What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

Well, it was arranged that I was to go every day to Mark Drury’s study, not, as I have said, as a regular member of the school, but to get such tuition as might be picked up from the genius loci, and from such personal teaching as the old man could bestow on me at moments unoccupied by his own pupils. And this arrangement, it must be understood, was entirely a matter of friendship—one incident of the many years’ friendship between my parents and all the Drurys. There was no question of any honorarium in the matter.

My father’s appetite for teaching was such that he would, I am very sure, have much preferred keeping my brother and myself under his sole tuition. But he used to drive up to London in his gig daily to his chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, for he still struggled to hope on at his profession. (I remember that these drives down in the dark winter evenings became a source of some anxiety when a messenger travelling with despatches for the French Minister, who at that time rented Lord Northwick’s house at Harrow, was mysteriously murdered and his despatches stolen.) And it thus became necessary that some means should be found for preventing us boys from making école buissonière in the fields and under the hedgerows.

I do not think I profited much by my attendance at old Mark’s pupil-room. The boys whose lessons he was hearing stood in a row in front of his armchair, and I sat behind him, supposed to be intently occupied in conning the task he had set me, in preparation for the moment, when, the class before him having been dismissed, he would have little me, all alone, in front of him for a few minutes, while another class was mustering.

How I hated it all! How very much more bitterly I hated it than I ever hated any subsequent school troubles! What a Pariah I was among these denizens of Mark’s and other pupil-rooms! For I was a “town boy,” “village boy” would have been a more correct designation; one of the very few, who by the terms of the founder’s will, had any right to be there at all; and was in consequence an object of scorn and contumely on the part of all the paying pupils. I was a charity boy. But at Winchester subsequently I was far more of a charity boy, for William of Wykeham’s foundation provided me with food and lodging as well as tuition; whereas I claimed and received nothing save a modicum of the latter at the hands of those who enjoyed and administered John Lyon’s bounty. Yet, though at Winchester there were only seventy scholars and a hundred and thirty private pupils of the head master, or “commoners,” there was no trace whatsoever of any analogous feeling, no slightest arrogation of any superiority, social or other, on the part of the commoner over the collegian. In fact the matter was rather the other way; any difference between the son of the presumably richer man, and the presumably poorer, having been merged and lost sight of entirely in the higher scholastic dignity of the college boy.

I remember also, more vividly than I could wish, the bullying to which I and others were subjected at Harrow. There was much of a very brutal description. And in this respect also the difference at Winchester was very marked. The theory of the two places on the subject was entirely different, with the result I have stated. At Harrow, in those days—how it may be now I know not—no “fagging” was authorised or permitted by the masters. No boy had any legitimate authority over any other boy. And inasmuch as it was, is, and ever will be, in every large school impossible to achieve such a Saturnian state of things, the result was that the bigger and stronger assumed an authority supported by sheer violence over the smaller and weaker. At Winchester, on the other hand, the subjection of those below them in college to the “prefects” or upper class, was not only recognised but enforced by the authorities. It thus came to pass that many a big hulking fellow was subjected to the authority of a “prefect” whom he could have tossed over his head. It was an authority nobody dreamed of resisting; a matter of course; not a rule of the stronger supported by violence. And the result—contributed to, also, by other arrangements, of which I shall speak hereafter—was that anything of the nature of “bullying” was infinitely rarer at Winchester than at Harrow.

Despite old Mark’s invariable good-nature and kindness, my hours in his study were very unhappy ones; and I was hardly disposed to consider as a misfortune a severe illness which attacked me and my brother Henry, and for the nonce put an end to them. Very shortly it became clear that we were both suffering from a bad form of typhus. How was such an attack to be accounted for? My father’s new house was visited, and examined, and found to be above suspicion. But further inquiry elicited the fact that we boys had passed a half hour before breakfast in watching the proceedings of some men engaged in cleaning and restoring an old drain connected with a neighbouring farm house. The case was clear! It would seem, however, that the proper mode of treatment was not so clear to the Harrow general practitioner—a village apothecary of the old school, who, strange as it may seem, was the only available medico at Harrow in those far off days. He treated us with calomel, and very, very nearly let me slip through his hands. It would have been quite, but for a fortunate chance. Among our Harrow friends was a Mrs. Edwards, the widow of a once very well known bookseller—not a publisher, but a scholarly, and indeed learned, seller of old books—who had, I believe, left her a considerable fortune. She was a highly cultured, and very clever woman, and a special friend of my mother’s. Now it so happened that a Dr. Butt, a physician, her brother, or brother-in-law, I forget which, paid her a visit just at the time we boys were at the worst. Mrs. Edwards brought him to our bedsides. I was altogether unconscious, and had been raving about masters coming in at the window to drag me off to the pupil-room. My knowledge of what followed therefore is derived wholly from my mother’s subsequent telling. Dr. Butt, having learned the treatment to which we had been subjected, said only “No more calomel, I think. Let me have a glass of port wine immediately.” And with his finger on my wrist, he proceeded to administer a teaspoonful at a time of the cordial. A few more visits from Dr. Butt set us fairly on the way to recovery; and from that day, some sixty-eight years ago, to the present, I have never passed one day in bed from illness.

CHAPTER IV.

Another incident of these boyish years of a very different complexion has made a far deeper impression on my memory. It must have been, to the best of my remembrance, about the same time, probably some six months later in the same year, that it was decided that I was to accompany my father and mother in a “long vacation” ramble which had long been projected. My father’s method of travel on this excursion, which was to include parts of Sussex, Hampshire, Wilts, Devon, Somerset, and Monmouth, was to drive my mother and myself in his gig, accompanied by a servant riding another horse, who was provided with a pair of traces to hook on as tandem whenever the nature of the road required such assistance. I think that this tour afforded me some of the happiest days and hours I have ever known. I can never forget the ecstasy of delight with which I looked forward to it, and the preparations I made—suggested probably, some of them, by the experiences of Robinson Crusoe. The distance and differentiation between me and other boys of my acquaintance which was caused by my destination to this great adventure I felt to be such as that which may be supposed to exist between Livingstone and the stay-at-home mortals who read his books.

We started after breakfast one fine morning, “George,” the footman, turned into groom and courier, riding after the gig. I considered this a disappointingly tame proceeding. I had been up myself considerably before daylight, and considered that, looking to the arduous nature of the journey before us (we were to sleep at Dorking that night), we ought at least to have been on the road while the less adventurous part of the world were still asleep.

We had not proceeded many miles before an amari aliquid disclosed itself of a very distressing kind. I was seated on a little box placed on the floor of the gig between the knees of my father and mother, and was “as happy as a prince,” or probably much happier than any contemporaneous prince then in Christendom, when my father produced from out of the driving seat beneath him a Delphin Virgil, and intimated to me that our journey must by no means entail an entire interruption of my education; that our travelling was not at all incompatible with a little study; and that he was ready to hear me construe. It may be readily imagined how much such “study” was likely to profit me. Every incident of the road, every waggon, every stage coach we met, every village church seen across the fields, every milestone even, was a matter of intense interest to me. Had I been Argus-eyed every eye would have been busy. I remember that my mother remonstrated, but in vain. And an hour or two of otherwise intense delight was turned into something which it is scarcely an exaggeration to call torture. I think, however, that my mother must have subsequently renewed her pleadings, for on the second day’s journey the Virgil was not brought out. It was reserved for the days when we were stationary, but no longer poisoned our absolute travel.