SUCH. SUCH WERE THE JOYS
521
good memories are of summer. In winter your nose ran continually,
your fingers were too numb to button your shirt (this was an
especial misery on Sundays, when we wore Eton collars), and there
was the daily nightmare of football-the cold, the mud, the hideous
greasy ball that came whizzing at one's face, the gouging knees
and trampling boots of the bigger boys. Part of the trouble was
that in winter, after the age of about ten, I was seldom in good health,
at any rate during term-time. I had defective bronchial tubes and
a lesion in one lung which was not discovered till many years later.
Hence I not only had a chronic cough, but running was a torment
to me. In those days however, "wheeziness," or "chestiness," as it
was called, was either diagnosed as imagination or was looked on a5
essentially a moral disorder, caused by overeating. "You wheeze like
a concertina," Sim would say disapprovingly as he stood behind my
chair; "You're perpetually stuffing yourself with food, that's why."
My cough was referred to as a "stomach cough," which made it
sound both disgusting and reprehensible. The cure for it was hard
running, which, if you kept it up long enough, ultimately "cleared
your chest."
It is curious, the degree-I will not say of actual hardship, but
of squalor and neglect, that was taken for granted in upper-class
schools of that period. Almost as in the days of Thackeray, it seemed
natural that a little boy of eight or ten should be a miserable,
snotty-nosed creature, his face almost permanently dirty, his hands
chapped, his nails bitten, his handkerchief a sodden horror, his
bottom frequently blue with bruises. It was partly the prospect of
actual physical discomfort that made the thought of going back to
school lie in one's breast like a lump of lead during the last few
days of the holidays. A characteristic memory of Crossgates is the
astonishing hardness of one's bed on the first night of term. Since
this was an expensive school, I took a social step upwards by at–
tending it, and yet the standard of comfort was in every way far
lower than in my own home, or indeed, than it would have been in
a prosperous working-class home. One only had a hot bath once a
week, for instance. The food was not only bad, it was also insuffi–
cient. Never before or since have I seen butter or jam scraped on
bread so thinly. I do not think I can be imagining the fact that we
were underfed, when I remember the lengths we would go in order
