The Loom of Youth | Page 2

VI Clarke 62
VII When One is in Rome 69
BOOK II: THE TANGLED SKEIN

I Quantum Mutatus 79
II Healthy Philistinism 102
III Tin Gods 119
IV Through a Glass Darkly 130
BOOK III: UNRAVELLING THE THREADS
I Common Room Faces 134
II Carnival 169
III Broadening Outlook 179
IV Thirds 185
V Dual Personality 196
VI The Games Committee 200
VII Rebellion 208
VIII The Dawning of many Dreams 213
BOOK IV: THE WEAVING
I The Twilight of the Gods 226
II Setting Stars 239
III Romance 242
IV The Dawn of Nothing 249
V The Things that Seem 259
VI The Tapestry Completed 277

PREFACE TO NEW EDITION
Books have their fates and this one's has been curious. I wrote it
between January and March 1916, when I was seventeen and a half
years old and in camp at Berkhamsted with the Inns of Court O.T.C. I
loathed it there, everything about it, the impersonal military machine,
the monotonous routine of drills and musketry, the endless
foot-slogging, the perpetual petty fault-finding. I kept comparing my
present life with that which I had been leading ten, eighteen, thirty
months ago at Sherborne, as a schoolboy.
My four years there had been very happy. I was the kind of a boy who
gets the most out of a public school. I loved cricket and football and
was reasonably good at them. I was in the first XV and my last summer
headed the batting averages. My father had lit in me a love of poetry
and an interest in history and the classics. More often than not I went
into a class-room looking forward to the hour that lay ahead. I enjoyed
the whole competitive drama of school life--the cups and caps and form
promotions. As I marched as a cadet over Ashridge Park I remembered
that a year ago I had been bicycling down to the football field for a
punt about on Upper. As I listened to a lecture on the establishment of
an infantry brigade, I thought of the sixth form sitting under that fine
scholar and Wordsworthian Nowell Smith to a discussion of Victorian
poetry. In the evenings on my way to night operations, passing
Berkhamsted School and looking at the lighted windows, I would think,
"At Sherborne now they are sitting round the games study fire waiting
for the bell to ring for hall". Day by day, hour by hour, I pictured
myself back at school.
I was in a nostalgic mood, but I was also in a rebellious mood.
Intensely though I had enjoyed my four years at Sherborne, I had been
in constant conflict with authority. That conflict, so it seemed to me,
had been in the main caused and determined by authority's inability or
refusal to recognise the true nature of school life. The Public School
system was venerated as a pillar of the British Empire and out of that
veneration had grown a myth of the ideal Public School boy--Kipling's

Brushwood Boy. In no sense had I incarnated such a myth and it had
been responsible, I felt, for half my troubles. I wanted to expose it.
Those moods of nostalgia and rebellion fused finally in an imperious
need to relive my school days on paper, to put it all down, term by term,
exactly as it had been, to explain, interpret, justify my point of view.
I wrote the book in six and a half weeks, getting up at half past four
every morning and returning to my manuscript at night after the day's
parades. I posted it, section by section, to my father who corrected the
spelling and punctuation, interjected an occasional phrase and sent it
to be typed. I never revised it. As the manuscript shows, it was printed
as it was written, paragraph by paragraph.
The book after two or three refusals was accepted by Grant Richards
and published in July 1917 in the same week that I was posted as a
machine-gun second-lieutenant to the B.E.F. in France. It could not
have come out under luckier auspices. It had an immediate news value.
There was a boom in soldier poets. Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon,
Robert Nichols, W.J. Turner had recently made their debuts. Here was
a soldier novelist, the first and in his teens. As always in war-time there
was a demand for books and there was that summer a dearth of novels.
A spirit of challenge and criticism was in the air. The war after three
years was still "bogged down" and public opinion attributed allied
failings in the field to mismanagement in high places. The
rebelliousness of The Loom of Youth was in tune with the temper of
the hour. Finally I had the immense advantage of being the son of
Arthur Waugh. My father as