SUCH. SUCH WERE THE JOYS
537
Lucifer, defeated and justly defeated, with no possibility of revenge.
The schoohnasters with their canes, the millionaires with their Scot–
tish castles, the athletes with their curly hair-these were the armies
of the unalterable law. It was not easy, at that date, to realize that
in fact
it
was
alterable. And according to that law I was damned.
I had no money, I was weak, I was ugly, I was unpopular, I had a
chronic cough, I was cowardly, I smelt. This picture, I should add,
was not altogether fanciful. I was an unattractive boy. Crossgates
soon made me so, even
if
I had not been so before. But a child's
belief of its own shortcomings is not much influenced by facts.
I believed, for example, that I "smelt," but this was based simply
on general probability. It was notorious that disagreeable people
smelt, and therefore presumably I did so too. Again, until after I had
left school for good I continued to believe that I was preternaturally
ugly. It was what my schoolfellows had told me, and I had no
other authority to refer to. The conviction that it was
not possible
for
me to be a success went deep enough to influence my actions till far
into adult life. Until I was about thirty I always planned my life
on the assumption not only that any major undertaking was bound
to fail, but that I could only expect to live a few years longer.
But this sense of guilt and inevitable failure was balanced by
something else: that is, the instinct to survive. Even a creature
that is weak, ugly, cowardly, smelly and in no way justifiable still
wants to stay alive and be happy after its own fashion. I could not
invert the existing scale of values, or turn myself into a success,
but I could accept my failure and make the best of it. I could
resign myself to being what I was, and then endeavor to survive on
those terms.
To survive, or at least to preserve any kind of independence, was
essentially criminal, since it meant breaking rules which you yourself
recognized. There was a boy named Johnny Hall who for some
months oppressed me horribly. He was a big, powerful, coarsely hand–
some boy with a very red face and curly black hair, who was forever
twisting somebody's arm, wringing somebody's ear, flogging some–
body with a riding crop (he was a member of the Sixth Form),
or performing prodigies of activity on the football field. Bingo loved
him (hence the fact that he was habitually called by his Christian
name), and Sim commended him as a boy who "had character"
