高级听力教程 - Unit 1 Part 4
When I Was at Harrow ……
I was born of a working-class father and the aspiration of many self-made men is to send their children to private boarding school, to give them the best education money can buy, and one of the best schools in the country is Harrow.
Harrow is one of those institutions when I was there which at that time were really geared to train an elite ruling class, so that everything was geared to that, and so team spirit and team games were the thing, and games were really more important than the acquisition of knowledge. If you were good at games you were considered to be one of the heroes of the school, and if you were good at work then the chances are you would be derided and laughed at as a swot or somebody who worked hard and studied hard, and that was not the attribute of a gentleman. So there were some games, like tennis, golf, that were frowned on and you were not encouraged to pursue those games but you were more encouraged to play cricket and football and Harrow football and so forth because it required a team effort, you were one of a team, you were not an individual, and it seemed to me that the public school system actually ground out the individual. You fitted into a mould; you learnt to accept certain standards. You never showed pain, for example, you didn't whinge about pain or discomfort, and schools in my day not comfortable places. They are now.
I think tying in with the importance of games is the fact that also you had to be a “man”, and if people abroad think that the English gentleman is someone who is clean of limb, I can assure you he's not. I think most of us washed about once a week; in that you didn’t wear a overcoat so this meant that in winter we would pull over our clothes off and the whole lot came off, shirt, several pullovers and vests and they all came off in one go. We then put our pyjamas on and if the next morning it was particularly cold, we’d just put the whole damn lot on over the pyjamas so you'd see small boys with bits of about an inch or two of pyjamas trouser showing out at the bottom of their grey trousers, but you went, in the end, if it sort of dropped to minus ten you went around like little Michelin men with layers and layers of things on but no overcoat -- that was the sign of weakness.
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