Next morning I had to get up and go to school. It was going to be a bright day. The balls of my feet felt springy as I ran downstairs, and as I jumped on to my bicycle the saddle felt springy. Hoorah! for Myrtle, I thought; there is nothing makes a man feel so wonderful as a wonderful girl. Flying downhill past the cemetery I skidded violently in the tramlines and gave myself a fright: a wonderful girl does not fill a man with courage to face death – quite the reverse.
The school was a big grammar school for boys, in the centre of the town. The building was Victorian, dark, ugly, ill-planned, dirty and smelly.
Instead of going to morning prayers I went down to the laboratory. My task in the school was to teach physics, and for the whole of the morning I was due to take the senior sixth form in practical work. I felt more inclined to prepare the apparatus for their experiments than to take part in communal devotions.
Every so often the headmaster sent round a chit, asking all masters to attend morning prayers, but it produced not the slightest effect. One half of the masters claimed more important matters of preparation, and the other just did not go: I fluctuated between the two. The headmaster was zealous and high-minded, but he had not a scrap of natural authority. He ought to have been a local preacher, on a circuit with very small congregations.
This school was the first at which I had ever taught, so I had no other to compare it with. And I found that like many other men I had no objective recollections of my own school, or of half the things I did there – this appears to be nature’s way of avoiding embarrassment all round.
I could not help feeling this school was something out of the ordinary. On my very first day there I overheard a small boy, apparently also on his very first day, say to another small boy in the crowded corridor: ‘It’s like Bedlam, isn’t it?’ After six years I still could not improve on this innocent description.
The small room used as a laboratory by the sixth form was on the ground floor at the end of the building. I could only get to it by going through the main laboratory, which was empty. Though both rooms were empty neither was quiet. Traffic roared past a few feet from the windows, while upstairs the school was singing its head off with ‘Awake, my soul!’
There were four boys aged eighteen or nineteen in the senior sixth form, and they did experiments in pairs. I was at work, with all the cupboard doors open, when one of them came in. He was mature in appearance, and greeted me in a friendly fashion.
‘’Ello, Joe,’ he said. ‘I’n’t it a luvly day!’
The local dialect was characterized by a snarling, whining intonation: Fred spoke it in the soppy, drawling, baby-talk of the slum areas.
The school did not have number one social standing in the town, and the pupils all came from the lower middle class and upper proletariat. Fred came from the proletariat. He was strong and stocky, with a sallow, greyish skin. His hair was covered with brilliantine and his hands were always dirty – I thought it was the grease off his head which made his hands pick up the dirt so readily.
Like Fred, most of the older boys called me by my Christian name, outside the lessons if not inside. I had wanted to get on free-and-easy terms with the boys – how else could I find out all about them? – and I had achieved the feat with little trouble, chiefly through letting them say anything they liked.
To an outsider the manners of my pupils must have been surprising. It happened that I was not given to being surprised; which very soon made the manners of my pupils more surprising still. The boys, when they discovered there was nothing they could say that would shock me, relapsed into the happy state they appeared to be in when I was not there.
At one period the upper forms had devoted a few days of their attention to choosing theme songs for members of the staff. I was told that mine was ‘Anything Goes’: it seemed to me fair. Unfortunately my free-and-easy attitude was strongly disapproved of by my senior master. He wanted to have me sacked, and frequently expressed his point of view to the headmaster.
It was absolutely necessary, if I wanted to become a novelist – and that was the only thing I wanted do – that I should keep my job. Nevertheless I found it unbearably tedious to pretend to be surprised when I was not, to be shocked when I was not, to be ignorant when I knew all about it, and to be morally censorious when I did not care a damn. To be frank, I found it impossible.
Fred was mooning about, so I told him to get out the travelling-microscope. At this point a boy called Frank came in.
Frank was the eldest and the cleverest of the four. He was captain of the school rugby football team, more because he had an eager, pleasing personality than because he carried a lot of weight. He had wavy hair, high cheek-bones, and a rather long nose that, to his secret sorrow, turned up at the end. Had it not been for his nose he would have been very handsome. He was an old friend of Tom’s.
‘Have a good week-end?’ he said.
‘Very.’
He glanced at me briefly. I suspected he had found out from Tom where I had spent it, though the cottage was supposed to be a secret. All the boys showed powerful curiosity and imagination about the private lives of the masters.
‘It’s time you and Trevor tried to find Newton’s rings,’ I said. It was a difficult experiment, appropriate as Frank had won a scholarship to Oxford.
It may not have occurred to everybody that most schoolmasters are preoccupied not with pedagogy but with keeping the pupils quiet. There are numerous methods of achieving this, ranging from giving them high-class instruction to knocking them unconscious.
Frank began to search for his experiment in the index of a textbook. Fred interrupted him.
‘Fred,’ I said, ‘you and Benny can do Kater’s pendulum.’
This was where my guile came in. The experiment necessitated one of them counting the oscillations of a pendulum and the other watching a clock, so precluding all foolish conversation.
Suddenly there began a distant roar as the school came out of prayers. They thundered down the staircases out of the hall, stamping their feet and raising their voices. It was no longer possible to hear the traffic outside the windows.
The last two boys, Trevor and Benny, came into the laboratory. Benny was big and ugly and heavy, with the comic-pathetic expression of a film-comedian. He generated a superabundance of emotion and physical energy, and he was not clever.
Trevor was quite different, unusually small, fair, pale and delicately formed. He had beautiful silky golden hair that he was always combing. He was languid, petulant, sarcastic, quick-tempered and horrid to anyone who gave him an opening. I was quite fond of him because he was intelligent and inclined to be original. He wanted to be an artist, and he had failed badly in the Oxford scholarship examination. I was worried about his future, and afraid that we might have trouble with him one day.
‘What are we going to do, sir?’ said Benny, standing too close to me and hopping about from one big foot to the other. Trevor went and combed his hair in front of a glass cupboard door.
I paused for a moment. A form was assembling in the main laboratory next door and the wooden wall between was resounding like a huge baffle. There was a loud hallooing shout from a master, and the noise subsided. I explained to my pupils what they had to do. Then I sat down in my chair to meditate.
One of the boys asked a question. ‘Do as you like,’ I said. I addressed the form as a whole. ‘It’s important that you should all learn to be resourceful.’
Trevor turned his small sharp face and laughed nastily.
‘It saves you a lot of trouble.’
I did not speak to any of them.
‘Come on, Trev,’ said Frank, and ran his fingers through Trevor’s hair.
Benny dropped a couple of metre sticks on the floor. On picking them up he discovered he could make a clacking noise by shaking them together. In a few moments this pleasure palled and they were all settling down to work.
I began to think about Myrtle.
The brightness of the day was beginning to be manifest. A pale ray of sunlight cut across the little room and glimmered on the green-painted wall. Trevor was drying out a piece of asbestos soaked in brine over a bunsen flame, and it made spluttering yellow flashes. Sounds of all kinds kept the room echoing. It was another day in which you could feel the air cleared and sharpened by dormant spring. My thoughts drifted into fantasies as they do when I listen to music.
There was another hallooing shout in the room next door. Then silence.
‘It’s Roley,’ said Frank. Roley was the boys’ name for my senior master, Roland Bolshaw.
There was a crash against the wall: it was the unmistakable sound of a boy being knocked down.
‘The sod!’ said Trevor, in a superior accent.
‘Oo-ya bugger!’ said Fred, in the language of the town.
We listened, but nothing else happened.
Frank went on polishing a lens with his handkerchief.
‘You haven’t got anything to do,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you brought a novel to read?’
I shook my head. He had reminded me of the fact that I did not read much nowadays. I was faced with an inescapable truth: you cannot have a mistress and read. Sometimes my illiteracy made me ashamed: at other times I thought, ‘Bah! Who wants to read?’
From his pile of text-books Trevor produced a copy of Eyeless in Gaza. I had read it once and found it too unpleasant to read again.
‘If I go to my locker I shall have to stop and talk to Bolshaw on the way,’ I said thoughtfully.
Immediately Benny was standing beside me. ‘Let me go and fetch you something, sir!’
I refused, and that committed me to going through Bolshaw’s room.
The headmaster of the school was regarded by staff and pupils alike as ineffective. The result of this diagnosis, right or wrong, was that there was little discipline among the boys, and a high degree of eccentricity, laziness and insubordination among the staff. The manners of the staff were no less surprising than those of the boys. By my simple standards of common sense, about one-third of them not only qualified for dismissal from this school but would never hold a job in any other. To say they habitually cut lessons, or spent lunch-time in a public-house, or held hilarious sessions of beating, was putting it mildly.
There were of course a number of masters, another third, who were ordinary decent men. The sort of men we all remember as the schoolmasters of our youth – a little less clever, shrewd, ambitious and successful than ourselves, but firm, honest and hardworking. Unfortunately these were not the men who made much impression at the time upon any of the boys I had a chance of observing.
My senior master fell into a third category. He was immediately recognizable as a schoolmaster, while at the same time he was impressive. I think he was most impressive because in the staff-room, the class-room, or any other gathering, he had the power of confidently assuming he was the most important person there.
Bolshaw was built on a big scale. He had a large heavy body, with thinnish arms and legs, and a slight stoop. He was fair-haired and blue-eyed, but that is not to say he was an example of nordic beauty. He was in his fifties, and his hair was thinning everywhere except on his upper lip, where it grew in a tough, straggling, fair moustache. He had to blow the whiskers of his moustache away from his mouth in order to speak. His eyes were sharp and clever, and he wore steel-framed spectacles. And he had one of the loudest booming voices I have ever heard.
It was the way his head came up out of his collar, and the way his moustache fell back from his greenish, ill-fitting, false teeth, that gave him the vigorous tusky look of a sealion. I could imagine such a head emerging from the surface of icy waters to blow and boom at other sealions.
By temperament Bolshaw looked solid and conventional. He was arrogant, lazy, more or less goodnatured, statesman-like, and given to confident disapproval of others. Bolshaw disapproved of me, with enormous confidence: he disapproved of the headmaster with equal confidence. The headmaster was conventional but possessed not a scrap of natural authority. I was solid enough but wilfully showed no signs of decorum.
On the whole, Bolshaw and I did not dislike each other. Had we not been members of the same profession I doubt if we should have quarrelled at all. Bolshaw merely wanted me to behave like a schoolmaster. He wanted me to conform. You may ask, who was he to demand conformity? The answer is, Bolshaw.
Bolshaw had natural authority and he exerted it. He entered the class-room in a solemn, dignified, lordly manner. He was, I repeat, a solid and conventional schoolmaster. On the other hand I am forced to record that he never taught the boys anything.
I bore Bolshaw very little ill-will. I was always interested in his devices for avoiding work, and enthralled by the tone of high moral confidence in which he referred to them. Also I appreciated his sense of humour: he made harsh, booming jokes. It was a pity he was trying to have me sacked.
As I passed through Bolshaw’s room I tried to evade him, though nothing pleased him more, when he was supposed to be teaching a form, than to gossip with me. On this occasion I failed. He had adopted the schoolmaster’s legal standby for keeping the pupils occupied – a test. He looked up at me as I passed, with his steel spectacles gleaming and his yellow moustache revealing a tusky grin.
I glanced at his list of questions on the blackboard, and then at the form, which was composed of louts. Bolshaw strolled across my path.
‘I always think,’ he began – it was one of his favourite beginnings, especially for a statement of egregious arrogance – in a loud, confident undertone that carried to the other end of the laboratory, ‘that I’m the only person who knows the answers to my own questions.’
There was a pause.
‘Have you heard this morning’s news?’ Bolshaw said.
I was a little surprised. At first I thought he must mean Hitler’s latest move, but as we disagreed over politics we did not pretend to discuss such things. Bolshaw approved of Hitler in so much as he approved the principle of the Führer’s function while feeling that he could fulfil it better himself.
‘Simms is away again.’
I looked at him with interest. Simms was the senior master of all the science departments; physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology: as such he was paid more money. Bolshaw, though he spoke as if he were headmaster of the school, was only senior physics master. Simms was a kindly, sensitive, unaggressive old man who suffered from asthma. Bolshaw was waiting for him to retire.
‘I told the headmaster only last week,’ said Bolshaw, ‘that Simms is a sick man.’
I smiled to myself at the phrase. If your friend is ill, you say, ‘So-and-so’s down with asthma.’ ‘So-and-so’s a sick man’ is the phrase reserved for someone you hope will be eliminated to the material improvement of your own prospects: it has a lofty, disinterested sound.
Bolshaw was a power-loving man. Getting Simms’s job meant a great deal to him. It meant something to me too; since I argued that if he got Simms’s it would be difficult to prevent me getting his, Bolshaw’s, job – which also carried more pay. This was only the beginning of my argument. Bolshaw was not only strong: he was wily and circuitous. And he was in a position to make the running. Up to date I had held my own, by at least keeping my job – but this, I reflected, might not be due as much to my own moral strength and manœuvring power as to the headmaster’s utter supineness.
‘My wife and I went out to see him yesterday. I thought he was a very sick man.’ He spoke with the solemn grandeur of his knowledge. ‘I’m afraid he doesn’t believe in his own recovery.’
I said I thought Simms would recover. ‘Asthma’s really a defensive complaint. The poor old man’s asthma keeps him out of the hurly-burly for a while. It may be …’
‘I always think,’ interrupted Bolshaw, raising his voice by several decibels, ‘the most important thing is that a man should believe in himself. It encourages the others.’
I had heard enough. ‘Do you believe in that boy over there?’ I said, pointing to a boy who was blatantly copying from his textbook.
The form heard what I said, and there was a sudden stillness. As Bolshaw turned to look, I made for the door.
In a few minutes I returned, and to my surprise Bolshaw did not attempt to waylay me again. I was suspicious.
I sat down in my own room and said:
‘What’s Bolshaw been up to?’
Frank said: ‘He came in to see if he could catch us playing the fool. He threatened Benny.’
‘What was Benny doing?’ Benny was always playing the fool.
‘Nothing, sir!’ Benny put on a look of ludicrous innocence.
‘Benny wasn’t,’ said Frank. ‘Roley only said he was so as to criticize you.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Trevor malevolently. ‘Roley enjoys threatening.’ He giggled.
I began to read.
After an hour or so I noticed that the sun was shining quite brightly. I stood up and stretched my limbs. I thought how much less cramped I should feel if I were sauntering over the fields with Myrtle. I threw my book down on the bench and leaned against the wall. Fred and Benny were counting with concentration; Frank was looking down the travelling-microscope; Trevor was filing his nails. A neighbouring church clock began to chime. Something inside me was chafing, and I said aloud:
‘Que je m’ennuie!’
There was a pause.
‘Why don’t you go out?’ said Trevor.
‘Go and have a cup of coffee,’ said Frank. ‘We shall be all right.’
‘’E can telephone somebody,’ said Fred suggestively.
I shook my head. ‘It means another encounter with Bolshaw.’
‘Go through the window,’ said Benny. ‘Roley won’t know you’ve gone.’
One of the panes of the window at the end of the room could be opened. If I climbed over the bench I could just squeeze through and drop into the street. I had tried it before.
Benny had already climbed on to the bench and was eagerly holding the window for me.
‘We’ll promise to help you in again,’ he said.
I did not trust him not to play tricks that would bring in Bolshaw and reveal my absence. It was tempting fate; but I decided to risk it.
A moment later I was walking outside in the cold sparkling sunshine. It made a pleasant relief to a morning in school.