Childhood: Complete Text.
School 1: Belleville.
School 2: Halbrake or St John's Hill House School.
School 3: Battersea Grammar or Sir Walter St John's.
School 4: St Paul's.
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I exchanged the Board-school when I was ten [i.e. c.1878] for a private school. Here there were fifty or sixty boys of from ten to seventeen years of age, perhaps half of them boarders. They were the sons of tradesmen, professional men, moderately well-to-do clerks, and men of small independent means.
[Which school is this? 50 or 60 boys - half of the boarders - is it's not too small to be Battersea Grammar? Small gravel playground. Halbrake School? Almost certainly.]
Only one of them had I known before. He preceded me by a term from the Board-school and at once asserted his superiority by making a fool of me. In the small gravel playground there was a swing consisting of a long board suspended at either end by a pair of chains. A boy at each end could work it up to what seemed to me a terrible height, the prime fear being to jump off backwards from your position just as the board began to swing forward. I took my first ride with this old school-fellow. The bell for lessons rang while we were well up, and he dropped off, leaving me helplessly to wait and watch the school assemble, and pointing me out with malice as well as grins when I at last took my
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place.
The schoolroom was a large single hall adjacent to the large old brick house where the boarders lived with the head master. The three classes under the head and two assistants all occupied the same room, but faced different ways. In the fourth quarter of the room stood the boarders' more substantial desks, where they kept silkworms and white mice. The boarders predominated in other ways. The familiar life together had given them a style and subject matter of their own. Knowing the masters privately they treated them with open ease and half-concealed amusement. They were pretty faithfully imitated by the day boys. But the head master was of stone. He wore a black gown. So long as he was in the room no sound was to be heard beyond a dismal foot shuffling, a pen dropping, a boy asking a question, a master answering or explaining, the head dictating or clearing his throat.
While he was out the hubbub was so general that the assistants could hardly single out a particular one to punish, for if it had a ring-leader it was some spirited bright popular boy whom it would be unpleasant and ruinous to punish.
I continued to accumulate information in history and geography, to do harder and harder sums, to copy models of handwriting. I learnt a few Latin declensions and conjugations. With the rest of the school I sat listening to Mr. _______ talking physiology as if the body were a newly discovered machine and we were angels.
Just before the holidays like everyone else I wrote a
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letter to my dear parents telling them what had been done during the term, when the holidays began and how long they were to last. But I learnt also how to keep silkworms alive, and added to the boarder's pocket-money by buying as many as I could. I had a penny or twopence a week. One of the masters, a black-haired snub-nosed kindly energetic freshman, was fond of me. He chaffed me about the freckles I got in the summer holidays; he gave me the Lamplighter and numbers of Horner's Penny Stories; he came round to see my father and offered to take me to the baths and teach me to swim. I had no particular liking for him or gratitude for his liking for me, and when I left the school I left all but the first of his letters to me unanswered and so tired his attention.
I only knew one boarder at all well. He was a Welsh boy from Flint several years older than myself, and wanting to do something to please him, I gave him the leather-bound New Testament which I had received as a prize at the Board-school.
I cannot recall that boarders and day boys had any united or organised games except paper-chases. A paper-chase made one of the Saturdays at this school a great and notable day for me. For I then discovered a piece of country as it seemed to me, exactly like the real country at Swindon and quite unlike the commonland at Wimbledon. Here were private but not inaccessible copses, hedges with oaks in them, and
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wandering paths, rough lanes, scant cottages. I got left behind and lost the rest of the school except one older boy. We had bread and cheese at the "George Inn'. That day I ran, walked and crawled six or seven miles out and the same distance back. For a year it may be I left this piece of country unrevisited.
I made several friends among the day boys. One who had a deep voice and must have been much older used to take me out to share his adventures on a double "sociable" tricycle; and he gave me white rats. But I had most to do with a boy only a year or two older than myself, named Jonathan, who introduced me to some of his father's workshops, and particularly the carpenter's shop. Adjoining this shop were roomy houses for pigeons of several kinds, Belgian hares, rabbits, guinea-pigs, and white rats.
Fine afternoons, therefore, had now scarce any advantages over wet ones. Making additions to the cages, cleaning them out, feeding the birds and animals, handling them, selling or exchanging them, talking about them, set the hours rolling lazily, swiftly. In a day or two I had learnt all, alas! that I ever did about the use of saw, hammer, screwdriver, and brace. That is to say I was now a quick unscrupulous maker of cages of all sizes. I fitted doors to them, fronts of split wood and wire-netting, roofs of tarred felt laid upon laths. I spent all the shorter sections of my spare time in making, altering, and mending cages for pigeons, rabbits and white mice.
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