My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleylegs could carry me. At length an insistent ringing of the bell terminated the farce, andwe returned to our corners; breathlessly I enquired of our instructor, have I won? Thelast fight of the series in the final was my first endurance test. There was not muchscience, just slogging it out toe to toe with straight lefts and rights to the face.Gradually he gave ground and I won my first championship. Three years later I took atremendous hiding from a boy in the final of the heavy-weight championship. Myopponent was bigger, heavier, older and a better boxer. I should have had no troublein winning if I had waited another year, but, as usual, was in too much of a hurry to goon to a public school and made this attempt, like everything else, prematurely.Helbert, with rare insight, praised me more in defeat than in victory. When we left atthe end of the term he selected two occasions to note in my school career. The firstwas the beating I took in this boxing final, because I had fought it out to a finish; itsimply had not occurred to me to do anything else. The second was my performancein the school shooting championship, when again I did badly. I was captain of theminiature-rifle shooting team and could normally have expected to win the individualinter-schools championship at the same time that the school team won the match. Itwas an off day for me and I shot so badly that I had no hope of the championship.Helbert remarked to the school audience that I had continued to do my best to the endof the day in order to contribute to the team's success; many boys apparently in hisexperience threw in their hands on such an occasion in a mood of petulant despair.Again I had not been at all conscious of any merit, because it did not occur to me todo anything else. Helbert however, rightly for a schoolmaster, was always on thelook-out for early evidence of character. He noted in me that I was capable of theteam spirit which has sometimes been denied; wrongly because I am a completelyloyal colleague while a member of a team.It has already been duly noted by analysts who induct from the trivial to theconsiderable that I was more attracted by individual sports like boxing, fencing andriding than by team games like cricket. Clarification of these turgid convolutions isoften simple. I liked these sports better because I was better at them, and mybackground inclined me to the sports of the country rather than to the games of thetown; individual ball games like golf and billiards seemed to me even more tedious.Was it also some complex that made me prefer conversation, reading or reflection tothe playing of cards; extraordinary aberration of ardent time-killers?My transition to the public school a year too early was one of the errors of myperpetual sense of haste. I persuaded parents and schoolmasters to let me go ahead forno good clear reason, just from a sense of urgency. I lacked at this point perhaps somecalm, male influence to say: what is the hurry?— why not wait another year at theprivate school, be head boy, win the boxing, do all the things you like doing at thefirst school, and then take a higher place in the public school when you are a yearolder and better fitted to go there? But I was in a hurry, and this advice was notavailable. I doubt if it mattered very much. I arrived at the public school a yearyounger than was normal, and my experience to that extent was tougher than the usual.As the chief merit of that education was supposed to be the toughening process, it caneven be argued that it was in this way an advantage. We were up early and to bed late,the food was meagre and the water cold, except once a week: we were at early schooland enjoying the solace of religion in chapel before breakfast; the rest of the day wasa hustling affair divided between lessons, compulsory games and fagging for the older25 of 424