SUCH. SUCH WERE THE JOYS
519
viction that I was no good, that I was wasting my time, wrecking
my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and in–
gratitude-and
all
this, it seemed, was inescapable, because I lived
among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which
it
was not possible for me to keep.
III
No one can look back on his school days and say wit!,
truth that they were altogether unhappy.
I have good memories of Crossgates, among a horde of bad ones.
Sometimes on summer afternoons there were wonderful expeditions
across the Downs, or to Beachy Head, where one bathed dangerously
among the chalk boulders and came home covered with cuts. And
there were still more wonderful midsummer evenings when, as a spe–
cial treat, we were not driven off to bed as usual but allowed to wan–
der about the grounds in the long twilight, ending up with a plunge
into the swimming bath at about nine o'clock. There was the joy of
waking early on summer mornings and getting in an hour's undis–
turbed reading (Ian Hay, Thackeray, Kipling and H. G. Wells were
the favorite authors of my boyhood) in the sunlit, sleeping dormi–
tory. There was also cricket, which I was no good at but with which
I conducted a sort of hopeless love affair up to the age of about
eighteen. And there was the pleasure of keeping caterpillars-the silky
green and purple puss-moth, the ghostly green poplar-hawk, the
privet hawk, large as one's third finger, specimens of which could
be illicitly purchased for sixpence at a shop in the town-and, when
one could escape long enough from the master who was "taking the
walk," there was the excitement of dredging the dew-ponds on the
Downs for enormous newts with orange-colored bellies. This business
of being out for a walk, corning across something of fascinating in–
terest and then being dragged away from it by a yell from the
master, like a dog jerked onwards by the leash,
is
an important feature
of school life, and helps to build up the conviction, so strong in
many children, that the things you most want to do are always un–
attainable.
Very occasionally, perhaps once during each summer, it was
possible to escape altogether from the barrack-like atmosphere of
