The Henson Journals

[399]

16th Sunday after Trinity, September 19th, 1915.

412th day

I attended the Celebration at 7.45 a.m. and received the Sacrament in company with 30 or 40 boys & masters. As I knelt in the chapel I mused on the strange courses of my life. How much better it might have fared with me if I had been sent to a public school, disciplined and taught as these boys, & sent in to the world with a normal outlook and a normal equipment. As it is, wherever I may be, or whatever positions I may hold, I shall always move through the world an enigmatic and friendless Ishmaelite! The privation of normal boyhood comes bitterly home to a man in the intolerable solitude of later years. The two grand bequests of well–ordered boyhood – memories & friendships – are hard to live without when the hair is seamed with silver, and one's gait has lost its elastic vigour. There are no places which fill me with so much regret & yearning as public schools. Is this nothing more than that futile human habit of coveting what one has not, & cannot have? Mackenzie's account of the Durham Canons when he was in contact with them is more interesting than edifying. Disunion & mutual back–biting evidently prevailed. Then as now there seems to have been a consensus of opinion with respect to W. "He will take infinite pains to do a man some considerable kindness, & find himself hated for it". That is pathetically true: & the reason is that when sincerity is felt to be absent, kindness has the aspect of an almost intolerable grievance. The problem of governing a society in which the senior & most important member has to be described as 'the falsest man in the world' is assuredly not lacking in elements of difficulty. It is of course, always easy to quarrel: but on those lines there is no solution of anything: yet the maintenance of harmony is no child's play, if one would maintain authority.

[401]

I went to chapel for Mattins. There is just room for the school, & only just. The ringing of the bells of the parish church made attention more difficult than it need have been, but on the whole the order & reverence were excellent, & the singing quite hearty though curiously gruff. A tall lad in front of me filled the place with the odour of the ointment with which he had been plentifully endued his own head. Similar anointing was very general & the effect distinctly trying to a sensitive nose! After service one of the masters, Parmiter, took me for a walk. He had been at Oriel when I was on the staff of that college. He was brought by Dibblee to dine at All Souls, & there he met me. He says that he recalls clearly an eager & prolonged argument between the Warden & me on the subject of 'Divorce' & that my views were then widely different from what they have become. I lunched with the boys & then dozed & dawdled until service time. Evensong was at 4 p.m. I had no reason to complain of lack of attention on the part of the boys. That they were not uninterested by the sermon may, perhaps, be inferred from the remark of one of the boys, which the Headmaster was good enough to repeat to me: "It ought to have been longer". Yet I preached for at least 20 minutes. After service one of the assistant masters took me to see the aviary. He said that Lord Lilford had introduced some small owls from Greece, & that these had so multiplied as to become a nuisance. The smaller birds were leaving the county before them. How unsafe it is to disturb the balance of nature! There are some very interesting old houses in Uppingham & the parish church contains the pulpit from which Jeremy Taylor preached as rector of the parish. I wrote letters to Frank & Carissima. Before going to bed I had much talk with mine host.

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