A Sort of Life by Graham Greene Page A

dams breaking, reservoirs overflowing (I had read about it all in Rider Haggard’s Lysbeth ), but even drowning was preferable to the ignoble routine of school. The matron’s kindness stood out by its rarity in that world, and perhaps because of its rarity two kind gentle people were drawn together and the assistant housemaster, Mr Dale, whom we had nicknamed Dicker, married the matron.
    Dicker was a youngish man in those days (though, of course, to me middle-aged) with a bald head and gold-rimmed glasses and a drawl which sometimes became a slight stutter; a difficulty of communication, one would have said, and yet to those willing to listen he communicated more than any other master, except perhaps my father. Oddly enough he had no difficulty with discipline, and though he had little obvious popularity, like some of the hearty mud-stained members of the staff, and looked out of place in flapping shorts as he circled the scrum with a whistle in his mouth, no one imitated his drawl, his nickname was innocuous, and the worst joke ever made at his expense was ‘Where do the fleas run? Up Hill and down Dale’. Hill, a fine tennis-player and an older man, was Dale’s chief friend at the school. Later, when retired, they collaborated in difficult academic crosswords which were published in a Sunday paper under the name of Torquemada. Some of Dale’s kindness must have rubbed off on Hill, for I remember how I was once invited to tea by him and how twohours of anchovy-toast and tea-cakes and adult conversation atoned for a week of misery and postponed again the final breakdown. Perhaps it would have been postponed indefinitely if at that period I could have comforted myself with Dale’s favourite apophthegm, drawled out in the most distressing circumstances: ‘It’s all experience.’ I remember repeating the phrase to keep my spirits up in April, 1941, as I shambled fearfully down blazing Gower Street in the footsteps of our old Jewish post warden, powerful and imperturbable in his shiny black mackintosh, like a moving statue in malachite, the stone catching the reflection of the flames and flares, one of the bravest men I have known and the most unaware of his own courage.
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    I think it may have been the interminable repetitions in my life which finally broke me down. A term always lasted thirteen weeks, and contained two ‘half-holidays’ as they were called, except in summer when there were three. Sundays came every seven days with terrible regularity, like Lazarus with his drop of water; there were no Saints’ Days to vary the week, and once a week came the dreaded O.T.C . parade.
    I tried out other forms of escape after I failed to cut my leg. Once at home on the eve of term I went into the dark room by the linen-cupboard, and in that red Mephistophelean glare drank a quantity of hypo under the false impression that it was poisonous. On another occasion I drained my blue glass bottle of hay-fever drops, which, as they contained a small quantity of cocaine, were probably good for my despair. A bunch of deadly nightshade, picked and eaten on the Common, had only a slightly narcotic effect, and once, towards the end of one holiday, I swallowed twenty aspirins before swimming in the empty school baths. (I can still remember the curious sensation of swimming through cotton wool.)
    I endured that life for some eight terms – a hundred and four weeks of monotony, humiliation and mental pain. It is astonishing how tough a boy can be, but I was helped by my truancies, those peaceful hours hidden in the hedge. At last came the momentof final decision. It was after breakfast one morning in the School House dining-room, on the last day of the summer holidays, that I made my break for liberty. I wrote a note, which I placed on the black oak sideboard under the whisky tantalus, saying that instead of returning to St John’s, I had taken to the Common and would remain there in hiding until my parents agreed that never again