I hated the stuffy malodorous
classrooms, with their whistling gas-jets and noise of inharmonious
life. I would have hated the yellow fogs had they not sometimes
shortened the hours of my bondage. That five hundred boys shared this
horrible environment with me did not abate my sufferings a jot; for
it was clear that they did not find it distasteful, and they
therefore became as unsympathetic for me as the smell and noise and
rotting stones of the school itself.
The masters moved as it were in another world, and, as the classes
were large, they understood me as little as I understood them. They
knew that I was idle and untruthful, and they could not know that I
was as full of nerves as a girl, and that the mere task of getting to
school every morning made me physically sick. They punished me
repeatedly and in vain, for I found every hour I passed within the
walls of the school an overwhelming punishment in itself, and nothing
I made any difference to me. I lied to them because they expected it,
and because I had no words in which to express the truth if I knew
it, which is doubtful. For some reason I could not tell them at home
why I got on so badly at school, or no doubt they would have taken me
away and sent me to a country school, as they did afterwards. Nearly
all the real sorrows of childhood are due to this dumbness of the
emotions; we teach children to convey facts by means of words, but we
do not teach them how to make their feelings intelligible.
Pages:
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35