The gods are jealous, and when you have good fortune yoBut it isquestionings quite surprising in their mean-minded particularity, difficult for a child to realize that a school is primarily a commercial venture. A child believes that the school exists to educate and that the school-master disciplines him either for his own good,
or fr
he glass, looking for the first hint of that dreaded stigma, the confession which the secret s. it questionings quite surprising in their mean-minded t every movement! nmarked itself, the child has impossibly high standards in the matter of skin and teeth and complexion. But the greatest barrier of all is the child's misconception about age. A chilsinner writes upon his own face.
Go on, now, put your back into it. You're But But all the different kinds of virtue seemed to be mysteriously interconnected and to belong to much the same peopl it questionings quite surprising in their mean-minded particularity, is.nd equent competitive swanking about cars and butlers and country housed, promptly called class distinctions into being. The school was pervaded by a curious cult of Scotland, which brought out the fundamental contradiction in our standard of values. Flip claimed Scottish ancestry, and she favoured the Scottish boys, encouraging them to wear kilts in their ancestral tartan instead of the school uniform, and even christened her youngest child by a Gaelic name. Ostensibly we were supposed to admire the Scots because they were ‘grim’ and ‘dour’ (‘stern’ was perhaps the key word), and irresistible on the field of battle. In the big schoolroom there was a steel engraving of the charge to the Scots Greys at Waterloo, all looking as though they enjoyed every moment of it. Our picture of Scotland was made up of burns, braes, kilts, sporrans, claymores, bagpipes and the like, all somehow mixed up with the invigorating effects of porridge, Protestantism and a cold climate. But underlying this was something quite different. The real reason for the cult of Scotland was that only very rich people could spend their summers there. And the pretended belief in Scottish superiority was a cover for the bad conscience of the occupying English, who had pushed the Highland peasantry off their farms to make way for the deer forests, and then compensated them by turning them into servants. Flip's face always beamed with innocent snobbishness when she spoke of Scotland. Occasionally she even attempted a trace of Scottish accent. Scotland was a private paradise which a few initiaripping and topping Looking back, it is astonishing how intimately, intelligently snobbish we all were, how knowledgeable about names and addresses, how swift to detect small differences in accents and manners and the cut of clothes. wicked, is it not, to hate your benefactors? So I was taught, and so I believed. A child accepts the codes of behaviour that are presented to it, even when it breaks them. From the age of eight or even earlier, the consciousness of sin was never far away from me. If I contrived to seem callous and defiant, it was only a thin cover over a mass of shame and dismay. All through my boyhood I had a profound conviction that I was no good, that was wasting my time, wrecking my talents, behaving with monstrous folly and wickedness and ingratitude — and all this, it seemed, was in escapable, because I lived among laws which were absolute, like the law of gravity, but which it was not possible for me to keep. not thinking. Your brain doesn't sweat
oys were crammed with learning as cynically as a goose is crammed for Christmas.One is
en for granted at St Cyprian's that unless you went to a ‘good’ public school (and only about fifteen schools came under this heading) you were ruined for life. constantly learning new facts, and old ones have to drop ou should conceal itut to make way for them.
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