SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS
541
Wellington, I had also won a scholarship at Eton, but was un–
certain whether there would be a vacancy, and I was going to
Wellington first. At Eton you had a room to yourself-a room
which might even have a fire in it, At Wellington you had your own
cubicle, and could make cocoa in the evenings. The privacy of it, the
grown-upness! And there would be libraries to hang about in, and
summer afternoons when you could shirk games and mooch about the
countryside alone, with no master driving you along. Meanwhile
there were the holidays. There was the .22 rifle that I had bought
the previous holidays (the Crackshot, it was called, costing twenty–
two and sixpence), and Christmas was coming next week. There were
also the pleasures of overeating. I thought of some particularly
voluptuous cream buns which could be bought for twopence each
at a shop in our town. (This was 1916, and food-rationing had not
yet started.) Even the detail that my journey-money had been
slightly miscalculated, leaving about a shilling over-enough for an
unforeseen cup of coffee and a cake or two somewhere on the way–
was enough to fill me with bliss. There was time for a bit of hap–
piness before the future closed in upon me. But I did know that
the future was dark. Failure, failure, failure- failure behind me,
failure ahead of me-that was by far the deepest conviction that I
carried away.
VI
All this was thirty years ago and more. The question is:
Does a child at school go through the same kind of experiences
nowadays?
The only honest answer, I believe, is that we do not with
certainty know. Of course it is obvious that the present-day
attitude
toward education is enormously more humane and sensible than
that of the past. The snobbishness that was an integral part of my own
education would be almost unthinkable today, because the society
that nourished it is dead. I recall a conversation that must have taken
place about a year before I left Crossgates. A Russian boy, large
and fair-haired, a year older than myself, was questioning me.
"How much a year has your father got?"
I told him what I thought
it
was, adding a few hundreds to
