My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosley2 - School and SandhurstI WAS always in too much of a hurry. This tendency began at school; I wasconcerned to get on with it and to grow up. School to me was not a happy interludebefore facing the harsh responsibilities of adult life. It was a necessary but tediousprogress through which we had to pass before the wide life of opportunity, adventureand great experience could begin. This was a fault, but I sometimes feel nowadays itwas a fault on the right side. The intense desire to become a man is surely preferableto the yearning for a lingering childhood. The hurry to embrace life is better than theflight from life. To me, childhood was just a nuisance; now it has become a blessedcult. Growing up must be delayed in early life, and old age welcomed in later life.Manhood with its responsibilities is the awkward and unpleasant time to be shortenedas far as possible. The tendency is to flight from the world, back to the womb or on tothe tomb. To play young in early life and old in late life is an exercise of the greatescape mechanism. For better or worse my generation was the extreme opposite. Werushed towards life with arms outstretched to embrace the sunshine, and even thedarkness, the light and shade which is the essence of existence, every variedenchantment of a glittering, wonderful world; a life rush, to be consummated.It was a deep difference in attitude and approach, which has had far-reaching effects.If too much is made of a cult of childhood its values tend to be unduly exalted; theaction proper to manhood can become inhibited, and its natural dynamism wasted. Weare told in early life that we are too young to do anything, and in later life that we aretoo old to do anything; the peddlers of these inhibitions really mean that they arealways against anything being done. The achievements of manhood are replaced bythe fantasies of childhood; Peter Pan mounts on the reversal of values established bynature and proven by history. Strangest paradox of all, just as science considerablyextends the effective life-span it has become the fashion to shorten it by the cult ofprotracted infancy and premature senility. Therefore I admit to error in being alwaysin too much of a hurry and usually driving things too hard, but I prefer the errors ofdynamism to the religion of lethargy.I arrived at my first school, West Downs, Winchester, just after my ninth birthday. Ithad an enlightened headmaster, Lionel Helbert, who had given up being a clerk in theHouse of Lords to found a small boys' school. He made a genuine effort to understandhis pupils; he ascribed to me at an early age certain qualities of leadership, and wishedme to join the navy, of which he was passionately fond. I arrived at nine as quite abright boy, after the home tuition of the excellent Miss Gandy, an intelligent womanand kindly guide, but I rapidly became a very stupid boy, not by lack of schoolteaching but by stress of growth, which I am now convinced was responsible for mybackwardness; at the age of fourteen I had reached my full height of six-foot-two andwas broad in proportion. Roughly my rhythm was, clever from nine to eleven, halfwittedfrom eleven to around sixteen, from sixteen to nineteen a gradual recovery ofmy faculties, and from nineteen onwards the achievement of my capacities for whatthey have since been worth. All this makes me look rather askance at such things asthe 11-plus exam, and other primitive tests which may at an early stage finally decideor at least influence a boy's future.In later life I teased public schoolmasters with the remark that in my generation andthe two preceding generations they had failed to discover at school any of the men23 of 424