Scotland was a private paradise which a few initiates could talk about and make outsiders feel small.

‘You going to Scotland this hols?’

‘Rather! We go every year.’

‘My pater's got three miles of river.’

‘My pater's giving me a new gun for the twelfth. There's jolly good black game where we go. Get out, Smith! What are listening for? You've never been to Scotland. I bet you don't know what a blackcock looks like.’

Following on this, imitations of the cry of a blackcock, of the roaring of a stag, of the accent of ‘our ghillies’, etc. etc.

And the questionings that new boys of doubtful social origin were sometimes put through — questionings quite surprising in their mean-minded particularity, when one reflects that the inquisitors were only twelve or thirteen!

‘How much a year has your pater got? What part of London do you live in? Is that Knightsbridge or Kensington? How many bathrooms has you house got? How many servants do your people keep? Have you got a butler? Well, then, have you got a cook? Where do you get your clothes made? How many shows did you go to in the hols? How much money did you bring back with you?’ etc. etc.

I have seen a little new boy, hardly older than eight, desperately lying his way through such a catechism:

‘Have your people got a car?’

‘Yes.’

‘What sort of car?’

‘Daimler.’

‘How many horse-power?’

(Pause, and leap in the dark.) ‘Fifteen.’

‘What kind of lights?’

The little boy is bewildered.

‘What kind of lights? Electric or acetylene?’

(A longer pause, and another leap in the dark.) ‘Acetylene.’

‘Coo! He says his pater's car's got acetylene lamps. They went out years ago. It must be as old as the hill.’

‘Rot! He's making it up. He hasn't got a car. He's just a navvy. Your pater's a navvy.’

And so on.

By the social standards that prevailed about me, I was no good, and could not be any good. But all the different kinds of virtue seemed to be mysteriously interconnected and to belong to much the same people. It was not only money that mattered: there were also strength, beauty, charm, athleticism and something called ‘guts’ or ‘character’, which in reality meant the power to impose your will on others. I did not possess any of these qualities. At games, for instance, I was hopeless. I was a fairly good swimmer and not altogether contemptible at cricket, but these had no prestige value, because boys only attach importance to a game if it requires strength and courage. What counted was football, at which I was a funk. I loathed the game, and since I could see no pleasure or usefulness in it, it was very difficult for me to show courage at it. Football, it seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a ball about, but is a species of fighting. The lovers of football are large, boisterous, nobbly boys who are good at knocking down and trampling on slightly smaller boys. That was the pattern of school life — a continuous triumph of the strong over the weak. Virtue consisted in winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people — in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.

I did not question the prevailing standards, because so far as I could see there were no others. How could the rich, the strong, the elegant, the fashionable, the powerful, be in the wrong? It was their world, and the rules they made for it must be the right ones. And yet from a very early age I was aware of the impossibility of any subjective conformity. Always at the centre of my heart the inner self seemed to be awake, pointing out the difference between the moral obligation and the psychological fact. It was the same in all matters, worldly or other-worldly. Take religion, for instance. You were supposed to love God, and I did not question this. Till the age of about fourteen I believed in God, and believed that the accounts given of him were true.