Appendixes

Summary

APPENDIX A: T.H. WHITE's AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FRAGMENT 4.ii.mcmxli [< > indicates material in Warner]

Reading Graves’ ‘Long Weekend’ made me think back to 1920–1924, when I was at Cheltenham. I still find it difficult to imagine this time factually. Sir Edmund Gosse says somewhere that the children of the lower classes do not tolerate being thrashed, but the children of the upper classes do tolerate and are said to take a melancholy pride in it. I suppose this is a vestige of the Norman conquest. The Normans imported buggery and flagellation, I believe, which were not Anglo–Celtic vices, and thus they became distinctive of the upper classes.

I was trying to remember how often I have been tanned, but couldn't. Twice at my preparatory school, certainly, i.e., before I was 14. Both times were fair enough and I did not resent them. The first time was for throwing a sharp geometry compass into the air, which landed on its point on the headmaster's desk. Even then he only made me stand on a chair, but I grinned and clowned at friends over his shoulder, was caught, and this exasperated him into whacking me. I only got three stripes, and felt quite proud. The second time was for a dormitory rag on my bath night. The H.M. had already found me out of bed, and ordered me back to it so that I should not catch cold. But I got out again and was found by him while pillow-fighting in another dormitory, itself a grave offense, so I was caned.

At Cheltenham I was tanned at least six times—it seems much more, but these I can remember clearly. Oblivion has scattered some poppy over this, in her kind way, for nearly all my beatings in that place were brutal. Three times by my housemaster, three by the prefects. These would be when I was 14 to 16 years old.

There would be about 60 boys in a ‘House’ and for these there would be study accommodation for about 20. This left 40 of the younger boys to herd together in a desk-filled hall called the ‘Sweat Room.’ <My housemaster was a sadistic, homosexual, middle aged bachelor with a gloomy, suffused face. His prefects were lither and brighter copies of himself.> It was easy, between housemaster and prefect, to goad any good-looking boy into being smacked.