Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 20th century; Great Britain -- Social conditions; World War, 1914-1918
So from term to term and year to year. Every summer carried away
the older friends, every autumn brought a new draft to take their
place. With time came better rooms and perhaps greater dignity of
position; a man worked through the lower offices of various clubs
and succeeded in time to the chair; he woke to find himself a
senior member of the college, setting to freshmen the tone which
had been set to him in his own first year. With abrupt suddenness
he discovered that he must begin looking for digs. out of college;
if he had idled or overspent his allowance, he would perhaps retire
to a distant monastic cell to retrench or work; otherwise he looked
for good rooms near the House and a friend to share them with him.
Life out of college diminishes the sense that a man is a living,
breathing part of a community which wakes to life in hall, common
room and cathedral, if indeed it is not always awake in the
quadrangle. So long as he is back in digs... by midnight, there are
few restrictions on his liberty; he can entertain, he can get up
and go to bed when he likes, he can see as much or as little of the
college as he chooses. And, with comfortable digs.., an excellent
cook and work which swells like a banking cloud as his schools
approach, there are many temptations to stay at home and only
to visit the college for Sunday evening chapel, hall and a club
meeting.
The last year, for those who find time to think, is depressing,
for they are watching the O.U.D.S. or the House Grind for the last
time, and the menace of their final schools throws a gloom over
everything. Some of the subjects are being read for the first time;
others, that seemed to have been mastered two years before, are
now almost wholly forgotten; losing confidence, a man speaks of
himself as "lucky to scrape a fourth," he grows fatalistic and
says that he does not care; and his tutor wisely sends him away for
a few days' holiday and reestablishes his confidence with a word of
praise.
Then for a week he faces his examiners, two papers a day, three
hours for each paper; and at the end, when they have laid him bare,
he cares very little indeed for any other result than that he will
probably never again be compelled to study English political or
constitutional history, political economy and economic history,
political science and European history, a special subject or even a
modern language. The taut nerves become of a sudden very slack.
And then it has to be realised that within a week all will be over.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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