and friendly pupil, saved from any temptation to vanity by his relentless elder brothers.
Neither he nor Dilly remembered Summer Fields with much pleasure, except for the chance to swim in the river under the willow trees on sunny afternoons. In middle age, Ronnie used to recall deliberately what it was like to be beaten for having an untidy locker, to remind himself “how much better it is to be forty than eight”. The preparation of the children for scholarships was so intensive as to be only just over the borderline of sanity. Before the Eton exam Dr Williams, the headmaster, used to take a room in the White Horse Hotel in Windsor and walk the candidates up and down to steady them while he crammed in a few last showy bits of information. Many of them never reached such a high standard of learning again. Fortunately Ronnie’s sparkling intelligence, and Dilly’s dispassionate view of adults, enabled them both to survive.
In 1896, the year that Ronnie arrived at Summer Fields, Eddie won his scholarship to Rugby. Thomas French had been there in the days of Arnold, although he had been quite unmoved by the great Doctor, whose teaching was “not the Gospel as he had been accustomed to receive it.” The headmaster was now Dr H. A. James, known as The Bodger. In comparison with Eton it was a rougher, more countrified, more eccentric, more rigidly classical, less elegant and sentimental establishment. There were the usual bewildering regulations, much more binding than the official rules; only certain boys, the “swells”, could wear white straw hats, all first-year boys must answer to a call of “fag” and run to see what the “swell” required, it was a crime to walk with your hands in your pockets until your fourth year, one hand was allowed in the third year, and so forth, proscriptions being multiplied, as in all primitive societies. The younger boys got up at five forty-five and took turns in the cold baths. Eddie, who was in School House, could consider himself lucky to get a “den” at the end of his first year, overlooking the seventeen green acres of the famous Close.
Divinity was taught by The Bodger himself, a short, squarish man with a luxuriant beard, concealing the absence of a tie. “Dr James walked up and down,” as Eddie remembered him; “if it was the Upper Bench, round and round, because it was a turret room. He walked like a Red Indian, placing one foot exactly in front of the other. He kept a small private notebook in which he put favourable remarks about a boy, but a quotation from the Lays of Ancient Rome would gain at least five marks a go.” This was fortunate for the Knoxes, reared since nursery days on the Lays. The finest scholar on the staff, however, was Robert Whitelaw, Rupert Brooke’s godfather, who taught classics to the Twenty, the form below the VIth. He is described as looking like a bird of prey, and was unable to correct examinations without listening to the music of a barrel organ, which he hired to play underneath his window. “I don’t think I ever felt so grand,” Eddie thought, “as when we were set to translate a poem of Matthew Arnold’s into Latin, and I hit on the same couplet as Whitelaw.” Eccentrics scarcely disturbed the late-Victorian schoolboy, who, however, had a rare sense of quality, and recognized the expert.
Undoubtedly Rugby could claim to “harden”. The boys worked an eleven-hour day, with two hours for prep. Hacking, scragging, mauling and tripping were supposed to have disappeared under The Bodger’s rule, but the prefects punished by making a wrongdoer run past an open door three times while they aimed a kick at him. Ribs got broken that way. At breakfast, rolls flew through the air and butter was flicked onto the ceiling, to fall, when the icy atmosphere had thawed out, onto the masters’ heads. There was a strong faction in favour of the Boers during the South African War, and strikes against the horrible food; to counter them, Dr James was obliged to eat a plateful, in furious indignation, in front of the whole school, but then, furious indignation was his usual attitude. All the notices he put up ended with the words THIS MUST STOP.
The tradition of Arnold was continued with frequent compulsory chapels, but Eddie, and later Wilfred, were less influenced by these than by another boy in School House, “a rotund, ridiculous, good-natured boy, who had from the start the sort of quiet purpose that earned respect—rather grudging, I suppose.” This was Billy Temple, the future Archbishop of Canterbury.
Eddie liked Rugby well enough and accepted its routine, though he particularly enjoyed the moments when it was interrupted. One midday a boy threw a squash ball which exactly struck the hands of the great clock that set the time for the whole school, and stopped it. Masters and boys, drawing their watches out of their pockets as they hurried across the yard, to compare the false with the true, were thrown into utter confusion. It turned out that the boy, who confessed at once, had been practising the shot for two years. The Bodger called this “un-English”. Eddie did not agree. The patient, self-contained, self-imposed pursuit of an entirely personal solution seemed to him most characteristically English.
At St Philip’s, Mrs K. was undismayed by the routine of the diocese. She taught herself shorthand to deal with her husband’s correspondence, gave heart to the shy chaplains, charmed the ordinands, and managed surprisingly well on an inadequate stipend, though the housekeeping was somewhat haphazard, and the wine was cheap and sometimes undrinkable. Perhaps only Mrs K. could have tamed Alice, the cook (though in those days it was assumed that all cooks were ill-tempered), but charm, energy and devotion carried all before them. With such a wife, it was clear that Edmund Knox would soon be more than a Suffragan Bishop.
The holiday expeditions continued, but now with much wider range, with the advent of bicycles. A Coventry firm presented a machine to the Bishop; Mrs K., although as a horsewoman she mistrusted the contraption, learned quicker than her portly husband, who was, he said, “an ardent devotee, until, one day, the bar snapped and let me down”; the children all followed, teaching themselves on Raleighs paid for by old Mrs Knox. Eddie and Dilly were soon rapidly skimming through the Birmingham traffic, the girls pedalling gamely along in hats and white cotton gloves, the little boys doing the best they could, before the days of freewheel, their short legs turning rapidly. Rules were immediately invented, and it became a point of honour among the four brothers never to get off even up the steepest hill. Pale with fatigue, Wilfred and Ronnie toiled upward, Eddie describing wide circles around them, until he brought them to a halt by the wayside, with the words THIS MUST STOP.
Ronnie sometimes stayed behind. He had become fascinated with dictionaries. He threatened, in spite of a rule that no one must speak a language that the others did not understand, to learn Sanskrit and Welsh. “I can still see Ronnie,” Winnie wrote, “on the seat by the Welsh driver of the waggonette which conveyed us all to church, making out a Welsh Bible with the aid of this friend, while the horse wandered along unnoticed, and my father predicted we should all be late for the service.”
At home, Eddie took charge of the family newspaper, The Bolliday Bango. It was the voice of Scholesia—their name for the world of the shabby schoolroom. Eddie levied the contributions, sometimes by force, copied them out in ink, and did the illustrations. There are action pictures of the bicycles, of a peculiar form of football played in the tiny yard, and, more fancifully, of a synod of bishops playing billiards with their crosiers, and hanging up their mitres on the pegs. It was Eddie’s first venture into journalism, and in its handwritten pages Dilly produced his first document in cipher (though the editor refused further instalments), and Ronnie, at the age of eight, his first Latin play.
In time, however, the editor and sub-editor became interested in other things. Developing a keenly critical spirit, they detected a number of inaccuracies, even downright contradictions, in the Sherlock Holmes stories, and sent a list of them to Conan Doyle in an envelope with five dried orange pips, in allusion to the threatening letter in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Eddie acquired photographs of a number of music-hall actresses who had appeared, or were appearing, on the Birmingham stage. Then he and Dilly acquired pipes and tins of Tortoiseshell Mixture. Clouds of smoke began to float round Scholesia, already frequently plunged in darkness while Wilfred tried to develop his photographic plates. Mrs K. heroically avoided noticing the haunting whiffs of tobacco. The Bolliday Bango ceased publication, and Ronnie, still in his sanctum underneath the table, tried to produce a magazine on his own, but the impetus was gone as he became the last one left in childhood.
His consolation was a book—not one of the borrowed dictionaries, but the first book that had ever been truly his own, not to be touched by any of the others without his permission. It was a present,