Life in an English Grammar School
If I tried my best, it would take a year to describe the life in that English grammar school at R… I had always been perfectly happy in every Irish school and especially in the Royal School at Armagh. Let me give one difference as briefly as possible. When I whispered in the classroom in Ireland, the master would frown at me and shake his head; ten minutes later I was talking again, and he'd hold up an admonitory finger; the third time he'd probably say, «Stop talking, Harris; don't you see you're disturbing your neighbor?» Half an hour later in despair he'd cry, «If you still talk, I'll have to punish you.» Ten minutes afterwards: «You're incorrigible, Harris; come up here,» and I'd have to go and stand beside his desk for the rest of the morning, and even this light punishment did not happen more than twice a week, and as I came to be head of my class, it grew rarer. In England, the procedure was quite different. «That new boy there is talking; take 300 lines to write out and keep quiet.» «Please, Sir,» I'd pipe up-«Take 500 lines and keep quiet.» «But, Sir»-in remonstrance. «Take a thousand lines and if you answer again, I'll send you to the Doctor»-which meant I'd get a caning or a long talking to. The English masters one and all ruled by punishment; consequently I was indoors writing out lines almost every day, and every half-holiday for the first year. Then my father, prompted by Vernon, complained to the Doctor that writing out lines was ruining my handwriting. After that I was punished by lines to learn by heart; the lines quickly grew into pages, and before the end of the first half year it was found that I knew the whole school history of England by heart through these punishments. Another remonstrance from my father and I was given lines of Vergil to learn. Thank God! that seemed worth learning and the story of Ulysses and Dido on «the wild sea-banks' became a series of living pictures to me, not to be dimmed, even so long as I live.
That English school for a year and a half was to me a brutal prison with stupid daily punishments. At the end of that time I was given a seat by myself, thanks to the mathematical master; but that's another story. The two or three best boys of my age in England were far more advanced than I was in Latin and had already waded through half the Greek grammar, which I had not begun, but I was better in mathematics than any one in the whole lower school. Because I was behind the English standard in languages, the form-master took me to be stupid and called me «stupid,» and as a result I never learned a Latin or Greek lesson in my two and a half years in grammar school. Nevertheless, thanks to the punishment of having to learn Vergil and Livy by heart, I was easily the best of my age in Latin, too, before the second year was over. I had an extraordinary verbal memory. The Doctor, I remember, once mouthed out some lines of Paradise Lost and told us in his pompous way that Lord Macaulay knew Paradise Lost by heart from beginning to end. I asked: «Is that hard, Sir?» «When you've learned half of it,» he replied, «you'll understand how hard! Lord Macaulay was a genius,» and he emphasized the «Lord» again. A week later when the Doctor again took the school in literature, I said at the end o? the hour: «Please, Sir, I know Paradise Lost by heart»; he tested me, and I remember how he looked at me afterwards from head to foot, as if asking himself where I had put all the learning. This «piece of impudence,» as the older boys called it, brought me several cuffs and kicks from boys in the sixth, and much ill will from many others. All English school life was summed up for me in the «fagging.» There was «fagging» in the Royal School in Armagh, but it was kindly. If you wanted to get out of it for a long walk with a chum, you had only to ask one of the sixth and you got permission to skip it. But in England the rule was rhadamanthine; the fags' names on duty were put up on a blackboard, and if you were not on time, ay, and servile to boot, you'd get a dozen from an ash plant on your behind, and not laid on perfunctorily and with distaste, as the Doctor did it, but with vim, so that I had painful weals on my backside and couldn't sit down for days without a smart. The fags, too, being young and weak, were very often brutally treated just for fun. On Sunday mornings in summer, for instance, we had an hour longer in bed. I was one of the half- dozen juniors in the big bedroom; there were two older boys in it, one at each end, presumably to keep order; but in reality to teach lechery and corrupt their younger favorites. If the mothers of England knew what goes on in the dormitories of these boarding schools throughout England, they would all be closed, from Eton and Harrow, upwards or downwards, in a day. If English fathers even had brains enough to understand that the fires of sex need no stoking in boyhood, they, too, would protect their sons from the foul abuse. But I shall come back to this. Now I wish to speak of the cruelty. Every form of cruelty was practiced on the younger, weaker and more nervous boys. I remember one Sunday morning the half-dozen older boys pulled one bed along the wall and forced all seven younger boys underneath it, beating with sticks any hand or foot that showed. One little fellow cried that he couldn't breathe, and at once the gang of tormentors began stuffing up all the apertures, saying that they would make a «Black Hole» of it. There were soon cries and strugglings under the bed, and at length one of the youngest began shrieking, so that the torturers ran away from the prison, fearing lest some master should hear. One wet Sunday afternoon in midwinter, a little nervous «mother's darling» from the West Indies, who always had a cold and was always sneaking near the fire in the big schoolroom, was caught by two of the fifth and held near the flames. Two more brutes pulled his trousers tight over his bottom, and the more he squirmed and begged to be let go, the nearer the flames he was pushed, till suddenly the trousers split apart scorched through; and as the little fellow tumbled forward screaming, the torturers realized that they had gone too far. The little «nigger,» as he was called, didn't tell how he came to be so scorched but took his fortnight in sick bay as a respite. We read of a fag at Shrewsbury who was thrown into a bath of boiling water by some older boys because he liked to take his bath very warm; but this experiment turned out badly, for the little fellow died and the affair could not be hushed up, though it was finally dismissed as a regrettable accident. The English are proud of the fact that they hand a good deal of the school discipline to the older boys: they attribute this innovation to Arnold of Rugby and, of course, it is possible, if the supervision is kept up by a genius, that it may work for good and not for evil; but usually it turns the school into a forcing-house of cruelty and immorality. The older boys establish the legend that only sneaks would tell anything to the masters, and they are free to give rein to their basest instincts. The two monitors in our big bedroom were a strapping big fellow named Dick F… who tired all the little boys by going into their beds and making them frig him till his semen came. The little fellows all hated to be covered by his filthy slime, but had to pretend to like doing as he told them, and usually he insisted on frigging them by way of exciting himself. Dick only picked me out once or twice, but I managed to catch his semen on his own night-shirt, and so after calling me a «dirty little devil,» he left me alone. The other monitor was Jones, a Liverpool boy of about seventeen, very backward in lessons but very strong, the «Cock» of the school at fighting. He used always to go to one young boy's bed, whom he favored in many ways. Henry H… used to be able to get off any fagging and he never let out what Jones made him do at night, but in the long run he got to be chums with another fellow and it all came out. Henry's chum one day let the cat out of the bag. It appeared that Jones used to make the little fellow take his sex in his mouth and frig and suck him at the same time. But one evening he had brought up some butter and smeared it over his prick and gradually inserted it into Henry's anus and this came to be his ordinary practice. But this night he had forgotten the butter, and when he found a certain resistance, he thrust violently forward, causing extreme pain and making his pathic bleed. Henry screamed, and so after an interval of some weeks or months, the whole procedure came to be known. If there had been no big boys as monitors, there would still have been a certain amount of solitary frigging; from twelve to thirteen on, most boys, and girls, too, practice self-abuse from time to time on some slight provocation; but the practice doesn't often become habitual unless it is fostered by one's elders and practiced mutually. In Ireland it is sporadic; in England perpetual, and in English schools it often led to downright sodomy, as in this instance. In my own case there were two restraining influences, and I wish to dwell on both as a hint to parents. I was a very eager little athlete; thanks to instructions and photographs in a book on athletics belonging to Vernon, I found out how to jump and how to run. To jump high, one had to take but a short run from the side and straighten oneself horizontally as one cleared the bar. By constant practice I could at thirteen walk under the bar and then jump it. I soon noticed that if I frigged myself the night before, I could not jump so well, the consequence being that I restrained myself, and never frigged save on Sunday, and soon managed to omit the practice three Sundays out of four. Since I came to understanding, I have always been grateful to that exercise for this lesson in self-restraint. Besides, one of the boys was always frigging himself: even in school he kept his right hand in his trousers pocket and continued the practice. All of us knew that he had torn a hole in his pocket so that he could play with his cock; but none of the masters ever noticed anything. The little fellow grew gradually paler and paler until he took to crying in a corner, and unaccountable nervous trembling shook him for a quarter of an hour at a time. At length, he was taken away by his parents: what became of him afterwards, I don't know, but I do know that till he was taught self-abuse, he was one of the quickest boys of his age at lessons and given like myself to much reading. This object lesson in consequences had little effect on me at the time; but later it was useful as a warning. Such teaching may have affected the Spartans, as we read that they taught their children temperance by showing them a drunken helot; but I want to lay stress on the fact I was first
