It was appalling to have to leave the comforts of Bath for the wilds of Radchester. It has been the worst Easter term so far within the remembrance of man. We were snowed right up from the beginning and House-fights of snowballing soon ceased to amuse. We are simply shivering in our rooms. The whole place is one medley of germs. Every conceivable sort of contagious disease is raging. It is useless trying to teach anybody anything except individually, for there is no continuity, one boy drops one day, another the next, six more the day after.

I have three in one of my sets where I'm supposed to have twenty-six. I've spent every spare moment in my rooms writing to Ruth, reading and trying my hand at poetry. Thank Heaven, Tony is still immune. He waits for me every night after chapel and we stagger across the snow-bound square with the wind blowing the filthy stuff into our eyes and down our necks and almost into our skins. One misses games in a place like this. I hate letting a day go by without taking violent exercise. I suppose if I were in the City I should be content with Saturday afternoons, but as a schoolmaster I feel that I can't teach and keep healthy unless I need a hot bath in the afternoon. The cold bath in the morning makes me yell with agony these days, but I always keep it up. I suppose it is good for me. At any rate it is refreshing.

Masefield had a new poem in the February number of the English Review called "The Widow in the Bye-Street." All my boys immediately proceeded to copy it. He is certainly virile and unlike anybody else. He makes an irresistible appeal to youth. Of course the outspokenness of his diction accounts for this, at least partially.

Of late I have been sleeping rottenly. I always like to keep my blind up, so that I can hear the waves more clearly and see the sea from my bed. I notice that when the moon is up I get appalling nightmares and wake to find it full on my face. I wonder if I am liable to moonstroke!

We have cleared the snow off some of the ponds and had some really good skating. The most ridiculous rules have been made about it, because two boys were once drowned, a hundred or so years ago. Each House has to take a ladder and a rope with it, and not more than twenty boys are allowed on the same pond at the same time. Considering that none of the ponds is more than two feet deep or ten yards across, such precautions seem rather unnecessary, but nothing can be done at Radchester without rules being framed by the dozen to meet all contingencies. Curiously enough, a tragedy has occurred. The head waiter in Common Room has drowned himself. We spent half of one bitter moonless night searching for his body. He leaves a widow and six children. I wonder why he did it. Was the conversation of the masters altogether too deadly for him? Was he underpaid? or was it just the depressing conditions? I never saw a place which so invited suicidal thoughts. The gloom of this coast at this time of the year is indescribable. All the bungalows down the beach are deserted and so are the little tea-houses which look so jolly in the summer-time. The Head Master has played a low-down, dirty trick on a man called Turner, who only joined us last term. He was quite young, brilliantly clever, popular and successful with the boys: he had to rent a cottage about a quarter of a mile away because he was married and had one baby. His wife was pretty and did a good deal to make the place habitable. One remembered sometimes even the way to take one's hat off. Well, he has had to go. His sin was—being married. The Head Master told him that he had come under false pretences, that the school could not afford to keep men who did not "live in," and that a wife caused a man to neglect his work.

March 23, 1912

During the last month or so I have been seized with a panic lest I should die of appendicitis or some such quick and hidden complaint. I can't sleep at all and I lie awake with a curious numb sort of pain and think of death. I am all right in the daytime for the most part. At any rate I am playing hockey and footer with all my old vigour and I never feel bad in form. It's just at night; unfortunately it's every night that I get seized with a real horror lest I should die uncared for, unhonoured and unwept. I should have liked a little taste of love and laughter, of civilized comfort—I should have liked to have written some sort of book which would have helped mankind along the rough road of life. I should like to have had a wife, an heir ... but as it is Tony must be my heir. I have transmitted to him my passionate love of literature, my keenness for beauty, my longing for a revolution in educational practice and theory.

I have worked off my spleen on a long centenary paper on Dickens for the Radcastrian, which will excite and annoy the lovers of that novelist a good deal.

I made all the boys in my form write centenary appreciations of Dickens, too. I got some queer stuff. He is not half as well known as he ought to be in spite of his great name. But I do wish he had resisted his tendency to caricature.

There have been the usual rows. By far the most disconcerting was the expulsion of Mather, who was a school prefect and a scholar of Magdalen, for stealing. It seems impossible to believe. It appears that he was in a House where most of the boys have far too much pocket-money: the very fags own to having "fivers." Poor old Mather was one of eight sons of a penniless country parson: he never had a sou and consequently starved when all the rest of the House were revelling in delicacies.