There is a silly system here by which one has to enter the names of all the boys one punishes in a book: I simply can't remember to do it. It's like looking at "roll" lists. I'm always slack about checking the reasons that my boys give for their absence. I always believe what a boy tells me. How can you expect boys to tell the truth if you always verify their statements by outside corroborative evidence? It seems to me to be asking for trouble.
There seems to be everlasting espionage here. The school sergeant is known to be in the "secret service" of the Head Master, and is popularly supposed to wander about with a pair of field-glasses scouring the countryside for miscreants. This seems a quaint conception of education. Wherever and whenever we meet boys we are expected to extract information from them as to their precise occupation.
The only safe place seems to be on the cricket field, and even there you are surrounded by seniors waiting to lash you if you drop a catch or (in their opinion) field badly.
I spend most of my afternoons, when I am not wanted to fill up last place in a Common Room eleven, in coaching the "Rabbits," which is a league composed entirely of those who are unable to play cricket at all, the worst two dozen in the school. It is really amusing: no one could possibly pretend to take it seriously. The only time when it perhaps gets monotonous is when some elderly fag appears and insists on playing, and I find him coercing all the others to field for and bowl to him, while he scores about a hundred and fifty. That only happens when there is no master about. The House matches this term have been frenziedly exciting and Chichester and I have spent most afternoons watching them. It is an Arcadian, simple life in the summer term. Every morning at 6.30 I pull Dearden out of bed and race him down to the sea in pyjamas. We have a hasty bathe and arrive just in time for chapel at 7, unshaven. We there (pernicious custom) have to take a "roll" of our form. We look down chapel to see the faces of friends and at some intimate verses in the hymn or psalms we smile as at some hidden secret between ourselves. 7.25 sees us running to first school. We run everywhere at Radchester. I hate these dreary lessons before breakfast: 8 o'clock seems an interminable distance ahead. There is supposed to be cocoa in Common Room between 7.20 and 7.25, but no one ever has time to drink it, unless he cares to risk being late for form, which is not a vice masters here are prone to. At 8 o'clock on two days of the week two of us have to deny ourselves breakfast until the whole school has finished, for we have to say grace in hall, collect the names of all absentees, walk round to see that no one cuts the cloth or indulges in undue ribaldry, and then when all is over we dismiss them. Only then (at 8.30) do we get our own breakfast. By this time all the best of the food is gone. Feversham will probably be helping himself to his fourth egg and sausage and fifth piece of toast, the morning papers will all have been seized and we shall be thoroughly irritable.
One of the things that makes me loathe the Common Room system is this herding together for breakfast, a meal that ought to be eaten in communion with the morning paper and no living soul to interrupt.
From 9 to 9.45 we punish, we practise fielding, we correct work. From 9.45 to 1.15 we rush from subject to subject, from class to class, attempting to drive some rudiments of mathematics and English into the heads of boys who don't want to know anything. If only they were born poor and knew that they had to depend on their wits for their livelihood, it would be infinitely easier for us. Occasionally one gets an hour off in the morning (I get three in the week) and this is spent either in writing letters, taking the illustrated weeklies from the House Room, or in going for a lonely walk or bathe. Sometimes I lie on the sand-dunes and eat and read, or try to write a few words more of an article. At 1.20 we all assemble in hall again, this time taking our food with the boys. I like this meal; the food is not good but the conversation is. I love all the clique that sits at my end of the table. Jimmy Haye, who sits on my right hand, is an argumentative soul who frequently sulks and refuses to speak to me when he thinks that I am doing the wrong thing, such as going about with Chichester, speaking against the classics at a debate, or advocating educational reform. Jimmy is a boy I should much like to know intimately, but he rarely comes up to my rooms: he doesn't care to mix with the riff-raff he finds there. I have occasionally persuaded him to come for a walk; he spends most of his life in "ragging" in the house and in being bullied by Naylor, the senior maths. tutor, who is endeavouring to raise him to the standard required for University scholarship. On my left sits Montague, Jimmy's greatest friend. He is easy-going, clever, very good at games, quite wild and irresponsible in the house, with a temper like a fiend. He has Spanish blood in him and has travelled all over the world. He treats me as I like to be treated—as a boon companion: although he doesn't take advantage of my standing invitation to use my rooms as an hotel he always comes to me for advice when he is implicated in a row. He likes to take me for walks on Sundays and pour out his many grievances against life. Sometimes neither he nor Haye talk to me at all for a month, then they suddenly relent, become their old gay selves again and chatter away, to my endless enjoyment.
It is at lunch-time that I generally hear the scandal of the day. In the afternoon immediately after lunch there is punishment drill—some twenty to fifty miscreants have to run or march round the square under direction of the drill-sergeant for half an hour, while other people are changing, going out to nets or playing tennis.
We bowl at nets till 3.30. Not many days pass without an accident. It's a wonder to me that boys aren't killed at this exercise: all the nets are very close together and hardly protected at all. Once the House matches start, of course, nets are "dropped" and we simply lie on rugs and applaud or groan according to the fortunes of the game. Most of the masters sit on an elevated mound, Olympians on their dung-hill, near which sacred spot no boy may approach.
At 3.45 we get a scrappy tea in our own rooms: the old witch of a bedmaker is supposed to put out the tea-things and the kettle, and produce the roll and butter provided by the school. She frequently forgets, just as she forgets to dust the room or wash up the dirty things. Usually I have to write orders for chocolate, walnut cakes, and fruit and jams or bananas and cream, and dispatch fags to the tuck-shop. There are never less than half a dozen urchins clamouring for tea: at 4.15 the bell rings for afternoon school.
Shall I ever forget in the years to come this hellish bell? It rings not less than fifty times a day, usually for five minutes at a time: nothing is so calculated to get on a new-comer's nerves as its incessant tolling, day and night, calling us to some fresh duty.