The Fall of Doctor Onslow Read Online Free Page B

the back row may do a hundred lines.’ He tore the note to Lucy Cooper into shreds, and scattered the shreds on the floor.
    Onslow did not realise that his voice, though smooth and level as always, had risen in volume and cut across theroom. He failed to notice that it was not only the Shell boys who were staring at him, waiting for worse, but the boys of the Upper and Lower Fourth, whose books lay forgotten in their laps.

2
    Onslow flogged Brandon at two o’clock, wiped the incident from his mind, and retired to his study for the rest of the afternoon. It was a Thursday, a half-holiday, and like the boys senior enough not to have to fag for their elders or be kicked by them at football, he was free to spend it as he wished.
    After reading some Sixth Form essays on the Athenian constitution, he went to his desk, and there spent a long time in composing a letter to The Times. The Times , a Radical newspaper, had recently criticised him for allowing the senior boys too much power: there had been a minor scandal a few weeks before, when a young fag was beaten so hard by a monitor that his back had required a doctor’s attention.
    From his study window, Onslow could see boys passing in the street. Looking up from his letter just before it was time to have the curtains closed, he noticed one of his favourite sixth-formers walking arm in arm with a younger boy, earnestly talking. He smiled to see them. Both were carrying sketch-books, and he guessed that they had been drawing some part of the parish church’s architecture, for the sixth-former was fascinated by all things medieval and loved to communicate his interest.
    Inspired by the sight of the two boys, Onslow was able to finish his difficult letter to The Times on a high, bold note. He turned it into a passionate defence of the old English system of education, in which boys were largely untroubled by masters outside lesson-hours, and kept discipline themselves. This system, he said, favoured the development of a manly character. Responsibility turnedboys into men. Freedom enabled them to develop intense, improving friendships, and keen interests of their own which might be of great consequence in later life. Faults committed outside the schoolroom ought therefore to be the province of masters only in exceptional cases. To be sure, there were sometimes unfortunate incidents when older boys enforced discipline, but so there were when masters did. On the whole, the products of a modern public school compared very well with those of schools run on the Continental model, where boys were constantly supervised, like children.
    Onslow concluded by pointing out that whereas it used to be the case that masters ignored boys entirely outside school, nowadays the Headmaster attempted to be a Christian guide and friend to his pupils: a friend and pastor, he emphasised, not a policeman. Then he laid down his pen, wondered whether he could be said to live up to his own ideal, and sealed the letter.
    *
    That evening after chapel, when Onslow and his wife and brother-in-law were finishing their dinner in a crimson dining-room, the boys of Mr Taylor’s house discussed the events of the morning in surroundings of noisy decay.
    Taylor’s was a typical boarding-house, modern and cheaply built, with rattling windows, mean fireplaces, and leaky gas-brackets. It smelt of latrines, mice and cabbage. Directly inside the boys’ entrance there was a rickety staircase, overshadowed by walls coated with arsenic-rich, dark green paint. On each landing there were many doors, for the boys of Charton did not sleep in dormitories and prepare their lessons in classrooms as at many schools, but slept and worked in rooms for two or three at most – some tried to make them homelike, with pictures and ornaments and improvised curtains. From after supper until morning chapel at seven, the boys were supposed to be in their rooms, but sometimes they slipped out. Their master Mr Taylor took little interest in