Read Online Noble in Reason by Phyllis Bentley - Free Book Online

possibility of failure, in order to keep my nerves taut and my mind concentrated, while in my heart of hearts I believed I should succeed. My outward modesty of demeanour, however, deceived my family, so that they were astonished when I triumphed—and I, of course, was offended by their astonishment.
    I went to this Northchester school, new to me but of ancientfoundation, determined not to repeat my failure in Hudley. At all costs, I said to myself as, pale and excited, I boarded the train the first morning of that autumn term, at all costs I will be like other people this time. But immediately I withdrew this unqualified adherence to the normal. No, I said stubbornly if confusedly to myself, not at all costs. Even to be normal, even to escape persecution, even—absurd hope—to be liked, I would not sacrifice my love of literature. That came first. But almost everything else could be cast before the Moloch of conformity.
    In the event, no such sacrifice was demanded of me. I found myself in a class of lads, mostly older than myself, who took schoolwork seriously because examinations loomed ahead on which the whole course of their lives depended. Accordingly every weekday was a joy to me. The solitary early rising in the dark; the tea drunk at ease alone; the rush down the long hill, where on all sides the mill chimneys were pouring out the black smoke of the first firing of the day; the swift powerful train, to catch which gave me a daily sensation of heroic achievement; the adventurous journey along the winding Pennine valleys between stern hills which gradually closed upon us until at last they barred our way and we plunged into the romantically named Summit Tunnel; the excellent teaching, the ever-widening horizon of one’s knowledge, the exultant expansion of one’s faculties; the justice and decency and reasonableness of school procedure; above all, the sense of separation from my family, all of whom were quite unknown to my schoolfellows—all this was bliss to me. I believed myself to be weighed down with work and took a very serious view of my responsibilities to my time-table, but even then I knew that I had found an environment exactly suited to the Chris Jarmayne organism and was enjoying happiness.
    Unfortunately I did not enjoy this fruitful milieu long; I was torn away from it at the end of my first term.
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    Looking back at this brief experience, I have nothing to add or alter to my feelings then: only to confirm them by what may be regarded as a somewhat sinister fact. The buildings of the Northchester Grammar School, combined with the courtyard of an old Norman castle I had visited with Henry when his old bicycle descended to me, became, when I had left them for ever, the scene of my most vivid and permanent daydream. Even to-day, in moments of distress, anxiety, fatigue or sleeplessness, I visit them from time to time. School, then, was for twenty, thirty years the beloved “other place”, the “private garden”, the abode desired above all others by my heart. In its early form homosexual, this dream soon took on the heterosexual character natural to my development; but the relations of the boys and girls in this co-educational establishment were governed by rules, preposterously distorted of course in order to allow certain (always incomplete) sexual satisfactions but yet modelled on the lines of a traditional public school—as a novelist may model the manners and customs of an imaginary or even fantastic country, Ruritania or Costaguana or Animal Farm, on those of a real nation.
    I need not, perhaps, say how bitterly I regret this youthful fantasy which hardened into permanence. I understand now all its implications of infantilism, of flight from manhood, its shirking of adult behaviour and responsibilities, its inhibiting and sterilizing power. Perhaps if I had not been torn away so soon from Northchester its grip would have been less tenacious, its fangs would