The Fag and the Scholar: Sidelights on Eton

I

IF we had written, our letters from Eton would have told the same story: the lively aristocrats of the cubicles and the sixth-form room were reduced to serfdom, cultivated Greeks pitched into the Carthaginian slave market. We began to adapt ourselves to our new indignity: C. V. Connolly, Esq., K. S., New Buildings, Eton College, Windsor.

The seventy Eton scholars lived together in a house, part Victorian, part mediæval, where they were ruled by the Master in College, who had under him the Captain of the School and nine other members of sixth form, who wore stickup collars, could cane, and had fags. The boys were divided into elections, according to the year in which they won their scholarships; the elections moved slowly up the school en bloc, and each represented a generation.

Below the top twenty came another thirty boys or so, who formed the bulk of College, and then the bottom twenty, about fifteen of whom were doing their compulsory year of fagging, and who, while all the others had rooms, lived in cubicles in Chamber.

The whole school, ruled in theory by sixth form and the Captain of the School, was governed by ‘Pop,’ or the Eton Society, an oligarchy of two dozen boys who, except for two or three ex officio members, were self-elected and could wear colored waistcoats, stick-up collars, and so forth, and cane boys from any house. The masters could not cane. They punished by lines, detentions, and ‘tickets’ or chits of misbehavior which had to be carried to the housemaster for signature. Serious offenses, or too many tickets, meant being complained of to the headmaster, and might end in a birching.

This system makes Eton the most democratic of schools, for it is a school where all the prefects except the sixth form (who are powerful only in College) are self-elected. The boys have the government they deserve.

In practice Eton was not a democracy, for the system was feudal. The masters represented the ‘church,’with the headmaster as Pope; the boys, with their hierarchy of colors and distinctions, were the rest of the population, while the prefects and athletes, the captains of houses and the members of Pop, were the feudal overlords who punished offenses at the request of the ‘church,’and in return were allowed to break the same rules themselves. Thus a boy had two loyalties, to his tutor and to his fagmaster or feudal overlord. Sometimes the ‘church’ could protect a young clerk, making the lot of a serious little boy more bearable; in other houses the housemaster was powerless, the ‘church’ weak, and unable to control the feudal barons. At other times there were struggles between master and boy which ended in Canossa.

On the whole the feudal system worked well. The boys elected to Pop — those who combined goodness at games with elegance, vitality, and a certain mental alertness — were urbane and tolerant; it was among the house barons that bullies and stupid types were to be found.

II

A fag in Chamber, I was in the lowest ranks of serfdom. Though fag-masters were usually chivalrous to their own slaves, mine was not, nor had w’e privacy, for our spare time was at the mercy of our rulers, who could send us far into Windsor to buy them food and beat us if we made a mistake over it. I had not often been beaten at St. Wulfric’s; at Eton it became a hideous experience, for even the little boy who was Captain of Chamber could beat us, not with a cane, but with a piece of rubber tubing. There was a ‘Chamber Pop’ who also could beat one in a body for a breach of privilege.

I felt quite lost and friendless in this world, and sought out Meynell, who had no use for me. He was the familiar blend of character and prettiness, a tousled wire-terrier of a boy, tough, humorous, a natural leader and political commissar. We were all unhappy, and had such a feeling of persecution that we bullied each other to forget it. I was sixty-ninth in college order, and among the most bullied boys in my election, where Meynell was the ringleader. He invented tortures as a perpetual inquest to see if we had ‘guts,’ and was much liked in the elections above him, who considered him a ‘good influence.'

Nobody would have believed that he could make me stand on a mantelpiece and dance while he brandished a red-hot poker between my feet and said, ‘What is your name?’ ‘Connolly.’ ‘No — what is your name? Go on. Say it.’ ‘Ugly.’ ‘All right, Ugly, you can come down.’ He was aided by a few boys who hoped that their sycophancy would save their skins, and by another bully called Highworth. Highworth was not a torturer like Meynell, but a conceited, rakish, conventional boy, who could not bear anyone to be eccentric or untidy. He should never have been in College; he was a natural Oppidan.

I spent much of my spare time in School Library, moping among the poets. I had discovered the Celtic Twilight, and in proportion as I was unhappy I took it out on ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree,’ ‘The Little Waves of Breffny,’ ‘Glencullen,’ and other escapist poems, to which I added ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand.’ I tried to make friends with one other bullied boy, but he reciprocated too violently, showed me poems, and sniffed at the back of his nose. Instead I fell for a boy called Wilfrid, the faun type over again with green eyes, nectarine coloring, who was quick to divine in the little black-gowned, dirty colleger a potential admirer, even as a beautiful orchid accepts the visits of some repulsive beetle.

He was an Oppidan, good at games, and older than I. It was possible to see him leaving his classroom about once a week, or sometimes coming out of Chapel or at Absence, when the whole of feudal society assembled in School Yard. If he was with anyone important he would cut me; if not he would make a joke or two at my expense, while I grinned like a waiter. My daydreams centred round him. I looked up his home address, found out about his family, and copied his initials on to bits of paper.

The beatings were torture. We were first conscious of impending doom at Prayers, when the eyes of sixth form would linger on us. They had supper in a room of their own; and a special fag, ‘Senior,’ who was excused from ordinary duties like other police spies, was sent from there to fetch the ‘wanted’ man. From Upper Tea Room ‘Senior’ set out on his vile errand, past the boys chatting outside their rooms. ‘ Who’s “ wanted ” ? ‘ ‘Connolly.’ At last he reached the fags, who were shivering with terror — for this was always an agonizing quarter of an hour for them — in their stalls in Chamber. Those who were sitting in their tin baths paused with the sponge in the air — they might have to get out again to dress. The talkers ceased their chorus simultaneously, like frogs, and fear swept over the wooden partitions. ‘It’s Connolly.’ ‘Connolly, you’re “wanted.”’ ‘Who by?’ ‘Wrangham.’ ‘That’s all right. He can’t beat me; only tick me off. He’s my fag-master.’ ‘He’s going to beat someone. He’s got the chair out.’

The chair was put in the middle of the room only when beatings were to take place, and sometimes the fag was sent beforehand to get the canes with which he would be beaten.

The worst part was the suspense, for we might make a mistake the day before and not be beaten for it till the following evening. Or we could get a day’s grace by pleading a headache and getting ‘early bed leave,’ or by going out to the shooting range, the musical society, or a mysterious evening service held once a week to end the war, called Intercession, which was much frequented by guilty consciences. The huge chapel was dark and deserted, the gas mantles plopped, the stained-glass windows glittered, the headmaster droned the prayers from the altar. I too was praying. ‘Please God may Wrangham not “want” me; please, please God may Wrangham not “want” me, or may he forget to-morrow, and I will clean my teeth. And make me see Wilfrid. Amen.’

The result of this, combined with chamber beatings and bullyings, was to ruin my nerve. My work went off, and I got tickets which I had to present to my tutor, in itself a torture. To this day I cannot bear to be sent for, or hear of anyone wanting to see me, without an acute nervous dread.

My own election were broken under the strain of beatings at night and bullying by day; all we could hope for was to achieve peace with seniority and then start beating in our turn. But there was one ray of hope. The election now in power was a reactionary one, which would be succeeded by a gentler lot; and our own senior election, the year above us, whom we as yet hardly knew, contained heroic fighters for liberty and justice. It bristled with Pyms and Hampdens, and the feudal system was powerless there.

I had another stroke of luck. After a Chamber Pop beating from Meynell and four other boys, he began a heart-toheart: ‘Ugly, why are you so filthy? What is the matter with you?’ After the tears which followed I succeeded in making him laugh, and revealed my capacity as a wit. I was able to expand it, and soon I could make not only Meynell laugh, but Highworth. They began to leave me alone, bullying me when they could not find anyone else, but even then sparing me, if I seemed unsuspecting and confident, and did not smell of fear. At last I made them laugh at the expense of their victims, and my sarcasm became useful. One evening in my second term, after the Armistice had been signed, Meynell asked me to call him Godfrey. From then I was safe; my prayers wore answered. I had become a bully too.

I was now fifteen — dirty, inky, miserable, untidy, a bad fag, a coward at games, lazy at work, unpopular with my masters and superiors, anxious to curry favor and yet bully whom I dared. The law of the election system was that we spoke only to the boys of our own year; we could be beaten for speaking first to a boy in an election above, and could enforce the same discipline on those below. All our election were formal with the year that had arrived beneath us.

I got a bad report and was described as ‘cynical and irreverent.’

III

The Christmas term of 1920 I was launched. Looking back at my school days, I am conscious of a rhythm about them. Every year culminated in the summer term; it was the term when things happened, the climax of emotions, successes, and failures. I never felt well in the summer term. The Thames Valley climate was lowering; I was enervated by the profusion of elms and buttercups and sheep turds, the heat and the leisure. The summers at Eton were too pagan; one collapsed halfway through. Those hot afternoons when the ‘toc, toc’ of bat hitting ball resounded, and I sat in the shade with a book or wandered through the deserted buildings, where the chalky sunbeam lay aslant the desk, were deleterious. Christmas terms meant consolidation, and new beginnings; Easter was a season of promise: the games that I was good at were fives and squash; I liked the Easter terms best. Christmas was a primitive, Easter the quattrocento, and summer the decadence.

To this day I can tell whether a person is school-minded: whether he is cowardly, gregarious, sensitive to pupilteacher relationships, warm, competitive, and adolescent — or whether he is school-proof. The art of getting on at school depends on a mixture of enthusiasm with moral cowardice and social sense. The enthusiasm is for personalities, and gossip about them, for a schoolboy is a novelist too busy to write. I had the ape-like virtues without which no one can enjoy a public school, and from now on was happy and successful. I joined the College Literary Society, for which we wrote poems, and criticism.

Although I affected not to care, I dreaded leaving; one part of me was bored, and looked forward to moving on, the other clung to the past. Once more I had built up a private civilization of reason and love at a temperature warmer than the world outside; once again it had to be shattered. ‘We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time are providentially taken off from such imaginations’ — but I could not repress a dread of the future, of the uglification of life, of Oxford bedrooms and dour undergraduates.

Eton is one of the few schools where the standard of comfort is almost in advance of the universities, and, unlike most boys, we were not looking forward to more liberty than we enjoyed already, to more interesting friendships, or to a room of our own for the first time. Also we were attached to the past, and used to a world of boys — boys with a certain grace, who wore their eighteenth-century clothes with elegance. The world of matey young men, with their pipes and gray bags, the ‘blokeries’ to which we had been allotted, filled us with despair; we mourned with apprehension, ‘Not the dead, but the flower of youth perishing.’

I was now entering the third hot room of English education; from St. Wulfric’s I had got a scholarship to Eton, from Eton to Balliol, and from thence there would, I supposed, be other scholarships awaiting me. I could not imagine a moment when I should not be receiving marks for something, when ‘poor’ or ‘very fair’ or ‘Beta plus’ was not being scrawled across my conduct by the Great Examiner. And yet already I was a defeatist.

Were I to deduce anything from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called ‘The Theory of Permanent Adolescence.’ It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives, and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and, in the last analysis, homosexual. Early laurels weigh like lead, and of many of the boys whom I knew at Eton I can say that their lives are over. Those who knew them then knew them at their best and fullest; now, in their early thirties, they are haunted ruins. When we meet we look at each other; there is a pause of recognition, then a subsequent moment of guilt and fear. ‘I won’t tell on you,’ our eyes say, ‘if you won’t tell on me,’ and when we do speak it is to discover peculiar evidence of this obsession.

A nightmare I have often had has been that of finding myself back; I am still a boy at Eton, still in Pop, still in my old room in Sixth Form Passage, but nobody remembers me, nobody tells me where to go. I am worse than a new boy — I am a new old boy. I go into Hall and search for a place to eat; I wander in schoolrooms trying to find a class where I am expected. When I first used to have this dream I had only just left Eton; I knew most of the boys and the masters, and the nightmare then took the form of having everyone, after my place had been filled, my gap closed over, pretend he was glad I had returned. As time went on nobody remembered me, and the dream ended with my ejection. I have found other old Etonians who have had the same experience; some dream they are back in their old rooms, while their wives and children hang about outside to disgrace them.

Once again romanticism, with its death wish, is to blame, for it lays an emphasis on childhood, on a fall from grace which is not compensated for by any doctrine of future redemption: we enter the world, trailing clouds of glory; there follow childhood and boyhood, and we are damned. Certainly growing up seems a hurdle which most of us are unable to take, and the lot of the artist is unpleasant in England because he is one of the few who, bending but not breaking, is able to throw off these early experiences, for maturity is the quality that the English dislike most, and the fault of artists is that, like certain foreigners, they are mature. (Even the Jews in England are boyish, like Disraeli, and not the creators of adult philosophies, like Marx or Freud.)

For my own part I was long dominated by impressions of school. The plopping of gas mantles in the classrooms, the refrain of psalm tunes, the smell of plaster on the stairs, the walk through the fields to the bathing places or to chapel across the cobbles of School Yard, evoked a vanished Eden of grace and security; the intimate noises of College, the striking of the clock at night from Agar’s plough, the showers running after games of football, the housemaster’s squeak, the rattle of tea things, the poking of fires, as I sat talking with Denis or Charles or Freddie on some evening when everybody was away at a lecture, were recollected with anguish, and College, after I left, seemed to me like one of those humming fortified paradises in an Italian primitive, outside which the Master in College stood with his flaming sword.

Since I was unable to write in any living language when I left Eton, I was already on the way to becoming a critic. My ambition was to be a poet, but I could not succeed when poetry was immersed in the Georgian or Neo-Tennysonian tradition. I could only have imitated Housman, Flecker, Brooke, de la Mare, or Ralph Hodgson. By the time Eliot and Valéry came to save my generation from the romantic dragon, it had already devoured me. I was, however, well grounded enough to become a critic, and drifted into this through unemployability.