That today I read nothing in either Latin or Greek (cannot any longer, in fact, read Greek at all) is a reflection on myself, not on the discipline. Having in Form V had an excellent mathematics teacher, the headmaster himself, I am able to calculate that, of the 10,000 hours of my life that I sat in classrooms of Harrison College, 50 per cent was devoted to the life and languages of ancient Greece and Rome. Even in Form VI, when that threat no longer existed, an hour spent poring over the grammatical solecisms of Aeschylus was hard slogging, not honey-sipping. No one thinks in such terms, who is faced every Friday in Form IIA, with a written test of his knowledge of ablative absolutes and the genitives of the obscurer Latin nouns, the whole overhung with the threat of detention or the cane, should the knowledge prove inadequate. Certainly none of us thought of them as flowers.
The pollen that rubbed off on me did not deprive others of the hive, and is probably not apt, a schoolmaster is more likely to blanch than bow at being likened to a flower. I say “I” bequeathed, as though the gathering of the treasure had been my express purpose, when, like a bee smeared with pollen while looking for honey, I had acquired it absent-mindedly, not to say unwillingly. But pleasure is not the same as profit, and, to return to the matter of wills and testaments, I am most ready to acknowledge that it was a rich inheritance which I bequeathed from my school days to my years beyond. They come as far down the scale of remembered pleasure as of time, and I suspect that anyone who thinks otherwise has not progressed very far into adulthood. School days are not the happiest of one’s life. My doubts about the truth of the adage also proved to be justified. Shouldn’t one, on the threshold of a new life, look ahead with optimism rather than back with regret? Or is it just one more example of Jehovah’s perversity that Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt? Even now, those phrases seem to me to contain an excellent sentiment. In any case, I was prepared to have an open mind on the subject.Ī headmasterly blue pencil had deleted these phrases from the copy that went to the printer, perhaps wisely from his point of view, but as far as I was concerned, he had removed the essence of what I had to say. I had stated quite clearly in my original copy that I was glad to be leaving school, that lack of knowledge of what lay beyond prevented me from being certain, but that I very much doubted the truth of the old adage about one’s school days being the happiest of one’s life. However, this “Last Will and Testament” (it appeared precisely under that title) bore in its printed form little resemblance to what I had written. That was not difficult to arrange, since at the time I was editor of the Harrisonian. The first that I remember writing, somewhat prematurely it seems, since I was not yet at the end of my third seven-year span, actually achieved publication. If I composed such testaments, mentally or on paper, at the ages of seven and fourteen, I do not remember them. What he finds himself doing is selecting from among the experiences of that period those that he will preserve into the next, and into all subsequent periods. On the other occasions we are the inheritors, as anyone knows who has actually set pen to paper to record, at its end, a period of his life. It is, of course, an idle arrogance, since only once do we have anything to bequeath, if even then. We compose many last wills and testaments during our lifetime, an average of ten, if we are to accept the popular proposition that one begins a new life every seven years.
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