Of course I always maintained that I was Irish. This claim was resented by an Irish boy who had been in the house about a year and a half longer than myself. He went out of his way to hurt me, not only by physical acts of spite, like throwing ink over my school-books, hiding my games-clothes, setting on me suddenly from behind corners, pouring water over me at night, but by continually forcing his bawdy humour on my prudishness and inviting everybody to laugh at my disgust; he also built up a sort of humorous legend of my hypocrisy and concealed depravity. I came near a nervous breakdown. School morality prevented me from informing the house-master of my troubles. The house-monitors were supposed to keep order and preserve the moral tone of the house, but at this time they were not the sort to interfere in any case of bullying among the juniors. I tried violent resistance, but as the odds were always heavily against me this merely encouraged the ragging. Complete passive resistance would probably have been better. I only got accustomed to bawdy-talk in my last two years at Charterhouse, and it was not until I had been some time in the army that I got hardened to it and could reply in kind to insults. A former headmaster of Charterhouse, an innocent man, is reported to have said at a Headmasters’ Conference: ‘My boys are amorous but seldom erotic.’ Few cases of eroticism indeed ever came to his notice; there were not more than five or six big rows all the time I was at Charterhouse and expulsions were rare. But the house-masters knew little about what went on in their houses; their living quarters were removed from the boys’. There was a true distinction between ‘amorousness,’ by which the headmaster meant a sentimental falling in love with younger boys, and eroticism, which was adolescent lust. The intimacy, as the newspapers call it, that frequently took place was practically never between an elder boy and the object of his affection, for that would have spoilt the romantic illusion, which was heterosexually cast. It was between boys of the same age who were not in love, but used each other coldly as convenient sex-instruments. So the atmosphere was always heavy with romance of a very conventional early-Victorian type, yet complicated by cynicism and foulness. VII