THE BOARDING HOUSE and THE OLD BOYS
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There may be a considerable delay before I review this book.
THE OLD BOYS
1
“From Moreton to Evenlode, to Adlestrop and Daylesford. He and Topham minor stopping off to buy sherbet in Chipping Norton. And showing Topham the Slaughters and the Swells.”
Mr Turtle is late for the Old Boys meeting in room 305, caught up, as he is, with a charwoman (not chairwoman!) mopping in the basement when he was meant to be on the 5th floor, and he should not have been in such an Adlestrop of Anxiety, I guess. With a change of narrative viewpoint to Mr Jaraby, the whole meeting — other than perhaps Mr Nox (“He caught Mr Nox’s eye and felt a little jump in his stomach.”) — seems ready to nod through Mr Jaraby as the next President. Mr Jaraby later at home is mentally coercive with his poor wife, but, after all, she did call his cat Monmouth a monster and that he should send it to a zoo. And she did not seem grateful for the head-shaped beetroot he brought home, well, I imagined it head-shaped and that she wasn’t grateful. And she imputes death and decay obsessing her husband when he tells her yet once again of his housemaster Dowse’s sad death, and how what a great beater of boys Dowse was. Not a marriage conversation to envy!
‘We are seventy-two, you must remember that. Communication is now an effort. It is not the easy thing that younger people know.’
2
“The goodness that is in you will be carried to the surface and fanned to a flame, the evil will be faced fairly and squarely: you will recognize it and make your peace with it.”
Back in 1907 George Nox is a new boy, H.L. Dowse his housemaster, and now ever as plain Nox, Dowse dowsed his night’s evil in the form of warning against the madness engendered by self-abuse, and some said he once castrated another boy to stop him doing it! That last bit I don’t believe, but I do believe the cruelty and fagging in rest of this chapter because it rings true from when I started at senior school in 1959, and I also became a reluctant ‘second row forward’ in rugger, and I hated cricket, too, as well as cross country!
Jaraby was then a prefect to whom Nox acted as fag, till somehow some throwing of a ‘nib’ sort of started, I guess, a chain of events towards Nox breaking a ‘rib’ — one that eventually punctured his lung!