The Old School

By E. M. FORSTER

SUPPOSE me a schoolmaster, called (say) Mr. Herbert Pembroke, and I have a boarding-house in the imaginary public school of Sawston. My day's work is over, my boys (whom I call hies) are safe in their cubicles and I take up a new book, as I still sometimes do, entitled The Old School. The title placates. It suggests caps with tassels, and photo- gravures in oak, and the words of the school anthem which I myself have composed flit pleasantly through my mind :

" Perish each sluggard ! Let it not be said That Sawston such within her walls hath bred ! "

But as I read I turn purple in the face, then pale, then petrified, and finally open the study door and burst out to my sister, who does the matroning for me : " Agnes ! Agnes ! Pray what is the meaning of this ? "

Agnes is used to being asked what things mean and she does not immediately come. When she does I exclaim that here is the most disgraceful, ill-conditioned, unnecessary book ever published, and I cannot trust myself to speak about it.

She composes herself to listen.

" Here is a collection of reminiscences by boys who seem recently to have left their schools, and one would like to know under what circumstances. Here is the sorriest set of sluggards ever collected. Here are fine nincompoops. Come ! They shirk games and the O.T.C., they have no notion of esprit de corps, they do not even work. And their names ! E. Arnot Robertson ! What a name for a boy I And Sean O'Faolain 1 Scarcely a name at all ! This per- sonage writes of Cork, if you please, and pray whoever heard of Cork as a school ? "

" Well, if the boys do not come from proper schools it is naturally not a proper book," says Agnes, who is adding up the washing under the rim of the study table where she thinks I cannot see it. " I don't think you ought to worry— (one pound three and two)—over that, Herbert."

" I am far from worrying, but I really must observe that Winchester, Malvern and Rugby are among the national institutions vilified."

" Does Sawston come in ? "

" Sawston ! Certainly not. How could it ? I should be very mortified indeed if any of our old --- " " Thirty-seven pillow cases. Might I look at this queer book now for a moment ? "

" Yes, but omit the chapter on St. Paul's."

My sister glances about, opines that though E. Arnot Robertson went to Sherborne he was a girl, and then hands the volume back with that bright smile of hers which both sustains and irritates me. " Oh, there's nothing to take any notice of," she says. They turn out to be only authors—not people who matter—they are just writing to one another about how they didn't get on at their schools. We must remind the library to choose more sensibly for us next time. And talking of choosing—what, Herbert, oh, what about a fresh laundry ? Do you agree to us trying the Snow White at Michaelmas ? "

" I am far from supposing that the Snow White. . . . " And far h om supposing, far from imagining, Mr. Herbert Pembroke and his sister fade away into ghosts. They have been evoked for a moment from a forgotten novel in which, topic of one's old school. I did not like mine. I felt towards ri nearly thirty years back, I tried to write about this same

it what most of the contributors to this volume feel towards towards sex, the snobbery—see passim. No longer can Mr.

theirs, and the Pembrokes were what is now called a compen-

sation-device. I invented them in order to get back a bit of " Lo the flag of Sawston lifted high appears

my own.

For the flag is getting torn, and according to Mr. Greene, the The Old School. Edited by Graham Greene. (Cape. .7s. 6d,) entire system is doomed for economic reasons.

devastating analysis of its workings at Holt. As for Imperial training see Mr. Derek Verschoyle on Malvern. The boarding- house system, fagging, the uneasy attitude of the authorities : Pembroke and his sister lead the massed choirs in Bravely hath it waved for twice two hundred years."

" So shall Sawston flourish, so shall manhood be

Serving God and Country, ruling land and sea."

I actually had to sing that. It seems incredible.

All the same, this book is not easy to review. It is rather scrappy. Here are eighteen men and women who have mostly been educated on public-school lines and have mostly disliked it, but not all of them have disliked it nor have they all been to public schools. Nor do they approach their immaturities in the same spirit. Some of them gossip sedately. others are charming, others do a raspberry, others use personal experience as a basis for some theory of education. The editor, Mr. (Graham Greene (Berkhamsted), shovels every- thing together as well as he can, but the book could, I think, have cohered better if he had either kept his selection strictly to public schools or else had worked to a much bigger plan and included a great many other educational models instead of merely a few—thus giving a real cross-section of adolescent England.

The contribution I have enjoyed most is Mr. O'Faolain's. He was educated by some gentle muddled monks at Cork, who taught him that there are twelve minerals, that com- bustion is due to phlogiston, and that circumcision is a small circle cut out on the forehead of Jewish children. He acquired this knowledge with an open book balanced upon his head, in order to protect it from the showers of broken glass which fell on occasion from the roof. The proiection was adequate, and out of the cold and the smells of that huge crumbling room in that vanished school he has con- structed a faery world of affection and beauty. The point of Cork is that there was esprit de corps, though it was never mentioned and could not have been pronounced. The monks and the boys worked together as a firmily, and con- spired to defeat the Board of Education. One of the inspectors urged schOlars to clean their teeth and 'supervise their hair, &c., and when he had gone, Brother Josephus "swept us together into his bosom for ever and ever in one wave of indignation by saying in contempt of all inspectors Boys ! He thinks ye're filth.' " That was education, and if one thinks of the wa:shing and washing and washing at Winchester —which as far -as my information goes is the most bleached of our Big Five—one realizes the humanizing power of a little dirt, and the limitations of laundries, even when they are snow-white. There was superstition and ignorance at Cork, but these are evils which can be rectified. They have not the paralysing permanency of good form.

Except for Mr. 'O'Faolain, and Miss Elizabeth Bowen, who gives a calming and charming account of Downe House, and Mr. Stephen Spender, who liked his time as a day boy at University College School, and Mr. William Plomer, who, though he did not like Rugby finely eulogizes his late head- master—except for these and for some scattered praises and happinesses, the general tone of the collection is vinegary. My own tone. If it seems a little monotonous, a little too much like Mrs. Gamp's salad, it is surely a needful change after so much oil. The amount of praise lavished on our public schools both by themselves and by sentimental foreign visitors has been preposterous and has led to unendurable complacency. So as for "Honour," read Mr. W. H. Auden's