Such, Such Were The Joys | |
George Orwell Soon after I arrived at Crossgates (not immediately, but after a week or 质量目标 two, just when I emed to be ttling into routine of school life) I began wetting my bed. I was now aged eight, so that this was a reversion to a habit which I must have grown out of at least four years earlier. Nowadays, I believe, bed-wetting in such circumstances is taken for granted. It is a normal reaction in children who have been removed from their homes to a strange place. In tho days, however, it was looked on as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpo and for which the proper cure was a beating. For my part I did not need to be told it was a crime. Night after night I prayed, with a fervor never previously attained in my prayers, 'Plea God, do not let me wet my bed! Oh, plea God, do not let me wet my bed!' but it made remarkably little difference. Some nights the thing happened, others not. There was no volition about it, no consciousness. You did not properly speaking do the deed: you were merely woke up in the morning and found that the sheets were wringing wet. After the cond or third offen I was warned that I should be beaten next time, but I received the warning in a curiously roundabout way. One afternoon, as we were filing out from tea, Mrs. Simpson, the headmaster's wife, was sitting at the head of one of the tables, chatting with a lady of whom I know nothing, except that she was on an afternoon's visit to the school. She was an intimidating, masculine-looking person wearing a riding habit, or something that I took to be a riding habit. I was just leaving the room when Mrs. Simpson called me back, as though to introduce me to the visitor. Mrs. Simpson was nicknamed Bingo, and I shall call her by that name for I ldom think of her by any other. (Officially, however, she was addresd as Mum, probably a corruption of the 'Ma'am' ud by public school boys to their houmasters' wives.) She was a stocky square-built woman with hard red cheeks, a flat top to her head, prominent brows and deept, suspicious eyes. Although a great deal of the time she was full of fal heartiness, jollying one along with mannish slang ('Buck up, old chap!' and so forth), and even using one's Christian name, her eyes never lost their anxious, accusing look. It was very difficult to look her in the face without feeling guilty, even at moments when one was not guilty of anything in particular. 'Here is a little boy,' said Bingo, indicating me to the strange lady, 'who wets his bed every night. Do you know what I am going to do if you wet your bed again?' she added, turning to me. 'I am going to get the Sixth Form to beat you.' The strange lady put on an air of being inexpressibly shocked, and exclaimed 'I-should-think-so!' And here occurred one of tho wild, almost lunatic misunderstandings which are part of the daily experience 酱紫是什么意思of childhood. The Sixth Form was a group of older boys who were lected as having 'character' and were empowered to beat smaller boys. I had not yet learned of their existence, and I mis-heard the phra 'the Sixth Form' as 'Mrs. Form.' I took it as referring to the strange lady--I thought, that is, that her name was Mrs. Form. It was an improbable name, but a child has no judgment in such matters. I imagined, therefore, that it was she who was to be deputed to beat me. It did not strike me as strange that this job should be turned over to a casual visitor in no way connected with the school. I merely assumed that 'Mrs. Form' was a stern disciplinarian who enjoyed beating people (somehow her appearance emed to bear this out) and I had an immediate terrifying vision of her arriving for the occasion in full riding kit and armed with a hunting qq手写输入法whip. To this day I can feel mylf almost swooning with shame as I stood, a very small, round-faced boy in short corduroy knickers, before the two women. I could not speak. I felt that I should die if 'Mrs. Form' were to beat me. But my dominant feeling was not fear or even rentment: it was simply shame becau one more person, and that a woman, had been told of my disgusting offen. A little later, I forget how, I learned that it was not after all 'Mrs. Form' who would do the beating. I cannot remember whether it was that very night that I wetted my bed again, but at any rate I did wet it again quite soon. Oh, the despair, the feeling of cruel injustice, after all my prayers and resolutions, at once again waking between the clammy sheets! There was no chance of hiding what I had done. The grim statuesque matron, Daphne by name, arrived in the dormitory specially to inspect my bed. She pulled back the clothes, then drew herlf up, and the dreaded words emed to come rolling out of her like a peal of thunder: 'REPORT YOURSELF to the headmaster after breakfast!' I do not know how many times I heard that phra during my early years at Crossgates. It was only very rarely that it did not mean a beating. The words always had a portentous sound in my ears, like muffled drums or the words of the death ntence. When I arrived to report mylf, Bingo was doing something or other at the long shiny table in the ante-room to the study. Her uneasy eyes arched me as I went past. In the study Mr. Simpson, nicknamed Sim, was waiting. Sim was a round-shouldered curiously oafish-looking man, not large but shambling in gait, with a chubby face which was like that of an overgrown baby, and which was capable of good humor. He knew, of cour, why I had been nt to him, and had already taken a bone-handled riding crop out of the cupboard, but it was part of the punishment of reporting yourlf that you had to proclaim your offen with your own lips. When I had said my say, he read me a short but pompous lecture, then ized me by the scruff of the neck, twisted me over and began beating me with the riding crop. He had a habit of continuing his lecture while he flogged you, and I remember the words 'you dirty little boy' keeping time with the blows. The beating did not hurt (perhaps as it was the first time, he was not hitting me very hard), and I walked out feeling very much better. The fact that the beating had not hurt was a sort of victory and partially wiped out the shame of the bed-wetting. I was even incautious enough to wear a grin on my face. Some small boys were hanging about in the passage outside the door of the ante-room. 'D'you get the cane?' 'It didn't hurt,' I said proudly. Bingo had heard everything. Instantly her voice came screaming after me: 'Come here! Come here this instant! What was that you said?' 'I said it didn't hurt,' I faltered out. 'How dare you say a thing like that? Do you think that is a proper thing to say? Go in and REPORT YOURSELF AGAIN!' This time Sim laid on in real earnest. He continued for a length of time that frightened and astonished me--about five minutes, it emed-- ending up by breaking the riding crop. The bone handle went flying across the room. 'Look what you've made me do!' he said furiously, holding up the broken crop. I had fallen into a chair, weakly sniveling. I remember that this was the only time throughout my boyhood when a beating actually reduced me to tears, and curiously enough I was not even now crying becau of the pain. The cond beating had not hurt very much either. Fright and shame emed to have anesthetized me. I was crying partly becau I felt that this was expected of me, partly from genuine repentance, but partly also becau of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a n of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them. I knew that bed-wetting was (a) wicked and (b) outside my control. The cond fact I was personally aware of, and the first I did not question. It was possible, therefore, to commit a sin without knowing that you committed it, without wanting to commit it, and without being able to avoid it. Sin was not necessarily something that you did: it might be something that happened to you. I do not want to claim that this idea flashed into my mind as a complete novelty at this very moment, under the blows of Sim's cane: I must have had glimps of it even before I left home, for my early childhood had not been altogether happy. But at any rate this was the great, abiding lesson of my boyhood: that I was in a world where it was not possible for me to be good. And the double beating was a turning-point, for it brought home to me for the first time the harshness of the environment into which I had been flung. Life was more terrible, and I was more wicked, than I had imagined. At any rate, as I sat on the edge of a chair in Sim's study, with not even the lf-posssion to stand up while he stormed at me, I had a conviction of sin and folly and weakness, such as I do not remember to have felt before. In general, one's memories of any period must necessarily weaken as one moves away from it. One is constantly learning new facts, and old ones have to drop out to make way for them. At twenty I could have written the history of my schooldays with an accuracy which would be quite impossible now. But it can also happen that one's memories grow sharper after a long lap of time, becau one is looking at the past with fresh eyes and can isolate and, as it were, notice facts which previously existed undifferentiated among a mass of others. Here are two things which in a n I remembered, but which did not strike me as strange or interesting until quite recently. One is that the cond beating emed to me a just and reasonable punishment. To get one beating, and then to get another and far fiercer one on top of it, for being so unwi as to show that the first had not hurt--that was quite natural. The gods are jealous, and when you have good fortune you should conceal it. The other is that I accepted the broken riding crop as my own crime. I can still recall my feeling as I saw the handle lying on the carpet--the feeling of having done an ill-bred clumsy thing, and ruined an expensive object. I had broken it: so Sim told me, and so I believed. This acceptance of guilt lay unnoticed in my memory for twenty or thirty years. 孤独寂寞图片So much for the episode of the bed-wetting. But there is one more thing to be remarked. That is that I did not wet my bed again--at least, I did wet it once again, and received another beating, after which the trouble stopped. So perhaps this barbarous remedy does work, though at a heavy price, I have no doubt. All this was thirty years ago and more. The question is: Does a child at school go through the same kind of experiences nowadays? The only honest answer, I believe, is that we do not with certainty know. Of cour it is obvious that the prent-day attitude towards education is enormously more humane and nsible than that of the past. The snobbishness that was an integral part of my own education would be almost unthinkable today, becau the society that nourished it is dead. I recall a conversation that must have taken place about a year before I left Crossgates. A Russian boy, large and fair-haired, a year older than mylf, was questioning me. 'How much a-year has your father got?' I told him what I thought it was, adding a few hundreds to make it sound 停止的近义词better. The Russian boy, neat in his habits, produced a pencil and a small notebook and made a calculation. 'My father has over two hundred times as much money as yours,' he announced with a sort of amud contempt. That was in 1915. What happened to that money a couple of years later, I wonder? And still more I wonder, do conversations of that kind happen at preparatory schools now? Clearly there has been a vast change of outlook, a general growth of 'enlightenment,' even among ordinary, unthinking middle-class people. Religious belief, for instance, has largely vanished, dragging other kinds of nonn after it. I imagine that very few people nowadays would tell a child that if it masturbates it will end in the lunatic asylum. Beating, too, has become discredited, and has even been abandoned at many schools. Nor is the underf ceding of children looked on as a normal, almost meritorious act. No one now would openly t out to give his pupils as little food as they could do with, or tell them that it is healthy to get up from a meal as hungry as you sat down. The whole status of children has improved, partly becau they have grown relatively less numerous. And the diffusion of even a little psychological knowledge has made it harder for parents and schoolteachers to indulge their aberrations in the name of discipline. Here is a ca, not known to me personally, but known to someone I can vouch for, and happening within my own lifetime. A small girl, daughter of a clergyman, continued wetting her bed at an age when she should have grown out of it. In order to punish her for this dreadful deed, her father took her to a large garden party and there introduced her to the whole company as a little girl who wetted her bed: and to underline her wickedness he had previously painted her face black. I do not suggest that Bingo and Sim would actually have done a thing like this, but I doubt whether it would have much surprid them. After all, things do change. And yet--! The question is not whether boys are still buckled into Eton collars on Sunday, or told that babies are dug up under gooberry bushes. That kind of thing is at an end, admittedly. The real question is whether it is still normal for a school child to live for years amid irrational terrors and lunatic misunderstandings. And here one is up against the very great difficulty of knowing what a child really feels and thinks. A child which appears reasonably happy may actually be suffering horrors which it cannot or will not reveal. It lives in a sort of alien under-water world which we can only penetrate by memory or divination. Our chief clue is the fact that we were once children ourlves, and many people appear to forget the atmosphere of their own childhood almost entirely. Think for instance of the unnecessary torments that people will inflict by nding a child back to school with clothes of the wrong pattern, and refusing to e that this matters! Over things of this kind a child will sometimes utter a protest, but a great deal of the time its attitude is one of simple concealment. Not to expo your true feelings to an adult ems to be instinctive from the age of ven or eight onwards. Even the affection that one feels for a child, the desire to protect and cherish it, is a cau of misunderstanding. One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but is rash to assume that the child 我的假期英语作文 林肯乐队feels any love in return. Looking back on my own childhood, after the infant years were over, I do not believe that I ever felt love for any mature person, except my mother, and even her I did not trust, in the n that shyness made me conceal most of my real feelings from her. Love, the spontaneous, unqualified emotion of love, was something I could only feel for people who were young. Towards people who were old--and remember that 'old' to a child means over thirty, or even over twenty-five--I could feel reverence, respect, admiration or compunction, but I emed cut off from them by a veil of fear and shyness mixed up with physical distaste. People are too ready to forget the child's physical shrinking from the adult. The enormous size of grownups, their ungainly, rigid bodies, their coar wrinkled skins, their great relaxed eyelids, their yellow teeth, and the whiffs of musty clothes and beer and sweat and tobacco that dingage from them at every movement! Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when en from below. Besides, being fresh and unmarked itlf, the child has impossibly high standards in the matter of skin and teeth and complexion. But the greatest barrier of all is the child's misconception about age. A child can hardly envisage life beyond thirty, and in judging people's ages it will make fantastic mistakes. It will think that a person of twenty-five is forty, that a person of forty is sixty-five, and so on. Thus, when I fell in love with Elsie I took her to be grown up. I met her again, when I was thirteen and she, I think, must have been twenty-three; she now emed to me a middle-aged woman, somewhat past her best. And the child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itlf. All who have pasd the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can e, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life. The schoolmaster who imagines he is loved and trusted by his boys is in fact mimicked and laughed at behind his back. An adult who does not em dangerous nearly always ems ridiculous. I ba the generalizations on what I can recall of my own childhood outlook. Treacherous though memory is, it ems to me the chief means we have of discovering how a child's mind works. Only by resurrecting our own memories can we realize how incredibly distorted is the child's vision of the world. Consider this, for example. How would Crossgates appear to me now, if I could go back, at my prent age, and e it as it was in 1915? What should I think of Bingo and Sim, tho terrible, all-powerful monsters? I should e them as a couple of silly, shallow, 画老虎ineffectual people, eagerly clambering up a social ladder which any thinking person could e to be on the point of collap. I would be no more frightened of them than I would be frightened of a dormou. Moreover, in tho days they emed to me fantastically old, whereas-- though of this I am not certain--I imagine they must have been somewhat younger than I am now. And how would Johnny Hall appear, with his blacksmith's arms and his red, jeering face? Merely a scruffy little boy, barely distinguishable from hundreds of other scruffy little boys. The two ts of facts can lie side by side in my mind, becau the happen to be my own memories. But it would be very difficult for me to e with the eyes of any other child, except by an effort of the imagination which might lead me completely astray. The child and the adult live in different worlds. If that is so, we cannot be certain that school, at any rate boarding school, is not still for many children as dreadful an experience as it ud to be. Take away God, Latin, the cane, class distinctions and xual taboos, and the fear, the hatred, the snobbery and the misunderstanding might still all be there. It will have been en that my own main trouble was an utter lack of any n of proportion or probability. This led me to accept outrages and believe absurdities, and to suffer torments over things which were in fact of no importance. It is not enough to say that I was 'silly' and 'ought to have known better.' Look back into your own childhood and think of the nonn you ud to believe and the trivialities which could make you suffer. Of cour my own ca had its individual variations, but esntially it was that of countless other boys. The weakness of the child is that it starts with a blank sheet. It neither understands nor questions the society in which it lives, and becau of its credulity other people can work upon it, infecting it with the n of inferiority and the dread of offending against mysterious, terrible laws. It may be that everything that happened to me at Crossgates could happen in the most 'enlightened' school, though perhaps in subtler forms. Of one thing, however, I do feel fairly sure, and that is that boarding schools are wor than day schools. A child has a better chance with the sanctuary of its home near at hand. And I think the characteristic faults of the English upper and middle class may be partly due to the practice, general until recently, of nding children away from home as young as nine, eight or even ven. I have never been back to Crossgates. In a way it is only within the last decade that I have really thought over my schooldays, vividly though their memory has haunted me. Nowadays, I believe, it would make very little impression on me to e the place again, if it still exists. And if I went inside and smelled again the inky, dusty smell of the big schoolroom, the rosiny smell of the chapel, the stagnant smell of the swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I think I should only feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in mylf! | |
本文发布于:2023-07-05 13:54:03，感谢您对本站的认可！
本文链接：https://www.wtabcd.cn/fanwen/fan/82/1079902.html
版权声明：本站内容均来自互联网，仅供演示用，请勿用于商业和其他非法用途。如果侵犯了您的权益请与我们联系，我们将在24小时内删除。
| 留言与评论（共有 0 条评论） |
