I

Under this comprenhensive title the schoolboy groups the whole of his relatives, of both sexes.

"Are your people coming for Speech Day?" inquires Master Smith of Master Brown.

"Yes, worse luck!"

"It is a bore," agrees Smith. "I wanted you to come and sit with me."

"Sorry!" says Brown, and the matter ends. It never occurs to Brown to invite Smith to join the family party. Such a proceeding would be unheard of. A schoolboy with his "people" in tow neither expects nor desires the society of his friends. His father may be genial, his mother charming, his sister pretty; but in the jaundiced eyes of their youthful host they are nothing more or less than a gang of lepers—to be segregated from all communication with the outer world; to be conveyed from one point to another as stealthily as possible; and above all to be kept out of the way of masters.

Later in life, say at the University, this diffidence disappears. A pretty sister becomes an asset; a pearl of price; a bait for luncheon parties and a trap for theatre-tickets. Even a father, provided he does not wear a made-up tie or take off his hat to the Dons, is tolerated. But at school—never! Why?

The reason is that it is almost impossible to give one's "people" their heads when on a visit to School without opening the way for breaches of etiquette and social outrages of the most deplorable kind. Left to themselves, fathers are addicted to entering into conversation with casual masters—especially masters who in the eyes of a boy are too magnificent to be approached or too despicable to be noticed. Mothers have been known to make unsolicited overtures to some School potentate—yea, even the Captain of the Eleven—because he happens to have curly hair or be wearing a pretty blazer. Sisters are capable of extending what the Lower School terms "the R.S.V.P. eye" to the meanest and most insignificant fag. These solecisms shame Master Brown to his very soul. Consequently he keeps his relatives in relentlessly close order, herding them across the quadrangle under a running fire of admonition and reproof.

"Yes, Dad, that's the Head. Look the other way, or he'll notice you.... For goodness sake, Mum, don't stop and talk to this fellow: he's in the Boat. Who is that dear little boy with brown eyes? Great Scott, how should I know all the rotten little ticks in the Lower School?...Sis, what on earth did you go smiling and grinning at that chap for? He is a master. He took his hat off? Well, you must have begun it, that's all! Think what an outsider he must consider you!... What, Mum? Who are these two nice-looking boys sitting on that bench? Not so loud! They're the Captain of the Eleven and the Secretary. Will I ask them to tea to amuse Dolly? Certainly, if you don't mind my leaving the School for good to-morrow morning!...This is the cricket-ground. No, you can't go and sit in the shade under those trees: it is fearful side to go there. Stay about here. If you see any people you know, from Town or anywhere, you can talk to them; but whatever you do, don't go making up to chaps. I'll find young Griffin for you if you like. He'll be pretty sick; but he knows you in the holidays, so I suppose he has got to go through it. Sit here. Perhaps you had better not speak to anybody while I'm away, whether you know them or not. Sis, remember about not making eyes at fellows. They don't like that sort of thing from young girls: they're different from your pals in Hyde Park; so hold yourself in. I'll be back in a minute."

Then he departs in search of the reluctant Griffin.

The only member of the staff to whom a boy permits his "people" to address themselves is his Housemaster. Him he regards as inevitable; and consents gloomily to conduct his tainted band to a ceremonial tea in the Housemaster's drawing-room. There he sits miserably upon the edge of a chair, masticating cake, and hoping against hope that the ceremony will end before his relatives have said or done something particularly disastrous.

He is conscious, too, of a sad falling-off in his own demeanour. Ten minutes ago he was a miniature Grand Turk, patronising his parents and ruffling it over his sister. Now he is a rather grubby little hobbledehoy, conscious of large feet and red hands, mumbling "Yes, sir," and "No, sir," to a man whom he has been accustomed to represent to his family as being wax in his hands and a worm in his presence.

An observant philosopher once pointed out that in every man there are embedded three men: first, the man as he appears to himself; second, the man as he appears to others; third, the man as he really is. This classification of points of view is particularly applicable to the scholastic world. Listen, for instance, to Master Smith, describing to an admiring circle of sisters and young brothers a scene from school life as it is lived in the Junior Remove.

"Is the work difficult? Bless you, we don't do any work: we just rot Duck-face. We simply rag his soul out. What do we do to him? Oh, all sorts of things. What sort? Well, the other day he started up his usual song about the necessity of absolute attention and concentration—great word of Duck-face's, concentration—and gave me an impot for not keeping my eyes fixed on him all the time he was jawing. I explained to him that anybody who attempted such a feat would drop down dead in five minutes. How dare I say such a thing to a master? Well, I didn't say it in so many words, but he knew what I meant all right. He got pretty red. After that I tipped the wink to the other chaps, and we all stared at him till he simply sweated. Oh, we give him a rotten time!"

Mr. Duckworth's version of the incident, in the Common Room, ran something like this.

"What's that, Allnutt? How is young Smith getting on? Let me see—Smith? Oh, that youth! I remember him now. Well, he strikes me as being not far removed from the idiot type, but he is perfectly harmless. I don't expect ever to teach him anything, of course, but he gives no trouble. He is quite incapable of concentrating his thoughts on anything for more than five minutes without constant ginger from me. I had to drop rather heavily upon him this morning, and the results were most satisfactory. He was attentive for quite half an hour. But he's a dull customer."

What really happened was this. Mr. Duckworth, who was a moderate disciplinarian and an extremely uninspiring teacher, had occasion to set Master Smith fifty lines for inattention. Master Smith, glaring resentfully and muttering muffled imprecations—symptoms of displeasure which Mr. Duckworth, who was a man of peace at any price, studiously ignored—remained comparatively attentive for the rest of the hour and ultimately showed up the lines.

All this time we have left our young friend Master Brown sitting upon the edge of a chair in his Housemaster's drawing-room, glaring defiantly at everyone and wondering what awful thing his "people" are saying now.

Occasionally scraps of conversation reach his ears. (He is sitting over by the window with his sister.) His mother is doing most of the talking. The heads of her discourse appear in the main to be two—the proper texture of her son's undergarments, and the state of his soul. The Housemaster, when he gets a chance, replies soothingly. The Matron shall be instructed to see that nothing is discarded prematurely during the treacherous early summer: he himself will take steps to have Reggie—the boy blushes hotly at the sound of his Christian name on alien lips—prepared for confirmation with the next batch of candidates.

Occasionally his father joins in.

"I expect we can safely leave that question to Mr. Allnutt's discretion, Mary," he observes drily. "After all, Reggie is not the only boy in the House."

"No, I am sure he is not," concedes Mrs. Brown. "But I know you won't object to hear the mother's point of view, will you, Mr. Allnutt?"

"I fancy Mr. Allnutt has heard the mother's point of view once or twice before," interpolates Mr. Brown, with a sympathetic smile in the direction of the Housemaster.

"Now, John," says Mrs. Brown playfully, "don't interfere! Mr. Allnutt and I understand one another perfectly, don't we, Mr. Allnutt?" She takes up her parable again with renewed zest. "You see, Mr. Allnutt, what I mean is, you are a bachelor. You have never had any young people to bring up, so naturally you can't quite appreciate, as I can——"

Mr. Allnutt, who has brought up about fifty "young people" per annum for fifteen years, smiles wanly, and bows to the storm. Master Brown, almost at the limit of human endurance, glances despairingly at his sister. That tactful young person grasps the situation, and endeavours to divert the conversation.

"What pretty cups those are on that shelf," she says in a clear voice to her brother. "Are they Mr. Allnutt's prizes?"

"Yes," replies Master Brown, with a sidelong glance towards his Housemaster. But that much-enduring man takes no notice: his attention is still fully occupied by Mrs. Brown, whom he now darkly suspects of having a suitable bride for him concealed somewhere in her peroration.

Master Brown and his sister rise to inspect the collection of trophies more closely.

"What a lot he has got," says Miss Brown, in an undertone now. "Was he a great athlete?"

"He thinks he was. When he gets in a bait over anything it is always a sound plan to get him to talk about one of these rotten things. I once got off a tanning by asking him how many times he had been Head of the River. As a matter of fact, most of these are prizes for chess, or tricycling, or something like that."

So the joyous libel proceeds. Master Reggie is beginning to cheer up a little.

"What is that silver bowl for?" inquires his sister.

"Ah, it takes him about half an hour to tell you about that. They won the race by two feet in record time, and he was in a dead faint for a week afterwards. As a matter of fact, Bailey tertius, whose governor was up at Oxford with the old Filbert"—etymologists will have no difficulty in tracing this synonym to its source—"says that he saw the race, and that Filbert caught a crab and lost his oar about five yards from the start and was a passenger all the way. The men on the bank yelled to him to jump out, but he was in too big a funk of being drowned, and wouldn't. Of course he doesn't know we know!" And so the joyous libel proceeds.

And yet, in Reggie Brown's last half-term report we find the words:

A conscientious, but somewhat stolid and unimaginative boy.

II

But "people" do not visit the School solely for the purpose of bringing social disaster upon their offspring. Their first visit, at any rate, is of a very different nature. On this occasion they come in the capacity of what Headmasters call "prospective parents"—that is, parents who propose to inspect the School with a view to entering a boy—and as such are treated with the deference due to imperfectly hooked fish.

The prospective parent varies considerably. Sometimes he is an old member of the School, and his visit is a purely perfunctory matter. He knows every inch of the place. He lunches with the Head, has a talk about old times, and mentions with proper pride that yet another of his boys is now of an age to take up his nomination for his father's old House.

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Then comes another type—the youthful parent. Usually he brings his wife with him. He is barely forty, and has not been near a school since he left his own twenty years ago. His wife is pretty, and not thirty-five. Both feel horribly juvenile in the presence of the Head. They listen deferentially to the great man's pontifical observations upon the requirements of modern education, and answer his queries as to their firstborn's age and attainments with trembling exactitude.

"I think we shall be able to lick him into shape," concludes the Head, with gracious jocularity. It is mere child's play to him, handling parents of this type.

Then the male bird plucks up courage, and timidly asks a leading question. The Head smiles.

"Ah!" he remarks. "Now you are laying an invidious task upon me. Who am I, to discriminate between my colleagues' Houses?"

The young parents apologise precipitately, but the Head says there is no need. In fact, he goes so far as to recommend a House—in strict confidence.

"Between ourselves," he says, "I consider that the man here at the present moment is Mr. Rotterson. Send your boy to him. I believe he has a vacancy for next term, but you had better see him at once. I will give you a note for him now. There you are! Good morning!"

Off hurry the anxious pair. But the telephone outstrips them.

"Is that you, Rotterson?" says the Head. "I have just despatched a brace of parents to you. Impress them! There are prospects of more to-morrow, so with any luck we ought to be able to pull up your numbers to a decent level after all."

"Thank you very much," says a meek voice at the other end.

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Then there is the bluff, hearty parent—the man who knows exactly what he wants, and does not hesitate to say so.

"I don't want my son taught any of your new-fangled nonsense," he explains breezily. "Just a good sound education, without frills! The boy will have to earn his own living afterwards, and I want you to teach him something which will enable him to do so. Don't go filling him up with Latin and Greek: give him something which will be useful in an office. I know you pedagogues stick obstinately to what you call a good general grounding; but, if I may say so, you ought to specialise a bit more. You're too shy of specialisation, you know. But I say: Find out what each boy in your School requires for his future career, and teach him that!"

A Headmaster once replied to a parent of this description:

"Unfortunately, sir, the fees of this school and the numbers of its Staff are calculated upon a table d'hÔte basis. If you want to have your son educated À la carte, you must get a private tutor for him."

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Then there is the Utterly Impossible parent. He is utterly impossible for one of two reasons—either because he is a born faddist, or because he has relieved Providence of a grave responsibility by labelling himself "A Self-Made Man, and Proud of It!"

The faddist is the sort of person who absorbs Blue Books without digesting them, and sits upon every available Board without growing any wiser, and cherishes theories of his own about non-competitive examinations, and cellular underclothing, and the use of graphs, and, generally speaking, about every subject on which there is no particular reason why the layman should hold any opinions at all. Such a creature harries the scholastic profession into premature senility. Him the Head always handles in the same fashion. He delivers him over at the first opportunity to a Housemaster, and the Housemaster promptly takes him out on to the cricket-field and, having introduced him to the greatest bore upon the Staff, leaves the pair together to suffer the fate of the Kilkenny cats.

The other sort of Utterly Impossible is not so easily scotched. The ordinary snubs of polite society are not for him. He is a plain man, he mentions, and likes to put things on a business footing. Putting things on a business footing seems to necessitate—no one knows why—a recital of the plain man's early struggles, together with a resumÉ of his present bank-balance and directorships. Not infrequently he brings his son with him, and having deposited that shrinking youth on a chair under the eyes both of the Head and himself, proceeds to run over his points with enormous gusto and unparental impartiality.

"There he is!" he bellows. "Now you've got him! Ram it into him! Learn him to be a scholar, and I'll pay any bill you like to send in. I've got the dibs. He's not a bad lad, as lads go, but he wants his jacket dusted now and then. My father dusted mine regular every Saturday night for fifteen year, and it made me the man I am. I'm worth——"

A condensed Budget follows. Then the harangue is resumed.

"So don't spare the rod—that's what I say. Learn him all that a scholar ought to be learned. If he wants books, get them, and put them down to me. I can pay for them. And at the end of the year, if he gets plucked in his examinations, you send him home to me, and I'll bile him!"

The plain man breaks off, and glares with ferocious affection upon his offspring. All this while the shrewd Head has been observing the boy's demeanour; and if he decides that the exuberance of his papa has not been inherited to an ineradicable extent, he accepts the cowering youth and does his best for him. As a rule he is justified in his judgment.

Lastly comes a novel and quite inexplicable variant of the species. It owes its existence entirely to journalistic enterprise.

Little Tommy Snooks, we will say, arrives home one afternoon in a taxi in the middle of term, and announces briefly but apprehensively to his parents that he has been "sacked." He is accompanied or preceded by a letter from his Headmaster, expressing genuine sorrow for the occurrence, and adding that though it has been found necessary for the sake of discipline to remove Master Thomas from the School, his offence has not been such as to involve any moral stigma. Little Tommy's parents, justly incensed that their offspring should have been expelled from school without incurring any moral stigma, write demanding instant reparation. The Headmaster, in his reply, states that Thomas has been expelled because he has broken a certain rule, the penalty for breaking which happens to be—and is known to be—expulsion. VoilÀ tout. In other words, he has been expelled, not for smoking or drinking or breaking bounds (or whatever he may happen to have done), but for deliberately and wantonly flying in the face of the Law which prohibits these misdemeanours. Either Tommy must go, or the Law be rendered futile and ridiculous.

This paltry and frivolous attempt to evade the real point at issue—which appears to be that many people, including Tommy's parents and the Headmaster himself, smoke, drink, and go out after dark and are none the worse—is treated with the severity which it deserves. A letter is despatched, consigning the Headmaster to scholastic perdition. The Headmaster briefly acknowledges receipt, and suggests that the correspondence should now cease.

So far the campaign has followed well-defined and perfectly natural lines, for a parent is seldom disposed to take his boy's expulsion "lying down." But at this point the new-style parent breaks right away from tradition—kicks over the traces, in fact. Despatching that slightly dazed but on the whole deeply gratified infant martyr, Master Tommy, to salve outraged nature at an adjacent Picture Palace, the parent sits down at his (or her) desk and unmasks the whole dastardly conspiracy to a halfpenny newspaper of wide circulation. "I do this," he explains, "not from any feeling of animosity towards the Headmaster of the School, but in order to clear my son's good name and fair fame in the eyes of the world." This is interesting and valuable news to the world, which has not previously heard of Tommy Snooks. The astute editor of the halfpenny paper, with a paternal smile upon his features and his tongue in his cheek, publishes the letter in a conspicuous position—if things in the football and political world happen to be particularly dull, he sometimes finds room for Tommy's photograph too—and invites general correspondence on the subject.

Few parents can resist such an opportunity; and for several weeks the editor is supplied, free gratis, with a column of diversified but eminently saleable matter. The beauty of a controversy of this kind is that you can debate upon almost any subject without being pulled up for irrelevance. Parents take full advantage of this licence. Some contribute interesting legends of their children's infancy. Others plunge into a debate upon punishment in general, and the old battle of cane, birch, slipper, imposition, detention, and moral suasion is fought over again. This leads to a discussion as to whether public schools shall or shall not be abolished—by whom, is not stated. Presently the national reserve of retired colonels is mobilised, and fiery old gentlemen write from Cheltenham to say that in their young days boys were boys and not molly-coddles. Old friends like Materfamilias, Pro Bono Publico, Quis Custodiet Custodes rush into the fray with joyous whoops. There is quite a riot of pseudonyms: the only person who gives his proper name (and address) is the headmaster of a small preparatory school, who contributes a copy of his prospectus, skilfully disguised as a treatise on "How to Preserve Home Influences at School."

But the boom is short-lived. Presently a crisis arises in some other department of our national life. Something cataclysmal happens to the House of Commons, or the Hippodrome, or Tottenham Hotspur. Public attention is diverted; the correspondence is closed with cruel abruptness; and little Tommy Snooks is summoned from the Picture Palace, and sent to another school or provided with a private tutor. Still, his good name and fair fame are now vindicated in the eyes of the world.

But it is not altogether surprising that the great Temple should once have observed:

"Boys are always reasonable; masters sometimes; parents never!"

III

Correspondence between school and home is conducted upon certain well-defined lines. A boy writes home every Sunday: his family may write to him when they please and as often as they please. But—they must never send postcards.

Postcards in public schools are common property. Many a new boy's promising young life has been overclouded at the very outset by the arrival of some such maternal indiscretion as this:

"Dearest Artie" usually comes into possession of this missive after it has been passed from hand to hand, with many joyous comments, the whole length of the Lower School breakfast-table. He may not hear the last of the vests and Baby for months.

As for writing home, a certain elasticity of method is essential. In addressing one's father, it is advisable to confine oneself chiefly to the topic of one's studies. Money should not be asked for, but references to the Classics may be introduced with advantage, and perhaps a fair copy of one's last Latin prose enclosed. The father will not be able to understand or even read it; but this will not prevent him from imagining that he could have done so thirty years ago; and his heart will glow with the reminiscent enthusiasm of the retired scholar.

Mothers may be addressed with more freedom. Small financial worries may be communicated, and it is a good plan to dwell resignedly but steadily upon the insufficiency of the food supplied by the School authorities. Health topics may be discussed, especially in so far as they touch upon the question of extra diet.

Sisters appreciate School gossip and small talk of any kind.

Young brothers may be impressed with daredevil tales of masters put to rout and prefects "ragged" to death.

The appended dossier furnishes a fairly comprehensive specimen of the art. It is entitled:

THE BIRTHDAY

Correspondence addressed to Master E. Bumpleigh,
Mr. Killick's House, Grandwich School

No. I

(Reply.

No. II

(Reply.

No. III

(Reply.

No. IV

(Reply.

No. V

(Reply.

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Extract from the Catalogue of the Killickite House Library, Grandwich School:

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