A Schoolmaster's Diary Being Extracts from the Journal of Patrick Traherne, M.A., Sometime Assistant Master at Radchester and Marlton.

I always return from a holiday in the West Country a different man. On this occasion as the result Tony wrote some wonderfully descriptive verses and three short stories, and I...

One result of my tentative efforts to leave has been a sort of restlessness which has made me buy guidebooks to all sorts of places. Illingworth and I had arranged to spend the...

Elspeth and I spent a few days at Nairn in order to taste the sea breezes and I played golf with a Cambridge billiard Blue, who has now a post in the British Museum. Nairn is fu...

To-morrow we go away to Aldershot for the annual camp; another school year is over and I now have two years to look back over. I don't know that my experience has taught me much...

I wonder if I shall stay on here interminably friendless, and soured like most of the others. It's a rotten prospect. Now of course the boys keep me fresh, but as the years roll...

We had a really gay time for two days. The bridesmaids had the time of their lives. I wonder that the Head didn't put up a list of rules about them but it was all over before he...

I am glad to be going away to-morrow: I want to think out all these myriad problems of education: I am very tired and rather depressed at the result of all my efforts. I have wo...

I have now had my first taste of life as a master at Marlton. The air here is sluggish, warm and unhealthy. I never want to go out and I always feel tired. There is none of the...

For the first few days I was talking over their heads the whole time. In mathematics I went too fast. In English I took it for granted that they knew something about the subject...

If, however, I or any junior member of the staff should have the effrontery to propose any alteration or reform, a storm of abuse immediately bursts on our heads and we are met...

This seems to me the Golden Age of the novel. There are about thirty or forty people writing really great stuff, full of a philosophy of life, candid, human, extraordinarily rea...

But several who come solely for food stay frequently to talk and unburden themselves of their troubles. It is then that I begin to think that after all there may be some chance...

In my defence I mentioned that boys came and went just as they pleased in my rooms and that I couldn't very well prohibit any one of them at any special time. I also pointed out...

I have just been reading F. R. G. Duckworth's "Leaves from a Pedagogue's Sketch-Book." I wish I had his gift for writing. I could a tale unfold of life at a Public School which...

There have been endless rows in the school this term and wholesale expulsions. House-masters are told all about them, and the rest of us kept in ignorance. What the whole body o...

H. A. Vachell in "The Hill" wrote a most readable novel and certainly portrayed that amazingly sentimental side that is really very prominent in the human boy. He hates and love...

This term has been altogether strange. We are chastened and quite different. Young boys are now prefects, heads of Houses, captains of games: the Corps has ousted athletics. It...

"_The man who looks at this view, for the first time, with the naked eye, sees far more of it than the man who looks at it for the hundredth time through smoked glasses. Experie...

"The Head Master to see Haxton at once, sir." Subdued murmurs and a casual whistle emanate as a fair-haired, good-looking boy goes off, blushing. In an undertone one of the bigg...

It was all I could do to keep going to the end of this term, but I managed it somehow. I've thrown myself into my work as never before: when I am actually in form, teaching, or...

Scenes from history again will be acted in costume, debates will take place in class as to why Shakespeare does not see fit to mention Magna Charta, what effects followed, what...