John Bull's Schooldays

The Road to Rornilly

By PHILIP TOYNBEE 4t-r• meN-beeeee!' The jeering cry of many hostile I voices still rings in my dreams, and the ease with which the name can he turned to ridicule has always prevented me from wearing it with comfort. `Dirt-eeee To) n-beee !' A just accusa- tion, though in my slightly cleaner middle age I no longer see it as quite such a total demolition of character and dignity. A more respectable reason for my extreme unpopularity when 1 first went to Rugby was that I was taking, at the time, a rather laborious and self-conscious interest in comparative religion. To wash too seldom and to read books on Buddhism! It was, of course, an intolerable combination of affronts.

The worst of this long period was the very beginning of it. Normally a new boy's first term or two were spent in a small 'waiting-house' where he was entirely in the company of his own contemporaries or, a most formidable group, of those who were just one term senior to him. A 'victim would be chosen, by some mysterious pro- cess,of group antipathy, whose function was to sit in a chair at one end of our room during the hour of prep and to act as target for gym-shoes slung at him from the other end. He wasn't en- couraged to dodge; but the worst of this ordeal was the idle and sporadic nature of the attacks. At any moment of intolerable boredom in the work which was going on at the other end of the room the bored would reach to the floor for a shoe, hurl it viciously and then return to their Latin grammars. To me this seemed both more humiliating and more alarming than a genuine fury of mob violence.

But I early learned the horrible lesson instilled by the Young Lady of Smyrna, and soon found a vicarious victim. He had, to begin with, an anglicised German name; and I further dis- covered that he was a pious high Anglican and the supporter of a soccer club called Sheffield Wednesday. After that I was only occasionally sent back to the chair : I saw to it that Newmark was there more often.

All this is familiar stuff; but it is worth em- phasising that the Flashman-Brown situation could never have recurred in the Rugby of my day. Pride of position had become much stronger than the sado-homosexuality of a large boy bully- ing a small one. To do this you would have had to show awareness of boys younger than your- self, and this—partly, no doubt, owing to the cunning encouragement of the masters—had become taboo. Small boys bullied each other, and so, with a little more subtlety, did big boys. When I graduated to my house I found that the greatest cruelty was practised by certain large and athletic boys in their treatment of unathletic and intellectual prefects. We did not use this word at Rugby. In a praiseworthy attempt to elevate the intellect, Dr. Arnold had made it a rule that any boy over the age of fifteen who reached the sixth form automatically assumed prefectorial powers. A prefect was a 'Sixth.' The results of this were often disastrous, and I particularly re- member one such unfortunate who was brutally mocked in front of his juniors by boys who were older and stronger, though technically more powerless, than himself.

Dirt-eeee Toyn-beeee I remained as I plodded up the dull middle reaches of the school. I was no longer physically assaulted, but,I was disliked by all except a few mild,friends. My only escape was to become a buffoon, and this was a painful role to play for it inevitably involved me in opposition to the more remote authorities. I clowned my way into many a beating—delivered, in minor cases, with a large butter-pat on pyjama'd bottom in the dormitory. This won no respect, of course,, among those whose dislike 1 was trying to allay, but it won the toleration accorded to a public entertainer.

And so the usual hard-luck tale might have continued to the end, and I would have left my school with nothing but detestable memories of its obtuse brutalities, its hideous buildings and its unimaginative teaching. From this I was dramatically saved by the unexpected bursting of my chrysalis. Until the age of seventeen 1 had been a good but obscure rugger player, rather young to be in the first house team but not nearly good enough to atone for dirt and Buddhism. But when I came back for the beginninrof the new football season of 1933 1 suddenly dis- covered that I had acquired, by some mystery of physical and mental development, bright new capacities for this most admired of games. Tried for the third school fifteen, I was playing for the first within a few weeks of the beginning of that term. And during those weeks it was neces- sary for my acquaintances to make a radical and awkward change in their attitude towards me. The way in which they achieved this has always remained' in my mind as a magnificent example of how to change with the wind and the tide.

What a dizzy elevation it was! To be walking now almost arm in arm with M. M. Walford, captain of cricket and hockey, centre three- quarter who would, within two years, be playing for Oxford. (And once, I think, for England !) To be wearing a blue, silver-braided cap, and to be able to take the short cut across Big Side which was allowed only to members of the first fifteen! Absolute and supreme glory had de- scended on the head of dirt-eeee Toyn-beee, and there were violent adjustments to be made all round. The contemptuous distortion of my name was dropped in favour of the affectionate .7oyners.1 and from being an outsider, in the old and by no means desirable sense of the word, I had become an eccentric—a permitted form of divergence in almost every sub-group of English society.

The Harrow match was played away that year, and played when I was still on trial for my cap. It was a match of the greatest importance to me—no doubt to my team as well—and the most important thing of all was that I, a wing forward, should not allow any Harrow tries to be scored through the blind side of the scrum. Within a short and harrowing few minutes two such tries had been scored, and 'I felt that only extreme measures could save me. I had been mildly hit on the head before these disasters, and now I began to stagger as I ran, to hold my brow, to force a dazed and groping look into my eyes. 1 rightly calculated that nobody would remember the exact point in the game when my affliction had developed; and at the end, though another blind-side try had been scored, and though Rugby had lost the game, I was treated as a hero.

Guilt followed, but so, after another match or two, did a velvet cap with a tassel. And guilt was further assuaged by the fact that I obviously did deserve my place in the fifteen. Take, for example, the home match against Cheltenham! I had brought down the opposing fly-half; the ball went loose and was snatched up by Walford; he passed out to Cranston, who passed in his turn to Tim Ellis on the wing. As Ellis fell I was there inside him, took his desperate pass and . . . No, but I kicked a long touch, at least, which set the sidelines roaring. And on those sidelines stood 'little Johnson,' the baby-faced brother of my gentle friend 'Big Johnson' who had treated me kindly all through the dark years of my un- popularity. 'Little Johnson'! Who sang treble to my tenor in the house quartet. Whom I had cun- ningly earmarked for my fag when I should reach the Sixth next term. Whom I loved with a painful and protective passion.

It would be rash to say that the moment of that movement down the field made up for all that had happened befotle. And it would be unkind to my adult years if I said that nothing was ever quite so good again. But at least l recognise the temptation to say these things.

I remained a clown, but on my own terms now. During that Christmas holiday a party of older boys spent a fortnight in the Nazional Politische Erziehungs Anstalt in Potsdam, in exchange for German youths who were to visit Rugby later on. This was a tough Prussian military academy already, after a few months of Hitler's new regime, inflamed by Nazi passions. To these I hadn't yet formed any particular aversion, but there was an arrogant heartiness about our hosts which offended us all. In a café one evening they produced a great glass stiefel of beer and swore that there wasn't one of us who could drink it all. I did so and, in the few minutes before total oblivion, 1 managed to achieve a good deal of loud and public misconduct. It seemed to me— it seems to me still—that 1 had upheld the threatened honour of my school and even, as never before or since, of my country. But the abstemious headmaster thought differently, and a special lecture was given to the school next term on the evils of drink. I must have forgotten what was said in it.

But all went well until the summer term. Then, in the classically grotesque position of captaining my second house cricket team, I found that too much of my glory had departed. Football heroes who were no good at cricket were not allowed to wear the insignia of their temporarily vanished splendour. Nothing, of course, could remove it from my mind or from the minds of others; but the clownish element became a little dispropor- tionate. A large and bad cricketer among small hopefuls, I would put myself on to bowl for almost the whole of every game, flinging the ball down at a great speed and a great many Yards from the wicket In keeping with my general reputation I now resigned from the Officers' Training Corps, and used the time I saved for going on long chaste walks with 'little Johnson' or for going to illicit cinemas with my dark angel, H. de C. A. Woodhouse. He and I would also visit pubs in the town, taking photo- graphs of each other leaning at the bar with glasses of shandy in the hand and ,grotesque imitations of drunken faces. Against Woodhouse my good angel, David Lusk, classical scholar, clergyman's son and head of my house, offered the calm and deep pleasures of the virtuous life.

There was also Rogers, a sloppy and decadent boy, my junior by a term or two, despised in the house as much as the handsome and ferocious WoodhouSe was admired. He had Cezanne repro- ductions on his study wall, and introduced me to the early poems of T. S. Eliot. When I managed to get hold of a copy of Ulysses I had won a small triumph in a term when triumphs had become too rare. • Having developed by now a progressive turn of mind I had abolished the butter-pat in the section of the dormitory over which I ruled each evening. I had substituted as a punishment the reading aloud, of poetry—at first of Julian Gren- fell's 'Into Battle,' but later of Prufrock. It is still a pleasure to me when I think of the spectacle of Bryan Boydell sitting upright in bed and announcing, from his all too convincing bald monkey of a face : 'I grow old! 1 grow old!' The punishments were ineffective, of course, but they were not meant to be effective. Ours was the merriest part of the dormitory, and poetry was serving a purpose which is, perhaps, too often neglected.

By now I had begun to wear a hammer and sickle in my buttonhole and to make speeches in the Debating Club on what I thought to be Com- munism. One of my friends—a quiet and well- intentioned boy—had become a Fascist and had spent much of his last holidays parading suburban streets in a black shirt. We discussed our rival faitihs together as we lay in the sun and watched cricket matches. I envied him the shirt and would at that time have changed sides, I rather think, if he had not made the mistake of showing me some anti-Semitic literature. There were many Jews at Rugby, and they were treated offensively by the people who, in the past, had been par- ticularly offensive to me.

All this, combined with Johnson's growing- 1 suspect his instructed—reluctance to go for walks with me, was enough to make me eagerly responsive when I. first heard Esmond Romilly's cry of schoolboy rebellion from London. I have written about that already, and I feel now an impulsion to make some declaration about those long-ago schooldays and that strange, because, for its time, so strangely ordinary, English public school. I cannot pretend that I feel the least affection for Rugby when I look back at it. It is an ugly school, to begin with, on the outskirts of an ugly town, in an ugly county; and though I was no msthete I believe that those pink and blue buildings are harder to look back on with love than, for example, the elegant antiquity of Winchester. And it was, in my time, a rather stupid school, with hardly a single one of those bright, disreputable masters who often teach so well until disaster ends their schoolmastering careers. There were few rebels among, my own contemporaries and a fearful number of self- satisfied bores.

On the other hand, it is impossible not to look back on that time with a lively interest, and it would be silly to deny that there were many moments of great happiness, and many moments when there was a lot to laugh at. My heart does not beat harder when the tune of my old school song conies to mind. They were not the happiest days of my life. I would not send my son there. But any institution so robustly self-confident as that one has a kind of power and a kind of effectiveness, however devious. I don't in the least regret that I went to the most typical of English public schools in the years before all public schools began to weaken in their self-assurance and to become, perhaps, too uneasily aware of imperfections.