Lower Fifth. Previously there had been a watertight compartment
between the books I read and the thoughts they begot on the one hand
and human intercourse on the other. Now I really began my higher
education, and aired and examined and developed in conversation the
doubts, the ideas, the interpretations that had been forming in my
mind. As we were both day-boys with a good deal of control over our
time we organised walks and expeditions together, and my habit of
solitary and rather vague prowling gave way to much more definite
joint enterprises. I went several times to his house, he was the
youngest of several brothers, one of whom was a medical student and
let us assist at the dissection of a cat, and once or twice in
vacation time he came to Penge, and we went with parcels of
provisions to do a thorough day in the grounds and galleries of the
Crystal Palace, ending with the fireworks at close quarters. We
went in a river steamboat down to Greenwich, and fired by that made
an excursion to Margate and back; we explored London docks and
Bethnal Green Museum, Petticoat Lane and all sorts of out-of-the-way
places together.
We confessed shyly to one another a common secret vice, "Phantom
warfare." When we walked alone, especially in the country, we had
both developed the same practice of fighting an imaginary battle
about us as we walked. As we went along we were generals, and our
attacks pushed along on either side, crouching and gathering behind
hedges, cresting ridges, occupying copses, rushing open spaces,
fighting from house to house. The hillsides about Penge were
honeycombed in my imagination with the pits and trenches I had
created to cheek a victorious invader coming out of Surrey. For him
West Kensington was chiefly important as the scene of a desperate
and successful last stand of insurrectionary troops (who had seized
the Navy, the Bank and other advantages) against a royalist army-
reinforced by Germans-advancing for reasons best known to
themselves by way of Harrow and Ealing. It is a secret and solitary
game, as we found when we tried to play it together. We made a
success of that only once. All the way down to Margate we schemed
defences and assailed and fought them as we came back against the
sunset. Afterwards we recapitulated all that conflict by means of a
large scale map of the Thames and little paper ironclads in plan cut
out of paper.
A subsequent revival of these imaginings was brought about by
Britten's luck in getting, through a friend of his father's,
admission for us both to the spectacle of volunteer officers
fighting the war game in Caxton Hall. We developed a war game of
our own at Britten's home with nearly a couple of hundred lead
soldiers, some excellent spring cannons that shot hard and true at
six yards, hills of books and a constantly elaborated set of rules.
For some months that occupied an immense proportion of our leisure.
Some of our battles lasted several days. We kept the game a
profound secret from the other fellows. They would not have
And we also began, it was certainly before we were sixteen, to
write, for the sake of writing. We liked writing. We had
discovered Lamb and the best of the middle articles in such weeklies
as the SATURDAY GAZETTE, and we imitated them. Our minds were full
of dim uncertain things we wanted to drag out into the light of
expression. Britten had got hold of IN MEMORIAM, and I had
disinterred Pope's ESSAY ON MAN and RABBI BEN EZRA, and these things
had set our theological and cosmic solicitudes talking. I was
somewhere between sixteen and eighteen, I know, when he and I walked
along the Thames Embankment confessing shamefully to one another
that we had never read Lucretius. We thought every one who mattered
had read Lucretius.
When I was nearly sixteen my mother was taken ill very suddenly, and
died of some perplexing complaint that involved a post-mortem
examination; it was, I think, the trouble that has since those days
been recognised as appendicitis. This led to a considerable change
in my circumstances; the house at Penge was given up, and my
Staffordshire uncle arranged for me to lodge during school terms
with a needy solicitor and his wife in Vicars Street, S. W., about a
mile and a half from the school. So it was I came right into
London; I had almost two years of London before I went to Cambridge.
Tehose were our great days together. Afterwards we were torn apart;
Britten went to Oxford, and our circumstances never afterwards threw
us continuously together until the days of the BLUE WEEKLY.
As boys, we walked together, read and discussed the same books,
pursued the same enquiries. We got a reputation as inseparables and
the nickname of the Rose and the Lily, for Britten was short and
thick-set with dark close curling hair and a ruddy Irish type of
face; I was lean and fair-haired and some inches taller than he.
Our talk ranged widely and yet had certain very definite
limitations. We were amazingly free with politics and religion, we
went to that little meeting-house of William Morris's at Hammersmith
and worked out the principles of Socialism pretty thoroughly, and we
got up the Darwinian theory with the help of Britten's medical-
student brother and the galleries of the Natural History Museum in
Cromwell Road. Those wonderful cases on the ground floor
illustrating mimicry, dimorphism and so forth, were new in our
times, and we went through them with earnest industry and tried over
our Darwinism in the light of that. Such topics we did
exhaustively. But on the other hand I do not