Cherry

Cherry by Sara Wheeler Read Free Book Online Page B

Book: Cherry by Sara Wheeler Read Free Book Online
Authors: Sara Wheeler
Tags: nonfiction
languages had been introduced, though the extent to which these subjects were taken seriously varied: French and German were taught by the maths masters. The thirteen-year-old Apsley embarked on a staple course of Latin, maths, English, history, divinity and some science. ‘Except in the Army Class,’ wrote Toynbee, ‘education in Winchester was nine-tenths classical. The reverse side of the excellence of the teaching of Latin and Greek was that other subjects were starved.’ In the mental world of Winchester, Toynbee went on, ‘we were hardly aware that science and technology were on the march; that they had joined hands with each other; and that mathematics had stooped to lend efficacious services to them both’. Apsley’s attitude to science on his Antarctic expedition six years after he left school reveals the absence of any real education outside the humanities. He displayed the frenzied enthusiasm of the convert, almost giving his life for a little knowledge of the life cycle of the Emperor penguin.
    Games were more than important; they were a cult. The most prestigious sports were cricket and a peculiar form of either six- or fifteena-side football. While Apsley was at Winchester one Richard Stafford Cripps starred in the Houses VI football team. He was to come within inches of 10 Downing Street. 6 The boys also went swimming under the lime trees at Gunner’s Hole, a hundred-yard-long stretch of the River Itchen dredged of mud, took two long runs each week, and endured regular sessions in the gym. A boy called George Mallory was a star in this last department. He was a year behind Apsley and, as a mathematical scholar, a member of the Parnassian élite of Collegemen. But not all Apsley’s peers came off the top shelf. The future Socialist MP and lawyer D. N. Pritt was the son of a Harlesden metal merchant. (‘Under the system then still prevailing,’ Pritt remembered, ‘some 95 per cent of my work consisted of translating Latin and Greek into English, and English into those languages, in prose and in verse.’)
    The Boer War broke out during Apsley’s first term at Winchester. Down at the bottom of Africa the Dutch settlers of the two Boer republics and their British neighbours in Cape Colony and Natal were still locked in bitter dispute, twenty years after the General buried his men on the plains of the Transvaal. In the second week of October 1899 the pent-up bitterness and violence exploded into full-scale war. The Boers were challenging British hegemony, and millions of imperial hearts quickened. The mood among the British was confident: few had any doubts about their right to dominate southern Africa or indeed anywhere else. Cecil Rhodes, colonial statesman, financier and until recently Prime Minister of Cape Colony, still expressed the hope that the British might win the United States back for the Empire. The school was gripped with a febrile elation that put a stop to the rather wearisome talk of the new century. Patriotic fervour swept through the cloisters, masters pored over the morning newspapers and the school magazine – the
Wykehamist
– carried a proud list of alumni on their way to the front. Apsley had been weaned on stories exalting the defence of the Empire, and his experience at Winchester endorsed his father’s attitudes. The ethos of the public schools at the end of the nineteenth century was imbued with the ideals of imperial glory, a ruling class and chivalry. The boys were indoctrinated with noble notions of honour, patriotism and leadership, so when a war came along they were gasping for it: war was the authenticating forge of nationhood. For the whole of that academic year, the ‘School News’ section in the
Wykehamist
teemed with war data – including a report of an Old Wykehamist dinner held in Pretoria during a pause in the fighting – and captains on leave hurried back to their alma mater to address boys longing to march off to wars of their own. The honour of the

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