522
PARTISAN REVIEW
to steal food. On a number of occasions I remember creeping down
at two or three o'clock in the morning through what seemed like
miles of pitch-dark stairways and passages-barefooted, stopping to
listen after each step, paralyzed with about equal fear' of Sim,
ghosts and burglars-to steal stale bread from the pantry. The
assistant masters had their meals with us, but they had somewhat
better food, and
if
one got half a chance it was usual to steal left–
over scraps of bacon rind or fried potato when their plates were
removed.
As usual, I did not see the sound commercial reason for this
underfeeding. On the whole I accepted Sim's view that a boy's
appetite is a sort of morbid growth which should be kept in check
as much as possible. A maxim often repeated to us at Crossgates was
that it is healthy to get up from a meal feeling as hungry as when
you sat down. Only a generation earlier than this
it
had been com–
mon for school dinners to start off with a slab of unsweetened suet
pudding, which, it was frankly said, "broke the boys' appetites." But
the underfeeding was probably less flagrant at preparatory schools,
where a boy was wholly dependent on the official diet, than at public
schools, where he was allowed-indeed, expected-to buy extra food
for himself. At some schools, he would literally not have had enough
to eat unless he had bought regular supplies of eggs, sausage, sar–
dines, etc.; and his parents had to allow him money for this purpose.
At Eton, for instance, at any rate in College, a boy was given no
solid meal after midday dinner. For
his
afternoon tea he was given
only tea and bread and butter, and at eight o'clock he was given a
miserable supper of soup or fried fish, or more often bread and
cheese, with water to drink. Sim went down to see his eldest son at
Eton and came back in snobbish ecstasies over the luxury in which the
boys lived. "They give them fried fish for supper!" he exclaimed,
beaming allover his chubby face. "There's no school like it in the
world." Fried fish! The habitual supper of the poorest of the
working class! At very cheap boarding schools it was no doubt worse.
A very early memory of mine is of seeing the boarders at a grammar
school-the sons, probably, of farmers and shopkeepers-being fed
on boiled lights.
Whoever writes about his childhood must beware of exaggera–
tion and self-pity. I do not want to claim that I was a martyr or that
