Well, there was I suddenly figuring as a clever boy, and a pride to my mother. I suppose she was as surprised as I was—We were a tiny batch of scholarship boys—“common” boys—among the rest of the truly middle-class lads, whose fathers were professors or lace-manufacturers or shop-keepers: anyhow, rich enough to pay the fees. But there was no very marked snobbishness. In Nottingham High School, I never had any sense of being looked down on, because I was a scholarship boy, of the working people. And yet there was a difference. There was a gap. It was nothing voluntary. I remember the better-class boys as having been kindly, almost always, and always ordinarily respectful. But there was a peculiar, indefinable difference. It was as if, boys of the same race, the same locality, the same everything, still we were, in some way, different animals.
After the High School, and a brief spell in an office, I became a school teacher, responsible for a class of boys, at half-a-crown a week for the first year. Then, as a school-teacher, I went to Nottingham University to take the normal course. We who had matriculated were allowed to take the degree course, along with the paying students. And the first year, I took the Arts work.
But it was the same again. The“normal” youths kept together, the paying students were apart. We met, we talked, we exchanged a modicum of ideas. But there was the indefinable gulf between the two sets. It was not snobbism, exactly. It was something deeper. It was something in the very way the heart beat. I remember I sent two poems to the college paper, On dit!—and they refused them in exactly the same way the middle-class montlies still would refuse them.
The mysterious difference in vibration between the working-class nature and that of the middle-class I never analysed, just accepting it as a fact. But there it was. Even one had no real pleasure, listening to the professors. They had that other peculiar vibration which caused them to be uninteresting, and in some curious way, outside one’s own life. By the end of the first year I was bored by the university, dropped the degree work, went on with the normal course, did no work at all, and wrote bits of The White Peacock or read novels during lectures.
Again, no one was unfriendly. The professors were lenient, even made slight advances, very kindly. But it was no good. Unless one were by nature a climber, one could not respond in kind. The middle-class seemed quite open, quite willing for one to climb into it. And one turned away, ungratefully.
It was the same with the rest of the normal students. Only one climbed in among the other class, and he was a Jew. The cleverest man of my own year—also a normal student, and a cleverer fellow than myself, by far—was expelled, went loose, drank, and died. So it was.
