The Project Gutenberg EBook of Years of Plenty, by Ivor Brown

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Title: Years of Plenty

Author: Ivor Brown

Release Date: July 6, 2010 [EBook #33096]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YEARS OF PLENTY ***

Produced by Al Haines

"_The wealth of youth, we spent it well
And decently, as very few can.
And is it lost? I cannot tell:
And what is more I doubt if you can._"
HILAIRE BELLOC.

YEARS OF PLENTY

BY IVOR BROWN

LONDON

MARTIN SECKER

NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET

ADELPHI

_First Published 1915_

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE: SCHOOL

BOOK TWO: UNIVERSITY

BOOK ONE

SCHOOL

I

Life seemed to Martin Leigh, as he gazed at the wooden walls of his
cubicle, very overwhelming: there were so many things to remember. He
had lived through his first day as a boarder at a public school and at
length he had the great joy of knowing that for nine hours there would
be nothing to find out. He seemed to have been finding things out ever
since seven o'clock that morning: finding out his form and his form
master, his desk at school and his desk in the house, his place in
chapel and his place at meals, his hours of work and his field for
play. He had moved in a world of mystery, a world of doors which had
to be opened and of locks which had to be picked. It had been
terrifying work, this probing of places.

All day Martin had been shown things by formidable people in a
hustling, inadequate way: he had been far too awed by the majesty of
his conductors to ask any questions and he realised now that he had
forgotten nearly all that he had been told. He knew that he was in the
Lower Fifth, Classical, and that his form master was a renowned terror:
he knew also that he was supposed to play football with the other small
boys of his house in a muddy-looking field some distance away. But his
place in chapel ... that had vanished entirely from his mind. And
to-morrow morning he would either have to pluck up his scanty courage
and make a fool of himself by asking one of the formidable people, or
else trust to luck and probably m