Haverton House School was a depressing establishment; in after years
when Mark looked back at it he used to wonder how it had managed to
survive so long, for when he came to live at Slowbridge it had actually
been in existence for twenty years, and his uncle was beginning to look
forward to the time when Old Havertonians, as he called them, would be
bringing their sons to be educated at the old place. There were about
fifty pupils, most of them the sons of local tradesmen, who left when
they were about fourteen, though a certain number lingered on until they
were as much as sixteen in what was called the Modern Class, where they
were supposed to receive at least as practical an education as they
would have received behind the counter, and certainly a more genteel
one. Fine fellows those were in the Modern Class at Haverton House,
stalwart heroes who made up the cricket and football teams and strode
about the playing fields of Haverton House with as keen a sense of their
own importance as Etonians of comparable status in their playing fields
not more than two miles away. Mark when everything else in his school
life should be obliterated by time would remember their names and
prowess. . . . Borrow, Tull, Yarde, Corke, Vincent, Macdougal, Skinner,
they would keep throughout his life some of that magic which clings to
Diomed and Deiphobus, to Hector and Achilles.
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