In January 1911, after Christmas break, Jack and Warren once again set off together for England. Surprisingly, Jack did not have the same negative reaction to England as before, and he looked forward to seeing his new home. The school was called Cherbourg, and Jack loved it from the first time he saw it. It was nestled in the Worcestershire Hills near the town of Great Malvern, in western England near the Welsh border. With its mineral wells, Great Malvern had a reputation for being a place of healing waters. Because of this, many famous people came to town to “take the water cure,” and a very un-English-looking community had sprung up there. The houses, which clung to the sides of the hills, looked like Swiss mountain houses, and gardeners took great care to trim the evergreen trees into fanciful shapes.
In his first letter home to his father, Jack wrote, “Malvern is one of the nicest English towns I have ever seen yet. The hills are beautiful but of course not so nice as ours.”
The whole effect on Jack was magical, and he felt he had entered another world. But once he was enrolled at Cherbourg and assigned to his dormitory, things became less magical and more mundane. Again Jack found himself in a small school, with only seventeen students. The standard of teaching, however, was much higher. Not surprisingly, Jack’s favorite activity was walking alone in the forest around the school.
Meanwhile, Warren was not setting a high example at nearby Malvern College. He hated Greek and Latin and soon devised a way to trade his English expertise for free papers in those subjects. Before long Warren and his group of friends had quite an enterprise going, each one doing all the homework in his area of strength and then sharing it with the other boys. Jack, on the other hand, loved all his subjects, apart from mathematics. He enjoyed translating works from classical languages and reading metaphysical papers.
Despite his academic success, Jack floundered about socially. He had not improved any in sports and found the other boys’ preoccupation with cricket and rugby baffling. He struggled to figure out how to fit in. He began to worry about his looks and became anxious about girls. Behind a brave front, he was a shy, gifted young teenager looking for a place to belong.
The matron of the school, Mrs. Cowrie, soon picked up on this and went out of her way to become Jack’s special friend and comforter. Unfortunately, this relationship ended disastrously when Jack set about to campaign for the right to send letters home without first having them approved by the headmaster. Mrs. Cowrie took Jack’s side in the argument, and she was fired as a result.
The incident devastated Jack and took away the best friend he had at Cherbourg. Still, Jack had no choice but to plod on, and eventually he made friends with other boys who had interests similar to his.
Christmas and summer holidays continued to be the highlight of the year for Jack, though there was now a lot of tension at home between Warren and their father. Mr. Lewis accused Warren of being lazy and wasting his schooling. Warren fired back that his father lived the most boring life imaginable and if that was what years of scholarship got you, he did not want it.
The situation with Warren’s schooling came to a head when Warren was caught smoking on the school grounds. He was not expelled immediately, but he was asked not to return to Malvern College for the fall term of 1913. Albert was furious about the situation. He felt that it was his responsibility to set both his sons on the right path to a useful career.
Following the summer holidays in Belfast in 1913, both boys returned once again to England. This time Warren had a new destination. He went to stay with Professor William Kirkpatrick in Surrey. W. T. Kirkpatrick, or “Old Knock,” as he was known, had been Albert Lewis’s headmaster many years before. Professor Kirkpatrick was a taskmaster and a stickler for routine.
It was a new start for both boys, since Jack had graduated from Cherbourg and won a classical entrance scholarship to Malvern College.
Jack knew what to expect when he got to Malvern, as he had lived in the shadow of the college for the past two years and had been there on numerous occasions to watch sporting events. His plan was to keep out of trouble and hope that no one took too much notice of him. His plan backfired from the start.
Each student at Malvern College was assigned to a club where he was to participate in compulsory games. Instead of checking for himself what club he was in, Jack relied on the information given to him by one of the older students in the school, a boy with the nickname Fribble. “You are in the same club as me, B6,” Fribble said. Armed with this information Jack went dutifully to the notice board to see which sports team he had been assigned to play on. To his delight, each week he learned that he had not been assigned to any team and thus did not have to participate in sports. Perhaps Warnie told them how bad I am at sports, he rationalized. But during his third week at school, Jack learned that Fribble had lied to him. He had not been assigned to the B6 club but was assigned to another club, and he had already failed to show up for several compulsory events. The punishment for this, whether the infraction was deliberate or not, was flogging with a cane by one of the school prefects. Jack accepted his punishment and vowed never to accept secondhand information again when he could just as easily get the information firsthand.
Fribble belonged to the most privileged group within Malvern College called the Bloods. A Blood was a student who had won the admiration of the rest of the college through his sports prowess and leadership. All the junior boys in the school wanted to grow up to become Bloods, mainly because of a system in the school called “fagging.” Under this system a Blood was entitled to get any junior boy to do manual tasks for him. Jack and the other new arrivals at Malvern College soon found themselves with little free time. As soon as a Blood shouted, the students were all expected to report to him to see what he wanted. One or more boys would be assigned to menial tasks, such as tidying his study or cleaning his boots. Jack soon learned that the trick was to do an adequate job—well enough that you did not get a flogging for slacking on the job but not so well that you became the Blood’s most conscientious worker, and therefore his favorite.
Jack did his best to fit in to what was going on around him. He feigned interest in sports, completed the tasks the Bloods gave him without complaining, and even pretended to pay attention at the twice-weekly church services. In fact, the religious fervor that Jack had felt in his younger years had by now drained from him. Jack told himself that he no longer believed in God and that Christianity was just another myth devised to keep the unhappy masses from giving up hope. He wrote to a neighbor in Belfast:
How dreary it all is! I could make some shift to put up with the work, and discomfort, and the school feeding: such inconveniences can only be expected. But what irritates me more than anything else is the absolute lack of appreciation of anything like music or books which prevails among the people whom I am forced to call my companions. Can you imagine what it is like to live for twelve weeks among boys whose thoughts never rise above the dull daily round of cricket and work and eating?
By Christmas 1913, Jack had given up hope of ever really fitting in at Malvern College. When Warren came to meet him for the journey home to Belfast, Jack hoped that he would never set foot in the school again. He knew what he had to do—over Christmas break he had to convince his father to withdraw him and enroll him in another school somewhere else.
Chapter 4
“Old Knock”
Back in Belfast during Christmas break, Jack and his father struck a bargain. Jack would return to Malvern College for one more term, and then he could finish his schooling with William Kirkpatrick, “Old Knock,” who had been tutoring Warren. It was a compromise he could live with, and Jack returned to Malvern College after Christmas to count down the days until he left the place for good.
At the same time, Warren entered the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in England as an officer cadet. With Warren being away from the influence of other boys at Malvern College, his academic work had flourished, and he had managed to win a cadetship at Sandhurst. He was ranked twenty-first out of the 201 young men who were accepted for the spring intake. It was a feat that astonished everyone and gave Albert Lewis great confidence in Professor Kirkpatrick’s ability to tutor Jack as well.
During his last term at Malvern College, Jack spent most of his time in the school library. His English teacher suggested he read the poetry of Irish poet William Butler Yeats and the books Northern Antiquities by Paul Henri Mallet and Myths of the Norsemen by Hélène Adeline Guerber. Once he had read the books, Jack began writing his own northern tragedy, which he called Loki Bound. The story was about a boy who rebelled against his bloodthirsty, cruel father.
The term flew by, and in the summer of 1914, Jack packed his belongings and left Malvern College for good. His boarding-school days were over.
While 1914 was marked by the arrival of personal freedom for Jack, it was not so for Warren and many other young Englishmen. Europe was on the brink of war. On June 28, 1914, news reverberated around the world that a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo had assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.
Three weeks later the Austro-Hungarian Empire delivered an ultimatum to Serbia to hand over the assassin. The ultimatum escalated the conflict, with Russia standing behind Serbia, and Germany siding with the Austro-Hungarians. Europe, it seemed, was drifting closer to war with each passing day. Finally, on July 28, 1914, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia. It was a sobering time for everyone in Europe and Great Britain. People waited anxiously to see whether the British would become embroiled in the war.
During the summer holidays, Jack tried to put these looming uncertainties out of his mind. He continued writing Loki Bound and much to his delight found someone to share it with. Jack had known the boy next door, Arthur Greeves, since the Lewis family moved into Little Lea. However, because Jack and Warren had always come home from school together, they were a tight team and did not often seek out the company of other boys. But with Warren away training to be an officer at Sandhurst, Jack was now alone. When he learned that Arthur was at home sick, he went next door to visit him. To his surprise Jack noticed a copy of Myths of the Norsemen on the nightstand beside Arthur’s bed. Jack pointed to it. “Do you like that?” he asked.
“Do you like that?” Arthur replied incredulously.
An hour later the two boys were still discussing myths and legends, and Jack knew he had found a true friend in Arthur.
Meanwhile, the situation in Europe continued to deteriorate. On August 1, Germany declared war on Russia, and two days later France declared war on Germany. Then Germany invaded Belgium in order to march through that country to Paris. In response, Great Britain honored its treaty with France and declared war on Germany on August 4, 1914. And three weeks later, Japan declared war on Germany, honoring its treaty with Great Britain. Not surprisingly, at Sandhurst Warren was fast-tracked in his officers’ training so that he would be ready to serve in the war.
In the midst of all this, Jack prepared to go and live with Professor Kirkpatrick, who lived in Great Bookham, Surrey, England. Although Jack was nearing his sixteenth birthday, he was not concerned that he would be conscripted to fight in the war. He was an Irish citizen, not a British citizen, and Britain had no power to call up Irish troops.
Once again Jack caught the boat from Belfast to Liverpool and then on Saturday caught the train to London, where he changed to another train for the final leg of his journey to Bookham. As the train rumbled through the Surrey countryside, the land was not at all how Jack had imagined it to be. The landscape was dotted with hills and wooded valleys, with villages tucked among them. Most of the houses were wooden, with tile roofs, rather than built of brick or stone. When the train finally pulled to a halt at the station at Bookham, William Kirkpatrick was waiting there to meet Jack. Old Knock was a tall, lanky man, standing over six feet tall. He had a bushy moustache and side-whiskers, but his chin was clean-shaven. As Jack shook his hand, he marveled at William Kirkpatrick’s clothes. Old Knock was dressed more like a gardener than a professor.
