Copious reading about the Dark and the Middle Ages had floridly coloured my views of the past and the King’s School, Canterbury, touched off emotions which were sharply opposed to those of Somerset Maugham in the same surroundings; they were closer to Walter Pater’s seventy years carlier, and probably identical, I liked to think, with those of Christopher Marlowe earlier still. I couldn’t get over the fact that the school had been founded at the very beginning of Anglo-Saxon Christianity—before the sixth century was out, that is: fragments of Thor and Woden had hardly stopped smouldering in the Kentish woods: the oldest part of the buildings was modern by these standards, dating only from a few decades after the Normans landed. There was a wonderfully cobwebbed feeling about this dizzy and intoxicating antiquity—an ambiance both haughty and obscure which turned famous seats of learning, founded eight hundred or a thousand years later, into gaudy mushrooms and seemed to invest these hoarier precincts, together with the wide green expanses beyond them, the huge elms, the Dark Entry, and the ruined arches and the cloisters—and, while I was about it, the booming and jackdaw-crowded pinnacles of the great Angevin cathedral itself, and the ghost of St. Thomas à Becket and the Black Prince’s bones—with an aura of nearly prehistoric myth.
Although it was a one-sided love in the end …
What went wrong? I think I know now. A bookish attempt to coerce life into a closer resemblance to literature was abetted—it can only be—by a hangover from early anarchy: translating ideas as fast as I could into deeds overrode every thought of punishment or danger; as I seem to have been unusually active and restless, the result was chaos. It mystified me and puzzled others. “You’re mad!” prefects and monitors would exclaim, brows knit in glaring scrum-half bewilderment, as new misdeeds came to light.… Everything was going badly and my housemaster’s penultimate report, in my third year, had an ominous ring: ‘… some attempts at improvement’ it went ‘but more to avoid detection. He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys.’
[…]
About lamplighting time at the end of a wet November day, I was peering morosely at the dog-eared pages on my writing table and then through the panes at the streaming reflections of Shepherd Market, thinking, as Night and Day succeeded Stormy Weather on the gramophone in the room below, that Lazybones couldn’t be far behind; when, almost with the abruptness of Herber’s lines at the beginning of these pages, inspiration came. A plan unfolded with the speed and the completeness of a Japanese paper flower in a tumbler.
To change scenery; abandon London and England and set out across Europe like a tramp—or, as I characteristically phrased it to myself, like a pilgrim or a palmer, an errant scholar, a broken knight or the hero of The Cloister and the Hearth! All of a sudden, this was not merely the obvious, but the only thing to do. I would travel on foot, sleep in hayricks in summer, shelter in barns when it was raining or snowing and only consort with peasants and tramps. If I lived on bread and cheese and apples, jogging along on fifty pounds a year like Lord Durham with a few noughts knocked off, there would even be some cash left over for paper and pencils and an occasional mug of beer. A new life! Freedom! Something to write about!