Now that the first freshness of my new environment had worn off, I was able to see my life as a series of grey pictures that repeated themselves day by day.  In my mind these pictures were marked off from each other by a sound of bells.  I woke in the morning in a bed that was like all the other beds, and lay on my back listening to the soft noises of sleep that filled the air with rumours of healthy boys.  The bell would ring and the dormitory would break into an uproar, splashing of water, dropping of hair-brushes and shouts of laughter, for these super-boys could laugh before breakfast.  Then we all trooped downstairs and I forced myself to drink bad coffee in a room that smelt of herrings.  The next bell called us to chapel, and at intervals during the morning other bells called us from one class to another.  Dinner was the one square meal we had during the day, and as it was always very good, and there was nothing morbid about my appetite, I looked forward to it with interest.  After dinner we played football.  I liked the game well enough, but the atmosphere of mud and forlorn grey fields made me shudder, and as I kept goal I spent my leisure moments in hardening my aeesthetic impressions.  I never see the word football today without recalling the curious sensation caused by the mud drying on my bare knees.  After football were other classes, classes in which it was sometimes very hard to keep awake, for the school was old, and the badly ventilated class-rooms were stuffy after the fresh air.  Then the bell summoned us to evening chapel and tea—­a meal which we were allowed to improve with sardines and eggs and jam, if we had money to buy them or a hamper from home.  After tea we had about two hours to ourselves and then came preparation, and supper and bed.  Everything was heralded by a bell, and now and again even in the midst of lessons I would hear the church-bell tolling for a funeral.

I think my hatred of bells dated back to my early childhood, when the village church, having only three bells, played the first bar of “Three Blind Mice” a million times every Sunday evening, till I could have cried for monotony and the vexation of the thwarted tune.  But at school I had to pay the penalty for my prejudice every hour of the day.  Especially I suffered at night during preparation, when they rang the curfew on the church bells at intolerable length, for these were tranquil hours to which I looked forward eagerly.  We prepared our lessons for the morrow in the Great Hall, and I would spread my books out on the desk and let my legs dangle from the form in a spirit of contentment for the troubled day happily past.  Over my head the gas stars burned quietly, and all about me I heard the restrained breathing of comrades, like a noise of fluttering moths.  And then, suddenly, the first stroke of the curfew would snarl through the air, filling the roof with nasal echoes, and troubling the quietude of my mind with insistent vibrations.  I derived small satisfaction from cursing William the Conqueror, who, the history book told me, was responsible for this ingenious tyranny.  The long pauses between the strokes held me in a state of strained expectancy until I wanted to howl.  I would look about me for sympathy and see the boys at their lessons, and the master on duty reading quietly at his table.  The curfew rang every night, and they did not notice it at all.