The school never quite got hold of me. Partly I think that was
because I was a day-boy and so freer than most of the boys, partly
because of a temperamental disposition to see things in my own way
and have my private dreams, partly because I was a little
antagonised by the family traditions that ran through the school. I
was made to feel at first that I was a rank outsider, and I never
quite forgot it. I suffered very little bullying, and I never had a
fight--in all my time there were only three fights--but I followed
my own curiosities. I was already a very keen theologian and
politician before I was fifteen. I was also intensely interested in
modern warfare. I read the morning papers in the Reading Room
during the midday recess, never missed the illustrated weeklies, and
often when I could afford it I bought a PALL MALL GAZETTE on my way
home.

I do not think that I was very exceptional in that; most intelligent
boys, I believe, want naturally to be men, and are keenly interested
in men's affairs. There is not the universal passion for a
magnified puerility among them it is customary to assume. I was
indeed a voracious reader of everything but boys' books--which I
detested--and fiction. I read histories, travel, popular science
and controversy with particular zest, and I loved maps. School work
and school games were quite subordinate affairs for me. I worked
well and made a passable figure at games, and I do not think I was
abnormally insensitive to the fine quality of our school, to the
charm of its mediaeval nucleus, its Gothic cloisters, its scraps of
Palladian and its dignified Georgian extensions; the contrast of the
old quiet, that in spite of our presence pervaded it everywhere,
with the rushing and impending London all about it, was indeed a