II

So I remember my uncle in that first phase, young, but already a little
fat, restless, fretful, garrulous, putting in my fermenting head all
sorts of discrepant ideas. Certainly he was educational....

For me the years at Wimblehurst were years of pretty active growth.
Most of my leisure and much of my time in the shop I spent in study.
I speedily mastered the modicum of Latin necessary for my qualifying
examinations, and--a little assisted by the Government Science and Art
Department classes that were held in the Grammar School--went on with my
mathematics. There were classes in physics, in chemistry, in mathematics
and machine drawing, and I took up these subjects with considerable
avidity. Exercise I got chiefly in the form of walks. There was some
cricket in the summer and football in the winter sustained by young
men's clubs that levied a parasitic blackmail of the big people and the
sitting member, but I was never very keen at these games. I didn't find
any very close companions among the youths of Wimblehurst. They struck
me, after my cockney schoolmates, as loutish and slow, servile and
furtive, spiteful and mean. WE used to swagger, but these countrymen
dragged their feet and hated an equal who didn't; we talked loud, but
you only got the real thoughts of Wimblehurst in a knowing undertone
behind its hand. And even then they weren't much in the way of thoughts.

No, I didn't like those young countrymen, and I'm no believer in the
English countryside under the Bladesover system as a breeding ground for
honourable men. One hears a frightful lot of nonsense about the Rural
Exodus and the degeneration wrought by town life upon our population. To
my mind, the English townsman, even in the slums, is infinitely better
spiritually, more courageous, more imaginative and cleaner, than his