II[ToC]
SCHOOL—AND AFTER
This Robin Hood kind of life in the open went on till Wilf was fourteen. Then he was sent away to Marlborough College—a boy's school which had 600 pupils. Marlborough is in the Chalk Hills of the Marlborough Downs, seventy-five miles west of London. The building, dating from 1843, is on the site of a castle of Henry I.
The first day Wilf landed there he looked about him and felt pretty forlorn.
"I wonder if I'll ever get to know all those boys?" he asked himself.
When he was at home, he had a room all his own or shared one with his brother. Here it was so different.
He counted the beds in his dormitory. There were twenty-five of them. "How can a fellow ever get to sleep in such a crowd?" he wondered. "Perhaps they'll toss me in a blanket, the way they did in 'Tom Brown at Rugby.' Well, if they try anything like that, they'll find I'm ready for them!"
He felt the mattress. "Pretty hard compared with the beds at home, but no matter. Let's see what the schoolroom is like."