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Page:Elwes1930MemoirsOfTravelSportAndNaturalHistory.djvu/18

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18
MEMOIRS OF TRAVEL

which meant a private boat kept by one of the three boat-builders whose rafts lined the shore above Windsor Bridge, you had to take your chance of a “chance boat," usually in those days a skiff without outriggers. To get this entailed hard running up town directly after chapel or school was over, and one of the great objects among boys not in the boats was to see how far one could get up the river in the course of the two and a quarter or two and a half hours before "absence," which was a calling over of the names of boys in the school yard at 6 p.m. in the summer. It was easy enough to go up to “Surly," a public-house above Boveney lock, three miles from Eton. In an outrigger it was possible to get to “Monkey Island," another public two miles further upstream, and there were athletes who talked of going to Maidenhead and back, nearly fourteen miles, but I only remember one—a little thin boy named Hall, who squeezed himself into the narrowest and lightest sculling boat ever built, said to be only eight inches wide—who actually accomplished the feat.

We used also to take long walks into the country in “after four" and succeeded sometimes, by running as long as we could and sometimes getting a lift when we were too blown to run any longer, in going as far as Virginia Water and back, about fourteen miles, in the limited time at our disposal.

My cousin Tom Hamond and I used to go bird-nesting a good deal in Ditton Park, among other places, though it was strictly preserved and enclosed with high palings. I remember once when he was up a tree after an owl's nest and I was keeping guard, the keeper came along; and though I tried to look as if I was innocently picking flowers, his red head peeping out of a hole in the tree betrayed us. The keepers round Eton, however, were not very difficult with Eton boys, who, they knew, would sometimes have relations with them in after life and who were more troublesome than actually harmful, and I never recollect having a regular row with any of them during our depredations. There was another owls nest in a hollow elm tree in the playing fields into which a cricket ball was accidentally hit, and was recovered with four eggs afterwards by someone who succeeded in climbing to it.

My tutor, Durnford, was a nice old man in his house and very kind to his pupils, whom he fed most liberally and well. He never complained of me, but I do not think he could have had much judgment as to the possibly latent talent of any boy who hated Latin verses and Greek grammar; for when I was sixteen he wrote to my father and said that as I was doing no good at Eton I had better go away in time to be crammed for the Army.

In those days stamp collecting was a new fad only taken up by school- boys. We had at home an old Swiss governess whose father was either postmaster-general or a high official in the Swiss general post office, and she used to get us parcels of stamps taken off letters in the Swiss dead letter office. Among these were many of the old Swiss Cantonal stamps which were already superseded by the National stamps, and these were very rare. A sort of Stamp Exchange was formed among the boys who collected, and we used to meet on certain days at each other's rooms to “swop stamps." In time I got to have one of the best collections in the school, and when I left I sold my collection for £5 10s. 0d. to a friend in order to pay my debts. But the promised money never came, and when three or four years after-