SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS
535
I have seen a little new boy, hardly older than eight, desperately
lying
his
way through such a catechism:
"Have your people got a car?"
"Yes."
"What sort of car?"
"Daimler."
"How many horse-power?"
(Pause, and leap in the dark.) "Fifteen."
"What kind of lights?"
The little boy is bewildered.
"What kind of lights? Electric or acetylene?"
(A longer pause, and another leap in the dark.) "Acetylene."
"Coo! He says his pater's car's got acetylene lamps. They went
out years ago. It must be as old as the hills."
"Rot! He's making it up. He hasn't got a car. He's just a
navvy. Your pater's a navvy."
And so on.
By the social standards that prevailed about me, I was no good
and could not be any good. But all the different kinds of virtue
seemed to be mysteriously interconnected and to belong to much
the same people. It was not only money that mattered: there were
also strength, beauty, charm, athleticism and something called "guts"
or "character," which in reality meant the power to impose your
will on others. I did not possess any of these qualities. At games, for
instance, I was hopeless. I was a fairly good swimmer and not alto–
gether contemptible at cricket, but these had no prestige value, be–
cause boys only attach importance to a game if it requires strength
and courage. What counted was football, at which I was a funk. I
loathed the game, and since I could see no pleasure or usefulness in
it, it was very difficult for me to show courage at it. Football, it
seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a ball
about, but is a species of fighting. The lovers of football are large,
boisterous, nobbly boys who are good at knocking down and tramp–
ling on slightly smaller boys. That was the pattern of school life--a
continuous triumph of the strong over the weak. Virtue consisted in
winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer,
more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people–
in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, mak-
