It was like the salt which his nurse used to tell
him about: you could catch any bird by putting
salt on his tail; and once he had taken a little bag
of it into Kensington Gardens. But he could never
get near enough to put the salt on a bird’s
tail. Before Easter he had given up the struggle.
He felt a dull resentment against his uncle for taking
him in. The text which spoke of the moving of
mountains was just one of those that said one thing
and meant another. He thought his uncle had been
playing a practical joke on him.
XV
The King’s School at Tercanbury, to which Philip
went when he was thirteen, prided itself on its antiquity.
It traced its origin to an abbey school, founded before
the Conquest, where the rudiments of learning were
taught by Augustine monks; and, like many another establishment
of this sort, on the destruction of the monasteries
it had been reorganised by the officers of King Henry
VIII and thus acquired its name. Since then,
pursuing its modest course, it had given to the sons
of the local gentry and of the professional people
of Kent an education sufficient to their needs.
One or two men of letters, beginning with a poet, than
whom only Shakespeare had a more splendid genius,
and ending with a writer of prose whose view of life
has affected profoundly the generation of which Philip
was a member, had gone forth from its gates to achieve
fame; it had produced one or two eminent lawyers,
but eminent lawyers are common, and one or two soldiers
of distinction; but during the three centuries since
its separation from the monastic order it had trained
especially men of the church, bishops, deans, canons,
and above all country clergymen: there were boys
in the school whose fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers,
had been educated there and had all been rectors of
parishes in the diocese of Tercanbury; and they came
to it with their minds made up already to be ordained.
But there were signs notwithstanding that even there
changes were coming; for a few, repeating what they
had heard at home, said that the Church was no longer
what it used to be. It wasn’t so much the
money; but the class of people who went in for it weren’t
the same; and two or three boys knew curates whose
fathers were tradesmen: they’d rather go
out to the Colonies (in those days the Colonies were
still the last hope of those who could get nothing
to do in England) than be a curate under some chap
who wasn’t a gentleman. At King’s
School, as at Blackstable Vicarage, a tradesman was
anyone who was not lucky enough to own land (and here
a fine distinction was made between the gentleman
farmer and the landowner), or did not follow one of
the four professions to which it was possible for
a gentleman to belong. Among the day-boys, of
whom there were about a hundred and fifty, sons of
the local gentry and of the men stationed at the depot,
those whose fathers were engaged in business were
made to feel the degradation of their state.
