Read The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me for Free Online

terrorised by Mr Gambril.’23
    One punishment was recalled as even worse than the agony of the long wait before being caned. Gerald had thrown a copy of the Bible across the room for a bet with another boy that the irreverent act would not bring forth the wrath of God. Unfortunately, the headmaster entered the class just as ‘God’s Sacred Book’ was hurtling through the air and Gerald saw it land at his feet. The punishment was peculiar but effective. Mr Gambril ordered all the boys in the class to hiss at the culprit. ‘Surrounded, as it were by a roomful of infuriated vipers, it seemed to be the most terrible thing that had ever happened to anyone, and the suggestion of mass-hatred in a peculiarly venomous shape intensified my sense of guilt.’ A beating was to follow, but it was the dreadful experience of ostracism that remained.
    Later, at Eton, he was rejected by the boys in his house and the ‘long hours of enforced solitude, spent in my room within earshot of the noisy companionship from which I was debarred brought with them an intolerable sense of inferiority and loneliness’.24 The teenager was only too aware of his shortcomings and later wrote about how he developed a technique of self-preservation – ‘the mixture of bluff and cunning that enables the physically weak to steer their way through dangers and difficulties’.
    If Gerald felt wretched and isolated at school, he also experienced love. The first object of his desire was at prep school – a boy as different from him as he could imagine. Longworth was a tall, athletic, fair-haired youth, several years older. Captain of the 2nd XI, ‘he seemed to me to embody every possible perfection’, and it was his image that Gerald conjured in Greek lessons when learning about Homeric demigods. This yearning for someone apparently unattainable, combined with a deep appreciation of beauty, was to continue in Gerald’s life.25 Forty years later, the Mad Boy was just as unlikely and handsome a love, who would never be an equal soulmate and partner, and who had a way of keeping Gerald in a state of insecurity.
    In First Childhood, there is an attempt to distance this type of adoration from clearly homosexual relationships. Gerald wrote that he was not aware of his longings for Longworth being sexual, though ‘my infatuation for this boy-hero of my schooldays was accompanied by all the usual symptoms connected with sexual attraction’. He suggests there was a purity ‘in those innocent, pre-Freudian, pre-Havelock Ellis generations … [unlike in] these days of intense sex-sophistication’.26 In A Distant Prospect, Gerald writes in an ostensibly open manner about the force of other passionate, youthful friendships, yet his discussion of homosexuality at Eton does nothing to elucidate his own experiences or his later life. He mentions the ‘vices’ which took place in the school and the hypocrisy that still existed on the subject, but then suggests that though a good deal of this sort of thing went on, ‘to speak of it as homosexuality would be unduly ponderous. It was merely the ebullition of puberty.’27 Gerald’s soothing, avuncular tone was surely intended as a knowing wink to those who knew.
    The Longworth episode did not end happily. Following a short if miraculous period of friendship, bestowed by Longworth de haut en bas, Gerald was dropped. His disgrace came after the two boys climbed onto the moonlit roof to smoke and Gerald vomited ignominiously. The misery of being rejected was overwhelming and the child fell into a state of deep depression. Whether this was the first time he experienced it is unknown, but it was a condition that recurred throughout his life. What he called accidie (a term originally used to describe the inability to work or pray among monks and other ascetics) made him feel that he ‘might as well not exist’.28 During these phases, he believed he was unloved, unworthy and that he would never do any good. The literary