July 24, 2000: I apologize for interrupting the account of Jim Yoshida's horrors in the Imperial Japanese army, but I picked up Humphrey Carpenter's excellent account of the circle surrounding Evelyn Waugh's circle, The Brideshead Generation, from a local Half Price Books, and I must jot down this amusing anecdote before I forget it.
Carpenter describes Cyril Connolly and Harold Acton's experiences at Eton College:"Connolly had rarely been beaten at St. Cyprian's [his prep school], but now 'even the litle boy who was Captain of Chamber [?] could beat us.' He was beaten if he had been far into Windsor to buy food for his fagmaster [the younger boys who served the older boys were known as fags in British public schools] and had made a wrong purchase; he was beaten for speaking first to a senior boy; he was beaten for some obscure infrigement of privilege. . . Another Etonian Christopher Hollis describes Harold Acton [gay author, author of books such as Memoirs of an Aesthete] being caned by another boy at the mature age of seventeen for not knowing the football colors of the various houses.
Acton told Hollis, " Smack, smack, smack. I shifted around so that the blows might fall in a different place.
"Keep still, " he [the boy caning Acton] shouted.
"It's my religion," I said. "I'm turning the other cheek."