SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS
523
Crossgates was a sort of Dotheboys Hall. But I should be falsifying
my own memories if I did not record that they are largely mem–
ories of disgust. The overcrowded, underfed underwashed life that
we led was disgusting, as I recall it.
If
I shut my eyes and say
"school," it is of course the physical surroundings that first come back
to me: the flat playing-field with its cricket pavilion and the little
shed by the rifle range, the drafty dormitories, the dusty splintery
passages, the square of asphalt in front of the gymnasium, the raw–
looking pinewood chapel at the back. And at almost every point
some filthy detail obtrudes itself. For example, there were the
pewter bowls out of which we had our porridge. They had over–
hanging rims, and under the rims there were accumulations of sour
porridge, which could be flaked off in long strips. The porridge
itself, too, contained more lumps, hairs and unexplained black
things than one would have thought possible, unless someone were
putting them there on purpose.
It
was never safe to start on that
porridge without investigating it first. And there was the slimy
water of the plunge bath- it was twelve or fifteen feet long, the
whole school was supposed to go into it every morning, and I doubt
whether the water was changed at all frequently-and the always–
damp towels with their cheesy smell: and, on occasional visits in the
winter, the murky sea-water of the local Baths, which came straight
in from the beach and on which I once saw floating a human turd.
And the sweaty smell of the changing-room with its greasy basins,
and, giving on this, the row of filthy, dilapidated lavatories, which
had no fastenings of any kind on the doors, so that whenever you
were sitting there someone was sure to come crashing in.
It
is not
easy for me to think of my school days without seeming to breathe
in a whiff of something cold and evil-smelling-a sort of compound
of sweaty stockings, dirty towels, fecal smells blowing along cor–
ridors, forks with old food between the prongs, neck-of-mutton stew,
and the banging doors of the lavatories and the echoing chamber–
pots in the dormitories.
It is true that I am by nature not gregarious, and the w. c.
and dirty-handkerchief side of life is necessarily more obtrusive when
great numbers of human beings are crushed together in small
space. It is just as bad in an army, and worse, no doubt, in a prison.
Besides, boyhood is the age of disgust. After one has learned to dif-
