A Year at Eton
A Distant Prospect. By Lord Berners. (Constable. 8s. 6d.)
LORD BERNERS Was at Eton for little over a year, his withdrawal at sixteen being due to an ill-timed letter home with an exaggerated account of a chill. His object had been to arouse sympathy and avoid football ; the result was that he was taken away, as being too delicate, just when he was beginning to enjoy Eton to the full. So in this memoir—a sequel to his First Childhood—he attempts no picture of the school as a whole and confines himself to his own experience and impressions.
He arrived, in 1897, from a prep. school which he hated, where music and painting had been taboo. His mother, when shown his quarters in Oxney's house, sniffed : " A room that I would hesitate to put even a pantry-boy into." But it seemed snug enough to her son; in so many accounts of Eton, privacy and leisure are seen to b among the chief blessings it bestows. A third, he came to realise, was the great beauty of the scene ; a fourth, the general tolerance of the unusual. A taste for music did not need to be concealed or deprecated ; for a time he was summoned every evening to play Chopin and the Geisha to a group of senior boys in the house dining-room. In work he was less lucky ; the rich characters of Percy Lubbock's Shades of Eton are only named here with regret, as not being known to the author. The only man who infused life into the classics, who made him feel that Latin and Greek authors were really worth reading in the original, was Arthur Benson ; and he only had him for one term. It was long enough to appreciate his quality and his tactics in dealing with the awful incursions of Dr. Warre:
Each time that he appeared in the division-room Arthur Benson would contrive to bring up the subject of Triremes. Doctor Warre's countenance would immediately light up with pleasure. . . . " Well, boys," he would say, " I suppose you all know what a Trireme looks like." He would then proceed to draw a Trireme on the blackboard and, becoming engrossed in his task, would invariably prolong his visit beyond the allotted time and be obliged to huriy away to inspect some other division-room. Construing had been avoided.
Accounts of his friends—the awkward intelligent one whom his mother disliked, the handsome worldly one whom his father admired .-of his country holidays, of his discovery of Wagner, of his mainly unsympathetic relations, fill out a slight and agreeable book.
JANET ADAM SMITH.
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