese, and wished it was brewing-time again. Then there was an hour’s preparation in the house class-room, and if you had not had a bath in the morning very likely you had one at night, and the other boys drifted into your dormitory where already you lay warm and sleepy in bed, and perhaps the head of the house gave you a piece of hot buttered toast, as he came in, for prefects had the privilege of taking bread and butter away from hall, and you ate it sumptuously and wiped your greasy hands on the bedclothes. If there was a boy with the gift of narrative in the dormitory, he often told a story as soon as lights were put out (or rather the one gas-jet) until he or his hearers got sleepy, and the story faded into silence. A slippered footstep would be heard along the passage, and the house-master, candle in hand, made his round of the dormitories....

In each dormitory there was a big boy, not in sixth form, who was captain of the dormitory, and a prefect in sixth form. On the character of these and the two or three other big fellows depended the character of their dormitory. Bullying, as far as I know, was non-existent; but in all other respects, they had far more power for good or ill in their hands than the whole staff of masters put together, for the house-master went his rounds soon after lights were put out, and it was pretty certain that he would not intrude again. Even if he should take it into his head to come out of his rooms a second time, his approach could be signalled by the boy who occupied the bed opposite the door, which was always left open; he would be told to “keep cavé,” and stories or bolster-fights or any other irregularity could safely be committed, for the young Brangaene from the watch-tower of a bed would whisper, “cavé,” and the white-robed had plenty of time to steal back to their nests from wherever they might be and be plunged in profound sleep before the master traversed the passage. Practically, then, there was no superior supervision; the elder boys and prefects of dormitories moulded the material committed to their charge as they chose, and certainly there was no secret detective-work or encouragement of talebearers on the part of the masters. The decency, the morality, the discipline that result from such a system, where these virtues are the result of public opinion, are of far more robust quality than if they are merely the forced product of the fear of detection. With the hideous ingenuity that is peculiarly characteristic of boys, it would have been perfectly easy to have evaded detection, if the knowledge that there was secret detective-work going on on the part of masters had challenged our wits and roused us to invention for the sake alone of “scoring off” masters. As it was, a well-behaved dormitory behaved well because it was “bad form” to behave otherwise, while a dormitory naturally ill-behaved, would have invented some system of sentries which would certainly have defeated all surprise night-attacks on the part of masters, and not, as Plato says, have “advanced one whit in virtue.” Boys are far more ingenious than grown-up men, and the challenge on the part of the authorities implied by creeping about at strange hours of the night in slippers would certainly have been delightedly accepted. But there was no such challenge and well-conducted dormitories, by far the majority, grew, so to speak, on their own root, and were not grafted on to any stem that fed them with the sap of authority.

Meantime, the fatal foundation-scholarship examination, to be held in December, was approaching, and I awaited its advent with an unruffled consciousness of another failure imminent. To prepare for it, I had certain private tuition out of school hours, and by a much more oppressive piece of legislation, I was not allowed to have anything to do with music except in so far as it was musical to contribute a muscular treble to the choir in chapel. That deprivation I still deplore, for I had at that time an odd and quite untrained faculty for visualizing, by some interior process, tunes that I heard, and being able to “see” them, so to speak, without any direct exercise of will. Thus, a term or two later, when an accompanist failed, I took his place at some sing-song, and transposed at sight Handel’s “Where’er you walk,” which I did not previously know, from the key of B flat into G, without any sense of effort, thanks to this little “kink” of internal visualization. Whatever that kink was, it was not the result of training, but, I suppose, some small natural aptitude towards the science of sound which now I dearly wish that I had been allowed to water and cultivate without break. It must have been a feeble and under-vitalized growth, for when I was at liberty again to waste as much time as I chose at the piano, it was certainly less vigorous than it had been, and never afterwards recovered, when I could stray and strum as I pleased in melodious pastures. The soil in which it grew was there, for all my life music has been to me as a celestial light, shining in dark places for the mitigation of their blackness, and flooding the serene and sunlit with its especial gold, but from that soil there withered a little herb that once grew there, a nest with incubated eggs was despoiled, and the bird came not back. But I expect that the wisdom of the edict was fully justified in the judgment of the prohibitionists, when on one snowy morning in December the list of the winners of foundation-scholarships was promulgated, and there was my name incredibly among them at a decent altitude.

By one of Nature’s most admirable devices our memories always retain a keener sense of such experiences as have been enjoyable, than those of the drabber sort, and to-day I find nothing that I can pick out of the bran-pie that was not bright and alluring. There were friendships and hero-worships, the initiation, in a blue and black striped jersey, into the muddy mysteries of Rugby football, and the dizzy heights (soaring far above the sordid business of the foundation-scholarship) of playing in the lower team of the house. There was a school concert at the end of that first term, and it gave me a complacent thrill to remember that I was a foundation-scholar when the “Carmen” was sung. But it gave me a sense of stupefied astonishment to hear the organist, Mr. Bambridge, play as an encore to his piano-solo, his own original variations on the theme of “Auld Lang Syne.” Never (except in the case of Miss Wirtz) was there such a finger, and speaking purely from the impression then made, I should be obliged to confess that for matter of pure brilliance of execution and mastery of technique, Mr. Bambridge must have been a far more accomplished performer than any pianist whom I have heard since. Why did he not take London by storm with those amazing pyrotechnics of his own invention, and throne himself higher than ever Paderewski or Carreno or Busoni soared? I cannot even now bring myself to believe that any of those lesser lights ever shone like Mr. Bambridge, when with flying fingers and any quantity of the loud pedal he swooped up and down in pearly runs and tremendous octaves, while all the time that powerful thumb of his, relentless and regular as the stroke of a piston, beat out simultaneously (there was the wonder of it) the original air. I wanted the piano to comprise an extra octave or two that so he might have a larger arena for his melodious magic. I wanted to have more ears, so that they should all be glutted with the beautiful banging and netted in the gossamer of Mr. Bambridge’s chromatic scales. Even Bach—but it is always idle to make comparisons between the supreme: who judges between the various peaks that face the dawn, or cares to plumb the sea, so long as the sun glitters on its surface, and in the shadow of the rock there glows the translucent blue of Tyre?...

Straight from that concert I made my honourable return to Truro, and found that my spurs were won, and with a light heart played Pirates again, and under the short reign of Byron’s supremacy (for we had been learning “Childe Harold” by heart in the English repetition lesson) deluged the chaste pages of the Saturday Magazine with amorous innocence. Soon, too, the butterfly collection began to assume the virile toga, for though music was forbidden as a study, natural history, as encouraged at Marlborough by the society known as the “Bug and Beetle,” was a legitimate pursuit, and my father strongly approved of my entering for the “Staunton Prize,” awarded to the best collection of butterflies and moths, to be made that spring and summer, and to be adjudged in the autumn. In the warm early-maturing spring of Cornwall, the downs and lanes were lively with lepidoptera at Easter, and those second holidays, passing in a whirl of butterfly nets and a corking and uncorking of killing-bottles, were a sort of canonization of the collections. Brimstones and garden whites, and holly blues and small tortoiseshells took on a more serious aspect, and the pins that eventually fixed them in cork-lined boxes were indeed as nails driven in by masters of assemblies. The collection must be a strictly personal one: I had to catch the victims myself, and kill and set them, but Maggie, even more wildly enthusiastic than me, might, without a violation of conscientious scruples, indicate a yellow-tip enjoying the sunshine, or among nibbled leaves discover a geometer caterpillar turning itself into a measuring-rod.

Cricket, therefore, on the return for the summer half took a subordinate place, and obtaining “leave off” from it as a compulsory game, I spent the long summer afternoons in the enchantment of Savernake Forest. Here it was that the Staunton Collection began to lay more pregnant eggs in a receptive soil, for I trace to those sunny hours the betrothal of my soul to the goddess of trees and solitary places, to whose allegiance I have ever been faithful. Net in hand, and bulging with nests of chip-boxes I used to climb the steep down fringed with the secular beeches that form the outer wall of that superb woodland, pausing perhaps for a “blue” or a “small copper” on the way, but eager for entry into the temple of trees. Here underneath those living towers, the earth would be bare, but from the coverts where the sunlight fell only in flakes and shower-drops of gold, you passed into open glades of bracken and bramble, through which ran smooth grass-walks of short downland turf. In these sunny lakes of forest-enfolded open, a few hawthorns stood like snowy and sweet-smelling islands, and along the edges of the grass-rides hovered the speckled fritillaries. Then came a group of hazel trees to be beaten, with net spread beneath to catch the dropping caterpillars, and grey-trunked oaks, whose bark was to be diligently searched for slumbering dagger-moths, difficult to find owing to their protective colouring. Red-spotted burnets clung to thistle-heads, green hair-streaks (especially in Rabley Copse) must be put up from their resting-places before they were visible, and there too marble whites rustled their chequered wings in my net. Deeper and deeper into the forest would I go, and though I had every conscious faculty alert for pursuits and captures, yet all the time—and this is precisely why I have lingered with such prolixity over the Staunton Prize—the honey-bees of my subconscious self were swarming in with their imperishable gleanings. Cell after cell they constructed within me, and filled them with the essences that they culled from beech and fern and all the presences that subtly haunted the great forest aisles. There first did I hear the music of Pan’s flute with the inward ear, and with the inward eye did I see the dancing satyrs, and the dryads of the woods; and if, as most surely I believe, my disembodied spirit shall some day visit the places where I learned to love the beauty of this peerless world, how swiftly will it traverse the thyme-tufted downs of Wiltshire to breathe again the noble and august serenity of the forest, and see the fritillaries poise on the bracken at the edge of the grass-rides.

The Staunton Prize (with how much more derived from those excursions!) fluttered pleasantly into my butterfly net, and with the flaming of the autumn leaves, and the hibernation of my quarry, another interest, that of athleticism, asserted its supremacy over its eager subject. Much has been written by many wise men as to this robust autocracy in schools, deploring its paramount sway, and suggesting nobler ideals than muscular swiftness and accuracy of eye for youth’s pursuing, but what, when all is said and done, can be proposed as a substitute while the nature of the average boy remains what it is? Love of learning, intellectual ambitions at that age are natural but to the few, and while we all respect the youth who at the age of fifteen is really more attracted by history or philosophy than by fives and football, who can believe that there would be any great gain to the nation at large if every schoolboy was like him? It is frankly unthinkable that the average boy should choose as his heroes those members of the sixth form who have a tremendous aptitude for Iambics, or applaud, with the fanatic enthusiasm with which he hails a fine run down the football field, the intellectual athlete who this morning showed up so stunning a piece of Ciceronian prose. Full opportunity in school hours and in voluntary study is given to the few who, from physical disability or mental precocity, actually prefer intellectual pursuits to athletics, but the English fifteen-year-old is naturally a Philistine, and Philistia had much better be glad of him. For as a rule he is not a prig, and while he cannot quite understand how anyone should prefer reading to playing games, he does not despise the student, but generally refers to him with a certain vague respect as being “jolly clever.” But if it was possible to implant firmly in the soil of schools the intellectual banner, and to succeed in making the whole body of boys rally enthusiastically round it, it is difficult to repress a shudder at the thought of what that school would be like. Germany, perhaps, alone among the modern nations has succeeded in imbuing its youth with a passion for learning and discipline, and it would appear, now that we have been able to appreciate German mentality, that this triumphant achievement has been won at an appalling cost; at the cost, that is, of precisely those virtues which games, generally speaking, are productive of. And in the long run, and on the large scale that type seems to come to a bad maturity.