In English preparatory and public schools romance is necessarily homo-sexual. The opposite sex is despised and hated, treated as something obscene. Many boys never recover from this perversion. I only recovered by a shock at the age of twenty-one. For every one born homo-sexual there are at least ten permanent pseudo-homo-sexuals made by the public school system. And nine of these ten are as honourably chaste and sentimental as I was. I left that day-school at Wimbledon because my father decided that the standard of work was not good enough to enable me to win a scholarship at a public school. He sent me to another preparatory school in the Midlands; because the headmaster’s wife was a sister of an old literary friend of his. It proved later that these were inadequate grounds. It was a queer place and I did not like it. There was a secret about the headmaster which a few of the elder boys shared. It was somehow sinister, but I never exactly knew what it was. All I knew was that he came weeping into the class-room one day beating his head with his fists and groaning: ‘Would to God I hadn’t done it! Would to God I hadn’t done it!’ I was taken away suddenly a few days later, which was the end of the school year. The headmaster was said to be ill. I found out later that he had been given twenty-four hours to leave the country. He was succeeded by the second master, a good man, who had taught me how to write English by eliminating all phrases that could be done without, and using verbs and nouns instead of adjectives and adverbs wherever possible. And where to start new paragraphs, and the difference between O and Oh. He was a very heavy man. He used to stand at his desk and lean on his thumbs until they bent at right angles. (The school he took over was now only half-strength because of the scandal. A fortnight later he fell out of a train on to his head and that was the end of him; but the school is apparently going on still; I am occasionally asked to subscribe to Old Boys’ funds for chapel windows and miniature rifle ranges and so on.) I first learned rugger here. What surprised me most at this school was when a boy of about twelve, whose father and mother were in India, was told by cable that they had both suddenly died of cholera. We all watched him sympathetically for weeks after, expecting him to die of grief or turn black in the face, or do something to match the occasion. Yet he seemed entirely unmoved, and since nobody dared discuss the tragedy with him he seemed to forget what had happened; he played about and ragged as he had done before. We found that rather monstrous. But he could not have been expected to behave otherwise. He had not seen his parents for two years. And preparatory schoolboys live in a world completely dissociated from home life. They have a different vocabulary, different moral system, different voice, and though on their return to school from the holidays the change over from home-self to school-self is