Page 9 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 3 Spring 2014

A Contrary View
He turned it over, searched the inside,
and said in a voice deep as a chasm, “I
do not see your name here. Every boy is
expected to have his name on each piece
of clothing and other belongings he brings
to the school. Henry Molseed, you will
see that your brother gets his name put
on this hat.” Why ever did he address
my brother by his first and middle name,
I wondered, but could not ask.
We retreated. Henry steered me across
the road to the place where I was to live,
admonished me to find a pen and write
my name on the hat’s leather sweatband,
and raced off to join his friends in the
V Form. Facing the door of a dark red brick
building that rose three stories to a steep
roof, I was about to enter this strange
school at the very bottom.
If I had known then what some persons
have written about their boarding school
lives, I would probably have turned and
fled into the woods.
Inside the door to that dark brick build-
ing, two long flights of iron steps mounted
around a square stairwell to the top floor
and the I Form dormitory. The long cham-
ber under the rafters was lighted by high
dormer windows. Below these, down either
side of the dormitory, ran a row of narrow
alcoves separated by wooded partitions.
Each alcove was furnished with an iron
bedstead, a bureau, and a chest.
Famous writers recalling their school
days, even in legendary schools to which
parents over centuries have aspired to
send their sons, evoke pictures of wretched
experience. Could this be because good
news doesn’t make news, and readers are
more readily drawn to stories of youthful
misery than those of contentment? Or
is the true artist inevitably bruised by
growing up?
To tell the truth for myself, I must
grapple with the problem of making news
out of good news. For my experience of
boarding school was like walking out of
shadows into light.
On the first Saturday afternoon of the
term, the I Formers were told that the
vice rector and his wife expected us for
tea. Henry Kittredge was as warm and
twinkly as the Rector was forbidding.
Mrs. Kittredge fed us lots of hot buttery
muffins and, for those who had not been
to an occasion of this sort before,
explained that the standard answer in
the school, when asked what you would
have in your tea, was “Two and cream,
please.”
The days of the first term grew shorter
and colder. Ice formed on the pond. By this
time of year the weather could be bitter;
when our hands and feet got too frozen to
continue skating with wild abandon over
the pond’s mile of black ice, we gathered
around one of the bonfires built on the
shore and had hot cocoa to drink.
The end of term came on in a hurry.
Through three months of being wholly
wrapped up in a tight community, I had
not spoken with my mother or father.
They wrote to me each week, and I tried
with fitful success to send them some
kind of note on a similar schedule. The
long-distance phone was for use only
in case of great emergencies.
Returning from Christmas vacation
on a stormy afternoon in January was
hardly the stuff that dreams are made
of. The half-forgotten stiff collar chafed
at supper. After lights, the cold pouring
down from the wide open dormer windows
twisted the nose.
Early on, though, we were taught that
the way to cope with a New England
winter is to seize hold of the sport it has
to offer. Chief among these for us was
hockey. Once the roads had been cleared
of snow, the teams of horses were guided
onto the School Pond, where the ice was
two or more feet thick, to plough the drifts
off the hockey rinks. Learning to skate
was taken as much for granted as know-
ing how to multiply and divide.
Eventually the days grew longer, the ice
thawed, the water from melting snows
washed out walks and roared over the
dam and down the Sluice. Spring vacation
came muddling through somewhat sooner
than seemed possible back in early Jan-
uary, and once again a train was waiting
amid clouds of steam in the Concord sta-
tion to carry us home.
[Then] arrived the spring term. Studies
could not be taken too seriously when
the sap was running strong and the
swans were again cruising the ponds.
Lower Schoolers had the special privi-
lege of being assigned their own canoes,
and we could spend a holiday exploring
coves or poling up the Sluice to Turkey
Pond for a fast downstream run at the
end of the day.
We came to Last Night in June. At the
close of the final chapel service, the VI
Formers lined up in the cloister to shake
hands with all the other members of the
school as they filed past into the dark. A
lot of those big seniors—from the view-
point of a little I Former they appeared
quite awesome —were weeping. I under-
stood when I was in the same place five
years later.
Of course there were boys who were
unhappy at the school. A natural leader
of our beginning form, the most mature
student as well as the best athlete among
us, dropped out after a couple of years
in a quandary of depression about his
parents’ divorce. Time has, I’m sure,
rubbed away the memory of days that
were black, [but] looking over seventy
years that have yielded a generous por-
tion of good times and satisfactions, the
six years of boarding school stand out as
the sunniest.
Years later, when I was talking with a
man about the school we knew—we had
started together in that I Form dormitory
up under the steep roof — he made a brief
observation that grasped a whole exper-
ience: “I never knew of a boy there who
did not have a friend.” 9