WITH AN ENROLLMENT OF fewer than one hundred boys, St. Cyprian’s was not a large school. Its facilities consisted of two large, many-roomed houses, under whose roofs all of the school’s indoor activities took place. Long hallways lined with doors held dormitory rooms for the students, small rooms and apartments for the faculty, a dining hall, library, chapel, kitchen, and bathrooms. Outside there were spacious lawns and a single playing field that served double duty as the site not only of cricket and soccer matches but also of practice marches, during which the boys learned discipline under the command of the school’s drill instructor.
St. Cyprian’s had fewer than a dozen teachers, or masters, as they were called, along with Mr. and Mrs. Vaughan Wilkes. The masters were responsible for drilling the boys in a variety of subjects, and the classroom work seemed at times as much forced march and steps by the numbers as did the ranked formations on the field outside. At St. Cyprian’s and similar preparatory schools across Britain, the teachers and administrations were less concerned with whether or not the students actually understood the material for which they were responsible than they were with whether or not their charges would be able to give the correct answers on the tests and examinations they would face when seeking entrance to more advanced schools. The measure of the masters’ success was not the spark of intellectual excitement ignited in young minds but the number of students who won high places to the great schools such as Harrow, Winchester, and especially Eton. Good performance on entrance exams was what mattered—performance that would reflect favorably upon St. Cyprian’s.
Arriving at the school in September 1911, Eric Arthur Blair, age eight, felt a curious and almost frightening mixture of emotions. The school itself was lovely, with the two huge houses dominating the grounds, which were not far from white chalk cliffs overlooking the English Channel. He was surrounded for the first time in his life by other boys of the same age, though from disparate backgrounds. Some of them were children of nobility, both British and foreign, others were accustomed to great wealth, still others were unknowing scholarship students such as himself. All felt very small as they approached the school, uncertain of what sort of world they were entering.
They learned quickly enough. Under the unwavering guidance of Mr. and Mrs. Vaughan Wilkes, St. Cyprian’s had developed a regimen for the boys designed to strengthen their characters, to instill in them the harsh discipline they would need in order to fulfill the obligations their rank in society would impose upon them.
Days began early with a communal plunge into a long, chilly pool, which also served as a bath. The shock of the cold and generally scummy water chased sleep from the boys’ minds, and a vigorous toweling stirred their blood, according to the Wilkeses. Breakfast came next, and again following theories held by Mr. and Mrs. Wilkes, the meal was small: too large a breakfast, they felt, might make the boys lazy or sleepy, and there was a day’s hard work ahead.
Classes began immediately after breakfast, and Eric learned from the first day that he would find at St. Cyprian’s none of the excitement and fun of learning that he had so enjoyed at Sunnylands. He was older now, the masters reminded him, at eight a young man by the standards of British schooling, and his studies served a different purpose. Achievement was the rule of the day, and a person’s position in the class rankings was the achievement students should keep foremost in their minds.
As a first-year student, Eric was placed in classes in Latin, French, mathematics, history, and English. He recognized immediately that the men who stood at the head of the class were little interested in him. They had been through it all before, and the world of learning and letters held no further excitement. Rarely would students read an entire book. Rather, a course in literature or history would be composed of those passages and facts most likely to be faced on the examinations that would be the ultimate test of the teachers’ achievement. Lessons were taught by rote, with memorization rather than understanding the key to a good grade. It was not what Eric had expected.
Before his first day was finished, Eric was overcome with a wave of homesickness that finally broke through his self-control. He hung his head and began to weep. Mrs. Wilkes spotted the boy and bent at his side, reminding Eric that, like all the other boys, he was to call her “Mum” while he was at St. Cyprian’s. She was the wife of the headmaster, and she was one of the teachers, she said, but she also wanted to be the source of maternal comfort when it was called for. She took Eric into her arms and held him tightly, but the comfort she offered was not the sort the boy desired.
Mrs. Wilkes dominated school life far more than did her husband. She was constantly on patrol, walking up and down the halls in search not only of boys in need of consolation, but also alert for transgressions of the school’s strict rules. St. Cyprian’s instilled maturity in its students, and the students were expected to display maturity from the day they arrived. Anything less was a denial of their class and of their responsibilities. St. Cyprian’s was typical of such schools for the middle classes.
Eric Blair had no wish to deny his responsibilities. He endeavored to be an example of the mature young man that Mum Wilkes and the masters so frequently described as the ideal toward which he should aspire. But everything was so different. Where Ida Blair had transformed even common vegetables into tasty and appetizing casseroles and dishes, the food at St. Cyprian’s was poorly cooked and often tasted spoiled. The home in which Eric had passed his childhood was kept clean and neat, but conditions at St. Cyprian’s were generally filthy, from the scum on the surface of the bathwater to the crusts of dried food that had to be chipped from plates and utensils before they could be used. Where his home life and the adventure stories he read had led him to believe that the future—including St. Cyprian’s—held challenges to which a well-prepared boy could rise and over which he could triumph, the thrust of the teaching at St. Cyprian’s seemed to be that one’s life was always poised on the edge of danger, that failure lurked everywhere, and that one must constantly be on guard against it.
Before he had been at St. Cyprian’s a month, Eric wet his bed. To Mrs. Wilkes, to her husband, and to the staff of masters, bed-wetting stood among the most grievous of offenses against not only nature but against society itself. Incontinence bespoke a lack of self-control, it revealed the hidden flaws in Eric’s character, it was an inexcusable demonstration of the boy’s lack of maturity. He was called to Headmaster Wilkes’s office and told of these truths, and reminded in no uncertain terms of the punishment that lay ahead if he failed to control himself and his bladder.
It did not help. The next night, Eric wet his bed again, and awoke the next morning to find himself summoned once more to face the headmaster and receive from that voice of authority the lecture on how Eric had failed, once more, to measure up. He would be given another chance but not, it was made clear, as an indulgence, but because he, a bright boy, should be able to bring himself under control. That, after all, was what St. Cyprian’s and the education it offered were all about: control of mind, control of manners, control of emotions, control of body.
Eric tried, but his body refused to cooperate, and, waking yet again to sodden sheets, he knew without being told that the time of warnings had passed. For this offense, for the repetition of that offense, he must be punished, not simply scolded. It was obvious to Headmaster and Mrs. Wilkes that words alone would not reach the boy. An example must be set for him.
Following afternoon tea, at which guests from the community were occasionally present, Mrs. Wilkes beckoned Eric to remain behind. The other boys left the dining hall, and Eric approached Mrs. Wilkes and an unfamiliar woman who sat at her table. He stared at Mrs. Wilkes and recalled that she had, not long after his first bout of homesickness, taken him and some other students on a picnic. It had not been the gay sort of picnic that Eric had enjoyed with his mother, though it had evidently been intended as such. Eric thought also of the nickname the older boys had given Mum Wilkes—they called her “Flip,” in crude reference to the motion of her ample bosom as she strode down the halls. The older boys were continually making vulgar jokes such as that, as well as picking on the younger, smaller, weaker boys such as Eric.
Now, in the dining hall after tea, Mrs. Wilkes introduced Eric to her companion, although he did not catch the woman’s name. He nodded at her, seeking to be polite but not quite daring to speak. Mrs. Wilkes rattled on a bit, referring to Eric occasionally, building up to the moment when, in a conversational tone of voice as though discussing something so matter of fact as gardening, she told her companion that Eric Blair was the eight-year-old who could not keep from wetting his bed.
Eric was stunned, but he managed to retain his composure. He would not give in and let Mrs. Wilkes enjoy the humiliation she had forced upon him. Nor did Mrs. Wilkes stop speaking. She chatted, while the other woman nodded in agreement, about how deplorable a thing it was for a boy of Eric’s years to soil his sheets at night. It was a failure, certainly, and one which would no longer be tolerated. Should the offense occur again, she said, as much to her companion as to Eric, the boy would be turned over to the bigger students for a sound beating. Should it happen again, she said, that was all the boy would deserve. With that, she dismissed Eric, and he walked from the dining hall, conscious with every step of Mrs. Wilkes and the other woman staring at him as he left, talking about him as he departed.
And that night he wet his bed once more.
Next morning, rather than being turned over to the older boys for his beating, Eric was summoned to Headmaster Wilkes’s office. Mr. Wilkes was a man of medium size, whose rounded shoulders and broad face made him seem larger than he really was. Even a small man, though, would tower over a boy of eight, and on the morning of Eric’s punishment, Mr. Wilkes did tower over the boy, bending to stare at him from his vantage point and intoning once more the now familiar lecture. It was bad enough—unforgivable!—to wet one’s bed, but to continue to do so was evidence of much more than mere incontinence. Such repetition was evidence of a rebellious and defiant nature and must be dealt with corporally: nothing less than physical punishment would do. Eric was told to prepare himself for a caning.
The cane used by the Headmaster was likely of bamboo, although Eric would remember it as having been a heavy, ivory-handled riding crop. Whatever the implement, its use was quickly made clear as Eric bent and braced himself, and Wilkes stood straight and raised the cane above his head and brought it down hard on Eric’s back. The boy did not cry out; it was as though he had decided to prove by his lack of emotion that he did have control over himself and his body. He endured the caning stoically, drawing his breath as the cane rose, holding his breath as the cane sliced air on its downward arc to bite into his back. The punishment seemed to last forever, and Eric would later claim that in the midst of the beating the riding crop, as he remembered it, broke, its ivory handle flying across the room, angering Mr. Wilkes even further. Eric never cried and did not even come close to requesting mercy. He could take whatever the headmaster offered and would prove by his silence the character he knew he possessed.
When the punishment was at last ended, Eric assured Mr. Wilkes that he had truly learned his lesson and would no longer wet his bed. He was dismissed. Outside Headmaster Wilkes’s office a group of boys waited, eager to hear the details of Eric’s beating. Eric stood tall as he emerged from the office, and with a smirk of pride he told his classmates that the caning had not been all that bad—it hadn’t hurt at all, really. His back was tougher than Wilkes’s blows. Eric’s brave proclamation was greeted with wonder by the boys but with anger by Mum Wilkes, who, unfortunately, happened to be passing by and overheard Eric’s boast.
Such defiance was as evil as bed-wetting and could no more be tolerated than that other offense. She took Eric and marched him immediately back into the headmaster’s office, where he was ordered to bend once more and receive instruction from the edge of a cane. This beating was even more ferocious, and during it Eric learned a lesson. What mattered, he realized, was for Wilkes to think that his message had gotten through. Eric collapsed weeping, crying out that he had learned his lesson, had seen the error of his ways. He knew now, he said, how bad a little boy he had been, and knew how hard he must work to become a good young man. His tears made their point, for the caning soon ceased, and he was dismissed.
That night Eric again wet his bed, and the next morning he was summoned after breakfast to Headmaster Wilkes’s office for another sound beating. Eric told no one, but this session under the cane hurt no more than had the first. It was as though he had willed himself to feel nothing once the punishment began. He had not forgotten the most important lesson, which was to let the headmaster know clearly that a lesson had been learned and learned painfully. Eric wept dutifully, apologized, was dismissed, and never again wet his bed.
There were other lessons as he adjusted to the rhythms of the school, and other pieces of understanding to be put into practice. When he wrote to his parents, for example, he never mentioned his punishment or let on to any unhappiness at all. In part this was boyish pride: he wanted them to see how well he could fend for himself. There was also a feeling at St. Cyprian’s that the boys’ mail was closely scrutinized by Mum Wilkes, and that comments which reflected poorly upon the school would not only be censored, but would also bring down punishment on the correspondent. Eric’s letters home were brief and chatty, telling of his studies, mentioning proudly the standing he earned in each of his classes, occasionally requesting items left at home such as his stamp collection.
The cheerful schoolboy of the letters was a pose, however, as was the weeping boy prostrate at the feet of the headmaster. Eric Blair, in the company of young boys for the first time in his life, learned of his own nature by watching them. He loved books and reading, but most of the other boys loathed such scholarly activities. They loved rough-and-tumble sports, but Eric was awkward. He tumbled more often than he displayed grace or agility, and often cost points to the teams to which he was assigned. He was not the sort of boy immediately chosen for a team, his performance hindering that of his teammates. The others seemed lithe and limber, making Eric ever more self-conscious of his own chubbiness. He felt that he smelled bad. His lungs rebelled as winter approached, and he found himself going often to the infirmary where he lay alone in bed; he made no real friends and thus had few visitors when he was confined to the sickroom. And when he was up and about he found himself the target of bullying assaults by older boys. More than once his nose or lips were bloodied by an unexpected, unwarranted blow—but it did no good to complain to the staff. Such complaints were, like bed-wetting or homesickness, signs of weakness, expressions of flawed character.
The one area in which he might hope to find some escape from his loneliness was the classroom. His standings confirmed his brightness. He had not been at St. Cyprian’s long before establishing himself at or near the top of every class he took. Learning came easily to him, and not only the memorization and rote learning that was the school’s sole educational theory. Eric also revealed a natural gift for comprehension and understanding. He could make connections between the ideas presented by the masters and begin to trace the flow of ideas through history, to observe and recapitulate their rise and fall over the centuries. He proved himself equally adept with words, his early appreciation of poetry growing deeper as he was exposed to Shakespeare, to the classical Greek and Roman poets, and to other great works of literature. At age eight he knew already, and told those around him, that he would be a writer when he was grown.
Such pronouncements fell on deaf ears. To his hardy classmates, Eric’s love of books and reading was one more indication of his weakness. The masters were not even that interested. Generally underpaid, genuinely devoid of scholarly habits, they cared little for this boy’s brightness and rarely took the trouble to compliment or even respond to his insights. Eric grew more withdrawn.
Mr. and Mrs. Wilkes did notice that Eric, for all the trouble he had given them early on, was an exceptionally intelligent boy. Such boys were prized at schools such as St. Cyprian’s, for they were most likely to earn scholarships to good schools, and the number of St. Cyprian’s graduates accepted by Eton, for example, would help the Wilkeses attract students in the future. They took to meeting with Eric occasionally, reminding him of the greatness he could achieve by excelling at his schoolwork, and encouraged him to study even harder, making certain that he kept at his books. For all that, though, even they had little interest in any originality of thought the boy displayed. Originality, after all, was virtually another form of rebellion.
The first term dragged by and Eric was delighted to return to Henley for the Christmas holidays. It took a bit of adjusting to grow accustomed to warm, large breakfasts in which he did not first have to search for hairs. It was special once more to have a room to himself, and a bed with enough blankets. And above all it felt wonderful to be surrounded once more by family rather than strangers. Richard Blair, in his midfifties now, might be aloof and more than a bit stuffy, guided by habits developed over a regimented career in the colonies. Nonetheless, he was father, and could be counted on for companionship during riverside walks, occasional fishing outings, and lovely surprises such as pocketknives. Ida Blair percolated with enthusiasm and good humor, her colorful clothes and bright earrings adding life as she darted here and there, rarely still, a good cook and a caring nurse, mother. Marjorie was special, too, not only as a sister but also as someone with whom Eric could share his love of books. And Avril, the baby of the family, was growing rapidly; a special bond developed between Eric and his younger sister. They cared for the family’s pets together, Eric protective and instructive with the little girl. Holidays were fine times, but they always ended too quickly.
Back at St. Cyprian’s early in 1912, Eric found himself once more alone, and, he increasingly felt, ostracized. Eric Blair did not fit in, and no one was more aware of that than Eric Blair himself. He came to dread rousing each morning to face the rows of filthy sinks, the toilet stalls whose doors could not be locked, the plunge and swim through the murky pool that was the only bath the boys had, dressing beside other boys who were muscular while he was chubby. Mealtimes were disgusting, the already low quality of the food declining even farther as winter deepened.
Classes themselves were a horror: Eric was smarter than the other boys and that did nothing to help him make friends. To encourage competition among the students—competition which built character, according to Mr. and Mrs. Wilkes—the boys’ class standings were posted each week, and each week Eric Blair’s name stood near the top of the roster for his courses. Those high marks made him an easy target for less bright, more bullying boys.
He was a target of laughter as well: in athletic competitions he was as untalented as it was possible to be. When his teams lost, the losses were blamed on Eric. When, on occasion, a team on which he was a member won, he shared little of the credit. The only athletic events he enjoyed were the infrequent visits to large public pools in nearby Eastbourne, but even in the water he did not excel as a competitor. He mustered what energy he could for the sports and even managed some enthusiasm, but he was not an athlete. His body conspired against him. As a result of a midwinter iceskating expedition, Eric’s lungs acted up once more, and he watched much of the winter pass from the vantage point of an infirmary bed.
The winter did pass, though, and the spring, and Eric Blair’s first year at St. Cyprian’s was nearly behind him. For his ninth birthday in June, his parents sent him a watch, and he wore it everywhere. He watched the calendar as well, counting the days until he could return to Henley for the summer, seizing upon every distraction to take his mind from St. Cyprian’s. One day there was a shipwreck within sight of the coast, and the boys spent hours watching the ship go down. As the weather improved, walks across the area’s fields occupied afternoons. And, late in the school year, Eric briefly enjoyed a moment’s triumph on the playing field, scoring an important goal almost by accident.
The summer of 1912 was spent with his family and his pets. Eric passed a great deal of his vacation reading and told Marjorie more than once that he would be a writer. That fall, after he had returned to St. Cyprian’s, the Blair family moved from Henley to a larger house with more spacious grounds in Shiplake, barely two miles away. The new house was quickly named “Roselawn” by Ida Blair, and the more suburban setting agreed with the family. Eric wrote often to ask if his pets had survived the move in good health.
At St. Cyprian’s the best thing he could say for his second year was that the school no longer held any surprises for him. The food was still terrible, the washrooms still smelly and dirty, the classes still stultifyingly dull. One high point of the year was a costume party which Eric attended dressed—in a school costume—as a regal footman. He enjoyed wearing the red velvet coat and red silk trousers; a white waistcoat and white wig completed the costume. The party was a colorful incident in a year otherwise as dull and drab as had been the first. Eric’s athletic performance improved somewhat, and his class standings remained high.
The summer of 1913 was spent in Shiplake. Roselawn sat in the center of nearly an acre of land, and Eric, Marjorie, and Avril walked the grounds often, taking great interest in the variety of flowers and animal life to be found there. The family menagerie now included birds as well as terriers and kittens, rabbits and guinea pigs, and Eric divided his holiday time between the animals and books.
In the fall, Eric’s third year at St. Cyprian’s began, and upon arrival at school the boy’s studiousness and natural academic talent were rewarded. He was placed in the school’s scholarship class, an advanced and challenging section whose students seemed most likely to win scholarships to Eton, Harrow, or one of the other great British schools. Great pressure was placed upon the students: the temper and tone of the instruction was the same as in regular classes—memorization, recitation, drill—but the volume of work assigned was far greater. Scholarship class students were expected to yield their holidays to the school, studying while the other boys played. Vacations were likewise crammed with assignments. Eric might return home for a few days and carry with him an assignment consisting of hundreds of lines of poetry to be memorized, long charts of historical dates to learn by rote, dozens upon dozens of French and Latin verbs to conjugate.
He rose to the challenges, aware that excellence was now expected of him. His class standings remained high, and he also managed to continue his outside reading. From the masters he received instruction in important or noteworthy passages from English and classical Greek and Latin literature; on his own he encountered novels and plays as entities, studying the ways in which authors developed their characters and themes.
That year at St. Cyprian’s, Eric made a true friend, a new boy who shared his precocious love and understanding of literature. Cyril Connolly, like Eric Blair, knew from an early age that he wanted to become a writer, and also like Eric, he spent every free moment immersed in a book. Eric and Cyril Connolly took to each other instantly, comparing favorite books, introducing each other to books that might otherwise have been overlooked. And they began sharing stories that they created themselves, taking the trouble to criticize each other’s work as well as enjoy it.
Eric returned to the Blair home in Shiplake for the summer of 1914. He took with him long lists of academic tasks that must be accomplished before the resumption of classes, but he also found time for fun. One afternoon, early in the summer, while walking through fields near his home, he noticed children from a nearby house playing beside the fence that surrounded their lawn. Eric immediately bent and placed his hands and head on the ground and heaved his feet into the air. He balanced precariously until one of the children asked why he was standing on his head. His purpose accomplished, Eric righted himself and pointed out that people standing on their heads were more quickly noticed by those around them—just as he had been.
The children were named Buddicom, and they were close in age to the Blair children. Jacintha, the eldest, was thirteen, two years older than Eric, and her brother, Prosper, was, at ten, a year younger. A third child, Guinever, called Guiny, was seven years old, a year older than Avril Blair. All in all it seemed from the first as though a family of friends had been fashioned for the Blair children, and the friendships that were struck that first afternoon deepened as the summer passed.
Eric became especially close to Jacintha Buddicom. She shared his love of books, and like Cyril Connolly at St. Cyprian’s, enjoyed talking of the sort of life a writer could fashion. She and Eric even discussed the bindings which would be most handsome when publishers began assembling “collected editions” of their works. When not talking of the stories and poems they would one day write, Eric and Jacintha put their fascination with language to work creating games. They invented a poetry game in which words selected at random were fashioned into nonsense verses; they became masters of more traditional word games such as Hangman; they even spent long hours inventing words of their own—odd-sounding words that did not exist but were clever enough that the children felt they should.
Words were not their sole preoccupation. On clear days Eric, Jacintha, and the other children would set out on long expeditions through open fields, spotting animals, selecting flowers to be pressed in books, collecting birds’ eggs—no more than one egg from each nest—for their collections. Jacintha’s father had been a museum curator, and his concern for orderliness and proper cataloging carried over to his children. It was a concern which they shared with the young Blairs, and their coins, stamps, flowers, and colorful birds’ eggs were displayed neatly, each item clearly labeled and identified.
Despite such pleasant distractions, Eric kept up with his school assignments, but when he returned to St. Cyprian’s for the fall term, 1914, he found the already intense pressure of the special scholarship class had increased. He was eleven now, approaching the age when his mastery of the required curriculum would be tested not by disinterested masters at St. Cyprian’s, but by the more exacting members of the entrance boards at Eton, Harrow, and Wellington. The dozens of historical facts and dates, hundreds of lines of classical poetry, and thousands of Latin, Greek, and French words Eric had already memorized were mere preparation for the academic agenda he and the other scholarship class students now faced. While other students played, they studied; when other students traveled home for holidays, the scholarship class remained in Eastbourne for drill and repetition. Eric nonetheless found time to read books of his own selection, often staying up after curfew to steal a few hours with a book by H. G. Wells or William Thackeray. He was taken with the ways in which Thackeray made his characters and the Victorian world in which they lived come alive. And for years there were few writers whose works he relished more than those of Wells. Eric, reading clandestinely in the small hours of night, could hardly stop turning the pages of Wells’s romances of science, utopias, and the future.
The real world of the present intruded upon the lives of the students at St. Cyprian’s that fall. On August 4, 1914, Great Britain had declared war on Germany, and over the course of the next few weeks Europe became engulfed in the First World War. The practice marches on St. Cyprian’s fields took on more meaning as Eric and the other students thought of their fellows, most of them but a few years older than the students themselves, marching off to fight and die in the muddy battlefields of the war. For Eric, the eruption of war served as a muse to his poetic streak, and before the conflict was two months old he had written a poem which his mother thought sufficiently skilled to submit for publication to a local newspaper.
Ida Blair mailed Eric’s poem to the Henley and South Oxfordshire Standard where its quality—especially for an author not yet twelve years old—was recognized. The newspaper printed the poem early in October 1914.
Its appearance in print delighted Eric, and he was even more delighted with the response that publication won him from Mr. and Mrs. Wilkes. The entire student body was assembled and Mrs. Wilkes read the poem aloud, taking care for once to single Eric Blair out for praise rather than criticism. The pleasant mood did not last, though. Eric was discovered reading a forbidden book. It was a realistic novel, Sinister Street, by Scottish novelist Compton Mackenzie, which was considered scandalously racy. He was placed once more under the headmaster’s cane.
Far worse punishment awaited him as he moved through the last two years at St. Cyprian’s. Although Eric felt that he never truly became “one of the boys” and recognized both his lack of athletic talent and his deeper commitment to the world of ideas, he did not think of himself as less than his fellows as a person. That would change when, during a period of hard studying and growing academic burdens, Eric’s performance in the scholarship class slipped a bit. He was summoned to Headmaster Wilkes’s office, as he had been summoned so many times before, but this visit was not to include the bite of the headmaster’s cane.
Wilkes invited Eric to sit, pointed out to him that his recent declining performance was unsatisfactory and could not be tolerated, and then, without warning, revealed that Eric was attending St. Cyprian’s on scholarship, telling the boy of the reduced fee arrangement he had struck with Ida Blair. Did Eric wish to betray the confidence of his parents by failing to excel in school? Wilkes described them as living in far more reduced financial circumstances than was actually the case. Had Wilkes been mistaken in awarding Eric a scholarship? Did the boy have no gratitude? Could he not appreciate the charity which St. Cyprian’s had shown such a poor lad?
Charity? Poor lad? Eric left Wilkes’s office shattered by the lecture. He had never thought of himself as poor—and the Blair family was not poor—nor had he really thought of boys from wealthier families as rich. At St. Cyprian’s they had come to seem essentially similar, some more talented as athletes, others more skilled at study, but still boys with common interests and concerns. Now, walking the halls of the school, Eric realized that there had been differences all along. Some students had more pocket money than others; some had finer clothes; some carried themselves more nobly, or obviously had received instruction from more mannered families or understood social lines more clearly. And Eric Blair? It was, he thought to himself, much as Headmaster Wilkes had said: he was a poor boy who must make his way in the world on the sufferance and indulgence of others. If he did not succeed in winning a scholarship he would be cast out into the world to survive—or more likely, Wilkes had said, to fail miserably—on his own.
Eric took stock of himself and realized that Wilkes, at least within the confines of St. Cyprian’s, was correct. The only device Eric had in his favor was a fine memory and an alert mind. His grades climbed once more and he settled into a routine he loathed. He spent his final two years cramming his mind with facts, figures, and quotations that he would regurgitate for the examination boards.
In Europe the war entered its years of stalemate, British and French troops facing Germans from trenches separated by muddy, body-strewn fields. Hundreds of thousands of young men died to gain a few feet of territory. Eric and his classmates often visited local hospitals, carrying cigarettes and candy to wounded soldiers. Football had been replaced by longer drills and rifle practice. Eric became a good shot, able to hit both stationary and moving targets. As a result of wartime shortages, the food at St. Cyprian’s became even more disgusting than it had been before, and the meager servings became even smaller. Wartime deprivations exerted their influence on every aspect of British life, and the war years seemed one dreary, endless winter. Awake young men of England, indeed.
Shortages imposed by the war affected the home life of the Blairs as well. They moved from Roselawn, with its acre of land, to a smaller house whose yard seemed barely large enough to stand in. When he was home for vacation Eric could not wait to leave the cramped house and set out with Jacintha and Prosper Buddicom for a day in the fields. An uncle had given Eric a rifle for Christmas, and Eric put it to use shooting birds and small animals. Jacintha was horrified that Eric and Prosper took such joy in killing, but she could do little to dissuade them. Prosper kept a record of every successful hunt, and he and Eric planned more and more ambitious jaunts after game. Once they killed a hedgehog, packed it in clay, and attempted to bake it in the Buddicoms’ kitchen, greatly angering not only Jacintha but the Buddicoms’ cook, who had to clean up the mess. Not long afterward, Eric and Prosper began experimenting with chemistry, particularly the chemistry of fermentation, and the still they constructed in the Buddicom’s kitchen exploded, scattering glass and splashing liquid everywhere. The cook would not clean this mess; she had quit.
Eric said nothing to his family or to Jacintha about Wilkes’s cruel lecture. The perception of himself as poor settled in for a while, and left its mark upon Eric’s thoughts, but it was not the sort of thing he would talk about. For one thing, early in 1915, Jacintha’s father abandoned his family and emigrated to Australia, and Eric was well aware of the pain the desertion caused his friends. How could he complain of poverty when they had no father? For another, he began to develop a method of coping with the sense of inadequacy Wilkes had attempted to foster. Eric became increasingly assertive, made more and more statements about the fame he would win as a writer, even managing to sneer at those who felt themselves better than he. He did not need, he made clear to Connolly at St. Cyprian’s and to his Buddicom friends in Shiplake, to be popular or well liked. He would be great, author of “collected editions,” and that would be enough.
Fall 1915 passed quickly, and then Eric was into his final season at St. Cyprian’s. Entrance examinations for the coveted public school scholarships would begin early in 1916, and Eric was clearly well prepared for them. He dutifully sat in classes, answering correctly when queried by a master, expressing disinterest otherwise. Politic performance no longer mattered: Wilkes could not hurt him now. The examinations were beginning and by their results—one way or another—Eric would be gone from St. Cyprian’s before the end of the school year.
In February, Eric took the examinations for Wellington, which had a high reputation—though no school’s reputation was so high as Eton’s—but which prepared its graduates for army careers. Eric passed the Wellington examination easily, and returned to St. Cyprian’s for a final round of cramming before the Eton exams.
In June Eric and Mr. Wilkes traveled to Eton for the examinations, which lasted nearly three days. Competition was, as expected, fierce. The scholarship Eric sought was that of King’s Scholar, and it was from the King’s Scholarships, established by Henry VI in the fifteenth century, that the great college had developed. Henry VI had created the position of King’s Scholar and the school that the scholars would attend to give deserving young men, regardless of class, the opportunity of a fine education. King’s Scholars were charged only nominal tuition, far less in fact than even the half-rate fees Eric’s parents had paid for St. Cyprian’s. Academic excellence was the sole criterion for a King’s Scholar: a class—or election, as it was called—of King’s Scholars might theoretically be composed of students of the humblest families in Britain as well as the noblest. Each year there was room at Eton for an election of only a dozen or so boys, so position on the examinations was crucial to entry.
For two-and-a-half days Eric sat through tests of his memory for obscure facts, his knowledge of literature, his abilities with foreign languages. One of his examinations was interrupted with the news that Lord Kitchener, the great British hero of Egypt and Britain’s War Minister, had been killed when the ship on which he was traveling on a secret mission to Russia had struck a mine and sunk. The news was a shock. Kitchener was one of the great military leaders of Britain, and was even more important as a wartime symbol, but the exams were not canceled. Eric pressed on, doing his best and confident that his performance was good indeed. At last he and Wilkes returned to St. Cyprian’s.
As he waited to discover whether or not Eton lay in his future, Eric returned to public poetry, this time with a composition, assigned by Mum Wilkes, to commemorate Kitchener’s death.
Once more Eric’s gift for poetic expression won favor from Mrs. Wilkes. His new poem was read to the assembled school, his patriotism applauded by the administration. Again he saw his name in print in the Henley newspaper, where the poem appeared late in July.
A less fortunate publication came earlier. When the results of the King’s Scholars examinations were tabulated, Eric Blair had earned fourteenth place among all the applicants. Each year’s election, though, was determined by the number of spaces available in King’s College at Eton, and in 1916 it had room for barely a dozen scholars. He’d done well, but not well enough to enter Eton in 1916. There was some hope, though, that as young men left Eton to serve in the war, room might be made for the addition of a few boys to the 1916 election.
Meanwhile, Eric faced a decision about his future. He had been accepted on scholarship to Wellington. It was agreed that he would enter that school early in 1917. A final season, then, awaited him at St. Cyprian’s.
Eric felt liberated. While he did not actually cross the line between diffidence and defiance, his behavior at school in the fall of 1916 made clear to Mr. and Mrs. Wilkes that their fears about the boy had not been groundless. With his examinations past and passed, Eric became lazy in the classroom, occasionally producing the right answer, but more often than not, never volunteering. He made mock of his patriotic poetry, and on more than one occasion of patriotism itself. He, who had placed high on one of Britain’s most rigorous scholarship examinations, now expressed his disdain for study or hard work of any academic sort. He was going to be a poet, a writer, and the doctrinaire, mundane approaches to literature as practiced by the Wilkeses and their staff simply struck him as foolish.
When the Christmas holidays arrived, Eric left St. Cyprian’s for the last time. His farewells to Mr. Wilkes and to Mum Wilkes were cool and restrained. He had been in their care for more than five years, and he had nothing to offer them other than a polite handshake. Eric Blair had, however, taken from them what he could: a hatred for unquestioning obedience to authority, a loathing of rote learning and memorization for its own sake, and a sense of awareness that class and social position counted for a great deal in the world but that, for those not born to high class or position, there was not a great deal that could be done. Eric might hate authority, but authority existed; it was a fact of life that must be faced. As he grew older Eric would have to come to terms with the nature of authority, and of his response to it. Mr. Wilkes felt confident that Eric would fail at whatever he attempted. As he left St. Cyprian’s, Eric Blair was full of hope, but not at all certain that he would be able to disprove Mr. Wilkes’s charge.