More masters have been poisoning the boys' minds against me. Tony's House-master has been lecturing him about my pernicious influence. I wish I knew what was behind this dark conspiracy. I wish they would give me some facts to go on, and say that just here or just there I was doing harm, but all their accusations are nebulous. Whenever I go up to a man's rooms and beard him in his den, he nearly always denies that he ever said any of the things which were reported of him. It's very difficult to know what to do.
I've discovered another wheeze which I use to get original work out of my form. I give out a list of forty or fifty words, ostensibly for spelling, and by the side of these they write a list of synonyms, and then during their next prep. they weave a story round the words I have given them. I have had wonderful results from this simple device. Incidentally the boys love doing it. It stimulates them, especially when they have to read their own efforts aloud.
Now that the sports are looming ahead, I get up in the very early mornings and take people for training walks. In the afternoon I run with them across country or round the track. Before I came no one worried much about the sports. I have really got them keen this year, much to Hallows' indignation, because as games master he is responsible for the sports, and he thinks I'm taking too much upon myself in training them daily for weeks before the events.
About a dozen of us, Tony and other boys in this House, go off every Sunday to a nook we've found by an inland stream. We call it a training walk: it pans out at twelve miles. By so doing we get right outside the country we know and really begin to get a glimmering of beauty on these glorious warm spring days. It's impossible to imagine now that we were ever snow-bound. It is warm and sunny every day; so much so that "Rugger," and hockey seem indescribably silly games for this time of year. It feels "crickety" weather. I've been writing articles on Hymns and Cross-Country Running for the London Press and had both accepted, which is a bit of luck. Things are looking up. All the same it's a nerve-racking process, waiting to hear one's fate by every post. Editors are as stubborn as mules and without any sense of humanity.
We have had one great excitement lately. A schooner ran ashore just close to my bedroom window and we had to rush out in the middle of the night and rescue people. Poor devils, they were awfully cold and miserable by the time we got them to bed in the sanatorium, but luckily there were no lives lost, and most of the cargo has been salvaged.
Life at the end of the Easter term is fairly brisk. It's impossible to get hold of boys to do anything in the way of extra work owing to the innumerable House competitions. There is the Junior and Senior Hockey, the Singing Competition, the Boxing, the Gym., the Corps and Certificate "A," the Sports, and Heaven knows what besides—and every man on the staff thinks that his pet job is the only one that matters. The only thing about which we are all agreed is that school work does not matter. No one thinks of that. All the same I think these contests are good things, particularly in the Corps, though I object to the extraordinary number of prizes and pots that are lavished upon individual winners. There's a huge element of selfishness inspired by the very things which we hold to eradicate it. I took two days off by going down to Queen's Club to see the Oxford and Cambridge Sports. It was a rare treat to meet all one's best friends of the Oxford days and watch other people in the last stages of nervous funk as we were so few years ago. I went to the dinner afterwards: I wonder whether one will ever grow out of these orgies. They are very life and blood to me now at any rate. I expect our older guests get a trifle tired with the exuberance of our spirits before the end. It was very tame to have to come back to Radchester and the school sports after that grand struggle at Queen's Club.
April 13, 1912
Here I am back again in my beloved Bath.
The term ended well. Heatherington's won the sports and I was the recipient of a tremendous ovation at the House Supper. I don't think I ever felt so proud before. At the end of term I went down to Hampton Court with Tony until Good Friday, when I went on to see Ruth: we have spent all the rest of the time together.