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With the exception of religion – which seemed to offer alternations of blue skies and dark, the latter being both threatening and exciting – I entered into relative calm. I was free of prep-school bullying; the horror of Sundays, half holidays, night-time, remained lively ghosts. Morgan in the main school was a physical representation only of himself; he was a non-entity; his relationship with all his prep school contemporaries had altered. Whether the change was located in himself or us, or both, I did not know. From the little I saw I did not think he had changed: his friend Pickett had – he was more intelligent, more cruel. The continuation of that friendship was one respect in which Morgan showed his lack of change.
The morale of the main school was powerful enough to show up clearly the defects of the prep school and the disastrous cancer of Hirst's tragedy. What was done to him by the laws of his time seems to me to be the outcome of the unspeakable cruelty of a nation dominated by a prep-school mentality.
The main school, which I have no intention of sparing from criticism, was well disciplined, extremely enlightened. It can stand comparison with any other known to me since. It was lively intellectually and emotionally, and therefore not a comfortable place to live in for any of us, but particularly uncomfortable for bullies like Pickett and Morgan. For whatever reason, these two left before they were sixteen. What happened to them I do not know. It was right, for the good of the school as a whole, that they were removed. The question posed by their presence or absence loomed large in my mind. I can see now that it repeated itself with variations many times in the course of my life. It resembled a mathematical problem set in examinations. The mathematician can see it is the ‘same’ problem; not so the student
who either cannot recognize it in its new formulation, or thinks of it as ‘disguised’ simply to make things difficult. I did not recognize the underlying