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PARTISAN REVIEW
ferentiate, and before one has become hardened-between seven and
eighteen, say--one seems always to be walking the tightrope over a
cesspool. Yet I do not think I exaggerate the squalor of school life,
when I remember how health and cleanliness were neglected, in
spite of the hoo-ha about fresh air and cold water and keeping in
hard training. It was common to remain constipated for days to–
gether. Indeed, one was hardly encouraged to keep one's bowels open,
since the aperients tolerated were castor oil or another almost equally
horrible drink called licorice powder. One was supposed to go into
the plunge bath every morning, but some boys shirked it for days
on end, simply making themselves scarce when the bell sounded, or
else slipping along the edge of the bath among the crowd, and then
wetting their hair with a little dirty water off the floor. A little boy
of eight or nine will not necessarily keep himself clean unless there
is someone to see that he does it. There was a new boy named Hazel,
a pretty, mother's darling of a boy, who came a little before I left.
The first thing I noticed about him was the beautiful pearly white–
ness of his teeth. By the end of that term his teeth were an extra–
ordinary shade of green. During all that time, apparently, no one
had taken sufficient interest in him to see that he brushed them.
But of course the differences between home and school were
more than physical. That bump on the hard mattress, on the first
night of term, used to give me a feeling of abrupt awakening, a
feeling of: "This is reality, this is what you are up against." Your
home might be far from perfect, but at least it was a place ruled
by love rather than by fear, where you did not have to be perpetually
on your guard against the people surrounding you. At eight years
old you were suddenly taken out of this warm nest and flung into a
world of force and fraud and secrecy, like a goldfish into a tank
full of pike. Against no matter what degree of bullying you had
no redress. You could only have defended yourself by sneaking,
which, except in a few rigidly defined circumstances, was the un–
forgivable sin. To write home and ask your parents to take you
away would have been even less thinkable, since to do so would
have been to admit yourself unhappy and unpopular, which a
boy will never do. Boys are Erewhonians: they think that misfortune
is disgraceful and must be concealed at all costs. It might perhaps
have been considered permissible to complain to your parents about
