Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/81

 would get games. Now, at the town school,—a lot of cheap rubbish. It's a bit of a problem."

Christopher betrayed a preference for the Grammar School. It was a question of æsthetics, of boyish fastidiousness, for at the Grammar School you had a beautiful old building, the boys looked clean and wore a neat apple-green school cap. Kit did not want to go to school near the rors, and play hobbledehoy games in an asphalted ard.

"I'd get cricket, pater, and footer."

"You would. But there is one thing that we must face. You would be the son of a porter at the Pelican. They might refuse to take you. That's my fault, not yours."

Kit was silent.

"And boys can be terrible snobs. I shouldn't like to think"

"It seems rather silly, pater, that a chap should be obliged to go to school."

"Compulsory stuffing."

"Most chaps don't want to be stuffed. A fellow is ready enough for his grub,—but when it comes to lessons. Seems to me there is something wrong, pater."

"How?"

"Well,—if the stuff they taught you at school was like your dinner. So that you wanted to swallow it—Hungry for it. There are all sorts of things to interest a fellow,—but you don't get them at school. It's such tosh, pater."

"I suppose it is. I was six years at a public school, and I don't think I learnt anything that was of much use to me afterwards. They call it 'forming your mind'—character building."

"But couldn't one's mind grow, pater, of itself? Scrambling about among interesting things?"

"What interests you, Kit?"

"O,—birds, and the country, and cricket, and all that."

"Not books? Be honest."

"Not school books, pater."

Sorrell felt challenged. He knew that he had loathed school books just as Kit loathed them, but then the conventions of civilization demanded that a boy should be stuffed with facts that bored him.