The boys were mostly sons of officers and there was one peer. The first day of term we were summoned to the main classroom and told this boy was going to arrive, that he was a lord and that in spite of this we were to treat him as one of ourselves. In this way and at once we were introduced to the snobbery amongst other things which make school life, paradoxically, a larger picture, an enlargement of the relationships which obtain between people in the world. What I mean is that any average person who in after-life does not go out looking for strange characters will find truer friendship, more genuine companionship, and conversely purer types, more perfect examples of liars, thieves and crooks in his first school during the six years he spends there than he will come across in twenty years of living in London, the kind of escaped prisoners we then are after our education has done with us.

This is not to say the school was worse than another, only that nothing better could be expected where boys, fresh from the oriental intrigues and power politics of their nurseries, were put into a strange environment on the first occasion, in many cases, they had left home. We came new boys into a strange society and found not only recognized snobbery of rank but of age as well.

More about this Author
Buy this book from in the UK and in the USA.
	Part of the Library of Bernadette Tavernin - © 1999