As a matter of fact Julia had already sold me that one as soon as I settled down with her at Kew; and I give her full marks for the way she handled me. Her line was that the better educated I became the more enjoyment I should get out of my great wealth when I grew up; so I must not look on lessons as a bore but as a necessary preparation to the appreciation of a thousand delights to come.
She, too, encouraged me to look upon myself as different from other children, and no doubt it was in order to prevent me from realising that I was not that she kept me away from them; but, on the other hand, she checked any tendency in me to become swollen headed by decreeing that, until I was seventeen, I should always be known in the household as 'Master' Toby, instead of the servants addressing me by the title I had inherited, that I should never give orders to any of them without her permission, and that my pocket money should not exceed the average amount given to boys of my age.
I do not think that my brain is in any way out of the ordinary, but Julia and Helmuth between them certainly induced me to make the best of it, as I found when I went into the R.A.F. that my general knowledge far exceeded that of the great majority of the junior officers with whom I mixed. The secret of this, I am sure, is that I was never forced to continue at any subject until I got stale and tired of it.
At Weylands, of course, one was allowed a free choice of work, but the fault of the system is that, despite the cleverness of the masters in inducing the pupils to acquire at least a smattering of the subjects that attract them least, most of them do leave with some pretty thin patches in their education, and Helmuth was taken on especially to thicken up the more faulty parts of mine, during the holidays. Even so he managed to do it without arousing in me a permanent prejudice against work, by sandwiching short spells at the uncongenial tasks between much longer ones on such fascinating matters as early voyages of discovery, Chinese art, the transmutation of metals, the causes of revolutions, the strange fish that live at great depths, and so on.
It strikes me only now, as a point of interest, that by the time I was fifteen I was already able to talk quite intelligently with all my Trustees except that old human calculating machine, Robertson their hobbies and favourite recreations. Obviously Helmuth must have found out what those were and deliberately coached me in them although that never occurred to me at the time but it is no wonder that they were all so well satisfied with him as a tutor for me; and no doubt it was his use of me, over a period of years, to convey to them something of his own wide knowledge and varied interests that made it easy for Iswick and Uncle Paul to persuade the others that he would be a good man to replace Sir Stanley Wellard on the Board.
But I owe just as much to Julia as to Helmuth, since he did not become the dominant influence in my life until I was thirteen.
My sojourn at Kew lasted only a little over three months, and with it ended that happy, exciting period of exploring a new world of restaurants, cinemas and shops instead of doing lessons. The Trustees agreed that Uncle Paul must be furnished with the means to bring me up in the sort of surroundings that I should have enjoyed had not my father died. After he became a widower, he had returned to live in Kensington Palace Gardens, and at Queensclere, with my grandfather; so it was in these two big houses that I had spent my childhood and would, presumably, have continued to live had my father survived the accident. In consequence, soon after Christmas, the contents of the little suburban villa were packed up and we transferred ourselves to Millionaires' Row. Then, a fortnight or so later, I was sent as a dayboy to the nearby prep school in Orme Square.
So far as I can judge, the teaching there was excellent but limited, of course, to a normal curriculum; and, as Julia remained my guiding star, I am sure that I picked up more useful miscellaneous knowledge in my evenings, outings, weekends and holidays with her than I did in my hours spent at lessons. But I attended the school in Orme Square only for a year. In the autumn of 1930 Julia told me about Weylands.
At the time she could not have known very much about the place herself, but some friends of hers had two boys there. After giving me a rough idea of the system, she said that it did seem to offer special opportunities for anyone who really liked learning things, as she was sure I did; so, if she sent me there, would I promise to work reasonably hard and not let her down with the Trustees by lazing about the whole time.
Like any other boy of nine and a half I was most averse to the idea of leaving home; but I knew there was no escaping a move in the near future to a prep school in the country, to get me used to being a boarder before I was sent to a public school. It seemed that my guardian angel had found a way of saving me from the worst, as she assured me that at this newfangled place there were no prefects, no bullying and no enforced games. So I duly promised not to let her down, and off to Weylands I went in January 1931.
Looking back from my present standpoint I do not think one can possibly defend Weylands as an institution. It is a terrible thing to bring children up as atheists just how terrible no one can fully appreciate until, like myself, they find themselves pursued by some creature of the Devil.
Then the tacit encouragement of the young to indulge in immorality must be a bad thing. Their freedom to experiment in sex without reproach may save a few of them from later developing secret complexes and abnormalities, but I believe that for every one it saves it robs a hundred who, if subject to the usual prohibitions, would turn out quite normal of their illusions.
It certainly did me; and that goes, too, for every other’ senior pupil, male or female, that I knew at all well there. We had all eaten too greedily of the tree of knowledge, and although appetite remained there was no longer any mystery surrounding the fruit. Both sexes had discovered too early that the other, like itself, had feet of clay; so when we went out into the world nothing was left to us but a cold, cynical seeking after partners in pleasure. Never could any of us hope to be carried away with the sort of mad, self sacrificing, glorious intoxication of which we had read in books. All too late we were conscious that for us, in connection with a member of the opposite sex, three great words must for ever remain meaningless glamour, romance, love.
Again, the whole conception of teaching people that they should develop their own ego, irrespective of every other consideration, is all wrong. It makes them hard, selfish, greedy, aggressive and incapable of cooperation in a time of crisis. When I went into the R.A.F. I knew nothing of the team spirit, except that at Weylands it had been sneeringly defined as 'a conception typical of the human herd mentality, as it excuses the timorous from emerging from the mass and accepting personal responsibility'. What utter tripe!
In view of the opinions I aired during my early days in uniform I must have appeared to my companions the most bumptious, self centred young cad; and I marvel now that they were so good natured as to do no more than laugh at me. But I was always a pretty quick learner and it did not take me long to find out the worthlessness of the Weylands definition of the 'team spirit'. In a Fighter Squadron your life and the lives of your friends depended on it. If we had started to play for our own hands instead of for our side, when opposed to a superior enemy formation, the lot of us would have been hurtling down in flames within a matter of minutes.
Had there been no war, I would probably still believe that the Weylands creed embodied the highest achievement in logical human thinking; but I know now that much, if not all, of it is false. Nevertheless, I believe that I acquired far more academic knowledge there than I would have at any school where it was forced upon me, to be learned parrot fashion as an alternative to receiving punishment; and I can look back on my schooldays as happy ones which is more than a lot of chaps can say.