which the Zeitgeist seemed to indicate in those transitional years.

7

The school never quite got hold of me. Partly I think that was

because I was a day-boy and so freer than most of the boys, partly

because of a temperamental disposition to see things in my own way

and have my private dreams, partly because I was a little

antagonised by the family traditions that ran through the school. I

was made to feel at first that I was a rank outsider, and I never

quite forgot it. I suffered very little bullying, and I never had a

fight-in all my time there were only three fights-but I followed

my own curiosities. I was already a very keen theologian and

politician before I was fifteen. I was also intensely interested in

modern warfare. I read the morning papers in the Reading Room

during the midday recess, never missed the illustrated weeklies, and

often when I could afford it I bought a PALL MALL GAZETTE on my way

home.

I do not think that I was very exceptional in that; most intelligent

boys, I believe, want naturally to be men, and are keenly interested

in men's affairs. There is not the universal passion for a

magnified puerility among them it is customary to assume. I was

indeed a voracious reader of everything but boys' books-which I

detested-and fiction. I read histories, travel, popular science

and controversy with particular zest, and I loved maps. School work

and school games were quite subordinate affairs for me. I worked

well and made a passable figure at games, and I do not think I was

abnormally insensitive to the fine quality of our school, to the

charm of its mediaeval nucleus, its Gothic cloisters, its scraps of

Palladian and its dignified Georgian extensions; the contrast of the

old quiet, that in spite of our presence pervaded it everywhere,

with the rushing and impending London all about it, was indeed a

continualpleasure to me. But these things were certainly not the

living and central interests of my life.

I had to conceal my wider outlook to a certain extent-from the

masters even more than from the boys. Indeed I only let myself go

freely with one boy, Britten, my especial chum, the son of the

Agent-General for East Australia. We two discovered in a chance

conversation A PROPOS of a map in the library that we were both of

us curious why there were Malays in Madagascar, and how the Mecca

pilgrims came from the East Indies before steamships were available.

Neither of us had suspected that there was any one at all in the

school who knew or cared a rap about the Indian Ocean, except as

water on the way to India. But Britten had come up through the Suez

Canal, and his ship had spoken a pilgrim ship on the way. It gave

him a startling quality of living knowledge. From these pilgrims we

got to a comparative treatment of religions, and from that, by a

sudden plunge, to entirely sceptical and disrespectful confessions

concerning Gates' last outbreak of simple piety in School Assembly.

We became congenial intimates from that hour.

The discovery of Britten happened to me when we were both in the

Lower Fifth. Previously there had been a watertight compartment

between the books I read and the thoughts they begot on the one hand

and human intercourse on the other. Now I really began my higher

education, and aired and examined and developed in conversation the

doubts, the ideas, the interpretations that had been forming in my

mind. As we were both day-boys with a good deal of control over our

time we organised walks and expeditions together, and my habit of

solitary and rather vague prowling gave way to much more definite

joint enterprises. I went several times to his house, he was the

youngest of several brothers, one of whom was a medical student and

let us assist at the dissection of a cat, and once or twice in

vacation time he came to Penge, and we went with parcels of

provisions to do a thorough day in the grounds and galleries of the

Crystal Palace, ending with the fireworks at close quarters. We

went in a river steamboat down to Greenwich, and fired by that made

an excursion to Margate and back; we explored London docks and

Bethnal Green Museum, Petticoat Lane and all sorts of out-of-the-way

places together.

We confessed shyly to one another a common secret vice, "Phantom

warfare." When we walked alone, especially in the country, we had

both developed the same practice of fighting an imaginary battle

about us as we walked. As we went along we were generals, and our

attacks pushed along on either side, crouching and gathering behind

hedges, cresting ridges, occupying copses, rushing open spaces,

fighting from house to house. The hillsides about Penge were

honeycombed in my imagination with the pits and trenches I had

created to cheek a victorious invader coming out of Surrey. For him

West Kensington was chiefly important as the scene of a desperate

and successful last stand of insurrectionary troops (who had seized

the Navy, the Bank and other advantages) against a royalist army-

reinforced by Germans-advancing for reasons best known to

themselves by way of Harrow and Ealing. It is a secret and solitary

game, as we found when we tried to play it together. We made a

success of that only once. All the way down to Margate we schemed

defences and assailed and fought them as we came back against the

sunset. Afterwards we recapitulated all that conflict by means of a

large scale map of the Thames and little paper ironclads in plan cut

out of paper.

A subsequent revival of these imaginings was brought about by

Britten's luck in getting, through a friend of his father's,

admission for us both to the spectacle of volunteer officers