riding crop. He had a habit of continuing his lecture while he flogged
you, and I remember the words 'you dirty little boy' keeping time with
the blows. The beating did not hurt (perhaps as it was the first time, he
was not hitting me very hard), and I walked out feeling very much better.
The fact that the beating had not hurt was a sort of victory and
partially wiped out the shame of the bed-wetting. I was even incautious
enough to wear a grin on my face. Some small boys were hanging about in
the passage outside the door of the ante-room.
'D'you get the cane?'
'It didn't hurt,' I said proudly.
Bingo had heard everything. Instantly her voice came screaming after me:
'Come here! Come here this instant! What was that you said?'
'I said it didn't hurt,' I faltered out.
'How dare you say a thing like that? Do you think that is a proper thing
to say? Go in and REPORT YOURSELF AGAIN!'
This time Sim laid on in real earnest. He continued for a length of time
that frightened and astonished me--about five minutes, it seemed--ending
up by breaking the riding crop. The bone handle went flying across the
room.
'Look what you've made me do!' he said furiously, holding up the broken
crop.
I had fallen into a chair, weakly sniveling. I remember that this was the
only time throughout my boyhood when a beating actually reduced me to
tears, and curiously enough I was not even now crying because of the
pain. The second beating had not hurt very much either. Fright and shame
seemed to have anesthetized me. I was crying partly because I felt that
this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but partly also
because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to
convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked
up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the
rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.
I knew that bed-wetting was (a) wicked and (b) outside my control. The
second fact I was personally aware of, and the first I did not question.
It was possible, therefore, to commit a sin without knowing that you
committed it, without wanting to commit it, and without being able to
avoid it. Sin was not necessarily something that you did: it might be
something that happened to you. I do not want to claim that this idea
flashed into my mind as a complete novelty at this very moment, under the
blows of Sim's cane: I must have had glimpses of it even before I left
home, for my early childhood had not been altogether happy. But at any
rate this was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a
world where it was not possible for me to be good. And the double beating
was a turning-point, for it brought home to me for the first time the
harshness of the environment into which I had been flung. Life was more
terrible, and I was more wicked, than I had imagined. At any rate, as I
sat on the edge of a chair in Sim's study, with not even the
self-possession to stand up while he stormed at me, I had a conviction of
sin and folly and weakness, such as I do not remember to have felt
before.
In general, one's memories of any period must necessarily weaken as one
moves away from it. One is constantly learning new facts, and old ones
have to drop out to make way for them. At twenty I could have written the
history of my schooldays with an accuracy which would be quite impossible
now. But it can also happen that one's memories grow sharper after a long
lapse of time, because one is looking at the past with fresh eyes and can
isolate and, as it were, notice facts which previously existed
undifferentiated among a mass of others. Here are two things which in a
sense I remembered, but which did not strike me as strange or interesting
until quite recently. One is that the second beating seemed to me a just
and reasonable punishment. To get one beating, and then to get another
and far fiercer one on top of it, for being so unwise as to show that the
first had not hurt--that was quite natural. The gods are jealous, and
when you have good fortune you should conceal it. The other is that I
accepted the broken riding crop as my own crime. I can still recall my
feeling as I saw the handle lying on the carpet--the feeling of having
done an ill-bred clumsy thing, and ruined an expensive object. I had
broken it: so Sim told me, and so I believed. This acceptance of guilt
lay unnoticed in my memory for twenty or thirty years.
So much for the episode of the bed-wetting. But there is one more thing
to be remarked. That is that I did not wet my bed again--at least, I did
wet it once again, and received another beating, after which the trouble
stopped. So perhaps this barbarous remedy does work, though at a heavy
price, I have no doubt.
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 towards 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 make it sound
better. The Russian boy, neat in his habits, produced a pencil and a
small notebook and made a calculation.
'My father has over two hundred times as much money as yours,' he
announced with a sort of amused contempt.
That was in 1915. What happened to that money a couple of years later, I
wonder? And still more I wonder, do conversations of that kind happen at
preparatory schools now?
Clearly there has been a vast change of outlook, a general growth of
'enlightenment,' even among ordinary, unthinking middle-class people.
Religious belief, for instance, has largely vanished, dragging other
kinds of nonsense after it. I imagine that very few people nowadays would
tell a child that if it masturbates it will end in the lunatic asylum.
Beating, too, has become discredited, and has even been abandoned at many
schools. Nor is the underfeeding of children looked on as a normal,
almost meritorious act. No one now would openly set out to give his
pupils as little food as they could do with, or tell them that it is
healthy to get up from a meal as hungry as you sat down. The whole status
of children has improved, partly because they have grown relatively less
numerous. And the diffusion of even a little psychological knowledge has
made it harder for parents and schoolteachers to indulge their
aberrations in the name of discipline. Here is a case, not known to me
personally, but known to someone I can vouch for, and happening wi
thin my
own lifetime. A small girl, daughter of a clergyman, continued wetting
her bed at an age when she should have grown out of it. In order to
punish her for this dreadful deed, her father took her to a large garden
party and there introduced her to the whole company as a little girl who
wetted her bed: and to underline her wickedness he had previously painted
her face black. I do not suggest that Bingo and Sim would actually have
done a thing like this, but I doubt whether it would have much surprised
them. After all, things do change. And yet--!
The question is not whether boys are still buckled into Eton collars on
Sunday, or told that babies are dug up under gooseberry bushes. That kind
of thing is at an end, admittedly. The real question is whether it is
still normal for a school child to live for years amid irrational terrors
and lunatic misunderstandings. And here one is up against the very great
difficulty of knowing what a child really feels and thinks. A child which
appears reasonably happy may actually be suffering horrors which it
cannot or will not reveal. It lives in a sort of alien under-water world
which we can only penetrate by memory or divination. Our chief clue is
the fact that we were once children ourselves, and many people appear to
forget the atmosphere of their own childhood almost entirely. Think for
instance of the unnecessary torments that people will inflict by sending
a child back to school with clothes of the wrong pattern, and refusing to
see that this matters! Over things of this kind a child will sometimes
utter a protest, but a great deal of the time its attitude is one of
simple concealment. Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to
be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards. Even the affection
that one feels for a child, the desire to protect and cherish it, is a
cause of misunderstanding. One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply
than one can love another adult, but is rash to assume that the child
feels any love in return. Looking back on my own childhood, after the
infant years were over, I do not believe that I ever felt love for any
mature person, except my mother, and even her I did not trust, in the
sense that shyness made me conceal most of my real feelings from her.
Love, the spontaneous, unqualified emotion of love, was something I could
only feel for people who were young. Towards people who were old--and
remember that 'old' to a child means over thirty, or even over
twenty-five--I could feel reverence, respect, admiration or compunction,
but I seemed cut off from them by a veil of fear and shyness mixed up
with physical distaste. People are too ready to forget the child's
physical shrinking from the adult. The enormous size of grownups, their
ungainly, rigid bodies, their coarse wrinkled skins, their great relaxed
eyelids, their yellow teeth, and the whiffs of musty clothes and beer and
sweat and tobacco that disengage from them at every movement! Part of the
reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child
is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen
from below. Besides, being fresh and unmarked itself, the child has
impossibly high standards in the matter of skin and teeth and complexion.
But the greatest barrier of all is the child's misconception about age. A
child can hardly envisage life beyond thirty, and in judging people's
ages it will make fantastic mistakes. It will think that a person of
twenty-five is forty, that a person of forty is sixty-five, and so on.
Thus, when I fell in love with Elsie I took her to be grown up. I met her
again, when I was thirteen and she, I think, must have been twenty-three;
she now seemed to me a middle-aged woman, somewhat past her best. And the
child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some
mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the
age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of
no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see,
having anything to live for. Only child life is real life. The
schoolmaster who imagines he is loved and trusted by his boys is in fact
mimicked and laughed at behind his back. An adult who does not seem
dangerous nearly always seems ridiculous.
I base these generalizations on what I can recall of my own childhood
outlook. Treacherous though memory is, it seems to me the chief means we
have of discovering how a child's mind works. Only by resurrecting our
own memories can we realize how incredibly distorted is the child's
vision of the world. Consider this, for example. How would Crossgates
appear to me now, if I could go back, at my present age, and see it as it
was in 1915? What should I think of Bingo and Sim, those terrible,
all-powerful monsters? I should see them as a couple of silly, shallow,
ineffectual people, eagerly clambering up a social ladder which any
thinking person could see to be on the point of collapse. I would be no
more frightened of them than I would be frightened of a dormouse.
Moreover, in those days they seemed to me fantastically old,
whereas--though of this I am not certain--I imagine they must have been
somewhat younger than I am now. And how would Johnny Hall appear, with
his blacksmith's arms and his red, jeering face? Merely a scruffy little
boy, barely distinguishable from hundreds of other scruffy little boys.
The two sets of facts can lie side by side in my mind, because these
happen to be my own memories. But it would be very difficult for me to
see with the eyes of any other child, except by an effort of the
imagination which might lead me completely astray. The child and the
adult live in different worlds. If that is so, we cannot be certain that
school, at any rate boarding school, is not still for many children as
dreadful an experience as it used to be. Take away God, Latin, the cane,
class distinctions and sexual taboos, and the fear, the hatred, the
snobbery and the misunderstanding might still all be there. It will have
been seen that my own main trouble was an utter lack of any sense of
proportion or probability. This led me to accept outrages and believe
absurdities, and to suffer torments over things which were in fact of no
importance. It is not enough to say that I was 'silly' and 'ought to
have known better.' Look back into your own childhood and think of the
nonsense you used to believe and the trivialities which could make you
suffer. Of course my own case had its individual variations, but
essentially it was that of countless other boys. The weakness of the
child is that it starts with a blank sheet. It neither understands nor
questions the society in which it lives, and because of its credulity
other people can work upon it, infecting it with the sense of
inferiority and the dread of offending against mysterious, terrible
laws. It may be that everything that happened to me at Crossgates could
happen in the most 'enlightened' school, though perhaps in subtler
forms. Of one thing, however, I do feel fairly sur
e, and that is that
boarding schools are worse than day schools. A child has a better chance
with the sanctuary of its home near at hand. And I think the
characteristic faults of the English upper and middle classes may be
partly due to the practice, general until recently, of sending children
away from home as young as nine, eight or even seven.
I have never been back to Crossgates. In a way it is only within the last
decade that I have really thought over my schooldays, vividly though
their memory has haunted me. Nowadays, I believe, it would make very
little impression on me to see the place again, if it still exists. And
if I went inside and smelled again the inky, dusty smell of the big
schoolroom, the rosiny smell of the chapel, the stagnant smell of the
swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I think I should only
feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How
small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in
myself!
WRITERS AND LEVIATHAN (1948)
The position of the writer in an age of State control is a subject that
has already been fairly largely discussed, although most of the evidence
that might be relevant is not yet available. In this place I do not want
to express an opinion either for or against State patronage of the arts,
but merely to point out that WHAT KIND of State rules over us must
depend partly on the prevailing intellectual atmosphere: meaning, in
this context, partly on the attitude of writers and artists themselves,
and on their willingness or otherwise to keep the spirit of liberalism
alive. If we find ourselves in ten years' time cringing before somebody
like Zhdanov, it will probably be because that is what we have deserved.
Obviously there are strong tendencies towards totalitarianism at work
within the English literary intelligentsia already. But here I am not
concerned with any organised and conscious movement such as Communism,
but merely with the effect, on people of goodwill, of political thinking
and the need to take sides politically.
This is a political age. War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber
truncheons, atomic bombs, etc are what we daily think about, and
therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not
name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship,
your thoughts will be about sinking ships. But not only is our
subject-matter narrowed, but our whole attitude towards literature is
coloured by loyalties which we at least intermittently realise to be
non-literary. I often have the feeling that even at the best of times
literary criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted
standards whatever--any EXTERNAL reference which can give meaning to the
statement that such and such a book is "good" or "bad"--every literary
judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an
instinctive preference. One's real reaction to a book, when one has a
reaction at all, is usually "I like this book" or "I don't like it", and
what follows is a rationalisation. But "I like this book" is not, I
think, a non-literary reaction; the non-literary reaction is "This book
is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it". Of course,
when one praises a book for political reasons one may be emotionally
sincere, in the sense that one does feel strong approval of it, but also
it often happens that party solidarity demands a plain lie. Anyone used
to reviewing books for political periodicals is well aware of this. In
general, if you are writing for a paper that you are in agreement with,
you sin by commission, and if for a paper of the opposite stamp, by
omission. At any rate, innumerable controversial books-books for or
against Soviet Russia, for or against Zionism, for or against the