I suppose that if we had
been in a workhouse, a prison, or a lunatic asylum, our aeesthetic
environment would have been very much the same as it was at school;
and afterwards when I went with the cricket and football teams to
other grammar schools they all gave me the same impression of clean
ugliness. It is not surprising that few boys emerge from their school
life with that feeling for colour and form which is common to nearly
all children.
There was something very unpleasant to me in the fact that we all
washed with the same kind of soap, drank out of the same kind of cup,
and in general did the same things at the same time. The school
timetable robbed life of all those accidental variations that make it
interesting. Our meals, our games, even our hours of freedom seemed
only like subtle lessons. We had to eat at a certain hour whether we
were hungry or not, we had to play at a certain hour when perhaps we
wanted to sit still and be quiet. The whole school discipline tended
to the formation of habits at the expense of our reasoning faculties.
Yet the astonishing thing to me was that the boys themselves set up
standards of conduct that still further narrowed the possibilities of
our life. It was bad form to read too much, to write home except on
Sundays, to work outside the appointed hours, to talk to the day-boys,
to cultivate social relationships with the masters, to be Cambridge
in the boat-race, and in fine to hold any opinion or follow any
pursuit that was not approved by the majority.
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