as an attack on my old school, but merely as a record of my feelings at the time. No doubt I was unappreciative of the hard knocks and character-training that public schools are supposed to provide, and as a typical Old Carthusian remarked to me recently: ‘The whole moral tone of the school has improved out of all recognition since those days.’ ♦ “the the” replaced with “the” As a matter of fact I did not go up to Oxford until five years later, in 1919, when my brother, four years younger than myself, was already in residence, and I did not take my degree until 1926, at the same time as the brother who was eight years younger than myself. Oxford was extraordinarily kind to me. I did no Latin or Greek there, though I had a Classical Exhibition. I did not sit for a single examination. I never had rooms at St. John’s, though I used to go there to draw a Government grant for tuition fees. I lived outside the University three-mile radius. For my last two undergraduate years I did not even have a tutor. I have a warm feeling for Oxford. Its rules and statutes, though apparently cast-iron, are ready for emergencies. In my case, at any rate, a poet was an emergency. Whenever I come to the word ‘Charterhouse’ in this story I find myself escaping into digressions, but I suppose that I must get through with it. From the moment I arrived at the school I suffered an oppression of spirit that I hesitate now to recall in its full intensity. It was something like being in that chilly cellar at Laufzorn among the potatoes, but being a potato out of a different bag from the rest. The school consisted of about six hundred boys. The chief interests were games and romantic friendships. School-work was despised by every one; the scholars, of whom there were about fifty in the school at any given time, were not concentrated in a single dormitory-house as at Winchester, but divided among ten. They were known as ‘pro’s,’ and unless they were good at games and willing to pretend that they hated work as much as or more than the non-scholars, and ready whenever called on to help these with their work, they usually had a bad time. I was a scholar and really liked work, and I was surprised and disappointed at the apathy of the class-rooms. My first term I was left alone more or less, it being a school convention that new boys should be neither encouraged nor baited. The other boys seldom spoke to them except to send them on errands, or to inform them of breaches of school convention. But my second term the trouble began. There were a number of things that naturally made for my unpopularity. Besides being a scholar and not outstandingly good at games, I was always short of pocket-money. I could not conform to the social custom of treating my contemporaries to food at the school shop, and because I could not treat them I could not accept their treating. My clothes were all wrong; they conformed outwardly to the school pattern, but