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it’s all right but not the same, because you play games then, desert islands or something, or shout and muck about. Its name is Longbarrow Wood and they say it had a madman living in it once, but Mr Lamble says it was only an old tramp who didn’t know any better. I don’t know what he meant by knowing better. I’m glad I’m in Mr Lamble’s form: he’s quite strict but not sarcastic like Mr Fletton: when I was lined up getting books Mr Fletton said
seniores priores
and made me wait till the next man had got his books, though I was in front of him and I don’t believe he was any older than me, but old Fletton said: He’s in the Fourth, my boy: you’re not. I’ve got to learn Latin here, everybody does, I don’t like it much but it’s not as bad as Algebra. Do you know Latin, Mum?
Mensa mensam
, that’s Latin for table, they say it a lot of different ways. Clifford, who’s next to me in the dorm, he’s in the Fourth too, quite high up, and he says the boy Mr Fletton gave the books to first when he made me wait is a beastly little swot, Prynne his name is, a lot younger than the others and no one likes him much except old Fletton. Dear Mum, how do you like this poem? When the woods are dark and you’re all by yourself, You listen and hark and afraid to go home. I shan’t tell it to anybody else.
    Clifford is quite a decent sport: he comes and talks to me and Abbott sometimes in the playground, though he’s a senior the same as Prynne. Hollis is another chap I know. He has a baby sister but no father. His mother has been very ill. Hollis and Abbott and me are The Three Highwaymen, but we don’t tell anybody. When anybody attacks us, such as archers in the New Forest, we shout
A moi
which is French and a sort of war-cry that people used to have in the Middle Ages or sometime, and then we all help each other and take them prisoners. Dear Mum, I wish Cockle wasn’t like he is. He’s only a day boy so perhaps that’s why. It was last Saturdaywe went to the wood: if we hadn’t have gone nothing would have happened. Is there a place where things like that go to when they’re dead? I should think there must be, wouldn’t you, because of how they look at you, like a person. I wish he could be alive again, that one: it wasn’t a bit like on the farm, at reaping, when they run out of the corn. There was only us three and it was nice till Jerry did that. He called me a blub but I didn’t care. Abbott is a decent chap, he taught me the half-nelson in the coach-house. There’s nothing in it but old harness, but Abbott said Mr Williams would have gone pop if he’d seen us there. I’m lucky, I haven’t had a caning yet. Most people catch it their first term, Abbott says. Jerry Cockle has been caned a lot: he says old Fletton’s the worst, he make you bend over. We have prayers and roll call every morning in Big School, and one boy used to pinch me to try to make me squeal. I’m glad I shan’t be a new boy next term….
    These confidences were possible only in the darkness of the night, and they got no further than his pillow. His few letters home, treasured by Emily, nodded at complacently by Joe, and regarded with a painful mixture of feelings by Guy, were short and practical, and inexpressive too, except perhaps for the postscript to his last: It’s only a week now Mum. You know what to.
§ 8
    JOE ELDERBROOK, with his barking voice and ferocious good humour, was a man for work and for seeing that others worked too where his interests were concerned; but though the farm came first with him he was no slave to it, and at intervals he took himself off, resolved on recreation. In the announcement of these excursions there was sometimes a touch of defiance, a challenging of the world to dispute his right to them; and this resolute bearing was apt to persist until selfconsciousness had been mellowed and