I seem to have left out one school – Penrallt, right away in the hills behind Llanbedr. I had never been away from home before. I went there just for a term, for my health. Here I had my first beating. The headmaster, a parson, caned me on the bottom because I learned the wrong collect one Sunday by mistake. I had never before 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. A boy at Penrallt called Ronny was the greatest hero I had ever met. He had a house at the top of a pine-tree which nobody else could climb, and a huge knife, made from the tip of a scythe which he had stolen; and he killed pigeons with a catapult, cooked them, and ate them in the tree-house. Ronny treated me very kindly; he went into the Navy afterwards, deserted on his first voyage, and, we were told, was never heard of again. He used to steal rides on cows and horses which he found in the fields. At Penrallt I found a book that had the ballads of ‘Chevy Chase’ and ‘Sir Andrew Barton’ in it; these were the first two real poems 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. One boy of nineteen had red hair, real bad, Irish, red hair all over his body. I did not know that hair grew on bothes. Also, the headmaster had a little daughter with a little girl friend, and I sweated with 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 from this part of my life. I once had to wait in the school cloak-room for my sisters, who went to the Wimbledon High School. We were going on to be photographed together. I waited for perhaps a quarter of an hour in a corner of the cloak-room. I must have been ten years old, and hundreds and hundreds of girls went to and fro; they all looked at me and giggled, and whispered to one another. I knew they hated me because I was a boy sitting in the cloak-room of a girls’ school; and my sisters, when they arrived, looked ashamed of me and seemed quite different from the sisters I knew at home. 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. In 1912, 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. It frightened me so much, I could have killed her.
In English preparatory and public schools romance is necessarily homosexual. The opposite sex is despised and treated as something obscene. Many boys never recover from this perversion. For every one born homosexual, at least ten permanent pseudo-homosexuals are made by the public school system: nine of these ten as honourably chaste and sentimental as I was.
I left the day-school at Wimbledon because my father decided that the standard of work was not high enough to get me a scholarship at a public school. He sent me to another preparatory school at Rugby, where the headmaster’s wife happened to be a sister of an old literary friend of his. I did not like the place. There was a secret about the headmaster which some of the elder boys shared – a somehow sinister secret. Nobody ever let me into it, but 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!’ My father took me away suddenly, a week later. The headmaster, having been given twenty-four hours to leave the country, 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 when to start new paragraphs, and the difference between ‘O’ and ‘Oh’. Mr Lush was a very heavy man, who used to stand at his desk and lean on his thumbs until they bent at right angles. A fortnight after taking over the school, he fell out of a train on his head, and that was the end of him; but the school seems to be still in being. I am occasionally asked to subscribe to Old Boys’ funds for memorial 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, heard 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 because nobody dared discuss the tragedy with him he seemed oblivious of it – playing about and ragging just as he had done before. We found that rather monstrous. But 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, a different moral system, even different voices. On their return to school from the holidays the change-over from home-self to school-self is almost instantaneous, whereas the reverse process takes a fortnight at least. A preparatory schoolboy, when caught off his guard, will call his mother ‘Please, matron,’ and always addresses any male relative or friend of the family as ‘Sir’, like 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 lose all intimate touch with their children from about the age of eight, and any attempts on their parts to insinuate home feeling into school life are resented.
Next, I went to Copdiorne, a typically good school in Sussex. The headmaster had been chary of admitting me at my age, particularly since I came from a school with such a bad recent history. However, family literary connexions did the trick, and the headmaster saw that I could win a scholarship if he took trouble over me. The depressed state I had been in ended the moment I arrived. My younger brother Charles followed me to this school, being taken away from the day-school at Wimbledon; and, later, my youngest brother John went there straight from home. How good and typical the school was can be seen in the case of John, a typical, good, normal person who, as I say, went straight there from home. He spent five or six years at Copthorne – played in the elevens – got the top scholarship at a public school, became head-boy with athletic distinctions, won a scholarship at Oxford and further athletic distinctions – and a good 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 needs a change, he is applying for a mastership at his old public school. If he gets it, and becomes a housemaster after a few years, he will at last, I suppose, become a headmaster and eventually take the next step as head of his old college at Oxford. That is the sort of typically good preparatory school it was.
There I learned to keep a straight bat at cricket, and to have a high moral sense; and mastered my fifth different pronunciation of Latin, and my fifth or sixth different way of doing simple arithmetic. They put me into the top class, and I got a scholarship – in fact, I got the first scholarship of the year. At Charterhouse. And why at Charterhouse? Because of íστημι and íημι. Charterhouse was the only public school whose scholarship examination did not contain a Greek grammar paper and, though smart enough at Greek Unseen and Greek composition, I could not conjugate íστημι and íημι conventionally. But for these two verbs, I should almost certainly have gone to the very different atmosphere of Winchester.
4
MY mother took us abroad to stay at my grandfather’s house in Germany five times between my second and twelfth year. Then he died, and we never went again. He owned a big old manor-house at Deisenhofen, ten miles from Munich; by name ‘Laufzorn’, which means ‘Begone, anger!’ Our summers there were easily the best things of my early childhood. Pine forests and hot sun, red deer, black and red squirrels, acres of blueberries and wild strawberries; nine or ten different kinds of edible mushrooms which we
went into the forest to pick, and unfamiliar flowers in the fields – Munich lies high, and outcrops of Alpine flowers occur here and there; a farm with all the usual animals except sheep; drives through the countryside in a brake behind my grandfather’s greys; and bathing in the Isar under a waterfall. The Isar was bright green, and said to be the fastest river of Europe. We used to visit the uncles who kept a peacock farm a few miles away; and a grand-uncle, Johannes von Ranke, the ethnologist, who lived on the lakeshore of Tegernsee, where everyone had buttercup-blonde hair; and occasionally my Aunt Agnes, Freifrau Baronin von Aufsess of Aufsess Castle, some hours away by train, high up in the Bavarian Alps.
Aufsess, built in the ninth century, stood so remote that it had never been sacked, but remained Aufsess property ever since. To the original building, a keep with only a ladder-entrance half-way up, a medieval castle had been added. Its treasures of plate and armour were amazing. My Uncle Siegfried showed us children the chapel: its walls hung with enamelled shields of each Aufsess baron, impaled with the arms of the noble family into which he had married. He pointed to a stone in the floor which pulled up by a ring, and said: ‘That is the family vault where all Aufsesses go when they die. I’ll be down there one day.’ He scowled comically. (But he got killed in the war as an officer of the Imperial German Staff and, I believe, they never found his body.) Uncle Siegfried had a peculiar sense of humour. One day we children saw him on the garden path, eating pebbles. He told us to go away, but of course we stayed, sat down, and tried to eat pebbles too; only to be told very seriously that children should not eat pebbles: we would break our teeth. We agreed, after trying one or two; so he chose us each a pebble which looked just like all the rest, but which crushed easily and had a chocolate centre. This was on condition that we went away and left him to his picking and crunching. When we returned, later in the day, we searched and searched, but found only the ordinary hard pebbles. He never once let us down in a joke.
Among the castle treasures were a baby’s lace cap that had taken two years to make; and a wine glass which my uncle’s old father had noticed in the Franco-Prussian War standing upright in the middle of the square in an entirely ruined French village. For dinner, when we went there, we ate some enormous trout. My father, a practised fisherman, asked my uncle in astonishment where they came from. He explained that an underground river welled up close to the castle, and the fish which emerged with it were quite white from the darkness, of extraordinary size, and stone-blind.
They also gave us jam made of wild rose-berries, which they called ‘Hetchi-Petch’, and showed us an iron chest in a small, thick-walled, white-washed room at the top of the keep – a tremendous chest, twice the size of the door, and obviously made inside the room, which had no windows except arrow-slits. It had two keys, and must have been twelfth- or thirteenth-century work. Tradition ruled that it should never be opened, unless the castle stood in the most extreme danger. The baron held one key; his steward, the other. The chest could be opened only by using both keys, and nobody knew what lay inside; it was even considered unlucky to speculate. Of course, we speculated. It might be gold; more likely 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. A ghost walked the castle, the ghost of a former baron known as the ‘Red Knight’; his terrifying portrait hung half-way up the turret staircase which led to our bedrooms. We slept on feather beds for the first time in our lives.
Laufzorn, which my grandfather had bought and restored from a ruinous condition, could not compare in tradition with Aufsess, though it had for a time been a shooting lodge of the Bavarian kings. Still, two ghosts went with the place; the farm labourers used to see them frequently. One of them was a carriage which drove furiously along without horses and, before the days of motor cars, horrible enough. Not having visited the banqueting hall since childhood, I find it difficult to recall its true dimensions. It seemed as big as a cathedral, with stained-glass armorial windows, and bare floorboards furnished only at the four corners with small islands of tables and chairs; swallows had built rows of nests all along the sides of the ceiling. There were roundels of coloured light from the windows, the many-tined stags’ heads (shot by my grandfather) mounted on the walls, swallow-droppings under the nests, and a little harmonium in one corner where we sang German songs. These concentrate my memories of Laufzorn. The bottom storey formed part of the farm. A carriage-drive ran right through it, with a wide, covered courtyard in the centre, where cattle were once driven to safety in times of baronial feud. On one side of the drive lay 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 for corn, apples, and other farm produce; and up here my cousin Wilhelm – later shot down in an air battle by a schoolfellow of mine – used to lie for hours picking off mice with an air-gun.
Bavarian food had a richness and spiciness that we always missed on our return to England. We liked the rye bread, the dark pine-honey, the huge ice-cream puddings made with fresh raspberry juice and the help of snow stored during the winter in an ice-house, my grandfather’s venison, the honey cakes, the pastries, and particularly the sauces made with different kinds of mushrooms. Also the pretzels, the carrots cooked in sugar, and summer pudding of cranberries and blueberries. In the orchard, close to the house, we could eat as many apples, pears, and greengages as we liked. There were also rows of blackcurrant and gooseberry bushes in the garden. The estate, despite the recency of my grandfather’s tenure, his liberalism, and his experiments in modern agricultural methods, remained feudalistic. The poor, sweaty, savage-looking farm servants, who talked a dialect we could not understand, frightened us. They ranked lower even than the servants at home; and as for the colony of Italians, settled about half a mile from the house, whom my grandfather had imported as cheap labour for his brick factory – we associated them in our minds with ‘the gipsies in the wood’ of the song. My grandfather took us over the factory one day and made me taste a lump of Italian polenta. My mother told us afterwards – when milk pudding at Wimbledon came to table burned, and we complained – ‘Those poor Italians in your grandfather’s brick yard used to burn their polenta on purpose, sometimes, just for a change of flavour.’
Beyond the farm buildings at Laufzorn lay a large pond, fringed with irises and full of carp; my uncles netted it every three or four years. Once we watched the fun, and shouted when we saw the net pulled closer and closer to the shallow landing corner. It bulged with wriggling carp, and a big pike threshed about among them. I waded in to help, and came out with six leeches, like black rubber tubes, fastened to my legs; salt had to be put on their tails before they would leave go. The farm labourers grew wildly excited; one of them gutted a fish with his thumb, and ate it raw. I also remember the truck line between the railway station, two miles away, and the brick yard. Since the land had a fall of perhaps one in a hundred between the factory and the station, the Italians used to load their trucks with bricks; then a squad of them would give the trucks a hard shove and run along the line pushing for twenty or thirty yards; after which the trucks sailed off all by themselves towards the station.
We were allowed to climb up into the rafters of the big hay barn, 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. Once we visited the Laufzorn cellar, not the ordinary beer cellar, but another into which one descended from the courtyard – quite dark except for a little slit window. A huge heap of potatoes lay on the floor; to get to the light, they had put out a twisted mass of long white feelers. In one corner was a dark hole closed by a gate: a secret passage from the house to a ruined monastery, a mile away – so we were told. My uncles had once been down some distance, but the air got bad and they came back; the gate had been put up to prevent anyone else trying it a
nd never returning. Come to think of it, they were probably teasing us, and the hole led to the bottom of the garde-robe – which is a polite name for a medieval earth-closet.
When we drove out beside my grandfather, he was acclaimed with ‘Grüss Gott, Herr Professor!’ by the principal personages of each village we went through. It always had a big inn with a rumbling skittle-alley, and a tall Maypole, banded like a barber’s pole with blue and white, the Bavarian national colours. Apple and pear trees lined every road. The idea of these unguarded public fruit-trees astonished us. We could not understand why any fruit remained on them. On Wimbledon Common even the horse-chestnut trees were pelted with sticks and stones, long before the chestnuts ripened, and in defiance of an energetic common-keeper. What we least liked in Bavaria were the wayside crucifixes with their realistic blood and wounds, and the ex-voto pictures, like sign-boards, of naked souls in purgatory, grinning for anguish among high red and yellow flames. Though taught to believe in Hell, we did not like to be reminded of it.
Munich we found sinister – disgusting fumes of beer and cigar smoke, and intense sounds of eating in the restaurants; the hotly dressed, enormously stout population in trams and trains; the ferocious officials. Then the terrifying Morgue, which children were not allowed to visit. Any notable who died was taken to the Morgue, they told us, and put in a chair, to sit in state for a day or two. If a general, he had his uniform on; or if a burgomaster’s wife, she had on her silks and jewels. Strings were tied to their fingers, and the slightest movement of a single string would ring a great bell, in case any life remained in the corpse after all. I have never verified the truth of this, but it was true enough to me. When my grandfather died, about a year after our last visit, I pictured him in the Morgue with his bushy white hair, his morning coat, his striped trousers, his decorations, and his stethoscope. And perhaps, I thought, a silk hat, gloves, and cane on a table beside him. Trying, in a nightmare, to be alive; but knowing himself dead.