JOHN BULL'S SCHOOLDAYS SIR,—It is now eight and a half
years since I left, not merely the school, but the very House that Mr. Raven describes in his contribution to 'John Bull's Schooldays' in your issue of last Friday, yet never, until this week, have I realised the true nature of the society in which I spent five years of my life.
But now that, thanks to your contributor, my eyes have at last been opened, I find it almost incredible that I should have been so obtuse and imperceptive. Those 600 ordinary, friendly boys : of course they constituted a midden of priggishness and betrayal —and to think I never noticed it at the time! How bad I was at learning the school customs: Never did I realise it was my privilege, even my duty, to drop in on the Head Monitor of an evening with some lurid tale of smoking in the shrubbery. What opportunities I missed! Those cosy, three-hour inter-monitorial chats on slackness and immorality : why did I never take my part in them? Now that it is too late, how bitterly do I regret my well-spent youth! Nor is there any possibility of things having been very different in my day from what they were in Mr. Raven's; for my first term coincided with his last and the system (as he is most definitely assured) still obtains; nor can it be supposed, tempting though it is to indulge the fancy, that some kind of spiritual cloud left the
place at the very same moment as Mr. Raven and then, after five or more years of blessed absence, re-asserted itself at some time subsequent to my own departure.
Human perception and human remembrance are fallible things and my own may well have been at fault, but I would like you and, if possible, your readers to know that not all of us who were there retain the same impression of a famous school as does your contributor; and if any of its staff have read and are pained by Mr. Raven's article, I would like to assure them that there is at least one of their former pupils who keeps a warmer and a kindlier memory of them and of the school they serve.—Yours faithfully,
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