Kipps | Page 5

sometimes one read from a cheap History of this land.
They did, as Kipps reported, 'loads of catechism.' Also there was much

learning of geographical names and lists, and sometimes Woodrow, in
an outbreak of energy, would see these names were actually found in a
map. And once, just once, there was a chemistry lesson -- a lesson of
indescribable excitement -- glass things of the strangest shape, a smell
like bad eggs, something bubbling in something, a smash and stench,
and Mr. Woodrow saying quite distinctly -- they threshed it out in the
dormitory afterwards -- 'Damn!' Followed by the whole school being
kept in, with extraordinary severities, for an hour...
But interspersed with the memories of this gray routine were certain
patches of brilliant colour, the Holidays, his holidays, which, in spite of
the feud between their seniors, he spent as much as possible with Sid
Pornick, the son of the irascible black-bearded haberdasher next door.
They seemed to be memories of a different world. There were glorious
days of 'mucking about' along the beach, the siege of unresisting
Martello towers, the incessant interest of the mystery and motion of
windmills, the windy excursions with boarded feet over the yielding
shingle to Dungeness lighthouse -- Sid Pornick and he far adrift from
reality, smugglers and armed men from the moment they left Great
Stone behind them -- wanderings in the hedgeless, reedy marsh, long
excursions reaching even to Hythe, where the machine-guns of the
Empire are for ever whirling and tapping, and to Rye and Winchelsea
perched like dream-cities on their little hills. The sky in these memories
was the blazing hemisphere of the marsh heaven in summer, or its
wintry tumult of sky and sea; and there were wrecks, real wrecks, in it
(near Dymchurch pitched high and blackened and rotting were the ribs
of a fishing smack, flung aside like an empty basket when the sea had
devoured its crew), and there was bathing all naked in the sea, bathing
to one's armpits, and even trying to swim in the warm sea-water (spite
of his aunt's prohibition) and (with her indulgence) the rare eating of
dinner from a paper parcel miles away from home. Cake and cold
ground-rice puddin' with plums it used to be -- there is no better food at
all. And for the background, in the place of Woodrow's mean and
fretting rule, were his aunt's spare but frequently quite amiable figure --
for though she insisted on his repeating the English Church catechism
every Sunday, she had an easy way over dinners that one wanted to
take abroad -- and his uncle, corpulent and irascible, but sedentary and

easily escaped. And freedom!
The holidays were, indeed, very different from school. They were free,
they were spacious, and though he never knew it in these words -- they
had an element of beauty. In his memory of his boyhood they shone
like strips of stained-glass window in a dreary waste of scholastic wall,
they grew brighter and brighter as they grew remoter. There came a
time at last and moods when he could look back to them with a feeling
akin to tears.
The last of these windows was the brightest, and instead of the
kaleidoscopic effect of its predecessors its glory was a single figure.
For in the last of his holidays before the Moloch of Retail Trade got
hold of him, Kipps made his first tentative essays at the mysterious
shrine of Love. Very tentative they were, for he had become a boy of
subdued passions, and potential rather than actual affectionateness.
And the object of these first stirrings of the great desire was no other
than Ann Pornick, the head of whose doll he and Sid had broken long
ago, and rejoiced over long ago, in the days when he had yet to learn
the meaning of a heart.

3
Negotiations were already on foot to make Kipps into a draper before
he discovered the lights that lurked in Ann Pornick's eyes. School was
over, absolutely over, and it was chiefly present to him that he was
never to go to school again. It was high summer. The 'breaking up' of
school had been hilarious; and the excellent maxim, 'Last Day's Pay
Day,' had been observed by him with a scrupulous attention to his
honour. He had punched the heads of all his enemies, wrung wrists and
kicked shins; he had distributed all his unfinished copy-books, all his
school books, his collection of marbles, and his mortar-board cap
among such as loved him; and he had secretly written in obscure pages
of their books 'remember Art Kipps.' He had also split the anaemic
Woodrow's cane, carved his own name deeply in several places about

the premises, and broken the scullery window. He