Such, Such Were the Joys
BY GEORGE ORWELL
Soon after I arrived at Crossgates
(not immediately, but after a week or two, just when I seemed to be
settling into routine of school life) I began wetting my bed. I was now
aged eight, so that this was a reversion to a habit which I must have
grown out of at least four years earlier.
Nowadays, I believe,
bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for granted. It is a normal
reaction in children who have been removed from their homes to a
strange place. In those days, however, it was looked on as a disgusting
crime which the child committed on purpose and for which the proper
cure was a beating. For my part I did not need to be told it was a
crime. Night after night I prayed, with a fervor never previously
attained in my prayers, ‘Please God, do not let me wet my bed! Oh,
please God, do not let me wet my bed!’ but it made remarkably little
difference. Some nights the thing happened, others not. There was no
volition about it, no consciousness. You did not properly speaking do
the deed: you were merely woke up in the morning and found that the
sheets were wringing wet.
After the second or third offense I
was warned that I should be beaten next time, but I received the
warning in a curiously roundabout way. One afternoon, as we were filing
out from tea, Mrs. Simpson, the headmaster’s wife, was sitting at the
head of one of the tables, chatting with a lady of whom I know nothing,
except that she was on an afternoon’s visit to the school. She was an
intimidating, masculine-looking person wearing a riding habit, or
something that I took to be a riding habit. I was just leaving the room
when Mrs. Simpson called me back, as though to introduce me to the
visitor.
Mrs. Simpson was nicknamed Bingo, and I shall call her
by that name for I seldom think of her by any other. (Officially,
however, she was addressed as Mum, probably a corruption of the ‘Ma’am’
used by public school boys to their housemasters’ wives.) She was a
stocky square-built woman with hard red cheeks, a flat top to her head,
prominent brows and deepset, suspicious eyes. Although a great deal of
the time she was full of false heartiness, jollying one along with
mannish slang (‘Buck up, old chap!’ and so forth), and even using one’s
Christian name, her eyes never lost their anxious, accusing look. It
was very difficult to look her in the face without feeling guilty, even
at moments when one was not guilty of anything in particular.
‘Here
is a little boy,’ said Bingo, 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
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
judgment 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 stern
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 offense.
A
little later, I forget how, I learned that it was not after all ‘Mrs.
Form’ who would do the beating. I cannot remember whether it was that
very night that I wetted my bed again, but at any rate I did wet it
again quite soon. Oh, the despair, the feeling of cruel injustice,
after all my prayers and resolutions, at once again waking between the
clammy sheets! There was no chance of hiding what I had done. The grim
statuesque matron, Daphne by name, arrived in the dormitory specially
to inspect my bed. She pulled back the clothes, then drew herself up,
and the dreaded words seemed to come rolling out of her like a peal of
thunder:
‘REPORT YOURSELF to the headmaster after breakfast!’
I
do not know how many times I heard that phrase during my early years at
Crossgates. It was only very rarely that it did not mean a beating. The
words always had a portentous sound in my ears, like muffled drums or
the words of the death sentence.
When I arrived to report
myself, Bingo was doing something or other at the long shiny table in
the ante-room to the study. Her uneasy eyes searched me as I went past.
In the study Mr. Simpson, nicknamed Sim, was waiting. Sim was 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 humor. He knew, of course, why I had been
sent to him, and had already taken a bone-handled riding crop out of
the cupboard, but it was part of the punishment of reporting yourself
that you had to proclaim your offense with your own lips. When I had
said my say, he read me a short but pompous lecture, then seized me by
the scruff of the neck, twisted me over and began beating me with the
riding crop. He had a habit of continuing his lecture while he flogged
you, and I remember the words ‘you dirty little boy’ keeping time with
the blows. The beating did not hurt (perhaps as it was the first time,
he was not hitting me very hard), and I walked out feeling very much
better. The fact that the beating had not hurt was a sort of victory
and partially wiped out the shame of the bed-wetting. I was even
incautious enough to wear a grin on my face. Some small boys were
hanging about in the passage outside the door of the ante-room.
‘D’you get the cane?’
‘It didn’t hurt,’ I said proudly.
Bingo had heard everything. Instantly her voice came screaming after me:
‘Come here! Come here this instant! What was that you said?’
‘I said it didn’t hurt,’ I faltered out.
‘How dare you say a thing like that? Do you think that is a proper thing to say? Go in and REPORT YOURSELF AGAIN!’
This
time Sim 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.
I
had fallen into a chair, weakly sniveling. I remember that this was the
only time throughout my boyhood when a beating actually reduced me to
tears, and curiously enough I was not even now crying because of the
pain. The second beating had not hurt very much either. Fright and
shame seemed to have anesthetized me. I was crying partly because I
felt that this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but
partly also 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.
I knew that bed-wetting was
(a) wicked and (b) outside my control. The second fact I was personally
aware of, and the first I did not question. It was possible, therefore,
to commit a sin without knowing that you committed it, without wanting
to commit it, and without being able to avoid it. 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 Sim’s cane: I
must have had glimpses of it even before I left home, for my early
childhood had not been 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. And the double beating was a
turning-point, for it brought home to me for the first time the
harshness of the environment into which I had been flung. Life was more
terrible, and I was more wicked, than I had imagined. At any rate, as I
sat on the edge of a chair in Sim’s study, with not even the
self-possession to stand up while he stormed at me, I had a conviction
of sin and folly and weakness, such as I do not remember to have felt
before.
In general, one’s memories of any period must
necessarily weaken as one moves away from it. One is constantly
learning new facts, and old ones have to drop out to make way for them.
At twenty I could have written the history of my schooldays with an
accuracy which would be quite impossible now. But it can also happen
that one’s memories grow sharper after a long lapse of time, because
one is looking at the past with fresh eyes and can isolate and, as it
were, notice facts which previously existed undifferentiated among a
mass of others. Here are two things which in a sense I remembered, but
which did not strike me as strange or interesting until quite recently.
One is that the second beating seemed to me a just and reasonable
punishment. To get one beating, and then to get another and far fiercer
one on top of it, for being so unwise as to show that the first had not
hurt—that was quite natural. The gods are jealous, and when you have
good fortune you should conceal it. The other is that I accepted the
broken riding crop as my own crime. I can still recall my feeling as I
saw the handle lying on the carpet—the feeling of having done an
ill-bred clumsy thing, and ruined an expensive object. I had broken it:
so Sim told me, and so I believed. This acceptance of guilt lay
unnoticed in my memory for twenty or thirty years.
So much for
the episode of the bed-wetting. But there is one more thing to be
remarked. That is that I did not wet my bed again—at least, I did wet
it once again, and received another beating, after which the trouble
stopped. So perhaps this barbarous remedy does work, though at a heavy
price, I have no doubt.
All this was thirty years ago and more.
The question is: Does a child at school go through the same kind of
experiences nowadays?
The only honest answer, I believe, is that
we do not with certainty know. Of course it is obvious that the
present-day attitude towards education is enormously more humane and
sensible than that of the past. The snobbishness that was an integral
part of my own education would be almost unthinkable today, because the
society that nourished it is dead. I recall a conversation that must
have taken place about a year before I left Crossgates. A Russian boy,
large and fair-haired, a year older than myself, was questioning me.
‘How much a-year has your father got?’
I
told him what I thought it was, adding a few hundreds to make it sound
better. The Russian boy, neat in his habits, produced a pencil and a
small notebook and made a calculation.
‘My father has over two hundred times as much money as yours,’ he announced with a sort of amused contempt.
That
was in 1915. What happened to that money a couple of years later, I
wonder? And still more I wonder, do conversations of that kind happen
at preparatory schools now?
Clearly there has been a vast change
of outlook, a general growth of ‘enlightenment,’ even among ordinary,
unthinking middle-class people. Religious belief, for instance, has
largely vanished, dragging other kinds of nonsense after it. I imagine
that very few people nowadays would tell a child that if it masturbates
it will end in the lunatic asylum. Beating, too, has become
discredited, and has even been abandoned at many schools. Nor is the
underfeeding of children looked on as a normal, almost meritorious act.
No one now would openly set out to give his pupils as little food as
they could do with, or tell them that it is healthy to get up from a
meal as hungry as you sat down. The whole status of children has
improved, partly because they have grown relatively less numerous. And
the diffusion of even a little psychological knowledge has made it
harder for parents and schoolteachers to indulge their aberrations in
the name of discipline. Here is a case, not known to me personally, but
known to someone I can vouch for, and happening within my own lifetime.
A small girl, daughter of a clergyman, continued wetting her bed at an
age when she should have grown out of it. In order to punish her for
this dreadful deed, her father took her to a large garden party and
there introduced her to the whole company as a little girl who wetted
her bed: and to underline her wickedness he had previously painted her
face black. I do not suggest that Bingo and Sim would actually have
done a thing like this, but I doubt whether it would have much
surprised them. After all, things do change. And yet—!
The
question is not whether boys are still buckled into Eton collars on
Sunday, or told that babies are dug up under gooseberry bushes. That
kind of thing is at an end, admittedly. The real question is whether it
is still normal for a school child to live for years amid irrational
terrors and lunatic misunderstandings. And here one is up against the
very great difficulty of knowing what a child really feels and thinks.
A child which appears reasonably happy may actually be suffering
horrors which it cannot or will not reveal. It lives in a sort of alien
under-water world which we can only penetrate by memory or divination.
Our chief clue is the fact that we were once children ourselves, and
many people appear to forget the atmosphere of their own childhood
almost entirely. Think for instance of the unnecessary torments that
people will inflict by sending a child back to school with clothes of
the wrong pattern, and refusing to see that this matters! Over things
of this kind a child will sometimes utter a protest, but a great deal
of the time its attitude is one of simple concealment. Not to expose
your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of
seven or eight onwards. Even the affection that one feels for a child,
the desire to protect and cherish it, is a cause of misunderstanding.
One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another
adult, but is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.
Looking back on my own childhood, after the infant years were over, I
do not believe that I ever felt love for any mature person, except my
mother, and even her I did not trust, in the sense that shyness made me
conceal most of my real feelings from her. Love, the spontaneous,
unqualified emotion of love, was something I could only feel for people
who were young. Towards people who were old—and remember that ‘old’ to
a child means over thirty, or even over twenty-five—I could feel
reverence, respect, admiration or compunction, but I seemed cut off
from them by a veil of fear and shyness mixed up with physical
distaste. People are too ready to forget the child’s physical shrinking
from the adult. The enormous size of grownups, their ungainly, rigid
bodies, their coarse wrinkled skins, their great relaxed eyelids, their
yellow teeth, and the whiffs of musty clothes and beer and sweat and
tobacco that disengage from them at every movement! Part of the reason
for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is
usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from
below. Besides, being fresh and unmarked itself, the child has
impossibly high standards in the matter of skin and teeth and
complexion. But the greatest barrier of all is the child’s
misconception about age. A child can hardly envisage life beyond
thirty, and in judging people’s ages it will make fantastic mistakes.
It will think that a person of twenty-five is forty, that a person of
forty is sixty-five, and so on. Thus, when I fell in love with Elsie I
took her to be grown up. I met her again, when I was thirteen and she,
I think, must have been twenty-three; she now seemed to me a
middle-aged woman, somewhat past her best. And the child thinks of
growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious
reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of
thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no
importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see,
having anything to live for. Only child life is real life. The
schoolmaster who imagines he is loved and trusted by his boys is in
fact mimicked and laughed at behind his back. An adult who does not
seem dangerous nearly always seems ridiculous.
I base these
generalizations on what I can recall of my own childhood outlook.
Treacherous though memory is, 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. Consider this, for example. How would Crossgates appear
to me now, if I could go back, at my present age, and see it as it was
in 1915? What should I think of Bingo and Sim, those terrible,
all-powerful monsters? I should see them as a couple of silly, shallow,
ineffectual people, eagerly clambering up a social ladder which any
thinking person could see to be on the point of collapse. I would be no
more frightened of them than I would be frightened of a dormouse.
Moreover, in those days they seemed to me fantastically old, whereas—
though of this I am not certain—I imagine they must have been somewhat
younger than I am now. And how would Johnny Hall appear, with his
blacksmith’s arms and his red, jeering face? Merely a scruffy little
boy, barely distinguishable from hundreds of other scruffy little boys.
The two sets of facts can lie side by side in my mind, because these
happen to be my own memories. But it would be very difficult for me to
see with the eyes of any other child, except by an effort of the
imagination which might lead me completely astray. The child and the
adult live in different worlds. If that is so, we cannot be certain
that school, at any rate boarding school, is not still for many
children as dreadful an experience as it used to be. Take away God,
Latin, the cane, class distinctions and sexual taboos, and the fear,
the hatred, the snobbery and the misunderstanding might still all be
there. It will have been seen that my own main trouble was an utter
lack of any sense of proportion or probability. This led me to accept
outrages and believe absurdities, and to suffer torments over things
which were in fact of no importance. It is not enough to say that I was
‘silly’ and ‘ought to have known better.’ Look back into your own
childhood and think of the nonsense you used to believe and the
trivialities which could make you suffer. Of course my own case had its
individual variations, but essentially it was that of countless other
boys. The weakness of the child is that it starts with a blank sheet.
It neither understands nor questions the society in which it lives, and
because of its credulity other people can work upon it, infecting it
with the sense of inferiority and the dread of offending against
mysterious, terrible laws. It may be that everything that happened to
me at Crossgates could happen in the most ‘enlightened’ school, though
perhaps in subtler forms. Of one thing, however, I do feel fairly sure,
and that is that boarding schools are worse than day schools. A child
has a better chance with the sanctuary of its home near at hand. And I
think the characteristic faults of the English upper and middle classes
may be partly due to the practice, general until recently, of sending
children away from home as young as nine, eight or even seven.
I
have never been back to Crossgates. In a way it is only within the last
decade that I have really thought over my schooldays, vividly though
their memory has haunted me. Nowadays, I believe, it would make very
little impression on me to see the place again, if it still exists. And
if I went inside and smelled again the inky, dusty smell of the big
schoolroom, the rosiny smell of the chapel, the stagnant smell of the
swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I think I should
only feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of
childhood: How small everything has grown, and how terrible is the
deterioration in myself!