imes I would fill the shadows of
the dormitory with the familiar furniture of my little bedroom at
home, and pretend that I was happy. But as a rule I came to bed
brimming over with the day's tears, and I would pull the bedclothes
over my head so that the other boys should not know that I was
homesick, and cry until I was sticky with tears and perspiration.

The discipline at school did not make us good boys, but it made us
civilised; it taught us to conceal our crimes. And as home-sickness
was justly regarded as a crime of ingratitude to the authorities and
to society in general, I had to restrain my physical weakness during
the day, and the reaction from this restraint made my tears at night
almost a luxury. My longing for home was founded on trifles, but it
was not the less passionate. I hated this life spent in walking on
bare boards, and the blank walls and polished forms of the school
appeared to me to be sordid. When now and again I went into one of
the master's studies and felt a carpet under my feet, and saw a
pleasant litter of pipes and novels lying on the table, it seemed to
me that I was in a holy place, and I looked at the hearthrug, the
wallpaper, and the upholstered chairs with a kind of desolate love
for things that were nice to see and touch. 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