At< no more than 8 years old the time came when every upper-upper-middle-class boy was sent away to school, even the sons of what Orwell called his own class, the ‘lower-upper-middle class’. He defined the ‘lower-upper’ as being the upper-middle class short of money, not really hard up, no discomfort, but not able from their own resources to play the full role expected of them by themselves and others, both from the education they received and the status (hey still enjoyed. Thus education was an investment as well as a mark of status. For colonial civil servants without either property or — in Richard Walmesley Blair’s case — family patronage, education was especially important, it was not just the ‘ladder of advancement’, it had to be climbed even to stay still in the same place. Entry to all the careers, the Church, the Army, and the Civil Service, and of course the professions, depended on having had ‘a good education’, to the end of school at 18, though at that time not necessarily university. It was ‘school’ that counted, and school was the private secondary institution from the ages of 13 or 14 to 18. To get boys into the ‘right school’ was the business of preparatory schools. Under the competitive pressure of the children of the growing professional classes, the so-called public schools had in the last decades of the nineteenth century raised their entrance standards appreciably, as if to bring status and achievement somewhat more into alignment. Even the sons of the landed aristocracy now commonly had to go through a prep school. So these preparatory schools were recent foundations; and even though they aped the ways of the more ancient foundations which they sought to supply, they were frankly utilitarian in character. They tried to be useful and their recruitment of fee-paying boys depended on their success (‘reputation’ was the customary word) in getting their little charges into ‘good schools’.

This led to them being eager to get some bright children as a leaven to the merely wealthy or the well-connected. Best that a child had all these attributes, of course, but the world was imperfect. A balance had to be struck. All their products would get somewhere if they could pay, for the supply of ancient and ancient-looking public school foundations was also increasing to meet the demand. The prep schools would attract ‘the better sort of pupil’ if they could get a few children a year into the ‘great schools’, among which Eton College and Harrow School stood at the top of the educational and social hierarchy. These figured prominently in the head master’s report in the school magazine, a document much scrutinized by parents and potential customers. Indeed, half-holidays would be given to the boys to celebrate scholarships to the great schools, so hundreds of letters home would spread the glad news widely and quickly.

Eric, strongly recommended by his local convent school, was taken on at half-fees by St Cyprian’s, one of the newest but most successful preparatory schools. He was to stay until he was 13. Mrs Blair must have made the application in the spring of 1911, interviewing and being interviewed by the head master and owner of the school, Mr Vaughan Wilkes, and the real power behind the throne, Mrs Wilkes. Could the Blairs have afforded it without the scholarship? Mr Blair was soon to retire and return home on a pension of £438 10s per year. Eric’s full fees would have been, £180. (By way of comparison, consider that in 1913-14 the average annual wage of a skilled manual worker was about £100, of a clerk about the same, of a manager about £200, and of the higher professions about £330.)[1] Marjorie and Avril were both sent away at a later stage, at the age of n, to a girls’ boarding school at Oxford, a decent enough place but by no means famous or front rank. So Eric’s scholarship of £90 per year must have turned ‘extraordinarily difficult’ into ‘just possible’ and may have made the difference between his younger sister being sent away at all rather than educated locally. The scholarship was confidential and was kept secret even from Eric. His contemporaries did not know. But as he got near his public-school exams, Mr Wilkes told him, perhaps to shame him into working even harder.

The school was only twelve years old in 1911-and already had a reputation for getting scholarships and places at Harrow or other leading public schools. The fees of £180 a year were high, yet with only about a hundred boys in the school, spread over four or five years, with ten teaching staff as well as a matron, a drill sergeant and the Wilkes themselves, both of whom taught, value for money was plainly given in terms of very small classes and intensive teaching. However mechanical the teaching, and it was very mechanical, small numbers made up for a lot. St Cyprian’s was just outside Eastbourne in Sussex, a fashionable and very respectable south-coast summer resort, and even then a town favoured for retirement among the prosperous middle class. The school occupied two large, late-Victorian William Morris-style houses, in extensive grounds very near to Beachy Head, the beautifully smooth chalk down and the steep cliff overlooking the English Channel.

St Cyprian’s had a good sprinkling of aristocracy as well as of upper middle and professional middle classes. Some ‘old boys’ strongly deny that there was any snobbery either in the school or in the attitudes of the Wilkes. Henry Longhurst (the famous amateur golfer and commentator) claimed in his memoirs ‘to have grown up absolutely “classless”’, citing as proof that the Wilkes ‘cheerfully accepted the rather uncouth offspring of a modest, though worthy, retail house furnisher’. Longhurst recalls with pleasure that among his particular school chums were Lord Mildmay, ‘among the last of the Corinthians of steeplechasing’, and ‘Reggie’, Viscount Maiden, heir to the 8th Earl of Essex.[2] Also a contemporary at St Cyprian’s, Cyril Connolly recalls ‘an awful lot of nobility’ as well as a Siamese prince and some sons of South American millionaires.[3] The school was hardly ‘classless’ so much as a good mixer of the complicated top section of the English, Scottish and Anglo-Irish class system and their wealthy foreign clients. The facts of social composition are not in question; only subsequent opinions are in fierce and irritable contradiction about what opinions and attitudes the boys had back then. On one thing, however, all accounts agree: the food was awful and inadequate, as was the heating and the sanitation. The code, of course, was an austere one and, to make matters worse, it was soon to be wartime. Hard conditions were accepted as part of ‘the building of character’, the official ideology through which even the oppressors themselves came to believe in the self-sacrificing altruism of this most unlikely form of commercial enterprise — as did their pupils when they went out to govern the Empire or to ‘help the family’ by taking a job in the City. Henry Longhurst actually meant to defend the old school against ‘abuse’ like Orwell’s and Connolly’s when he ended his chapter on St Cyprian’s ‘on a lighter note’. He relates with pride as well as superficial irony that a contemporary had just written to him: ‘It may amuse you to know that my brother attributes the fact that he emerged absolutely sane and fit from five years as a prisoner of war solely to having been at St Cyprian’s.’[4]

Orwell’s own testimony survives in two forms: the famous and virulent ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ (of uncertain date[*]) and some twenty-two simple boyish letters to his mother, all but one written in his first fifteen months at St Cyprian’s, all that remain of the required weekly letter home during his four years there. Both sets of evidence need careful handling: the essay is a polemical essay intended, like ‘A Hanging’ or ‘How the Poor Die’, to have a direct effect on the reader — one cannot assume that it is all literally true; and the letters were censored or ‘gone through’ by an adult hand, nominally to correct errors of fact and spelling, and were written in that knowledge. Here are his letters from the first term.

September 14 [1911]

Dear Mother, I hope you are quite well, thanks for that letter you sent me I havent read it yet. I supose you want to know what schools like, its alright we have fun in the morning. When we are in bed. from E. Blair.

‘Supose’ is corrected in the adult hand — they did not always bother, but it showed both parent and child that (as Orwell taught us to say) big brother was watching.

October 8 1911 Sunday

My dear Mother,
I hope you are quite well. I am top in arithmetic, and I have been moved up in Latin. I cannot quite read your letters yet, but I can read Margies. How is Togo, [a terrier], we had a magick lantern the other day. It is Kirkpatricks birthday today he is eight years old, Last time we played football I shot seven goals.
from E. Blair
P.S. I forgot to tell you I had a letter from Margie and I will write to her soon.

Togo was the family dog and Colin Kirkpatrick became a banker and businessman, who finally settled in Rhodesia.

Nov. 5

My dear Mother
Thank you very much for that shilling you sent me and my album. We had the thee Matches yesterday we won two and lost one, while the Matches went on we went for a lovely walk on the Downs, and called Smallman picked up ten shillings on the road.
On Sunday it is halfterm. Will you please send me Margerys adress. Next time you write to Auntie Hay and ask her to send me stamps.
lots of love from E. Blair
Thank you for the I/- you sent me

Nov. 12

My dear Mother
What kind of weather are you having? We are having lots of rain, but it is not raining this morning, but it is very dull. Will yoou please send me one of one or two of the new penny stamps for I have not got one yet.
The swimg races were on Monday, and a boy called Murray started last in a race and won by a good deal. I was third in the race, I had a rathe tight bathing dress on and could not swim a bit fast.
I am second, in Arithmetic, and this week I am first in Latin. And I am 8th in French.
We are breaking up on the 20 Dec: that is on a Vensday. Give my love to Avril, and to Father.
Much love from
E. Blair

‘First’ is corrected by the adult hand to read ‘second in Latin’. They were evidently given weekly placings. Notice how scores and placings in lessons and games are all mixed in together, seemingly of equal importance. This weird synthesis of team spirit and of individual competitiveness could truly be said to epitomize the blending of a capitalist and an aristocratic ethic, so typical of these schools.

[no date. November 19?]

My dear Mother
I hope you are quite well, please send my stamp album as soon as you can. We played 3 Malches yesterday, and lost all.
It is a lovely day quite warm.
Give my love to Avril
Much love from you son.
Eric Blair xxxxx

[no date. Nov. 26?]

My dear Mother
I hope you are quite well. I am second in Latin and first in arithmatick and third in history.
Iits raining like mad this morning and at about five aclock this morning and the house rattled like paper with the wind.
There is an aufly naughty boy hear called Lesly Cohen he has only just had his seventh birthday. We have had severi nice games of football this week.
x.x.x.x.x.x.x.x.xxxxxxxxxx
from your loving son
E. Blair

He was more sportive than he later made out, though he did have recurrent bronchitis even then and ‘a stomach cough’, but they told him that it was ‘nothing’ and that he could ‘run it ofF, like getting a second wind after a stitch. He said later that he had loathed football, but had quite liked cricket and swimming, adding typically that ‘these had no prestige value’.[5]

Dec. 2

My dear Mother, I hope you are alright.
It was Mrs: Wilkes birthday yesterday, we had aufel fun after tea and played games all over the house. We all went for a walk to Beachy-Head.
I am third in Arithmatick.
‘Its’ very dull today, and dosent look as if its going to be very warm. Thank you for your letter.
It is getting very near the end of the term, there are only eighteen days more. On Saturday evening we have dncing, and I am going to say a piece of poetry, some of the boys sing.
Give my love to Father and Avril. Is Togo alright. We had the Oxford and Cambridge Matches yesterday. Cambridge won in the first and third, and the second did not have a Match. I am very glad Colonel Hall has given me some stamps, he said he wold last year but I thought had had forgotten. Its a beastly wet day today all rain and cold.
I am very sorry to hear we had those beastly freaks of smelly white mice back. I hope these arnt smelly one. If they arnt I shall like them.
From your loveing son, E. A. Blair.

This letter was heavily corrected. One of the trade-marks of George Orwell was to be, according to one’s judgement, either an obsessive or a salutary frankness about the most neglected of our five senses, smell. From his earliest days he grew to associate smell with oppression.

These letters have no literary merit. So there would have been little point in printing them in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. But if they had been, then there might have been some second thoughts about accepting as literal rather than as figurative truth Orwell’s later account of the great terror of first term at prep school. There is no evidence of disturbance in these letters. Granted that one would not expect anything critical of the school, even of the food, in letters that the child knew were read by the Wilkes; but a child in terror would write more briefly and in safe and easy stock phrases, not so chattily and spontaneously.

The only real evidence of any trauma at being torn out of the comfort of the womanish home into the barbaric and totally un-private boys’ world of corridors, cubicles, caning and cramming is provided by what Orwell himself was to say in ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’: ‘Your home might be far from perfect, but at least it was a place ruled by love rather than by fear... At eight years old you were suddenly taken out of this warm nest and flung into a world of force and fraud and secrecy, like a gold-fish into a tank full of pike.’[6] Confident assertions that there was a trauma that marked and warped him for life, somehow explaining (often explaining away) the most uncomfortable parts of his future writing, have become a commonplace of critical writing on Orwell; but they are highly speculative, often attempts to use psychological explanations to short-cut a slow and detailed examination of his adult experiences, some of which may have affected his adult beliefs. Those who are confident that they can find a psychological ‘hidden wound’ in the young Eric and then locate Nineteen Eighty-Four on the map as a version of St Cyprian’s, as if the vision of totalitarianism arose from prep-school terror and sufferings, may be disguising their own lack of perception of the political horrors that Orwell said were under their own noses, far more dangerous, dramatic and objective, in their shared contemporary world of the 1930s and 1940s.[7]

Boys of his class expected to go away to school and can have been under no illusions, unless there was no talk with other children, that it was anything other than a pretty rough, uncomfortable and often painful experience; but on the other hand, lots of fun and games were to be expected, lots of other boys, sport, heroes, and lots of books to be read. He appears to have been a great reader before ever he went to St Cyprian’s. This by itself may have alienated him more from many of his contemporaries, as it did Cyril Connolly, than hypothetical traumas (which then, ex hypothesi, every boy would have suffered). The school authorities needed scholarship fodder but the mass of brute boys would mock and harry ‘the swots’ and ‘the bookish’.

His mother had given Eric on his eighth birthday Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. This was one of the most important introductions he ever had. He remembered finding the parcel the night before his birthday and being so eager to read it for himself that he began secretly then and there. It must have been an expurgated child’s edition, for precocious though he was, his parents would not have given him the original, even if he could have understood it. In the days of his fame, when he was being freely compared to Swift, he was to claim that ‘From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer.’[8] George Orwell was to say to Dean Swift in an ‘Imaginary Interview’ (a wartime broadcast) that Gulliver has ‘lived with me ever since so that I suppose a year has never passed without my re-reading at least part of it. And yet I can’t help feeling that you have laid it on a bit too thick. You were too hard on humanity, and on your own country.’[9]

The same problem of laying it on too thick arises with Orwell’s own essay, ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, which he described to his publisher as being ‘autobiographical’ (certainly so libellous that it could not be published in Great Britain until after Mrs Wilkes’ death in 1967 aged 92).[10] Swift could well have replied, ‘Tu quoque, Sir’. Was he too hard on his teachers and on himself? Did St Cyprian’s really lead him to believe that by their ‘law I was damned. I had no money, I was weak, I was ugly, I was unpopular, I had a chronic cough, I was cowardly, I smelt’?[11] How much was the essay pure autobiography and how much a polemical short story written in the first person and drawn from experience? None of Orwell’s novels and documentaries is entirely clear as to its genre. The reader must either lower his guard completely or constantly be on guard against assuming too readily that he is faced with either undiluted ‘fact’ or undiluted ‘fiction’. The problem arises, in part at least, because Orwell’s talent as a writer grew slowly and relatively late. He fed on his own early experiences but in so doing he changed them creatively. ‘I base these generalizations on what I can recall of my own childhood outlook. Treacherous though memory is,’ he himself warned at the end of the essay, ‘it seems to me the chief means we have of discovering how a child’s mind works. Only by resurrecting our own memories can we realize how incredibly distorted is the child’s vision of the world.’ The animus of ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ cannot be rejected as evidence of what actually happened and of what his feelings were back then at prep school as distinct from the time of writing; but the piece cannot be accepted fully either. It must be handled both emphatically and critically.

The title came from a line in ‘The Echoing Green’, one of Blake’s Songs of Innocence, some of which his mother had read to him when a young child.

Such, such were the joys
When we all, girls and boys,
In our youth time were seen,
On the Echoing Green.

As the mature Orwell fully realized, an echoing green is a more complex metaphor for the relationship between artistic and literal truth than, say, ‘holding a mirror up to nature’, or any delusion of ‘I am a camera’. If he mocked myths of childhood joy unbounded, he was surely well aware that by using such a quotation as the tide of his essay he was drawing attention to the fact that the author was creator, not remembrancer. Echoes both repeat and distort.

Certainly he came to blame the place (and such places) greatly. In 1938, he wrote to Cyril Connolly: ‘I’m always meaning one of these days to write a book about St Cyprian’s. I’ve always held that the public schools aren’t so bad, but people are wrecked by those filthy private schools long before they get to public school age.’[12] And he told readers of Tribune two years later, in reviewing a novel of Stephen Spender’s, The Backward Son:

It is about a ‘prep school’, one of those (on the whole) nasty little schools at which small boys are prepared for the public school entrance examination. Incidentally these schools with their money-grubbing proprietors and their staffs of underpaid hacks, are responsible for a lot of the harm that it is usual to blame on the public schools. A majority of middle-class boys have their minds permanently lamed by them before they are thirteen years old.[13]

Did he include himself for once among the hypothetical ‘majority of middle-class boys’ whose minds were ‘wrecked’ or ‘permanently lamed’? Certainly in the period between Burma and Spain he suffered from feelings of failure and of guilt, but it is not clear that he himself attributed this to prep school more than to imperial service and, even if he did, it is doubtful if this was the full story. Other things were to happen, and not to happen, later. Only a narrower point is crystal clear: that he loathed the anti-intellectualism of learning by rote. He saw the bad methods of St Cyprian’s as intellectually stultifying and oppressive.

Certainly Cyril Connolly regarded ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ as the ‘key to his [Orwell’s] formation’.[14] Biographical evidence from Orwell’s novels can also support Connolly’s judgement. Some of Eric Blair’s experiences must have gone into the character of Gordon Comstock, the poor and bitter anti-hero of Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying written in 1935:

Even at the third-rate schools to which Gordon was sent nearly all the boys were richer than himself. They soon found out his poverty, of course, and gave him hell because of it. Probably the greatest cruelty one can inflict on a child is to send it to school among children richer than itself. A child conscious of poverty will suffer snobbish agonies such as a grown-up person can scarcely even imagine.[15]

‘Money’ was to worry him, like Gordon Comstock, all the days of his life, until the success of Animal Farm. He too despised a world ‘infected with the mania of owning things’ and gone ‘money mad’: but also he realized that independence for a writer depended on earning some. Fear of exposure of his dependence on the secret scholarship, with which Mr Wilkes threatened him, would indeed, at every stage of his schoolboy and most of his adult life, have been agony. And it was an agony that he never forgot, but he put it to good use to understand the psychology of the poor and the oppressed in his early writings and, later on, to champion their causes.

The very first sentence of ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ began the symbolic anecdote from which all the other themes of the essay (cruelty, favouritism, snobbery and wealth, bad teaching, filth and bullying) radiated. It is about bed-wetting. ‘Soon after I arrived at St Cyprian’s (not immediately, but after a week or two, just when I began to be settling into the routine of school life) I began wetting my bed.’ And after two or three such hideous offences, he tells us, he was warned that he would be caned. The warning took place in a curiously roundabout way. Mrs Wilkes called him back from leaving tea to where she was sitting with a lady visitor, ‘an intimidating, masculine-looking person wearing a riding habit’, as if to introduce him.

‘Here is a little boy,’ said Flip, indicating me to the strange lady, ‘who wets his bed every night. Do you know what I am going to do if you wet your bed again?’ she added, turning to me. ‘I am going to get the Sixth Form to beat you.’

The strange lady put on an air of being’ inexpressibly shocked, and exclaimed, ‘I-should-think-so!’ And here there occurred one of those wild, almost lunatic misunderstandings which are part of the daily experience of childhood. The Sixth Form was a group of older boys who were selected as having ‘character’ and were empowered to beat smaller boys. I had not yet learned of their existence, and I mis-heard the phrase ‘the Sixth Form’ as ‘Mrs Form’. I took it as referring to the strange lady — I thought, that is, that her name was Mrs Form. It was an improbable name, but a child has no judgement in such matters. I imagined, therefore, that it was she who was to be deputed to beat me. It did not strike me as strange that this job should be turned over to a casual visitor in no way connected with the school. I merely assumed that ‘Mrs Form’ was a stem disciplinarian who enjoyed beating people (somehow her appearance seemed to bear this out) and I had an immediate terrifying vision of her arriving for the occasion in full riding kit and armed with a hunting-whip. To this day I can feel myself almost swooning with shame as I stood, a very small, round-faced boy in short corduroy knickers, before the two women. I could not speak. I felt that I should die if Mrs Form were to beat me. But my dominant feeling was not fear or even resentment: it was simply shame because one more person, and ‘that a woman, had been told of my disgusting offence.[16]

He then wet his bed again, was denounced by the matron and beaten by Mr Wilkes. Does this sound plausible? Surely the general points do, to which he reverts several times: both the cruelty and the ‘almost lunatic misunderstandings which are part of the daily experience of childhood’. It is a telling, sad and comic instance of ‘how incredibly distorted is the child’s version of the world’. But, as he said to Swift, ‘I can’t help feeling that you laid it on a bit thick.’ Something like that must have happened; but misheard as ‘Mrs Form’ and with a fantasy riding-whip? ‘Mrs Form’ sounds like a stock figure in Victorian and Edwardian pornographic novelettes. But no such lady can be found in such literature.[17] There is no reason to doubt that he was beaten for bed-wetting, which is barbarous enough, but the trimmings may belong more to a story in the first person, a polemic against the folly of inducing a sense of guilt about nameless (natural) things, and against the general harshness that could lead to disturbances far worse than bed-wetting: these are the point of the essay, not the most un-Orwellian (as we will see) gratuitous self-revelation. There is, however, one other piece of evidence on the bed-wetting and the beating. A very eminent Old St Cyprianite whose memory seems excellent has annotated the margins of an earlier published account of Eric Blair’s life at St Cyprian’s. His notes are full of fierce denials and disagreements, particularly where the account follows Orwell closely, for he defends the old school passionately and uncritically. Even so, twice he admits that there was a bed-wetter who was publicly beaten; but it was not Blair, he asserts, it was another little boy who later became a colonel in the British Army and a holder of the Victoria Cross.[18] Several boys, of course, could have been beaten for this same offence of nature. But whatever the literal truth, why should not a polemical essayist transpose events for dramatic effect?

Cruelty was certainly a characteristic of the school, particularly in relation to the arbitrariness and uncertainty of punishment, as illustrated by the beating for bed-wetting, to whomever it occurred. The head master, nicknamed ‘Sambo’, ‘a round-shouldered, curiously oafish-looking man, not large but shambling in gait, with a chubby face which was like that of an overgrown baby, and which was capable of good humour’, beat him, said Orwell, with ‘a riding-crop’, intoning as he did so, ‘you dir-ty lit-tle boy’, keeping time with the blows. But it was a mild, first beating, so he cockily told the others in the corridor as he came out. But ‘Flip’, as Mrs Wilkes was nicknamed, heard him and ordered him back. ‘This time Sambo laid on in real earnest. He continued for a length of time that frightened and astonished me — about five minutes it seemed, ending up by breaking the riding-crop. The bone handle went flying across the room. “Look what you’ve made me do!” he said furiously, holding up the broken crop.’[19]

Again this somewhat suspicious riding-crop. In those days an ordinary bamboo cane was, as children’s comics still testify, almost always held in the teacher’s hand or left lying prominently on his desk, even when not much used, a symbol of power and authority, much like an army officer’s dress-sword. When the earlier account paraphrases this, my marginal commentator comments, ‘NOT TRUE! You sod!!! LIBEL!’ And he means not merely that it was not Blair who was beaten, but that riding-crops were never the chosen medium of chastisement. Also, to push common sense to a point of absurdity, consider the ‘about five minutes’. Intoning Mr Wilkes’ phrase for rhythm, going as slowly and heavily as one can with a stick, it is hard to achieve a slower rate of fire than twelve strokes to the minute. ‘Six of the best’, as Orwell would have known, was traditionally reckoned the maximum punishment, enough to raise weals, often to break the skin bloodily. Five minutes would have been as bad as a naval flogging at the Nore or Spithead, and would have put the victim in the’ infirmary for days. Orwell’s actual words, however, were ‘about five minutes — it seemed’. Perhaps a beating could seem that long, but the innocent reader need not accept as gospel what is more likely to be either semi-fictional polemic against such real abuses of authority, or else in part a fantasy.

The school was harsh and Blair was caned from time to time, as caning was then common; he hated the place deeply for those cruelties, particularly for the arbitrariness and injustice of them. The terse ‘Not True’ of the marginal annotator against any passage that speaks of general unhappiness of small boys at prep school, particularly one of this kind, is unconvincing; although, of course, small boys can be ‘up’ one minute — and ‘down’ the next. Indeed, the whole rhythm of boarding-school life was somewhat manic-depressive, collective exultation alternated with collective gloom. Head masters at morning assembly would one day extol some scholastic, athletic or even national victory, and the next day condemn sin and corruption enough to depress anyone. Small boys would think, after masturbation or nocturnal emission, of suicide one day and of winning a race and becoming a hero on the next. Some writers truly have a point when they claim that boarding schools commonly institutionalized, as it were, both manic-depressive and sado-masochistic impulses. Yet individuals react differently: such broad terms never explain an individual’s ‘character’.

Consider the passage in Orwell’s essay that follows the episode of the second beating. He says that for the first and only time this beating reduced him to tears. Not because of the pain but:

...because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them.

He knew that bed-wetting was ‘wicked’ but also that it was ‘outside my control’.

Sin was not necessarily something that you did: it might be something that happened to you. I do not want to claim that this idea flashed into my mind as a complete novelty at this very moment, under the blows of Sambo’s cane: I must have had glimpses of it even before I left home, for my early childhood had been not altogether happy. But at any rate this was the great abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a world where it was not possible for me to be good.[20]

This is, indeed, the world of a totalitarian state, truly of Nineteen Eighty-Four. But it is also the reflection of a mature writer. Was it possible for any boy of eight to have thought that? Could Orwell really have thought that he thought it then? Which is more plausible: that he is here untypically exposing the roots of his own psychology, or that he is transfiguring imaginatively aspects of his early experiences into what was soon to become the helplessness of Winston Smith?

Favouritism was rampant. The boys spoke of being ‘in or out of favour’ with ‘Mum’ Wilkes. Orwell disliked her so much that he asserts that the habit of addressing her as ‘Mum’ was ‘Probably a corruption of the “Ma’am” used by public schoolboys to their housemasters’ wives’,[21] as if not wanting to recognize the far more obvious derivation, or to sully the sacred name of ‘Mother’. To be officially ‘Mum’ was plainly part other bag of tricks: to be matriarch with all the boys ‘under her thumb’ and also have them as ‘one of the family’. She liked to be both stem schoolmistress cramming them for her beloved Harrow History Essay Prize — an infectiously enthusiastic teacher, one Old Boy has said — and, on occasion, woman: comforting, indulgent, and understanding. In other words, she was capricious, vain, volatile and inconsistent as well as genuinely caring for her charges. As Cyril Connolly put it: ‘On all the boys who went through this Elizabeth and Essex relationship she had a remarkable effect, hotting them up like little Alfa-Romeos for the Brooklands of life.’[22] Later Connolly polished yet more wicked epigrams about her.

Both Orwell and I were dominated by the head mistress of our private school; it was this remarkable woman who dished out rewards and punishments, who quoted Kipling and inculcated patriotism, who exalted .character and moral courage and Scottish chieftains in kilts. We learnt the father values from a mother, we bit the hand that fed us, that tweaked the short hairs above the ear. But it was a woman’s hand whose husband’s cane was merely the secular arm. Agonizing ambivalence![23]

Above all, her capriciousness: ‘even the nickname “Flip” suggested some primitive goddess of fortune.’[24] But it also suggests ‘flip-Hop’; and though Connolly ignores or does not notice the vulgarism, Gavin Maxwell has roundly stated that: ‘She was a stout woman in middle age, with a well-developed bust from which her nickname was derived... “Here comes Flip”, someone would say,”... flapping nicely, eighty to the minute, everything in clockwork order.”’[25]

‘I conclude that St Cyprian’s was a very good school indeed,’ wrote Henry Longhurst despite the fact, he added, that three celebrated contemporaries (Connolly, Orwell and Maxwell) ‘have written so vitri-olically about it as to make one wonder whether we are writing of the same institution’.

It is true that Mum Wilkes’ dominant and sometimes emotional character caused one’s whole existence to depend on whether one was ‘in favour’ or otherwise, and indeed the expression became a normal part of one’s daily life without, so to speak, the inverted commas. If you were in favour, life could be bliss: if you weren’t it was hell, and no doubt this should be chalked up on the debit side. On the other hand it taught you the hard way one of the lessons of life — if you don’t ‘look after Number One’, no one else will.[26]

With friends like that, what need had Mrs Wilkes of such a trio of detractors?

Gavin Maxwell, in fact, only spent a year at the school and that ten years later; but it was much the same. He read and relished Connolly’s Elizabeth and Essex metaphor: ‘Flip would have liked to have kept me in favour but I was just too much of an oddity for a busy woman to cope with.’[27] He might have all the blood of the border barons in him, Percys and Maxwells, but he was a very nervous and distraught little boy. He took it hard when on one occasion, being out of favour. Flip bellowed publicly, ‘Matron, I think Maxwell is working that cold of his to death, he can start football again today and cold baths again tomorrow.’

Because I was as over-sensitive as a hermit crab without a shell, these thrusts hurt far more than I believe Flip ever intended them to; she was, I think, basically a kindly person and certainly an extremely efficient one. But she was using her standard technique on very unstandard material and instead of my being hotted up by [St Cyprian’s] I was slowly reduced to a jelly.[28]

He summed it all up by saying that he had been ‘through a prison sentence that ended in escape, however ignominious’.[29] Certainly it is not unreasonable to suppose that some never escaped from such an experience. Both Cyril Connolly and Colin Kirkpatrick remember Eric Blair as being generally out of favour, confirming his own account.

The experience of snobbery and wealth furnished another battleground between old boys of St Cyprian’s. ‘St Cyprian’s was an expensive and snobbish school which was in the process of becoming more snobbish,’ wrote Orwell, ‘and, I imagine, more expensive.’[30] ‘Snobbery,’ writes a contemporary, ‘we didn’t know what the word meant.’ ‘One of the charges levelled against the Wilkes family by the critics I have mentioned was that of “snobbery”,’ writes Henry Longhurst, ‘in that they liked to have in the school the offspring of the aristocracy, and indeed I think they did, but for the life of me I cannot see why they shouldn’t.’ Of course, one may reply to the anonymous contemporary, that it is not a question of acting in a way you then called ‘snobbish’, but of acting in a way that others could reasonably call snobbish. Yet one must concede, as Orwell did by lack of complaint against Eton, that sometimes right at the top, in high status schools, clubs, regiments and colleges, there is an almost republican equality among the elite: high status in English society can bridge wide variations of income. At its best, St Cyprian’s was probably like that, but surely too new, uncertain, arriviste and pushy a place to be secure? Orwell asserted that ‘the rich boys had milk and biscuits in the middle of the morning’, and that there were differentials in the very small amounts of pocket money doled out by the Wilkes and charged on the bill. No one else can remember this, even those who broadly agree with Orwell. But his account of the boys quizzing each other and boasting about their parents’ incomes rings true; at least none of the surviving contemporaries denies that it ‘sometimes’ went on. But Orwell’s ‘I doubt whether Sambo ever caned any boy whose father’s income was much above £2,000 a year’ is less likely to be descriptive sociology than the arresting pseudo-precision of the skilled essayist.

The Wilkes themselves played the money card in two obnoxious ways. First, Mr Wilkes revealed to Eric that he was on reduced fees (‘You are living on my bounty’) to spur him to work harder for a good scholarship; and second, he told him that if he didn’t win this scholarship, he must leave the school at 14 ‘and become, in Sambo’s favourite phrase, “a little office boy at forty pounds a year”’ — the ultimate horror of falling among the poverty-stricken genteel, the world of Gordon Comstock and his sister indeed. But this fear probably arose only in his last year in the school. There is little doubt, however, that even if the boys were reasonably egalitarian among themselves at most times, the Wilkes, for the survival and expansion of the school, had to work pretty hard at pleasing the kind of well-off and well-connected parent whose example would be followed in where to get the male offspring crammed and prepared for public school. Their task was made easier because most of the parents would have regarded spartan conditions, strict discipline and stoic behaviour as essential parts of the building of character; indeed, of Empire too. Eric Blair certainly suffered inwardly, even if not from outward abuse, at knowing how marginal he was in this strange world that tried to blend competitive careerism with the ethic of an unambitious English gentleman batting at number eight in a village cricket match.

Filth as a characteristic of the school impressed itself on his adult mind.

Whoever writes about his childhood must beware of exaggeration and self-pity. I do not want to claim that I was a martyr or that St Cyprian’s was a sort of Dotheboys Hall. But I should be falsifying my own memories if I did not record that they are largely memories of disgust. The overcrowded, underfed, underwashed life that we led was disgusting, as I recall it. If I shut my eyes and say ‘school’, it is of course the physical surroundings that first come back to me: the flat playing field with its cricket pavilion and the little shed by the rifle range, the draughty dormitories, the dusty splintery passages, the square of asphalt in front of the gymnasium, the raw-looking pinewood chapel at the back. And at almost every point some filthy detail obtrudes itself. For example, there were the pewter bowls out of which we had our porridge. They had overhanging rims, and under the rims there were accumulations of sour porridge, which could be flaked off in long strips. The porridge itself, too, contained more lumps, hairs and unexplained black things than one would have thought possible, unless someone were putting them there on purpose. It was never safe to start on that porridge without investigating it first. And there was the slimy water of the plunge bath — it was twelve or fifteen feet long, the whole school was supposed to go into it every morning, and I doubt whether the water was changed all that frequently — and the always-damp towels with their cheesy smell; and on occasional visits in the winter, the murky sea-water of the local Baths, which came straight in from the beach and on which I once saw floating a human turd. And the sweaty smell of the changing-room with its greasy basins and, giving on this, the row of filthy, dilapidated lavatories which had no fastenings of any kind on the doors, so that whenever you were sitting there someone was sure to come crashing in. It is not easy for me to think of my school-days without seeming to breathe in a whiff of something cold and evil-smelling — a sort of compound of sweaty stockings, dirty towels, faecal smells blowing along corridors, forks with old food between the prongs, neck of mutton stew, and the banging of doors of the lavatories and the echoing chamber-pots in the dormitories.[31]

That Orwell warns us, so honestly, against ‘exaggeration and self-pity’, is not to conjure that possibility away. Again the evidence conflicts. Connolly concurs: ‘blue with cold, haunting the radiators and the lavatories, and waking up every morning with the accumulated misery of the mornings before.’[32] The contemporary disagrees, saying that the baths in question were both clean and modem. ‘Murky sea-water’ coming ‘straight in from the beach’ — but could anything have been fresher in those days before widespread pollution? To picture the sea itself being filthy or corrupted by one random turd is laying it on a bit thick. It is reminiscent of the polluted ponds and rivers of his novel, Coming Up For Air (1939), which symbolizes a whole civilization gone sour and decadent. As to the foul food, again the most fervid defender of the school against Orwell, Connolly and Maxwell has this to say:

At that age you don’t ask many questions. You take life for what it is, and on the whole, by today’s standards, it was pretty spartan, not only from the point of view of washing in very cold water and having to do a length of the swimming-pool every morning, followed by P.T., which put me off every form of artificial physical exercise for life, but also because the food rationing was far less expertly managed in the First War than in the Second... It is one of the more merciful dispensations of providence that one tends to forget the hard times and remember the good... Some of the scars remain, but not many. Among them I should put the cold pewter bowls of porridge with the thick slimy lumps, into which I was actually sick one day and made to stand at a side-table and eat it up, the liquified orange-coloured maize pudding with the coarse husks floating on the top...[33]

Henry Longhurst surely kicks a decisive own-goal: nothing in Orwell’s account is as horrible as that. Orwell may have laid it on thick, but there is little doubt that his identification of filth with oppression and squalor with tyranny began so early, and so plausibly.

Bullying was rife. Orwell tells of being constantly bullied by a boy in the top form and of resolving to sneak up on him and hit him hard by surprise. He did, bloodying his mouth. The boy then challenged him to fight and Eric kept on refusing, out of fear he said, and feeling doubly guilty that he was breaking ‘rules’ both against surprise attack and against refusing legitimate challenges. To his surprise, the boy did not attack him out of hand, indeed thereafter left him alone. He said it then took him twenty years to realize that ‘the weak in a world governed by the strong’ must ‘break the rules, or perish... have the right to make a different set of rules for themselves.’ Although the story sounds almost too good to be true — old George making out that young Eric was an effective anti-hero — his admission that he drew the moral much later is impressive: he does not pretend that this is a first step on the road to his believing in a socialist revolution. Something like it must have happened. Sardonic about it all though he became, he was not a purely passive resister. This incident would have been in his penultimate year in school. But before that too he had been a target for bullying. Sir John Grotrian, a year behind him at school, has written:

My memories of Blair are of a time when he was an unhappy little boy at prep school. Both my brother and he, as intellectuals, were not infrequently ‘mobbed’ by the school’s gang of philistines and, in great fear, were reduced to tears and then laughed at; and I as an onlooker, to my everlasting shame, had not the guts to attempt to defend them. What would have been the use I argued. Outnumbered by twenty or thirty to one, how could I have quelled the mob?

And poor Blair didn’t only suffer physically from his contemporaries. Mrs Wilkes herself, frequently in a rage of impatience while teaching the children, was not above resorting to violence. She used to reach out and pull the boys’ hair, as though that would be any kind of an aid to learning or remembering. For that reason, Blair told us, he kept his hair very well greased so that the teacher’s fingers would slip off! His hair was quite straight and butter coloured, his complexion cream. His face was moon shaped and all too often streaked with tears.[34]

This is poignant and impressive evidence, especially as Grotrian had not read anything of Orwell’s and had never heard of’Such, Such Were the Joys’, nor yet Connolly’s Enemies of Promise. It is confirmed in some notes that the contemporary (a year senior to Blair) prepared:

To be absolutely frank, he was NOT popular among the majority of our ‘little hooligans’!!! Nevertheless I always liked Eric and I believe he liked me... He was very UNordinary. He seemed to think about things in a much more sophisticated and mature manner than we did. I think he appreciated that I thought of him like this. He had a temper which could be very easily aroused by ‘little hooligans’ — but I remember that on several occasions I — as head boy — stood and drove the hooligans off. NO, he was not popular, but neither was he generally disliked. I think it was just a matter of him seeming to be years ahead of the rest of all of us — mentally. I think he was ‘bullied’ by the younger ones and this probably infuriated and affected him. I don’t know about his private family life — but may be because his mother remained at home while his father returned to India, had something to do with it.[35]

The ‘it’ is his general view that ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ was a monstrously unfair and unbalanced attack on the school. And he plainly thinks that Eric should have put up with the bullying and not taken such a belated revenge, even on the assumption that it was Eric himself who was flogged for bed-wetting. Nevertheless, if the attitudes are different in these two accounts, the facts are much the same and are equally damning. But again the essential ‘offence’ of Eric seems to have been, not as George makes out, lack of money and social insecurity, but of being intellectual, bookish, a swot, mentally superior. It is a wonder these Philistines did not kill Cyril Connolly.

What Orwell most disliked was simply the bad teaching. All the barbarity and psychological stress could have been forgiven if not forgotten if the Wilkes had valued learning for its own sake and not, as he constantly stresses, for its cash value. ‘Over a period of two or three years the scholarship boys were crammed with learning as cynically as a goose is crammed for Christmas.’ But ‘with what learning!’ he says. The whole ‘evil’ process was ‘frankly a preparation for a sort of confidence trick. Your job was to learn exactly those things that would give an examiner the impression that you knew more than you did know, and... to avoid burdening your brain with anything else.’ They were prepared in the classics in a ‘flashy, unsound way’, never reading a book through, only the kind of passages that might come up in the exam as an ‘unseen translation’. He then used, and kept, Entick’s English-Latin Dictionary — in which he wrote his name in Greek — published in 1820 and unrevised.

History was taught ‘as a series of unrelated, unintelligible but — in some way that was never explained to us — important facts with resounding phrases attached to them’. He recalled ‘positive orgies of dates, with the keener boys leaping up and down in their places in their eagerness to shout out the right answers, and at the same time not feeling the faintest interest in the meaning of the mysterious events they were naming’.[36] He felt strongly enough to tell the — possibly indifferent — Indian listeners to the BBC’s wartime Eastern Service all about this: ‘I used to think of history as a sort of long scroll with thick black lines ruled across it at intervals. Each of these lines marked the end of what was called “a period”, and you were given to understand that what came afterwards was completely different from what had gone before.’[37] He also regaled the readers of Tribune in 1947 with an account of how bad history teaching is in private schools.[38]

Gavin Maxwell’s account confirms the factualist frenzy: ‘a young master... loped up to the blackboard and wrote his first question, “Who beat De Gras?” This struck me as a funny and naive simplification of the issue... it was one of my first recognitions of weakness, woolliness.’ Maxwell suffered particularly because they expected him to have instant recall of every date in Scottish and border history, his ancestors having been in on so much of it.[39]

All in all, the school seems to have been a pretty despicable place. Orwell’s description of it seems truthful, but it is not literally accurate, and his account of his own relationship with it, of its effect on him, is either semi-fictional or heavily overdrawn. He was able to keep a greater distance than the essay suggests, as if even in those days he had developed both a tendency to be against authority and an ability to preserve himself from its influence. Some of Orwell’s later rage at the school may have been due to a puritanical feeling of time so badly wasted — brutality and strain without intellectual compensation; and, at that period, the sheer disappointment of a small boy who naively and genuinely liked books. Much of his rage was highly rational. ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ was no Émile, but it was a considerable tract on what education should not be. Fifty years later it so stung a distinguished Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, old Andrew Gow, who had been Blair’s tutor at Eton, that he wrote to Sonia Orwell:

I did not know that you were collecting his works, but I hope, if so, that you do not intend to reprint that essay about his private [prep] school... It shocked me profoundly. I knew the Wilkes’s and the school quite well... and the essay is monstrously unfair. It was quite a good school: Mr W., though a rather stupid and probably idle man, was genuinely keen on it and his boys; Mrs W., capable, energetic, and motherly, probably really ran it... No doubt G. (and Cyril Connolly) being rebels, resented being mothered, and G. seems from the essay to have acquired an inferiority complex because he was taken at a reduced fee. I could understand his having written thus venomously just after leaving but if the date on the essay is correct it was written long afterwards and I was horrified at his having nursed his rancour so long. I cannot believe that he would ever have published it himself aad think it would be a disservice both to him and to the W.’s to resurrect it.[40]

And when, a few years before, David Farrer, the partner of Fredric Warburg, Orwell’s final and most faithful publisher, had actually visited Mrs Wilkes to explore the possibility of publishing the obviously libellous piece, he reported: ‘I am bound to say that she produced ample evidence in the form of letters, testimonials, etc., to substantiate her denunciation of the story, which I suspect is a gross distortion of what actually took place.’[41] Gross distortion?

What finally emerges from ‘the Echoing Green’, that is, the highly complex relationship between moral truths of his adult ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ and the facts of his actual career at St Cyprian’s (does not the full quotation warn of such complexity?), is the common ground of the two experiences of brutality, injustice and oppression. But the oppression of St Cyprian’s was not in a totalitarian mode — completely unenvisaged by anyone in the 1910s and Orwell recognized it, though among the very first, only after 1936 — but rather in an old-fashioned autocratic mode. Autocracy was shock enough in what was supposed to be a cultivated school in a civilized parliamentary democracy. Under autocracy inner dissent can be maintained beneath the cover of politic conformity; but his picture of totalitarianism was of a world in which all privacy was denied and which had to be resisted if individualism was to survive. Such a distinction was important to Orwell in his last years. His experiences at prep school prepared him to reject imperialism when he went to Burma and to side with the underdog, for ever afterwards, with empathy and understanding. But they did not directly form the imaginative roots of Nineteen Eighty-Four, even though some time just before writing that book, his least autobiographical novel, he wrote or revised an apparently autobiographical essay, as if to get the feeling for Winston Smith in his world of no escape from doing evil. The essay exploited and reinterpreted his own past for both literary and polemical effort, in the light of later knowledge.

Jacintha Buddicom, the author of Cat Poems, knew him well in his teens and wrote a book about their childhood friendship in which she actually claimed that ‘he was a specially happy child’. She cast shrewd doubts on the literal accuracy of the great polemic against prep schools.[42] A reviewer in the New Statesman had represented her as saying that the essay was ‘a pack of lies’. In her reply, which was not published, she wrote,

Orwell’s ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ is not a pack of lies! It is a story in the form of an autobiographical sketch written in the first person: a story so brilliantly told that it is popularly believed to have happened word for word — as some incidents undoubtedly did.[43]

She is probably right; but it is simply impossible to be sure. All that is clear is that if he intended it to be literally truthful, then memory played him some curious tricks, but that none the less it was a brilliant polemic — not entirely about the past.