The Loom of Youth

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THE LOOM OF YOUTH

"Well, I mean there's Davenham now and--"

"Davenham!" came the scornful retort. "What does it matter what
happens to Davenham? He's absolutely useless to the House,
rotten at games and spends his whole time reading about
fossils. Who cares a curse about Davenham!"

"Oh I suppose you're right, but--"

"My dear ass, of course I am right. Meredith is a simply
glorious fellow. Do you remember the way he brought down
Freeman in the Two Cock? Why, the House simply couldn't get on
without him."

To Gordon all this conveyed very little. He had no idea who
Meredith or Davenham were. The only thing he realised was that
for those who wore a blue and gold ribbon laws ceased to exist.
It was apparently rather advantageous to get into the Fifteen.
He had not looked on athletics in that light before. Obviously
his preparatory school had failed singularly to keep level with
the times. He had always been told by the masters there that
games were only important for training the body. But at
Fernhurst they seemed the one thing that mattered. To the
athlete all things are forgiven. There was clearly a lot to
learn.

"To him who desireth much, much is given; and to him who
desireth little, little is given; but to neither according to
the letter of his desire."

GILBERT CANNAN

_The Loom of Youth_

ALEC WAUGH

Methuen

First published in Great Britain 1917
Reprinted July 1917, August 1917, September 1917 (twice)
November 1917, January 1918, March 1918, October 1918,
1919, 1921, 1930, 1933, 1945
Cassell's Pocket Library, 1928
Penguin Abridged Edition, 1942
New edition reset and revised 1955
Reprinted 1972

This edition published 1984
by Methuen London Ltd
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Copyright (c) Alec Waugh 1917
ISBN 0 413 54970 4 (hardback)
ISBN 0 413 54980 1 (paperback)

Printed and bound in Great Britain
by Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd
Bungay, Suffolk

This book is available in both a hardcover and paperback edition. The
paperback is solid subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated
without the Publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

* * * * *

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected in text. There is
one place where a subscript is used and is designated by an underscore
and curly brackets thus: H_{2}O.

* * * * *

_Dedicatory Letter to Arthur Waugh_

My Dear Father,

This book, which I am bringing you, is a very small return for all you
have given me. In every mood, in every phase of my shifting pilgrimage,
I have found you ever the same--loving, sympathetic, wise. You have been
with me in my success, and in my happiness, in my failures and in my
disappointments, in the hours when I have followed wandering fires.
There has never yet come to me a moment when I did not know that I had
but to stretch out my hand to find you at my side. In return for so
much, this first book of mine is a very small offering.

But yet I bring it to you, simply because it is my first. For whatever
altars I may have raised by the wayside, whatever ephemeral loyalties
may have swayed me, my one real lodestar has always been your love, and
sympathy, and guidance. And as in life it has always been to you first
that I have brought my troubles, my aims, my hopes, so in the world of
ideas it is to you that I would bring this, the first-born of my dreams.

Accept it. For it carries with it the very real and very deep love of a
most grateful son.

A.W.

CONTENTS

Preface _page_ 9

BOOK I: WARP AND WOOF

I Groping 15

II Finding his Feet 21

III The New Philosophy 31

IV New Faces 44

V Emerging 52

VI Clarke 62

VII When One is in Rome 69

BOOK II: THE TANGLED SKEIN

I Quantum Mutatus 79

II Healthy Philistinism 102

III Tin Gods 119

IV Through a Glass Darkly 130

BOOK III: UNRAVELLING THE THREADS

I Common Room Faces 134

II Carnival 169

III Broadening Outlook 179

IV Thirds 185

V Dual Personality 196

VI The Games Committee 200

VII Rebellion 208

VIII The Dawning of many Dreams 213

BOOK IV: THE WEAVING

I The Twilight of the Gods 226

II Setting Stars 239

III Romance 242

IV The Dawn of Nothing 249

V The Things that Seem 259

VI The Tapestry Completed 277

PREFACE TO NEW EDITION

Books have their fates and this one's has been curious. I wrote it
between January and March 1916, when I was seventeen and a half years
old and in camp at Berkhamsted with the Inns of Court O.T.C. I loathed
it there, everything about it, the impersonal military machine, the
monotonous routine of drills and musketry, the endless foot-slogging,
the perpetual petty fault-finding. I kept comparing my present life with
that which I had been leading ten, eighteen, thirty months ago at
Sherborne, as a schoolboy.

My four years there had been very happy. I was the kind of a boy who
gets the most out of a public school. I loved cricket and football and
was reasonably good at them. I was in the first XV and my last summer
headed the batting averages. My father had lit in me a love of poetry
and an interest in history and the classics. More often than not I went
into a class-room looking forward to the hour that lay ahead. I enjoyed
the whole competitive drama of school life--the cups and caps and form
promotions. As I marched as a cadet over Ashridge Park I remembered that
a year ago I had been bicycling down to the football field for a punt
about on Upper. As I listened to a lecture on the establishment of an
infantry brigade, I thought of the sixth form sitting under that fine
scholar and Wordsworthian Nowell Smith to a discussion of Victorian
poetry. In the evenings on my way to night operations, passing
Berkhamsted School and looking at the lighted windows, I would think,
"At Sherborne now they are sitting round the games study fire waiting
for the bell to ring for hall". Day by day, hour by hour, I pictured
myself back at school.

I was in a nostalgic mood, but I was also in a rebellious mood.
Intensely though I had enjoyed my four years at Sherborne, I had been in
constant conflict with authority. That conflict, so it seemed to me, had
been in the main caused and determined by authority's inability or
refusal to recognise the true nature of school life. The Public School
system was venerated as a pillar of the British Empire and out of that
veneration had grown a myth of the ideal Public School boy--Kipling's
Brushwood Boy. In no sense had I incarnated such a myth and it had been
responsible, I felt, for half my troubles. I wanted to expose it. Those
moods of nostalgia and rebellion fused finally in an imperious need to
relive my school days on paper, to put it all down, term by term,
exactly as it had been, to explain, interpret, justify my point of view.

I wrote the book in six and a half weeks, getting up at half past four
every morning and returning to my manuscript at night after the day's
parades. I posted it, section by section, to my father who corrected the
spelling and punctuation, interjected an occasional phrase and sent it
to be typed. I never revised it. As the manuscript shows, it was printed
as it was written, paragraph by paragraph.

The book after two or three refusals was accepted by Grant Richards and
published in July 1917 in the same week that I was posted as a
machine-gun second-lieutenant to the B.E.F. in France. It could not have
come out under luckier auspices. It had an immediate news value. There
was a boom in soldier poets. Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert
Nichols, W.J. Turner had recently made their debuts. Here was a soldier
novelist, the first and in his teens. As always in war-time there was a
demand for books and there was that summer a dearth of novels. A spirit
of challenge and criticism was in the air. The war after three years was
still "bogged down" and public opinion attributed allied failings in the
field to mismanagement in high places. The rebelliousness of _The Loom
of Youth_ was in tune with the temper of the hour. Finally I had the
immense advantage of being the son of Arthur Waugh. My father as a
critic and a publisher was one of the most loved and respected figures
in the world of letters. Many were anxious to give his son a chance.

The book had a flattering reception. Nothing of any particular interest
was being published at the moment and reviewers welcomed it. J.C.
Squire, Gerald Gould, Ralph Straus, C.K. Scott-Moncrieff, E.B. Osborn,
all made it their book of the week. Nor was it noticed only in the book
sections. Richards had suggested that Thomas Seccombe who was then
history professor at Sandhurst and had introduced the book to him,
should write a preface. That preface discussed the Public School system
in the light of contemporary events. The system, Seccombe wrote, "has
fairly helped, you may say, to get us out of the mess of August 1914.
Yes, but it contributed heavily to get us into it." The preface
encouraged and helped a journalist to use the book as the text for a
general article. Within a month it had received twenty-four columns of
reviews and was in its third impression. Grant Richards told my father
that with any luck he would sell five thousand copies.

That was at the end of the August. Three weeks later the schools went
back and half the housemasters in the country found their desks littered
with letters from anxious parents demanding an assurance that their
Bobbie was not subject to the temptations described in this alarming
book. In self-defence the schoolmasters hit back and by mid-November the
book had become the centre of violent controversy. In many schools the
book was banned and several boys were caned for reading it. Canon Edward
Lyttleton, the ex-headmaster of Eton, wrote a ten-page article in _The
Contemporary_--then an influential monthly--explaining how biased and
partial a picture the school gave. _The Spectator_ ran for ten weeks and
_The Nation_ for six a correspondence filling three or four pages an
issue in which schoolmaster after schoolmaster asserted that whatever
might be true of "Fernhurst", at his school it was all very different.
Grant Richards adeptly fanned the conflagration. He had initiated that
summer an original style of advertising. He inserted each week in the
_Times Literary Supplement_ a half column of gossip about his books and
authors. It was set in small heavy black type, and caught the eye.
Richards was a good writer and it was very readable. He was, I think,
the first publisher to exploit the publicity value of unfavourable
comment. Richard Hughes, at that time in the sixth form at Charterhouse,
wrote, as his weekly essay, an attack on _The Loom of Youth_. His form
master, Dames Longworth, a fine old Tory, sent it up to _The Spectator_,
as a counterblast to such "pernicious stuff". Next week Grant Richards
quoted him. Mr Dames Longworth called the book "pernicious stuff", but
Clement Shorter prophesied in _The Sphere_ that it would prove "the
Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Public School system". By Christmas the book
was a best seller.

A modern reader will wonder what all this fuss and indignation was
about. Two points are to be remembered. First that before World War I
Britain's imperial destiny was never questioned, and the Public School
system as a bulwark of Empire was held sacrosanct. Second that no book
before _The Loom of Youth_ had accepted as part of the fabric of School
life the inevitable emotional consequences of a monastic herding
together for eight months of the year of thirteen year old children and
eighteen year old adolescents. On that issue such a complete conspiracy
of silence had been maintained that when fathers were asked by their
wives, and schoolmasters by parents who had not themselves been at
public schools whether "such things really could take place", the only
defence was a grudging admission, "Perhaps in a bad house, in a bad
school, in a bad time."

I followed the controversy with mixed feelings. I was delighted of
course at the book's success. At the same time I was distressed at being
accused of having libelled the school where I had been so happy, to
which I was so devoted, and to so many of whose masters--in particular
its headmaster--I owed so much.

Well, that is all a long long time ago, and usually nothing is more dead
and dated than the book which once caused controversy. Yet _The Loom of
Youth_ has continued to sell steadily from one year to the next; in 1928
it was included in Cassell's Pocket Library; in 1942 it was issued as a
Penguin and now that the original plates are wearing out, Mr Martin
Secker and the directors of The Richards Press feel that it is worth
their while to reset the type and give the book another lease of life. I
hope that their confidence will be justified. If it is, it will be for
reasons very different from those which made _The Loom of Youth_ a best
seller in 1917. The modern reader will find nothing here to shock or
startle him. Several years ago a friend was reading the book in my
company. "When do I reach _the_ scene?" he asked. I looked over his
shoulder. "You've passed it, ten pages back," I told him. At the same
time the book is not presented as a "period piece". Though England
to-day is a different country, socially and economically, from what it
was in 1911 when I went to Sherborne, I do not think that in essentials
the life of the Public School boy has greatly changed. Most schools are
larger than they were, but they have retained the same traditions and
ideals; there is the same atmosphere of rivalry and competing loyalties;
youth has the same basic problems, is fired by the same ambitions, beset
by the same doubts. And if the modern reader, after turning a page or
two finds his attention held and wants to go on reading, it will mean
that this book has become at last what in fact it was always meant to
be--a realistic but romantic story of healthy adolescence set against
the background of an average English Public School.

April, 1954.

Alec Waugh

BOOK I: WARP AND WOOF

"While I lived I sought no wings,
Schemed no heaven, planned no hell;
But, content with little things,
Made an earth and it was well."

RICHARD MIDDLETON.

CHAPTER I: GROPING

There comes some time an end to all things, to the good and to the bad.
And at last Gordon Caruthers' first day at school, which had so combined
excitement and depression as to make it unforgettable, ended also.
Seldom had he felt such a supreme happiness as when he stepped out at
Fernhurst station, and between his father and mother walked up the
broad, white road that led past the Eversham Hotel to the great grey
Abbey, that watches as a sentinel over the dreamy Wessex town. There are
few schools in England more surrounded with the glamour of mediaeval days
than Fernhurst. Founded in the eighth century by a Saxon saint, it was
the abode of monks till the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Then after a
short interregnum Edward VI endowed it and restored the old curriculum.
The buildings are unchanged. It is true that there have sprung up new
class-rooms round the court, and that opposite the cloisters a huge
yellow block of buildings has been erected which provides workshops and
laboratories, but the Abbey and the School House studies stand as they
stood seven hundred years ago. To a boy of any imagination, such a place
could not but waken a wonderful sense of the beautiful. And Gordon
gazing from the school gateway across to the grey ivy-clad studies was
taken for a few moments clean outside himself. The next few hours only
served to deepen this wonder and admiration. For Fernhurst is prodigal
of associations. The School House dining-hall is a magnificent
oak-panelled room, where generations of men have cut their names; and
above the ledge on which repose the silver challenge cups the house has
won, is a large statue of King Edward VI looking down on the row of
tables. When he first entered the hall, Gordon pitied those in other
houses immensely. It seemed to him that though in "the outhouses"--as
they were called at Fernhurst--the eugenic machinery might be more up to
date, and the method of lighting and heating far more satisfactory, yet
it could not be the same there as in the School House; and he never
quite freed himself of the illusion that, if the truth were known, every
outhouse boy rather regretted that he had not chosen otherwise. For
indeed the bloods of other houses are very often found sitting over the
fire in the School House games study.

Until about six o'clock Gordon could not have been happier, his future
seemed so full of possibilities. But when his father and mother left him
to catch the afternoon train back to town, and the evening train brought
with it a swarm of boys in the most wonderful ties and socks, and all so
engrossed in their own affairs, and so indifferent to his, Gordon began
to feel very lonely. Supper was not till nine and he had three hours to
put in. Very disconsolately he wandered round the green slopes above the
town where was the town football ground and where in the summer term
those members of the Fifteen who despised cricket would enjoy their
quiet pipe and long for the rains of November. But that walk did not
take long, especially as he did not dare to go out of the sight of the
Abbey for fear of getting lost. When he returned to the House the court
was loud with shouts and laughter. Everyone had something to do. There
was the luggage to fetch from the day-room. The town porter, known
generally as Slimy Tim, was waiting to be tipped. Health certificates
had to be produced. There was a sporting chance of finding in Merriman's
second-hand bookshop--out of bounds during term-time--an English version
of Vergil and Xenophon. There were a hundred things to do for everyone
except Gordon. There were several other new boys, doubtless, to be found
among this unending stream of bowler hats. But he saw no way of
discovering them. He did, it is true, make one attempt. Very bravely he
walked up to a rather bored individual who was leaning against the door
that led into the studies and asked him if he was a new boy. His
reception was not friendly. The person in question was Sandham of the
Lower Sixth, who had been made a house prefect and was very conscious of
it, and who was also well aware of the fact that he was not very tall.
His friends called him "The Cockroach"; and Gordon was told politely to
go elsewhere. He did not, however, go where he was told, but sauntered
sadly down to the matron's room, only to find it full of people all with
some complaint. Some had lost their keys, others were furious that their
people should have been charged for biscuits and sultana cake that they
had never had, but the greater part were wanting to know why the old
bathroom had been turned into a study for the Chief's secretary, while
they had been given in exchange a lot of small zinc hip-baths. To the
smaller members of the House this change was rather popular. On the days
when there were only four baths among eighty, it did not matter very
much to them how large they were, if they were always occupied by the
bloods, while however small the new baths might be, there were
sufficient to go round. The bloods did not look on the matter in this
light.

Gordon walked from room to room utterly miserable. Nobody took the
slightest notice of him, only one person asked his name, and that was a
small person of one term's standing who wanted to show that he was a
power in the land. At last, however, the old cracked bell rang out for
supper, and very thankfully he took his place among the new boys at the
bottom of the day-room table. Evening prayers in the School House had
once been rather a festive occasion, and a hymn chosen by the head of
the House was sung every night. It had been the custom to choose a hymn
with some topical allusion. For instance, on the evening when the House
tutor had given a hundred lines to every member of the day-room for
disturbing a masters' meeting, by playing cricket next door, they chose
_Fierce raged the Tempest o'er the Deep_; and on one occasion when an
unpopular prefect had been unexpectedly expelled the House was soothed
with the strains of _Peace, Perfect Peace_. But those days were over. A
new headmaster had come with an ear for music, and the riot of melody
that surged from the V. A table seemed to him not only blasphemous, but
also inartistic. And so hymn-singing stopped, and only a few prayers
were read instead.

On this particular evening the Chief was in high spirits. It was
characteristic of his indomitable kindliness and optimism that, though
he ended every term in a state of exhaustion, having strained his energy
and endurance to the breaking-point, he invariably began the new term in
a spirit of geniality and hope. It was not till years later that Gordon
came to understand the depth of unselfish idealism that burned behind
the quiet modesty of the Chief; but even at first sight the least
impressionable boy was conscious of being under the influence of an
unusual personality. There was nothing of the theatrical pedagogue about
him; he surrounded himself with no trappings of a proud authority. His
voice was gentle and persuasive; his smile as winning almost as a
child's. The little speech with which he welcomed the House back, and a
passing allusion, half humorous, half appealing, to the changes in the
bath-rooms were perhaps too homely to impress the imagination of the
average inhuman boy. But they were the sincere expression of the man--an
idealist, with an unfailing faith in human nature, founded in an even
deeper faith in Christianity.

When he had gone, Gordon ventured to look round at the sea of faces. On
a raised dais was the Sixth Form table. In the middle, haughty,
self-conscious, with sleepy-looking but watchful eyes, sat the captain
of the House, Lovelace major, in many ways the finest athlete Fernhurst
ever produced, who had already got his County cap and played "Rugger"
for Richmond. Gordon had seen him bat at Lord's for the Public Schools
_v._ M.C.C., and before he had come to Fernhurst, Lovelace had been the
hero of his imagination; ambition could hardly attain a higher pedestal.

There were about twelve in all at the Sixth Form table, of whom the
majority were prefects; and no one could leave the hall till one of them
went out. After a few minutes' conversation, in which no one ate
anything, although plates of hot soup were busily provided, someone got
up and went out. Immediately there was a rush towards the door, and
Gordon was borne down the long winding passage to the foot of the
stairs that led to the dormitories. Here, however, for some reason,
everyone stopped and began to talk at the top of their voices. Gordon
saw no reason for the delay, but thought it better to follow the throng,
and waited. As a matter of fact, the last train up from town had just
come in. There are some who always demand the last ounce of flesh; there
are always those who return by the last possible train, although it
stops at every station on the way. Suddenly, however, the House tutor
shouted from the top of the stairs, "Lights out in the upper dormitories
by nine-thirty," and the procession moved upstairs.

The upper dormitories in the School House were, like most other school
dormitories, a dismal spectacle. There was a long passage running down
from the House tutor's room, and on the left were doors leading into
long, bare rooms, with the usual red-quilted beds and the usual
wash-hand basins. On the right-hand side was the bathroom. The upper
dormitories were occupied by the smaller boys of the House. Once a
prefect had been put in charge over each room, but the system did not
work very well, and soon came to an abrupt end, so that there was only
the House tutor to keep them in order till the prefects went to bed in
the lower dormitories an hour later; and then any sound was promptly
dealt with. Gordon had been placed in the largest room, which was known
as "the nursery." It contained ten beds, and only four of its
inhabitants were of more than one term's standing. Among other less
enviable claims to fame, it had the reputation of being the finest
football-playing dormitory, and every night its members would race up
from supper to play their game before the House tutor came to put out
lights at nine-fifteen. The new boys took it in turns to keep "cave,"
and it must be owned that for the first few weeks the sentinel rather
preferred the role of onlooker to that of player, and found it hard to
sympathise with those who were continually flinging abuse at the huge
football crowds at Stamford Bridge. This night there was, of course,
hardly any ragging. There was so much to talk about, and some faint
interest was even taken in the new boys, for two very important-looking
young people, Turner and Roberts, swaggered into the dormitories "just
to have a squint at the new kids," but after a casual inspection Turner
said in a lordly manner, "Good lord! what a crew," and the pair sought
better things elsewhere. Turner and Roberts were very insignificant
people during the daytime: they were little use at games, and even a
year's spasmodic cribbing had only managed to secure them a promotion
from the Second Form to the Third. But when the evening came they were
indeed great men, and ruled over a small dormitory that contained,
besides themselves, only four new boys who looked up to them as gods and
hung on their every word.

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