Joan and Peter: The story of an education

by H. G. Wells

Wednesday and Saturday were half-holidays, and in the afternoon the boys wore flannels or shorts, according to the season, and played pick-up cricket or football or hockey in a well-worn field at the back of the school, or they went for a walk with Noakley or Smithers. On Sundays they wore top hats and pseudo-Eton jackets, and went to church in the morning and the evening. In the afternoon Smithers took Scripture wearily for an hour, and then went for a walk with Noakley. And on Sunday evening they wrote home carefully supervised letters saying how happy they were and how they were all in the best of health and about “examinational prospects,” and how they hoped they were making satisfactory progress and suchlike topics. But they never gave any account of the talk that went on during the playground loafing, nor of the strange games and ceremonies over which Probyn presided in the dormitories, nor of the exercises of Mr. Mainwearing’s cane. There was no library, and the boys never read anything except school books and such printed matter as they themselves introduced into the school. They never read nor drew nor painted nor made verses to please themselves. They never dreamt of acting or singing. Their only training in the use of their hands was at cricket, and they never looked at a newspaper. Occasionally Smithers gave a lesson in botany, but there was no other science teaching. Science teaching requires apparatus and apparatus costs money, and so far as the prospectus went it was quite easy to call the botany “science.”...

§ 10

In this manner did High Cross School grind and polish its little batch of boys for their participation in the affairs of the greatest, most civilized and most civilizing empire the world has ever seen.

It was, perhaps, a bad specimen of an English private school, but it was a specimen. There were worse as well as better among the schools of England. There were no doubt many newer and larger, many cleaner, many better classified. Some had visiting drill-sergeants, some had chemistry cupboards, some had specially built gymnasia, some even had school libraries of a hundred volumes or so.... Most of them had better housing and better arranged dormitories. And most of them were consistently “preparatory,” stuck to an upward age-limit, and turned out a boy as soon as he became a youth to go on to business or medicine or the public schools. Mr. Mainwearing’s school was exceptional in this, that it had to hold on to all it could get. He had a connexion with one or two solicitors, an understanding—Mr. Grimes was one of his friends—and his school contained in addition to Peter several other samples of that unfortunate type of boy whose school is found for him by a solicitor. Some stayed at Windsor with Mr. Mainwearing during the holidays. In that matter High Cross School was exceptional. But the want of any intellectual interest, of any spontaneous activities of the mind at all in High Cross School, was no exceptional thing.

Life never stands altogether still, but it has a queer tendency to form stationary eddies, and very much of the education of middle-class and upper-class youth in England had been an eddy for a century. The still exquisite and impressionable brains of the new generation came tumbling down the stream, curious, active, greedy, and the eddying schools caught them with a grip of iron and spun them round and round for six or seven precious years and at last flung them out....

§ 11

Into this vicious eddy about Mr. Mainwearing’s life and school came the developing brain of Master Peter Stubland, and resented it extremely. At first he had been too much astonished by his transfer from Limpsfield to entertain any other emotion; it was only after some days at High Cross School that he began to realize that the experience was not simply astonishing but uncongenial, and indeed hateful.

He discovered he hated the whole place. Comprehended within this general hatred were particular ones. He hated Newton. The fight remained in suspense, neither boy knew anything of scientific fisticuffs, neither had ever worn a boxing-glove, and both were disposed to evade the hard, clear issue of the ring. But Newton continued to threaten and grimace at him, and once as he was passing Peter on the staircase he turned about and punched him in the back.

For Newton Peter’s hatred was uncomplicated; for Probyn and a second boy nearly as big, a fair, sleepy boy named Ames, Peter had a feeling that differed from a clear, clean hatred; it had an element of disgust and dread in it. Probyn, with Ames as an accessory and Newton as his pet toady, dominated the school. It is an unnatural and an unwholesome thing for boys and youths of various ages to be herded as closely together as they were in High Cross School; the natural instinct of the young is against such an association. In a good, big school whose atmosphere is wholesome, boys will classify themselves out in the completest way; they will not associate, they will scarcely speak with boys outside their own year. There is a foolish way of disposing of this fact by saying that boys are “such Snobs.” But indeed they are kept apart by the fiercest instinct of self-preservation. All life and all its questions are stirring and unfolding in the young boy; in every sort of young creature a natural discretion fights against forced and premature developments. “Keep to your phase,” says nature. The older boys, perplexed by novel urgencies and curiosities, are embarrassed by their younger fellows; younger boys are naturally afraid of older ones and a little disposed to cringe. But what were such considerations as these to a man like Mainwearing? He had never thought over, he had long since forgotten, his own development. Any boy, old or young, whose parents could pay the bill, was got into the school and kept in the school as long as possible. None of the school work was interesting; there were constant gaps in the routine when there was nothing to do but loaf. It was inevitable that the older boys should become mischievous louts; they bullied and tormented and corrupted the younger boys because there was nothing else to do; if there had been anything else to do they would have absolutely disregarded the younger boys; and the younger boys did what they could to propitiate these powerful and unaccountable giants. The younger boys “sucked up” to the bigger boys; they became, as it were, clients; they were annexed by patrons. They professed unlimited obedience in exchange for protection. Newton, for instance, called himself Probyn’s “monkey”; Pyecroft was Ames’s. Probyn would help Newton with his sums, amuse himself by putting him to the torture (when Newton was expected to display a doglike submission) or make him jealous by professing an affection for other small boys.

Peter came into this stuffy atmosphere of forced and undignified relationships instinct, though he knew it not, with a passionate sense of honour. From the very beginning he knew there was something in these boys and in their atmosphere that made them different from himself, something from which he had to keep himself aloof. There was a word missing from his vocabulary that would have expressed it, and that word was “Cad.” But at the School of St. George and the Venerable Bede they were not taught to call any people “cads.”