SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS
as I sat on the edge of a chair
in
Sim's study, with not even the self–
possession to stand up while he stonned at me, I had a conviction of
sin and folly and weakne$, such as I do not remember to have felt
before.
In general, one's memories of any period must necessarily weaken
as one moves away from it. One
is
constantly learning new facts,
and old ones have to drop out to make way for them. At twenty I
could have written the history of my school days with an accuracy
which would
be
quite impossible now. But it can also happen that
one's memories grow sharper after a long lapse of time, because one is
looking at the past with fresh eyes and can isolate and, as it were,
notice facts which previously existed undifferentiated among a ma$
of others. Here are two things which
in
a sense I remembered, but
which did not strike me as strange or interesting until quite recently.
One is that the second beating seemed to me a just and reasonable
punishment. To get one beating, and then to get another and far
fiercer one on top of it, for being
so
unwise as to show that the
first had not hurt-that was quite natural. The gods are jealous, and
when you have good fortune you should conceal it. The other is
that I accepted the broken riding crop as my own crime. I can
still recall my feeling as I saw the handle lying on the carpet-the
feeling of having done an ill-bred clumsy thing, and ruined an
expensive object.
I
had broken it:
so
Sim told me, and so I believed.
This acceptance of guilt lay unnoticed in my memory for twenty
or
thirty
years.
So much for the episode of the bed-wetting. But there is one
more thing to be remarked. This is that I did not wet my bed
again-at least, I did wet it once again, and received another beat–
ing, after which the trouble stopped.
So
perhaps this barbarous
remedy does work, though at a heavy price, I have no doubt.
II
Cro$gates was an expensive and snobbish school which
was in process of becoming more snobbish, and, I imagine, more
expensive. The public school with which it had special connections
was Harrow, but during my time an increasing proportion of the
boys went on to Eton. Most of them were the children of rich
