Desmond Coke has described in The Bending of a Twig, the middle years of a public school career as being slow to pass, but swift in retrospect. He devoted two chapters to them—'See-saw down' and 'See-saw up.' And those chapter headings convey more clearly than a long analysis the nature of that period. To begin with it is 'See-saw down.' The boy is confused with his new-found liberty; the future stretches endlessly before him. There is plenty of time. There is no need for hurry. And so he rags and wastes his time and makes, on the whole, a pretty general nuisance of himself. His house reports are worse at the end of every term. His parents grow worried; they remember the bright promise of that first term: the prize, the promotion, the glowing panegyric. The arrival of the blue envelope during the second week of the holidays is the occasion of considerable domestic stress. On such a morning one remembers that one has promised to spend the day with a friend at Richmond.

And then suddenly, when the revel is at its height, some chance incident or conversation forces a boy to realise that he has not so much time as he had thought, that the weeks are passing, that, already, the end has drawn close to him. Clifford Bax, in one of his many beautiful poems, has described a man's first appreciation of the approach of age.

In the same way the boy discovers that the half of his schooldays are at an end, that he has put them to little use. And, as the temporal quality of life drives the epicurean to gather with what eager haste he may, flowers that for him will soon have blossomed, the sense of passing days defines and directs for the schoolboy the course of ambition. It is perhaps the first moment of conscious thought, of objective reasoning. The days of unreflecting action are at an end. He is no longer a child playing in a nursery. He is a man, subject to the laws of time and space, a mortal man aware of his mortality.

Now this sudden change, which partakes of the nature of a conversion, owes its existence, as often as not, to some perfectly trivial occurrence. The stage is not set appropriately. There is no long heart to heart talk with a schoolmaster, a parent, or a friend at the end of which the boy leaps to his feet, claps his hand to his forehead, and exclaims: 'I see the evil of my ways.' Such dramatic moments, I suppose, take place occasionally, but they are the exception. The boy has reached that stage of his development when the idea of time can become an actuality to him, and some quite casual incident will bring this actuality before him.

It is possible, of course, that this reformation may be effected by a conversation. But it will be an unrehearsed effect. One is walking down to hall, and, through the open door of the changing room overhears some uncomplimentary statement of one's worth. The statement need not be made by a particular friend. Indeed, it will probably be more effective if it is not. We accept with composure the criticisms of our friends, our relatives, our enemies. Wherever there is an intimate relationship there is friction. We know that, at times, we must be intensely annoying to our friends, because they are at times so intensely annoying to ourselves. Little tricks, traits of character, intonations of the voice that we should hardly notice in those to whom we are indifferent, exasperate us in those for whom we care. We expect our friends at times to say nasty things about us. We are too conscious of our own delinquencies. But impersonal criticism is unpleasant; it is like an unfavourable review that is unsigned. If we cannot reassure ourselves with the knowledge that our assailant is either jealous of us or dislikes us, or thinks we pay too many attentions to his wife; if, that is to say, we can detect in this criticism no ulterior motive, but simply a dispassionate impersonal disapproval of ourselves and of our work, then we do indeed feel that the need for drastic self-criticism is immediate.

When, therefore, Jones on his way down to hall overhears Ferguson, who is in another form, who has never been brought into contact with him, who has no possible reason for feeling envious or jealous, remark that Jones is the sort of fellow whom the house could get on very well without, he goes quickly to his study and communes with himself.

At the beginning of my third year at school, when I was very happy, very light-hearted, very boisterous, and, I suppose, rather obnoxious generally, I was standing at the counter of the tuck shop waiting to be served with a poached egg and a sausage. I experienced considerable difficulty in catching the eye of the waitress, and for the better announcing of my presence I took a knife out of the basket and beat it upon the zinc covering of the counter. The waitress, who was harassed by the number of orders, turned round impatiently: 'Oh, do be quiet, Mr. Waugh,' she said, 'I don't know what's come over you lately. You used to be such a nice quiet boy when you first came.' Several people laughed, but her remark was a shock to me. I had not the slightest romantic interest in her. I did not care greatly what opinion she held of my moral worth, but I had not before realised that it was possible for a change of which I was myself ignorant to take place within me, that a process of degeneration could take its slow effect, altering me in the eyes of others, leaving me unaltered in my own, that, like rust on iron, environment could corrode temperament. That chance remark had a most profound effect on me. It gave me a sudden insight into the secret forces that lie under the surface of life. I do not know whether from the outside I appeared afterwards a different person. One cannot focus the impression one has of oneself and the impression one makes on others. But to myself I know that I was different. And some such revelation invariably comes to a boy during his period of school life.

In novels and stories we attribute it to some emotional crisis. The reason of the change is less important than that there should be change, and that the reader should be able to realise that for such a change there was a reason. But, actually, the reason is usually trivial enough. It may be that a boy's pride has been rebuffed; some one has got a house cap before him. He begins to reassure himself with the old dope: 'There is plenty of time. It doesn't matter. I'll catch him later on.' But for once the old dope does not work. He realises with a shock that there is less time than he had thought. He has allowed his rival to get too far ahead. A house cap is only two stages distant from a first. He may not have time to catch him up. In the light of the discovery he revises his whole career. He asks himself whither he is drifting. He sees that he has passed beyond the stage of a vague promise into one of definite rivalry and achievement.

The prospects of the beginner are always golden. His wares are not yet for sale in the open market. He has not entered into competition with his contemporaries. A young professional makes a century during his first month of first-class cricket and is immediately the object of generous enthusiasm. The reporter can write of him as ecstatically as he will. The professional has not yet reached representative cricket. At school a slow left-hand bowler takes eight wickets for twenty-seven in a house match. He is spoken of at once as the coming man. For another season he will continue to take wickets in house matches to the delight of every one. Then he will enter the lists of representative cricket. He will play on uppers, and it will have to be decided, not whether he is a good slow left-hand bowler, but whether he is better than Evans in Buller's, and Morrison in Wilkes's. It is so easy to say of a boy of fifteen: 'Some day he will be captain of the house.' We can all of us exclaim at the beginning of a Marathon: 'What a beautiful runner that fellow is.' It is after ten miles have been run and the runners have sorted themselves out that the real race begins. It is the appreciation of this moment that ends the 'see-saw down' period and sees the start of the 'see-saw up.'

It must not be imagined, however, that this process of see-saw up involves a complete moral, spiritual, and intellectual reformation; it sometimes does; more usually it means that the schoolboy looks at the same life from a different angle. His standards, his scale of values remain unaltered. He feels that he has not adjusted himself properly to their demands. He has been making an ass of himself: he has been ragging about, he has allowed opportunities to slip past him. 'It won't do,' he tells himself. 'I must stop all this. I must settle down.'

Such a resolution involves, to a certain extent, an appreciation of imminent responsibilities; a boy realises that a series of desperate escapades will prejudice his prospects of prefectship; it often results in the exchange of a positive for a negative manner of life. The Sixth Former, the potential scholar of Balliol, is spurred by such an experience to really hard work. For him a turning-point has been reached. It is different, however, for the second eleven colour who has reached the Lower Fifth after three years of spasmodic cribbing. He has been in the past a free-lance, an irresponsible ragster. He decides that the time has come for him to settle down. If the Lower Fifth is, as it often is, a comfortable backwater, he is content to rest there. He sits on a back bench, and plays an occasional part in the life of the form. While he was a ragster he had to work. A well-prepared lesson was his armour. Now that he no longer rags he need no longer work; he is content to be inoffensive, agreeable, somnolent. He considers that between himself and his form master there is an unwritten pact by which each agrees to leave the other alone. It is as though he said: 'Your time, Mr. Featherbrain, is fully occupied between the ragsters and the industrious. You have to keep a constant watch upon the ragster. You have to teach the industrious. That is a whole-time job. Why worry about me? You need not keep a watch upon me. It is agreed that I shall do no ragging. And why try to teach me anything. Your energies are wasted upon me. I don't want to learn anything. You may lead a horse to the water, you know. Why worry yourself and me! There are all those other fellows who want to learn.' And the master, usually, signs the contract. He is a busy man. The temptation is very great. He excuses himself in the common room by speaking of 'fellows like dear old Thomas; good-natured chaps, but with absolutely no brains. Latin and Greek are flung away on them. But they'll make fine empire builders.' And so the boy who has settled down spends the greater part of his day wool-gathering in vacuous laziness. To nothing that happens between chapel and lunch can he bring the least enthusiasm. His thoughts are fixed on the more thrilling encounters of the football field. His whole life, indeed, is centred on sport, and on the most entertaining methods he can discover for the better employing of his spare time. All his energy, all his enthusiasm, is concentrated into one, or perhaps two, focuses. It is not surprising that he should become tolerably proficient at games and a source of moral anxiety to prefects and house masters.

Is the pursuit of athletic success a sufficiently engrossing occupation for such a boy? That is the question that a house master unconsciously puts to himself. He must put it to himself, but his attitude to this particular type of boy is based on a non-committal answer to this question: the answer—'Perhaps; but it's up to you.' The house master, therefore, does all in his power to persuade the boy that the acquiring of a First Fifteen cap is his immediate object in life. He will not state his case in words; but he will omit the uncomfortable topic of form work in conversations, and discuss at length the prospects of the house in the senior matches. If he does not succeed in directing the entire energy of the boy on games, the results of such a failure may be disastrous. A fellow of seventeen who has nothing particular to do is bound to find himself in mischief. This fact is realised by both parents and house masters, and those boys who are good neither at games nor work usually leave at about this period. It is the falling out of the unsuccessful runner in a long race. It is no good going on. The leaders are too far ahead. The gap between the senior and the junior is thus considerably increased. The stepping-stones have been removed. A boy of eighteen at the start of his last year sees very few of his contemporaries sitting at the Sixth Form table. Of the eight or nine boys who came there with him, only three are left, and the Fifth Form table is filled by fellows two or three years junior to himself, with whom he has but a slight acquaintance. It is always the 'blood' who is asked to stop on that extra year. The insignificant are encouraged by silence to retire.

By the time the boy comes to be a prefect he is able to feel himself supreme, not only because of the system that is at his back.