I think that was because
I was a day-boy and so freer than most of the boys, partly because of
a temperamental disposition to see things in my own way and have my
private dreams, partly because I was a little antagonised by the family
traditions that ran through the school. I was made to feel at first
that I was a rank outsider, and I never quite forgot it. I suffered very
little bullying, and I never had a fight--in all my time there were only
three fights--but I followed my own curiosities. I was already a
very keen theologian and politician before I was fifteen. I was also
intensely interested in modern warfare. I read the morning papers in
the Reading Room during the midday recess, never missed the illustrated
weeklies, and often when I could afford it I bought a PALL MALL GAZETTE
on my way home.

I do not think that I was very exceptional in that; most intelligent
boys, I believe, want naturally to be men, and are keenly interested
in men's affairs. There is not the universal passion for a magnified
puerility among them it is customary to assume. I was indeed a voracious
reader of everything but boys' books--which I detested--and fiction. I
read histories, travel, popular science and controversy with particular
zest, and I loved maps. School work and school games were quite
subordinate affairs for me. I worked well and made a passable figure
at games, and I do not think I was abnormally insensitive to the fine
quality of our school, to the charm of its mediaeval nucleus, its
Gothic cloisters, its scraps of Palladian and its dignified Georgian
extensions; the contrast of the old quiet, that in spite of our presence
pervaded it everywhere, with the rushing and impending London all
about it, was indeed a continual pleasure to me. But these things were
certainly not the living and central interests of my life.

I had to conceal my wider outlook to a certain extent--from the masters
even more than from the boys. Indeed I only let myself go freely with
one boy, Britten, my especial chum, the son of the Agent-General for
East Australia. We two discovered in a chance conversation A PROPOS of a
map in the library that we were both of us curious why there were Malays
in Madagascar, and how the Mecca pilgrims came from the East Indies
before steamships were available. Neither of us had suspected that
there was any one at all in the school who knew or cared a rap about the
Indian Ocean, except as water on the way to India. Bu