SUCH. SUCH WERE THE JOYS
527
whether one laughed or sniveled or went into frenzies of gratitude
for small favors-one's only true feeling was hatred.
IV
I had learned early in my career that one can do wrong
,against one's will, and before long I also learned that one can do
wrong without ever discovering what one has done or why it was
wrong. There were sins that were too subtle to be explained, anrl
there were others that were too terrible to
be
clearly mentioned. For
example, there was sex, which was always smoldering just under the
surface and which suddenly blew up into a tremendous row when
I was about twelve.
At some preparatory schools homosexuality is not a problem,
but I think that Crossgates may have acquired a "bad tone" thanks
to the presence of the South American boys, who would perhaps
mature a year or two earlier than an English boy. At that age I was
not interested, so I do not actually know what went on, but I
imagine it was group masturbation. At any rate, one day the
storm suddenly burst over our heads. There were summonses, inter–
rogations, confessions, floggings, repentances, solemn lectures of
which one understood nothing except that some irredeemable sin
known as "swinishness" or "beastliness" had been committed. One
of the ringleaders, a boy named Horne, was flogged, according to
eyewitnesses, for a quarter of an hour continuously before being
expelled. His yells rang through the house. But we were all impli–
cated, more or less, or felt ourselves to be implicated. Guilt seemed
to hang in the air like a pall of smoke. A solemn, black-haired im–
becile of an assistant master, who was later to be a Member of
Parliament, took the older boys to a secluded room and delivered a
talk on the Temple of the Body.
"Don't you realize what a wonderful thing your body is?" he
said gravely. "You talk of your motor-car engines, your Rolls-Royces
and Daimlers and so on. Don't you understand that no engine ever
made is fit to be compared with your body? And then you go and
wreck it, ruin it-for life!"
He turned his cavernous black eyes on me and added sadly:
"And you, whom I'd always believed to be quite a decent per-
