Some Memories

Before me, as I write, lies an old photograph taken some twenty odd years ago by a camera enthusiast of the Lower III. I sit in the midst—a slim young man of something under thirty, with my mortarboard cocked jauntily over the left eye: around me fourteen boys, also of the Lower III. (Why is it that all the jolliest chaps are always in the Lower III?) At any rate, they were jolly for the moment, for we were all—master and boys alike—bunking a Latin lesson for the more congenial occupation of being photographed down there, in the corner of the playground behind "Jackson's room."

Of those fourteen, two died in boyhood; of the remaining twelve, ten are or have been serving. Great as is the record of the School for service, no form, I venture to say, before or since could beat this. There in the back row stands Gordon Harper; in front, seated, his brother Robin, both in the blue-striped blouse of innocence. On my right sits "Ru" Garsia, looking in his white turn-down collar as cherubic as any choirboy. He retained the cherubic look even when a middy on H.M.S. Russell—I have Ms photo of that period; page 80but he had lost it when he came found in H.M.S. New Zealand—Lieutenant-Commander, no less, and very much a man of the world, but with most of the old charm left. He it was who accepted the surrender of von Müller's sword on board the Emden, with, I doubt not, the same fine Spanish courtesy (his father was a Spaniard) that Richard Grenville met on the decks of the Revenge.

Oliver is not in the photo; his last letter to me, written the night before he set out from Curragh Camp, to fall a few days later in the first battle of the Aisne, has already been printed in the magazine. Oliver Garsia's was my first experience of a personal loss in the war. I had received his letter— such a bright, game "Lower III" letter—only a week before I chanced on the announcement of his death in the Morning Post. Since that loss, over three years ago, many another old boy of my own time has followed. And when a chap came to you in the Lower III, or even earlier, and you had him again for a year or two in the Middle School, and finished with him perhaps in the Sixth, and had watched him through all the stages from serge blouse to "stand-up" collars with a pretty taste in ties, and even something of the dandiacal as to the socks—well, it is not comparable to the grief of a father for his son, of course, but we schoolmasters suffer too: we have so many gallant boys to mourn for.

But to return to my photo—the "gay Gordon," with his close-cropped ginger hair, his firm set jaw, the twinkle of humour in the eye that never left him—his was the individuality that impressed me most strongly of all the boys I ever taught. I suppose it was partly because he was a rebel. On the morning after he left school he walked up and down Worcester Street in front of the windows of the Masters' Room for a full hour puffing at a page 81huge pipe to show his independence. That was characteristic of him. At the little "Saturday nights" for the Sixth Form I used to hold in my cottage in the last term of each year, the rule was that boys who were leaving that term—all, be it remembered, young men of seventeen or more— might have ale and their pipes. Boys who were staying on had to drink lemonade and look on at the smokers. It was most "unmasterly" to let any of them smoke, I admit, or even drink small-beer, I suppose, but I'll wager none of them ever "split" on me; and the Head, when he reads these lines, will learn for the first time of this further breach of duty by his one-time graceless under-master, and, learning it, will forgive it as generously as he did all my other lapses from pedagogic rectitude. But I mention the fact merely to add that for two years before he did actually leave, Gordon Harper was "leaving" at the end of each year, and sucked his pipe at my "Saturdays" in lofty contempt for the poor devils who were "coming back." But all the space and more than the editor will allow might be easily filled with Gordon Harper; his dramatic triumphs in "Box and Cox" (or was it "Cox and Box"?), his ingenious practical jokes, his defiance of all school conventions, and his passionate loyalty to all of good the school stood for—gay, gallant Gordon; brief his life might seem to some, but he was, through it all, "The Happy Warrior." And I am constrained to believe that he fought the Turks in Gallipoli with the same imperturbable humour that he fought prenorious masters at school. But if anyone asks me to translate "prenorious" as applied to schoolmasters, I refuse, for this is a school magazine, and I must write nothing that might be subversive to discipline. But—well, my old friend Jackson was never prenorious.

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I am sorry my photo contains only one representative of "The Three Families." Perhaps there are more now, but in my day there were "The Three Families"—and what families they were! The six Deanses, the six Guthries, and the four Lawrences. In all the fifteen years I was on the staff there was never a year without a Guthrie and a Deans at school, seldom one without a Lawrence. Never a scholarship boy in the whole sixteen, not a swot in the bunch, but honest workers at tilings that really mattered; never by any chance at the top of a form, but seldom below the middle. In the real life of the school—in all that made for character and had nothing to do with exams.— what grand chaps they were! The record of "The Three Families" is one to be proud of. Of the six Guthries, five have served—two killed; of six Deanses, four, and one just lately lost; and the four Lawrences—well, we are fighting in this war on four fronts, and there is a Lawrence on each.

But if the heroes of the Lower III have a warm place in one's heart, the stalwarts—and even the intellectuals—of the Sixth are not less dear to memory. Torn Currie, one remembers, disgracing the high dignity of monitor by introducing a foxterrier into VI French to harry a humourless form master; and three more monitors joined in the riot that followed, and for the first and only time in history four grave and reverend monitors had their names inscribed in the "appearance book" to appear before the Head. And dear old Carrie in after-life took himself so seriously too. There was "Rosseau" Reid and "Chummy" Campbell, Monty Clayton and Andrew Reese—a goodly fellowship of true men all—and all gone west! And that gentle and studious spirit George Mayne, intended by Nature for an even gentler and not less lovable Vicar of Wakefield, made strife instead page 83of peace his goal, and sought a career first at the Bar and then with the Forces—and made a good end. And of all the long roll of head monitors, the best, at any rate from the view-point of an assistant master, was "Jogger" Maude. I remember him first a quarter of a century ago, a little boy of ten. I can see him now in his blue serge sailor-suit when we read "Sir Patrick Spens" and "The Ballad of Chevy Chase" in junior English. I remember him last, a bronzed soldier of thirty-five, standing at the door of his hutment in Trentham Training Camp, bidding good-bye. He had the same bonny smile in his eyes then that won me at our first meeting, and it helps one to know that in all the years between there was never a rift— not even one "imposition" in the friendship that bound us.

I promised the Head to write some "cheerful reminiscences," and as I have failed lamentably in that I had better stop. But there are consolations. It is good to remember that I did not teach them overmuch; I certainly never worried them about their exams., but we passed bright hours and swopped stories, and were chums together. The fascination of the least common, denominator left us cold, and the mysteries of science charmed us not at all; but we travelled much in the realms of gold; and in the cadences of "Kubla Khan" and "La Belle Dame," over the pages of "Esmond" and "Hypatia," and among the scenes of "Lear" and "The Tempest," we sought joyously, all of us together, to capture the gleam of Old Romance and to glimpse the humour of things.