SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS
511
I did not at first understand that I was being taken at re–
duced fees;
it
was only when I was about eleven that Bingo and
Sim began throwing the fact in my teeth. For my first two or three
years I went through the ordinary educational mill: then, soon after
I had started Greek (one started Latin at eight, Greek at ten), I
moved into the scholarship class, which was taught, so far as classics
went, largely by Sim himself. Over a period of two or three years
the scholarship boys were crammed with learning as cynically as a
goose is crammed for Christmas. And with what learning!
This
business of making a gifted boy's career depend on a competitive
examination, taken when he is only twelve or thirteen, is an evil
thing at best, but there do appear to be preparatory schools which
send scholars to Eton, Winchester, etc. without teaching them to
see everything in terms of marks. At Crossgates the whole process
was frankly a preparation for a sort of confidence trick. Your job
was to learn exactly those things that would give an examiner the
impression that you knew more than you did know, and as far as
possible
to
avoid burdening your brain with anything else. Subjects
which lacked examination-value, such as geography, were almost
completely neglected, mathematics was
also
neglected if you were
a "classical," science was not taught in any form-indeed
it
was
so despised that even an interest in natural history was discouraged–
and the books you were encouraged to read in your spare time were
chosen with one eye on the "English Paper." Latin and Greek, the
main scholarship subjects, were what counted, but even these were
deliberately taught in a flashy, unsound way. We never, for example,
read right through even a single book of a Greek or Latin author:
we merely read short passages which were picked out because they
were the kind of thing likely to be set as an "unseen translation."
During the last year or so before we went up for our scholarships,
most of our time was spent in simply working our way through the
scholarship papers of previous years. Sim had sheaves of these in
his possession, from every one of the major public schools. But the
greatest outrage of all was the teaching of history.
There was in those days a piece of nonsense called the Harrow
History Prize, an annual competition for which many preparatory
schools entered. At Crossgates we mugged up every paper that had
been set since the competition started. They were the kind of stupid
