Latest / The H. G. Wells Library / Certain Personal Matters - On Schooling and the Phases of Mr. Sandsome

Transcript

Certain Personal Matters - On Schooling and the Phases of Mr. Sandsome · The H. G. Wells Library

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Chapter seven of Certain Personal Matters. This is a LibriVox recording.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Certain
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: Personal Matters by H. G. Wells, Chapter seven on schooling
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: and the phases of mister Sansom. I do not know
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: if you remember your dates. Indeed, I do not know
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: if anyone does. My own memory is of a bridge
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: like that bridge of Goldsmith's, standing firm and clear on
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: its hither peers, and then passing into a cloud. In
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: the beginning of days was William the Conqueror ten sixty six,
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: and the path lay safe and open to Henry the Second.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: Then came titanic forms of kings, advancing and receding, elongating
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: and dwindling, exchanging dates, losing dates, stealing dates from battles
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: and murders, and great enactments, even inventing dates, vacant years
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: that were really no dates at all. The things I
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: have suffered prisons, scourgings, beatings with rods, wild masters, in bounds,
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: often a hundred lines, often standing on forms and holding
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: out books. Often on account of these dates I knew,
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: and knew well before I was fifteen. What these heredity
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: babblers are only beginning to discover that the past is
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: the curse of the present. But I never knew, my
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: dear dates never, And I marvel now that all little
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: boys do not grow up to be Republicans, seeing how
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: much they suffer for the mere memory of kings. Then
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: there were pedigrees and principal parts, and conjugations and county towns.
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: Every county had a county town, and it was always
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: on a river. Mister Sansum never allowed us a town
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: without that caliphan. I remember in my early manhood going
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: to Guildford on the way and trying to find that
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: unobtrusive rivulet. I went over the downs for miles. It
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: was not only the way I have had a difficulty
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: in finding. There are certain verses Heaven help me, but
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: I forget gotten them about evel Edat? Was it that
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: utrum malice? If I remember rightly, and all that about
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: amo amas Amat. There was a multitude of such things
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: I acquired, and they lie now in the remote box
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: rooms and lumber recesses of my mind, arresting armory far
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: gone and decay. I have never been able to find
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: a use for them. I wonder even now why mister
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: Sansum equipped me with them. Yet he seemed to be
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: in deadly earnest about this learning, and I still go
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: in doubt. In those early days he impressed me, chiefly
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: in horizontal strips, with the profoundest respect for his mental
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: and physical superior I credited him then, and still inclined
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: to believe he deserved to be credited, with a sincere
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: persuasion that unless I learnt these things, I should assuredly go.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: If I may be frank to the devil, it may
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: be so, I may be living in a fool's paradise,
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: prospering like that wicked man the Psalmist disliked. Some unsuspected
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: gulf may open, some undreamt of danger, thrust itself upon
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: the phantasmagoria of the universe, and I may learn too
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: late the folly of forgetting my declensions. I remember mister
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: Sansum chiefly as sitting at his desk in a little
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: room full of boy a humming hive whose air was
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: thick with dust, as the slanting beams showed. When we
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: were not doing sums or writing copies, we were always
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: learning or saying lessons in the early morning. Mister Sansum
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: sat erect and bright, his face animated, his ruddy eyes
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: keen and observant, the cane hanging but uncertainly upon its hook.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: There was a standing up of classes, a babble of
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: repetition now, and then a crisis. How long the days were? Then?
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: I have heard that scientific people Professor C. Darwin is
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: their leader, unless I air, which I probably do, for
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: names and dates I have hated from my youth up
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: say the days grow longer anyhow, whoever says it, it
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: is quite wrong. But as the lank hours of that
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: vast school time drawled on, mister Samson lost energy, drooped
• 6:18
  Speaker 1: like a flower, especially if the day was at all hot.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: His sandy hair became disheveled, justice became nerveless, hectic and hasty.
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: Finally came copybooks and yawns and weird rumblings from mister Sandsom,
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: and so the world aged to the dinner hour. When
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: I had been home. It was a day school for
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: my aunt, who had an appetite for such things, knew
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: that boarding schools were sinks of iniquity, and returned. I
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: had mister Samson at another phase he had dined for
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: we were simple country folk. The figurative suggestions of that
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: phase are irresistible. The lunar quality. May I say that
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: mister Samson was at his full We now stood up,
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: thirty odd of us all together to read, reading out
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: of books in a soothing monotone. And he sat with
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: his reading book before him, ruddy as the setting sun,
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: and slowly, slowly settling down. But now and then he
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: would jerk back suddenly into staring wakefulness, as though he
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: were fishing with himself as bait for schoolboy crimes in
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: the waters of oblivion, and fancied a nibble that was
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: a dangerous time full of anxiety. At last he went
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: right under and slept, And the reading grew cheerful, full
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: of quaint glosses and unexpected gaps, leaping playfully from boy
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: to boy instead of traveling around with proper decorum. But
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: it never ceased, and little Hercley's silly, little squeak of
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: a voice never broke in upon its mellow flow. It
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: took a year for Hercley's voice to break any such interruption,
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: And mister Sandsom woke up and into his next phase,
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: forthwith a disagreeable phase always and one. We made it
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: our business to postpone as long as possible. During that
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: final period, the last quarter, mister Samson was distinctly malignant.
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: It was hard to do right, harder still to do wrong.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: A feverish energy usually inspired our government. Let us try
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: to get some work done, mister Samson would say, and
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: I have even known him teach things. Then more frequently,
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: with a needless bitterness, he set us upon impossible tasks,
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: demanding a colossal tale of sums, perhaps scattering pens and
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: paper and sowing the horrors of bookkeeping, or chastising us
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: with the scorpions of parsing and translation. And even in
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: winter weather, the little room grew hot and stuffy, and
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: we terminated our school day, much exhausted with mine's lax,
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: lounging attitudes and red ears. What became of mister Samson
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: after the giving out of homework, the concluding prayer, the
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: aftermath of impositions, I do not know. I stuffed my
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: books such as came to hand, very dirty they were
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: inside and very neat, out with my aunt Charlotte's chintz covers,
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: into my green baize bag, and went forth from the
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: mysteries of schooling into the great world up the broad
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: white road that went slanting over the down. I say,
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: the mysteries of schooling deliberately. I wonder. Then I wonder
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: still what it was all for? Reading, almost my only art,
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: I learnt from Aunt Charlotte, a certain facility in drawing.
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: I acquired it home and took to school to my
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: own undoing. Undoing again, is deliberate. It was no mere
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: swish of the hand, gentle reader. But the things I learnt,
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: more or less partially at school lie in my mind
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: like the sarsen stones of Wiltshire, great disconnected, time worn
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: chunks amidst the natural herbage of it. The rivers of
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: the East coast, the tweed, the tide, the wear, the teas,
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: the Humber. Why is that, for instance, sticking up among
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: my ferns and wild flowers. It is not only useless
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: but misleading, For the Humber is not another tweed. I
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: sometimes fancy the world may be mad, Yet that seems
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: so egoistical. The fact remains that for the greater part
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: of my young life, mister Sandsum got an appetite upon
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: us from nine till twelve, and digested his dinner, at
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: first placidly and then with petulance from two until five,
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: and we thirty odd boys were sent by our twenty
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: odd parents to act as a sort of chorus to
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: his physiology. And he was fed, as I judge, more
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: than sufficiently clothed, and sheltered, and esteemed. On account of
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: this relation, I think, after all, there must have been
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: something in that schooling. I can't believe the world mad
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: and I have forgotten it, or as good as forgotten
• 13:13
  Speaker 1: it all. At times I feel a wild impulse to
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: hunt up all those chintz covered books and brush up
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: my dates and paradigms before it is too late. End
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: of chapter seven, recording by Elizabeth Kvallen in France,