Very few boys at Charterhouse boxed and the boxing-room, which was over the school confectionery shop, was a good place to meet Raymond, whom, otherwise, I would not have been able to see often. I began boxing seriously and savagely. Raymond said to me: ‘You know these cricketers and footballers are all afraid of boxers, almost superstitious. They won’t box themselves for fear of losing their good looks—the inter-house competitions every year are such bloody affairs. But do you remember the Mansfield, Waller and Taylor show? That’s a good tradition to keep up.’ Of course I remembered. Two terms previously there had been a meeting of the school debating society which I had attended. The committee of the debating society was usually made up of sixth-form boys; the debates were formal and usually dull, but in so far as there was any intellectual life at Charterhouse, it was represented by the debating society—and by _The Carthusian_, always edited by two members of this committee; both institutions were free from influence of the masters. Debates were always held in the school library on Saturday night. One debate night the usual decorous conventions were broken by an invasion of ‘the bloods.’ The bloods were the members of the cricket and football elevens. They were the ruling caste at Charterhouse; the eleventh man in the football eleven, though a member of the under-fourth form, had a great deal more prestige than the most brilliant classical scholar in the sixth. Even ‘Head of the School’ was an empty title. There was not, however, an open warfare between the sixth-form intellectuals and the bloods. The bloods were stupid and knew it, and had nothing to gain by a clash; the intellectuals were happy to be left alone. So this invasion of the bloods, who had just returned from winning a match against the _Casuals_, and had probably been drinking, caused the debating society a good deal of embarrassment. The bloods disturbed the meeting by cheers and cat-cries and slamming the library magazine-folders on the table. Mansfield, as president of the society, called them to order, but they continued the disturbance; so Mansfield closed the debate. The bloods thought the incident finished, but it was not. A letter appeared in _The Carthusian_ a few days later protesting against the bad behaviour in the debating society of ‘certain First Eleven babies.’ Three sets of initials were signed and they were those of Mansfield, Waller and Taylor. The school was astonished by this suicidally daring act; it waited for Korah, Dathan and Abiram to be swallowed up. The captain of football is said to have sworn that he’d chuck the three signatories into the fountain in Founder’s Court. But somehow he did not. The fact was that this happened early in the autumn term and there were only two other First Eleven colours left over from the preceding year; new colours were only given gradually as the football season advanced. The other rowdies had only been embryo bloods.