age. He recalls, for example:
periodical killing of pigs in the farmyard that adjoined the school. Pig-killing day was a red letter day to the other boys and myself, but in different ways. They loved it and I dreaded it, I used to shut myself up in the class room and close the shutters to shut out the pigs’ screams.2
He describes, with affection, his first schoolmaster, Dr Williams of Summerfield. Although having ‘flogged enough Latin and Greek’ into him, White still demonstrated an appreciation of what was done for him despite the various grades of punishments he received, ranging from slaps on the hand to more serious lashings. All administered in a courteous way, as he would have it.
He believed he had a dual relationship with another headmaster, Dr Fearon, the ‘Bear’, at Winchester; one was of two equals discussing the vagaries of school, the other was of master and pupil that involved a chronic history of transgression and punishment. White’s account of the conversations he had with the ‘Bear’ is amusing; he suggested that he negotiated his expulsion from the school. At first, this was to avoid expulsion and, then, when he deemed himself tired of the whole system, to actively encourage it. White’s rendering of the bewilderment of the teacher and his subsequent resignation to behaving in a manner contrary to his kindly disposition by expelling the boy is a masterly piece of writing in its overturning of conventional expectations.
White’s accounts of his battles with the housemaster Smith, ‘The Prowler’, are evidence, if there is much substance in them, of a very high-spirited
youth, including stories of attempts at setting off explosions and taking unauthorised trips to town to sample everything from drink to the local girls. However, the most illuminating story details his succumbing to ennui while fielding on the cricket pitch:
It seemed to me I had been there since the world began, and the sun sinking towards the horizon was about to terminate a cycle of creation without incident or meaning. Something must enliven, or, if need be disrupt, this aeonic monotony. The cycle must not close carrying my ego with it to unbroken nothingness. I began to make water for height, not, I think, with any intention of outrage of display, but anaesthetized from the mass-consciousness by my own boredom, and wishing to revive in myself the atrophying faculty of interest in something. I was soon observed, there was a roar of delighted amusement from twenty-two boys; […] I was flogged of course. I was always being flogged.3
This anecdote elevates a conventional account of schooldays to something more significant. Along with the consistent rebelliousness, there was a conviction that he did not really fit in and was in any case disliked by the majority. He appeared to require a continual stimulation and this was often provided by getting into trouble for reasons that puzzled him as much as others. He continues about his punishment:
Thus it has always been, I possess the capacity of being bored to desperation, which moves me to break the mechanical routine under which others silently suffer. They rejoice for a moment at a glimpse of vicarious revolt, then round on the rebel.4
Singled out for general derision, he is sore and surprised to be once again unsupported by his schoolmates. It is as if his display was a desperate foray to achieve popularity and this, briefly attained when they roar with laughter, is again denied him when they realise what he has done.
He puzzles over this, not his seeking of the popular vote, which he probably could not admit to himself, but the fact that even to himself he is incorrigible and incomprehensible. He talks about reaching a ‘desperation point where I knew I was no longer responsible for my actions’ and quotes a previous teacher who said, ‘White, you are in for more trouble than any boy in the school, but you are not the worst boy in the school. For whatever you do you are always found out.’ 5 Then White goes on to consider if he might have wanted to be found out and finally surrenders by saying, ‘I wanted to preserve something, though I don’t know what’, and there is no explanation, thirty-five years later, of what that might be.6
There were further adventures, including an abortive attempt to blow up one of the teachers and another story of having returned to the school dressed up as a prospective guardian. While probably daring escapades judged by any criteria, they are such that a large number of schoolboys could admit to having been involved in without any great sense of achievement; it does, however, indicate high spirits which in view of some episodes from his adult life are not surprising.
In recounting his struggles with various authorities and his almost automatic rejection of anything that was presented to him as received wisdom, White never mentions his parents except when he is finally requested to leave Winchester. Earlier in the text he writes about his doting grandmother, Archdeacon Baly’s wife, and the good priest himself, as a man who had no idea about children, but beyond that he seems to have perceived his life as a solitary, almost orphan-like one. His son Derrick has commented when he first read the autobiography (late in life) that he was taken aback by the seeming self-centredness of the man, but this could also be seen as self sufficiency.7
Winchester has no records of note about White except that he featured in several of the school magazines as a member of the debating team where he seems to have performed adequately. The one speech of his whose substance was noted (without being recorded) was a spirited defence of Oliver Cromwell. Winchester could provide no evidence or record of his expulsion, but it is possible that public schools would perceive a need to expel a pupil as some sort of failure on their part. The school confirms that he got ‘an exhibition’ but points out that this was not as elevated as a scholarship.8
Sandhurst
White related that despite his absence from formal education for six months after his departure from Winchester, he still succeeded in gaining a King’s cadetship for Sandhurst. Whatever other admissions he made about being incorrigible or even mad, or later, cowardly, it was always important for him not to be seen as a fool.
His becoming a soldier could be seen as puzzling, and he does not comment on it, although his radical tendencies soon caused him problems. More than likely the decision arose from a combination of his father’s influence and the fact that there was little other choice open to him. There is a general consensus that the august military academy of Sandhurst was far from being an efficient training ground at that time. Like Sir George who, at the outset of the Boer War, ‘had never commanded an army in the field against forces armed with modern weapons’,9 Britain itself had had very few serious military engagements for nearly fifty years. This became evident in Africa when the general flabbiness of the military thinking in the college was shown up. The historian A.P. Thornton quotes Admiral of the Fleet Jackie Fisher, who said in 1903 about the Boer War that it was ‘accepted and continuing opinion in naval circles’ that:
One does not wonder at South Africa when one sees every day the utter ineptitude of military officers. Half the year they are on leave and the other half of the year everything is left to the sergeant-major and the NCO’s.10
White’s apparent perversity came to the fore when faced with what he might have believed to be a totally unnecessary task, but there was a justification to his discontent. The study of fortifications in particular aroused his ire, and he saw all the instruction as outdated by at least fifty years.11 This recalcitrance was reflected in his marks, but the most notable evidence was his rustication for riding in a point-to-point when he had been specifically forbidden to do so because of some previous infringement. He relates meeting at this time with his father, about to become Quartermaster General at the War Office, who had come back from India having broken his leg in seven places in a horse race in Calcutta (this man was now sixty-two). When White went with his mother to meet him off the boat, Sir George had already heard about Jack’s suspension:
Lying in his cabin with his leg in plaster of Paris, he greeted me ‘Well, Jack, I hear you’ve made a damned fool of yourself’. I knew I had, but I had learned the futility of too much self-abasement. ‘Well, Father,’ said I, ‘I heard something of your coming to grief in a somewhat similar manner’. My father smiled and the incident was closed.12
This is one of the rare comments on record of his father’s attitude to White’s exploits, but it does not appear to be inconsistent with the other details of Sir George’s attitude to his son’s behaviour. The telegrams