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PARTISAN REVIEW
parents, but on the whole they were the unaristocratic rich, the sort
of people who live in huge shrubberied houses in Boumemouth or
Richmond, and who have cars and butlers but not country estates.
There were a few exotics among them-some South American boys,
sons of Argentine beef barons, one or two Russians, and even a
Siamese prince, or someone who was described as a prince.
Sim had two great ambitions. One was
to
attract titled boys to
the school, and the other was to train up pupils to win scholarships
at public schools, above all Eton. He did, toward the end of my
time, succeed . in getting hold of two boys with real English titles.
One of them, I remember, was a wretched little creature, almost an
albino, peering upwards out of weak eyes, with a long nose at the
end of which a dewdrop always seemed to be trembling. Sim always
gave these boys their titles when mentioning them to a third person,
and for their first few days he actually addressed them to their faces
as "Lord So-and-so." Needless to say he found ways of drawing at–
tention to them when any visitor was being shown round the school.
Once, I remember, the little fair-haired boy had a choking fit at
dinner, and a stream of snot ran out of his nose onto his plate in a
way horrible to see. Any lesser person would have been called a
dirty little beast and ordered out of the room instantly: but Sim
and Bingo laughed it off in a "boys will be boys" spirit.
All the very rich boys were more or less undisguisedly favored.
The school still had a faint suggestion of the Victorian "private
academy" with its "parlor boarders," and when I later read about
that kind of school in Thackeray I immediately saw the resemblance.
The rich boys had milk and biscuits in the middle of the morning,
they were given riding lessons once or twice a week, Bingo mothered
them and called them by their Christian names, and above all they
were never caned. Apart from the South Americans, whose parents
were safely distant, I doubt whether Sim ever caned any boy whose
father's income was much above £2,000 a year. But he was some–
times willing to sacrifice financial profit to scholastic prestige. Oc–
casionally, by special arrangement, he would take at greatly reduced
fees some boy who seemed likely to win scholarships and thus bring
credit on the school. It was on these terms that I was at Crossgates
myself: otherwise my parents could not have afforded to send me to
so expensive a school.
