SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS
515
was provided as a matter of routine and went on
his
parents' bill. I
never had such a cake, though my parents would have paid for it
readily enough. Year after year, never daring to ask, I would miser–
ably hope that this year a cake would appear. Once or twice I
even rashly pretended to my companions that this time I
was
going
to have a cake. Then came teatime, and no cake, which did not
make me more popular.
Very early it was impressed upon me that I had no chance of
a decent future unless I won a scholarship at a public school. Either
I won my scholarship, or I must leave school .at fourteen and be–
come, in Sim's favorite phrase, "a little office boy at forty pounds a
year." In my circumstances it was natural that I should believe
this. Indeed, it was universally taken for granted at Crossgates that
unless you went to a "good" public school (and only about fifteen
schools came under this heading) you were ruined for life. It is
not easy to convey to a grown-up person the sense of strain, of
nerving oneself for some terrible all-deciding combat, as the date
of the examination crept nearer-eleven years old, twelve years old,
then thirteen, the fatal year itself! Over a period of about two years,
I do not think there w,as ever a day when "the exam," as I called it,
was quite out of my waking thoughts. In my prayers it figured in–
variably: and whenever I got the bigger portion of a wishbone, or
picked up a horseshoe, or bowed seven times to the new moon, or
succeeded in passing through a wishing-gate without touching the
sides, then the wish I earned by doing so went on "the exam" as
a matter of course. And yet curiously enough I was also tormented
by an almost irresistible impulse
not
to work. There were days when
my heart sickened at the labors ahead of me, and I stood stupid as
an animal before the most elementary difficulties. In the holidays,
also, I could not work. Some of the scholarship boys received extra
tuition from a certain Mr. Batchelor, a likeable, very hairy man who
wore shaggy suits and lived in a typical bachelor's "den"-book-lined
walls, overwhelming stench of tobacco--somewhere in the town.
During the holidays Mr. Batchelor used to send us extracts from
Latin authors to translate, and we were supposed to send back a
wad of work once a week. Somehow I could not do it. The empty
paper and the black Latin dictionary lying on the table, the con–
sciousness of a plain duty shirked, poisoned my leisure, but some-
