For the seven years, from when I was eight to when I was fifteen, what I chiefly remember is fishing.
Don』t think that I did nothing else. It』s only that when you look back over a long period of time, certain things seem to swell up till they overshadow everything else. I left Mother Howlett』s ao the Grammar School, with a leather satchel and a black cap with yellow stripes, and got my first bicycle and a long time afterwards my first long trousers. My first bike was a fixed- wheel—free-wheel bikes were very expehen. When you went downhill you put your feet up on the fros ahe pedals go whizzing round. That was one of the characteristic sights of the early een-hundreds—a boy sailing downhill with his head bad his feet up in the air. I went to the Grammar School in fear and trembling, because of the frightful tales Joe had told me about old Whiskers (his name was Wicksey) the headmaster, who was certainly a dreadful-looking little man, with a face just like a wolf, and at the end of the big schoolroom he had a glass case with es in it, which he』d sometimes take out and swish through the air in a terrifying manner. But to my surprise I did rather well at school. It had never occurred to me that I might be cleverer than Joe, who was two years older than me and had bullied me ever since he could walk. Actually Joe was an utter dunce, got the e about once a week, and stayed somewhere he bottom of the school till he was sixteen. My sed term I took a prize in arithmetid another in some queer stuff that was mostly ed with pressed flowers a by the name of Sce, and by the time I was fourteen Whiskers was talking about scholarships and Reading Uy. Father, who had ambitions for Joe and me in those days, was very anxious that I should go to 『college』. There was an idea floating round that I was to be a schoolteacher and Joe was to be an aueer.
But I haven』t many memories ected with school. When I』ve mixed with chaps from the upper classes, as I did during the war, I』ve been struck by the fact that they never really get over that frightful drilling they gh at public schools. Either it flattens them out into half-wits or they spend the rest of their lives kig against it. It wasn』t so with boys of our class, the sons of shopkeepers and farmers. You went to the Grammar School and you stayed there till you were sixteen, just to show that you weren』t a prole, but school was chiefly a place that you wao get away from. You』d iment of loyalty, no goofy feeling about the old grey stones (and they WERE old, right enough, the school had been founded by Cardinal Wolsey), and there was no Old Boy』s tie and not even a school song. You had your half-holidays to yourself, because games weren』t pulsory and as often as not you cut them. We played football in braces, and though it was sidered proper to play cricket in a belt, you wore your ordinary shirt and trousers. The only game I really cared about was the stump cricket we used to play in the gravel yard during the break, with a bat made out of a bit of pag case and a po ball.
But I remember the smell of the big schoolroom, a smell of ink and dust and boots, and the stone in the yard that had been a mounting blod was used for sharpening knives on, and the little baker』s shop opposite where they sold a kind of Chelsea bun, twice the size of the Chelsea buns you get nowadays, which were called Lardy Busters and cost a halfpenny. I did all the things you do at school. I carved my name on a desk a