Sometimes in the afternoon Betty would take me up to her room and read out books to me, but that was later.
Our house played football with Evans’, Radcliffe’s, and Ainger’s. We had to play four times a week, and though I was always a useless football player, I thoroughly enjoyed these games, especially the changing afterwards (when we roasted chestnuts in the fire as we undressed), and the long teas. Milton, my mess-mate, was an enthusiastic, but not a skilful chemist, and one day he blew off his eyebrows while making an experiment.
At the end of my first half we had a concert in the house, in which I took part in the chorus. I had organ lessons from Mr. Clapshaw, and during my first half I once had the treat of hearing Jimmy Joynes preach in Lower Chapel. He had been lower master for years, and had just left Eton; he came down to pay a visit, and this was the last time he ever preached at Eton. His sermons were of the anecdotal type, full of quaint, pathetic, and dramatic stories of the triumph of innocence. They were greatly enjoyed by the boys. In the evening, after prayers, my tutor used to come round the boys’ rooms and talk to every boy. He used to come into the room saying: “Qu’est-ce que c’est que ci que ça?” My friends were Dunglass, Herbert Scott, Milton, Stewart, and Brackley. After Eton days I never saw Stewart again till 1914, when the war had just begun. I met him then in Paris. He was in the Intelligence. He had been imprisoned in Germany before the war, and he was killed one day while riding through the town of Braisne on the Aisne.
Dunglass was peculiarly untidy in his clothes, and his hat was always brushed round the wrong way. My tutor used to say to him: “You’re covered with garbage from head to foot,” and sometimes to me: “If your friends and relations could see you now they would have a fit.”
In the evenings the Lower boys did their work in pupil room. Boys in fifth form, when they were slack, did the same as a punishment, and this was called penal servitude. While they prepared their lessons or did their verses, my tutor would be taking older boys in what was called private; this in our case meant special lessons in Greek. One night these older boys were construing Xenophon, and a boy called Rashleigh could not translate the phrase, “Τοὺς πρὸς ἐμὲ λέγοντας.”[3] My tutor repeated it over and over again, and then appealed to us Lower boys. I knew what it meant, but when I was asked I repeated exactly what Rashleigh had said, like one hypnotised, much to my tutor’s annoyance.
Sometimes when my tutor was really annoyed he would say: “Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and think what a ghastly fool you are?” Another time he said to a boy: “You’ve no more manners than a cow, and a bad cow, too.” When the word δύναμαι occurred in Greek, my tutor made a great point of distinguishing the pronunciation of δύναμαι and δυνάμει. δύναμαι he pronounced more broadly. When we read out the word δύναμαι we made no such distinction, and he used to say, “Do you mean dunamẏ or dunamai?” It was our great delight to draw this expression from him, and whenever the word δύναμαι occurred we were careful to accent the last syllable as slightly as possible. It never failed.
We did verses once a week. A little later most of these were done in the house by a boy called Malcolm, who had the talent for dictating verses, on any subject, while he was eating his breakfast, with the necessary number of mistakes and to the exact degree of badness needed for the standard of each boy, for if they were at all too good my tutor would write on them, “Who is the poet?” In return for this I did the French for him and a number of other boys. Latin verses both then, and until I left Eton, were the most important event of the week’s work. When one’s verses had been done and signed by one’s tutor one gave a gasp of relief. Sometimes he tore them up and one had to do them again. I was a bad writer of Latin verse. The kind of mistakes I made exasperated my tutor to madness, especially when I ventured on lyrics which he implored me once never to attempt again. In spite of the trouble verses gave one, even when they were partly done by someone else, one preferred doing them to a long passage of Latin prose, which was sometimes a possible alternative. It is a strange fact, but none the less true, that boys can acquire a mechanical facility for doing Latin verse of a kind, with the help of a gradus, without knowing either what the English or the Latin is about.
The subjects given for Latin verse, what we called sense for verses, were sometimes amusing. The favourite subject from the boys’ point of view was Spring. It was a favourite subject among the masters, too. It afforded opportunities for innumerable clichés, which were easy to find. One of the masters giving out sense for verses used to say: “This week we will do verses”—and then, as if it were something unheard of—“on Spring. Take down some hints. The grass is green, sheep bleat, sound of water is heard in the distance—might perhaps get in desilientis aquæ.”
The same master said one day, to a boy who had done some verses on Charles II., “Castus et infelix is hardly an appropriate epithet for Charles II.” Once we had a lyric on a toad. “Avoid the gardener, a dangerous man,” was one of the hints which I rendered:
“Fas tibi sit bufo custodem fallere agelli.”