Part 3

_Question_: Why were the Britons so called? _Answer_: Because they painted themselves blue.

My father said it was out of date. Also I was made to do mental arithmetic to a metronome. I once wet myself for nervousness at this torture. So I went to the lowest class of King’s College School, Wimbledon. I was just seven years old, the youngest boy there, and they went up to nineteen. I was taken away after a couple of terms because I was found to be using naughty words. I was glad to leave that school because I did not understand a word of the lessons. I had started Latin and I did not know what Latin was or meant; its declensions and conjugations were pure incantations to me. For that matter so were the strings of naughty words. And I was oppressed by the huge hall, the enormous boys, the frightening rowdiness of the corridors, and compulsory Rugby football of which nobody told me the rules. I went from there to another preparatory school of the ordinary type, also at Wimbledon, where I stayed for about three years. Here I began playing games seriously, was quarrelsome, boastful, and talkative, won prizes, and collected things. The only difference between me and the other boys was that I collected coins instead of stamps. The value of coins seemed less fictitious to me than stamp values. My first training as a gentleman was here. I was only once caned, for forgetting to bring my gymnastic shoes to school, and then I was only given two strokes on the hand with the cane. Yet even now the memory makes me hot with fury. The principal outrage was that it was on the hand. My hands have a great importance for me and are unusually sensitive. I live a lot in them; my visual imagery is defective and so I memorize largely by sense of touch.

I seem to have left out a school. It was in North Wales, right away in the hills behind Llanbedr. It was the first time I had been away from home. I went there just for a term, for my health. Here I had my first beating. The headmaster was a parson, and he caned me on the bottom because I learned the wrong collect one Sunday by mistake. This was the first time that I had come upon forcible training in religion. (At my dame’s school we learned collects too, but were not punished for mistakes; we competed for prizes—ornamental texts to take home and hang over our beds.) There was a boy at this school called Ronny, and he was the greatest thing that I had ever met. He had a house at the top of a pine tree that nobody else could climb, and a huge knife, made from the top of a scythe that he had stolen; and he killed pigeons with a catapult and cooked them up in the tree. He was very kind to me; he went into the Navy afterwards and deserted on his first voyage and was never heard of again. He used to steal rides on cows and horses that he found in the fields. And I found a book that had the ballads of ‘Chevy Chace’ and ‘Sir Andrew Barton’ in it; they were the first two real poems that I remember reading. I saw how good they were. But, on the other hand, there was an open-air swimming bath where all the boys bathed naked, and I was overcome by horror at the sight. There was one boy there of nineteen with red hair, real bad, Irish, red hair all over his body. I had not known that hair grew on bodies. And the headmaster had a little daughter with a little girl friend, and I was in a sweat of terror whenever I met them; because, having no brothers, they once tried to find out about male anatomy from me by exploring down my shirt-neck when we were digging up pig-nuts in the garden.

Another frightening experience of this part of my life was when I had once to wait in the school cloakroom for my sisters, who went to the Wimbledon High School. We were going on to be photographed together. I waited about a quarter of an hour in the corner of the cloakroom. I suppose I was about ten years old, and hundreds and hundreds of girls went to and fro, and they all looked at me and giggled and whispered things to each other. I knew they hated me, because I was a boy sitting in the cloakroom of a girls’ school, and when my sisters arrived they looked ashamed of me and quite different from the sisters I knew at home. I realized that I had blundered into a secret world, and for months and even years afterwards my worst nightmares were of this girls’ school, which was always filled with coloured toy balloons. ‘Very Freudian,’ as one says now. My normal impulses were set back for years by these two experiences. When I was about seventeen we spent our Christmas holidays in Brussels. An Irish girl staying at the same _pension_ made love to me in a way that I see now was really very sweet. I was so frightened I could have killed her.

In English preparatory and public schools romance is necessarily homo-sexual. The opposite sex is despised and hated, treated as something obscene. Many boys never recover from this perversion. I only recovered by a shock at the age of twenty-one. For every one born homo-sexual there are at least ten permanent pseudo-homo-sexuals made by the public school system. And nine of these ten are as honourably chaste and sentimental as I was.

I left that day-school at Wimbledon because my father decided that the standard of work was not good enough to enable me to win a scholarship at a public school. He sent me to another preparatory school in the Midlands; because the headmaster’s wife was a sister of an old literary friend of his. It proved later that these were inadequate grounds. It was a queer place and I did not like it. There was a secret about the headmaster which a few of the elder boys shared. It was somehow sinister, but I never exactly knew what it was. All I knew was that he came weeping into the class-room one day beating his head with his fists and groaning: ‘Would to God I hadn’t done it! Would to God I hadn’t done it!’ I was taken away suddenly a few days later, which was the end of the school year. The headmaster was said to be ill. I found out later that he had been given twenty-four hours to leave the country. He was succeeded by the second master, a good man, who had taught me how to write English by eliminating all phrases that could be done without, and using verbs and nouns instead of adjectives and adverbs wherever possible. And where to start new paragraphs, and the difference between O and Oh. He was a very heavy man. He used to stand at his desk and lean on his thumbs until they bent at right angles. (The school he took over was now only half-strength because of the scandal. A fortnight later he fell out of a train on to his head and that was the end of him; but the school is apparently going on still; I am occasionally asked to subscribe to Old Boys’ funds for chapel windows and miniature rifle ranges and so on.) I first learned rugger here. What surprised me most at this school was when a boy of about twelve, whose father and mother were in India, was told by cable that they had both suddenly died of cholera. We all watched him sympathetically for weeks after, expecting him to die of grief or turn black in the face, or do something to match the occasion. Yet he seemed entirely unmoved, and since nobody dared discuss the tragedy with him he seemed to forget what had happened; he played about and ragged as he had done before. We found that rather monstrous. But he could not have been expected to behave otherwise. He had not seen his parents for two years. And preparatory schoolboys live in a world completely dissociated from home life. They have a different vocabulary, different moral system, different voice, and though on their return to school from the holidays the change over from home-self to school-self is almost instantaneous, the reverse process takes a fortnight at least. A preparatory-school boy, when off his guard, will often call his mother, ‘Please, matron,’ and will always address any man relation or friend of the family as ‘Sir,’ as though he were a master. I used to do it. School life becomes the reality and home life the illusion. In England parents of the governing classes virtually finish all intimate life with their children from about the age of eight, and any attempt on their part to insinuate home feeling into school life is resented.

Next I went to a typically good school in Sussex. The headmaster was chary of admitting me at my age, particularly from a school with such a bad recent history. Family literary connections did the trick, however, and the headmaster saw that I was advanced enough to win a scholarship and do the school credit. The depressed state I had been in since the last school ended the moment I arrived. My younger brother followed me to this school, being taken away from the day-school at Wimbledon, and, later, my youngest brother went there straight from home. How good and typical the school was can best be seen in the case of my youngest brother, who is a typical good, normal person, and, as I say, went straight from home to the school without other school influences. He spent five or six years there—and played in the elevens—and got the top scholarship at a public school—and became head boy with athletic distinctions—and won a scholarship at Oxford and further athletic distinctions—and a degree—and then what did he do? Because he was such a typically good normal person he naturally went back as a master to his old typically good preparatory school, and now that he has been there some years and wants a change he is applying for a mastership at his old public school and, if he gets it and becomes a house-master after a few years, he will at last, I suppose, become a headmaster and eventually take the next step and become the head of his old college at Oxford. That is the sort of typically good preparatory school it was. At this school I learned to keep a straight bat at cricket and to have a high moral sense, and my fifth different pronunciation of Latin, and my fifth or sixth different way of doing simple arithmetic. But I did not mind, and they put me in the top class and I got a scholarship—in fact I got the first scholarship of the year. At Charterhouse. And why Charterhouse? Because of ἴστημι and ἵημι. Charterhouse was the only public school whose scholarship examination did not contain a Greek grammar paper and, though I was good enough at Greek Unseen and Greek Composition, I could not conjugate ἴστημι and ἵημι conventionally. If it had not been for these two verbs I would almost certainly have gone to the very different atmosphere of Winchester.

IV

My mother took us abroad to stay at my grandfather’s house in Germany five times between my second and twelfth year. After this he died and we never went again. He had a big old manor-house ten miles from Munich; it was called ‘Laufzorn,’ which means ‘Begone, care!’ Our summers there were easily the best things of my early childhood. Pine forests and hot sun, red deer and black and red squirrels, acres of blue-berries and wild strawberries; nine or ten different kinds of edible mushrooms that we went into the forest to pick, and unfamiliar flowers in the fields—Munich is high up and there are outcrops of Alpine flowers here and there—and the farm with all the usual animals except sheep, and drives through the countryside in a brake behind my grandfather’s greys. And bathing in the Iser under a waterfall; the Iser was bright green and said to be the fastest river in Europe. We used to visit the uncles who had a peacock farm a few miles away, and a granduncle, Johannes von Ranke, the ethnologist, who lived on the lakeshore of Tegensee, where every one had buttercup-blonde hair. And occasionally my Aunt Agnes, Baronin von Aufsess, who lived some hours away by train, high up in the Bavarian Alps, in Aufsess Castle.

This castle was a wonder; it was built in the ninth century and had been in the von Aufsess family ever since. The original building was a keep with only a ladder-entrance half-way up. A medieval castle had been added. Aufsess was so remote that it had never been sacked, and its treasures of plate and armour were amazing. Each baron added to the treasure and none took away. My Uncle Siegfried was the heir. He showed us children the chapel with its walls hung with enamelled shields of each Aufsess baron, impaled with the arms of the family into which he married. These families were always noble. He pointed to a stone in the floor which pulled up by a ring and said: ‘That is the family vault where all we Aufsesses go when we die. I’ll go there one day.’ He scowled comically. (But he was killed in the war as an officer of the Imperial German Staff and I believe that they never found his body.) He had a peculiar sense of humour. One day we children found him on the pebbled garden path, eating the pebbles. He told us to go away, but, of course, we would not. We sat down and tried to eat pebbles too. He told us very seriously that eating pebbles was not a thing for children to do; we should break our teeth. We agreed after trying one or two; so to get rid of us he found us each a pebble which looked just like all the other pebbles, but which crushed easily and had a chocolate centre. But this was only on condition that we went away and left him to his picking and crunching. When we came back later in the day we searched and searched, but only found the ordinary hard pebbles. He never once let us down in a joke.

Among the treasures of the castle were a baby’s lace cap that had taken two years to make, and a wine glass that my uncle’s old father, the reigning baron, had found in the Franco-Prussian War standing upright in the middle of the square in an entirely ruined village. For dinner when we were there we had enormous trout. My father, who was a fisherman, was astonished and asked the baron how they came to be that size. The baron said that there was an underground river that welled up close to the castle and the fish that came out with it were quite white from the darkness, of enormous size and stone-blind. They also gave us jam, made of wild roseberries, which they called ‘Hetchi-Petch.’

The most remarkable thing in the castle was an iron chest in a small thick-walled white-washed room at the top of the keep. It was a huge chest, twice the size of the door, and had obviously been made inside the room—there were no windows but arrow-slits. It had two keys. I could not say what its date was, but I recall it as twelfth or thirteenth century work. There was a tradition that it should never be opened unless the castle were in the most extreme danger. One key was held by the baron and one by the steward; I believe the stewardship was a hereditary office. The chest could only be opened by using both keys, and nobody knew what was inside; it was even considered unlucky to speculate. Of course we speculated. It might be gold, more likely it was a store of corn in sealed jars, or even some sort of weapon—Greek fire, perhaps. From what I know of the Aufsesses and their stewards, it is inconceivable that the chest ever got the better of their curiosity. The castle ghost was that of a former baron known as the Red Knight; his terrifying portrait hung half-way up the turret staircase that took us to our bedrooms. We slept for the first time in our lives on feather beds.

Laufzorn, which my grandfather had bought and restored from a ruinous state, had nothing to compare with the Aufsess tradition, though it had for a time been a shooting-lodge of the kings of Bavaria. Still, there were two ghosts that went with the place; the farm labourers used to see them frequently. One of them was a carriage which drove furiously along without any horses, and before the days of motor-cars this was frightening enough. And the banqueting hall was magnificent. I have not been there since I was a child, so it is impossible for me to recall its true dimensions. It seemed as big as a cathedral, and its bare boards were only furnished at the four corners with little islands of tables and chairs. The windows were of stained glass, and there were swallows’ nests all along where the walls joined the ceiling. Roundels of coloured light from the stained-glass windows, the many-tined stags’ heads (that my grandfather had shot) mounted on the wall, swallow-droppings on the floor under the nests and a little harmonium in one corner where we sang German songs; these concentrate my memories of Laufzorn. It was in three divisions. The bottom storey was part of the farm. A carriage-drive went right through it, and there was also a wide, covered courtyard—originally these had served for driving the cattle to safety in times of baronial feud. On one side of the drive was the estate steward’s quarters, on the other the farm servants’ inn and kitchen. In the middle storey lived my grandfather and his family. The top storey was a store-place for corn and apples and other farm produce. It was up here that my cousin Wilhelm, who was killed in an air-fight during the war, used to lie for hours shooting mice with an air-gun. (I learned that he was shot down by a schoolfellow of mine.)

The best part of Germany was the food. There was a richness and spiciness about it that we missed in England. We liked the rye bread, the black honey (black, I believe, because it came from the combs of the previous year), the huge ice-cream puddings made with fresh raspberry juice, and the venison, and the honey cakes, and the pastries, and particularly the sauces made with different sorts of mushrooms. And the bretzels, and carrots cooked with sugar, and summer pudding of cranberries and blue-berries. There was an orchard close to the house, and we could eat as many apples, pears, and greengages as we liked. There were rows of blackcurrant and gooseberry bushes. The estate, in spite of the recency of my grandfather’s tenure, and his liberalism and experiments in modern agricultural methods, was still feudalistic. The farm servants, because they talked a dialect that we could not understand and because they were Catholics and poor and sweaty and savage-looking, frightened us. They were lower even than the servants at home; and as for the colony of Italians settled about half a mile from the house, imported from Italy by my grandfather as cheap labour for his brick-making factory, we associated them in our minds with the ‘gypsies in the wood’ of the song. My grandfather took us over the factory one day; he made me taste a lump of Italian _polenta_. My mother told us afterwards (when a milk pudding at Wimbledon came to table burnt and we complained about it), ‘Those poor Italians at the factory used to burn their _polenta_ on purpose sometimes just for a change of flavour.’

There were other unusual things at Laufzorn. There was a large pond full of carp; it was netted every three or four years. The last year we were there we were allowed to help. It was good to see the net pulled closer and closer to the shallow landing corner. It bulged with wriggling carp, and a big pike was threshing about among them. I was allowed to wade in to help, and came out with six leeches, like black rubber tubes, fastened to my legs; salt had to be put on them to make them leave go. I do not remember that it hurt much. The farm labourers were excited, and one of them, called The Jackal, gutted a fish with his thumbs and ate it raw. And there was the truck line between the railway station, two miles away, and the brick-yard. There was a fall of perhaps one in a hundred from the factory to the station. The Italians used to load up the trucks with bricks, and a squad of them would give the trucks a hard push and run along the track pushing for about twenty or thirty yards; and then the trucks used to sail off all by themselves to the station. There was a big hay-barn where we were allowed to climb up on the rafters and jump down into the springy hay; we gradually increased the height of the jumps. It was exciting to feel our insides left behind us in the air. Then the cellar, not the ordinary beer cellar, but another that you went down into from the courtyard. It was quite dark there except for a little slit-window; and there was a heap of potatoes on the floor. To get to the light they had put out long white feelers—a twisted mass. In one corner there was a dark hole closed by a gate: it was a secret passage out of the house to a ruined monastery, a mile or two away. My uncles had once been down some way, but the air got bad and they had to come back. The gate had been put up to prevent anyone else trying it and being overcome.

When we drove out with my grandfather he was acclaimed by the principal personages of every village we went through. At each village there was a big inn with a rumbling skittle-alley and always a tall Maypole banded like a barber’s pole with blue and white, the Bavarian national colours. The roads were lined with fruit trees. The idea of these unguarded public fruit trees astonished us. We could not understand why there was any fruit left on them. Even the horse-chestnut trees on Wimbledon Common were pelted with sticks and stones, long before the chestnuts were ripe and in defiance of an energetic common keeper. The only things that we could not quite get accustomed to in Bavaria were the wayside crucifixes with the realistic blood and wounds, and the _ex-voto_ pictures, like sign-boards, of naked souls in purgatory, grinning with anguish in the middle of high red and yellow flames. We had been taught to believe in hell, but did not like to be reminded of it. Munich we found sinister—disgusting fumes of beer and cigar smoke and intense sounds of eating, the hotly dressed, enormously stout population in the trams and trains, the ferocious officials, the wanton crowds at the art shops and picture galleries. Then there was the Morgue. We were not allowed inside because we were children, but it was bad enough to be told about it. Any notable who died was taken to the Morgue and put in a chair, sitting in state for a day or two, and if he was a general he had his uniform on, or if she was a burgomaster’s wife she had on her silks and jewels; and strings were tied to their fingers and the slightest movement of one of the strings would ring a great bell, in case there was any life left in the corpse after all. I have never verified the truth of all this, but it was true enough to me. When my grandfather died about a year after our last visit I thought of him there in the Morgue with his bushy white hair, and his morning coat and striped trousers and his decorations and his stethoscope, and perhaps, I thought, his silk hat, gloves, and cane on a table beside the chair. Trying, in a nightmare, to be alive but knowing himself dead.