He had chosen resistance.

     TUDOR HOUSE. 
          CHELTENHAM,
               Sunday.

DEAREST MOTHER: 

I’ve put Sunday on this letter, though it’s really Friday, because I’m supposed to be writing it on Sunday when the other fellows are writing.  That’s the beastly thing about this place, you’re expected to do everything when the other fellows are doing it, whether you want to or not, as if the very fact that they’re doing it too didn’t make you hate it.

I’m writing now because I simply must.  If I waited till Sunday I mightn’t want to, and anyhow I shouldn’t remember a single thing I meant to say.  Even now Johnson minor’s digging his skinny elbows into one side of me, and Hartley major’s biting the feathers off his pen and spitting them out again on the other.  But they’re only supposed to be doing Latin verse, so it doesn’t matter so much.  What I mean is it’s as if their beastly minds kept on leaking into yours till you’re all mixed up with them.  That’s why I asked Daddy to take me away next term.  You see—­it’s more serious than he thinks—­it is, really.  You’ve no idea what it’s like.  You’ve got to swot every blessed thing the other fellows swot even if you can’t do it, and whether it’s going to be any good to you or not.  Why, you’re expected to sleep when they’re sleeping, even if the chap next you snores.  Daddy might remember that it’s Nicky who likes mathematics, not me.  It’s all very well for Nicky when he wants to go into the Army all the time.  There are things I want to do.  I want to write and I’m going to write.  Daddy can’t keep me off it.  And I don’t believe he’d want to if he understood.  There’s nothing else in the world I’ll ever be any good at.

And there are things I want to know.  I want to know Greek and Latin and French and German and Italian and Spanish, and Old French and Russian and Chinese and Japanese, oh, and Provencal, and every blessed language that has or has had a literature.  I can learn languages quite fast.  Do you suppose I’ve got a chance of knowing one of them—­really knowing—­even if I had the time?  Not much.  And that’s where being here’s so rotten.  They waste your time as if it was theirs, not yours.  They’ve simply no notion of the value of it.  They seem to think time doesn’t matter because you’re young.  Fancy taking three months over a Greek play you can read in three hours.  That’ll give you some idea.

It all comes of being in a beastly form and having to go with the other fellows.  Say they’re thirty fellows in your form, and twenty-nine stick; you’ve got to stick with them, if it’s terms and terms.  They can’t do it any other way.  It’s because I’m young, Mummy, that I mind so awfully.  Supposing I died in ten years’ time, or even fifteen?  It simply makes me hate everybody.

Love to Daddy and Don.

     Your loving MICK.

P.S.-I don’t mean that Hartley major isn’t good at Latin verse.  He is.  He can lick me into fits when he’s bitten all the feathers off.