ace, and Michael told Buckley that he was called Charles
Michael Saxby, and also that his mother was generally away from home,
that his father was dead, that his governess was called Miss Carthew,
that he had a sister who played the piano and that one day when he grew
up he hoped to be an explorer and search for orchids in Borneo.
Sometimes on Saturday or Wednesday half-holidays Buckley came to tea
with Michael and sometimes Michael went to tea with Buckley, and
observed how well Buckley kept in order his young brothers and kiddy
sisters. Buckley lived close to Kensington Gardens and rode to school
every morning on a London Road Car, which was the reason of Michael's
keen partizanship of that company. In the eleven o'clock break between
first and second hours, Michael and Buckley walked arm in arm round the
field, and in the dinner-hour Michael and Buckley shared a rope on the
Giant Stride and talked intimately on the top of the horizontal ladder
in the outdoor gymnasium. During the Christmas holidays they haunted the
banks of the Round Pond and fished for minnows and sailed capsizable
yachts and cheeked keepers. Every night Michael thought of Buckley and
every night Michael hoped that Buckley thought of him. Even in
scholarship they were scarcely distinguishable; for when at the end of
the autumn term Michael was top of the class in Divinity and English,
Buckley headed the Latin list. As for Drawing they were bracketed equal
at the very bottom of the form.

Then towards the middle of the Lent term Randell House was divided
against itself; for one half of the school became Oxford and the other
half Cambridge, in celebration of the boat-race which would be rowed at
the end of March. When one morning Michael saw Buckley coming into
school with a light blue swallow pinned to the left of his sailor-knot
and when Buckley perceived attached to Michael's sailor-top a medal
dependent from a dark blue ribbon, they eyed each other as strangers.
This difference of opinion was irremediable. Neither romance nor
sentiment could ever restore to Michael and Buckley their pristine
cordiality, because Michael was now a despised Oxtail and Buckley was a
loathed Cabbage-stalk.

They shouted to one another from the heart of massed factions mocking
rhymes. Michael would chant:

"Oxford upstairs eating all the cakes; Cambridge downstairs licking up
the plates."

To which Buckley would retort:

"Cambridge, rowing on and on for ever; Oxfo