John Farmer's eccentricities were, I think, all assumed. He thought they helped him to manage the boys. I sang in the chapel choir, and he circulated the quaintest little notes amongst us, telling us how he wished the Psalms sung. "Psalm 136, quite gaily and cheerfully; Psalm 137, very slowly and sorrowfully; Psalm 138, real merry bell-tinkle, with plenty of organ.—J. F."
Long after I had left, Farmer continued to pour out a ceaseless flow of school songs. Of course they varied in merit, but in some, such as "Raleigh," and "Five Hundred Faces," he managed to touch some subtle chord of sympathy that makes them very dear to those who heard them in their youth. After Farmer left Harrow for Oxford, his successor, Eaton Faning, worthily continued the traditions. All Eaton Failing's songs are melodious, but in two of them, "Here, sir!" and "Pray, charge your glasses, gentlemen," he reaches far higher levels.
The late E.W. Howson's words to "Here, sir!" seem to strike exactly the right note for boys. They are fine and virile, with underlying sentiment, yet free from the faintest suspicion of mawkish sentimentality. Two of the verses are worth quoting:
"Is it nought—our long procession,
Father, brother, friend, and son,
As we step in quick succession,
Cap and pass and hurry on?
One and all,
At the call,
Cap and pass and hurry on?
Here, sir! Here, sir!" etc.
"So to-day—and oh! if ever
Duty's voice is ringing clear,
Bidding men to brave endeavour,
Be our answer, 'We are here!'
Come what will,
Good or ill,
We will answer, 'We are here!'
Here, sir! Here, sir!" etc.
The allusion is, of course, to "Bill," the Harrow term for the roll-call. These lines, for me, embody all that is best in the so-called "Public School spirit."
In my time the distant view from the chapel terrace was exceedingly beautiful, whilst the immediate foreground was uncompromisingly ugly. A vegetable garden then covered the space where now the steps of the "Slopes" run down through lawns and shrubberies, and rows of utilitarian cabbages and potatoes extended right up to the terrace wall. But beyond this prosaic display of kitchen-stuff, in summer-time an unbroken sea of green extended to the horizon, dotted with such splendid oaks as only a heavy clay soil can produce. London, instead of being ten miles off, might have been a hundred miles distant. Now, for fifty years London, Cobbett's "monstrous wen," has been throwing her tentative feelers into the green Harrow country. Already pioneer tentacles of red-brick houses are creeping over the fields, and before long the rural surroundings will have vanished beyond repair.
"Ducker," the Harrow bathing-place, has had scant justice done to it. It is a most attractive spot, standing demurely isolated amidst its encircling fringe of fine elms, and jealously guarded by a high wooden palisade, No unauthorised person can penetrate into "Ducker"; in summer-time it is the boys' own domain. The long tiled pool stretches in sweeping curves for 250 feet under the great elms, a splashing fountain at one end, its far extremity gay with lawns and flower-beds. I can conceive of nothing more typical of the exuberant joie-de-vivre of youth than the sight of Ducker on a warm summer evening when the place is ringing with the shouts and laughter of some four hundred boys, all naked as when they were born, swimming, diving, ducking each other, splashing and rollicking in the water, whilst others stretched out on the grass, puris naturalibus, are basking in the sun, or regaling themselves on buns and cocoa. The whole place is vibrant with the intense zest the young feel in life, and with the whole-hearted powers of enjoyment of boyhood. A school-song set to a captivating waltz-lilt record the charms of Ducker. One verse of it,
"Oh! the effervescing tingle,
How it rushes in the veins!
Till the water seems to mingle
With the pulses and the brains,"
exactly expresses the reason why, as a boy, I loved Ducker so.