The Head of Kay’s quotes

Bad luck, wasn’t it? I don’t think he found it so bad before he became head of the house. He didn’t come into contact with Kay so much. But now he finds that he can’t do a thing without Kay buzzing round and interfering.”

“I wonder,” said Jimmy Silver, thoughtfully, “if that’s why he bowls so fast. To work it off, you know.”

In the course of a beautiful innings of fifty-three that afternoon, the captain of Blackburn’s had received two of Fenn’s speediest on the same spot just above the pad in rapid succession, and he now hobbled painfully when he moved about.

This was, however, not the case. There is no reason to suppose that Mr. Kay did not mean well. But there is no doubt that he was extremely fussy.

And fussiness⁠—with the possible exceptions of homicidal mania and a taste for arson⁠—is quite the worst characteristic it is possible for a housemaster to possess.

He caught sight of Fenn and Kennedy at the gate, and stopped in his stride.

“I thought you might wish to apologise for slanging me in front of the fags.”

It is wonderful what a difference the last straw will make in one’s demeanour to a person.

“Apologise! I think you forget whom it is you are speaking to.”

“My dear chap, you can’t get out of it now,” said Kennedy anxiously. He did not want to see Fenn plunging into any more strife with the authorities this term.

“Think of the crowned heads who are coming to hear you,” pleaded Jimmy Silver. “Think of the nobility and gentry. Think of me. You must play.”

“Ah, there you are, Fenn.”

He mounted the platform amidst howls of delight from the gallery.

Applause at the Eckleton concerts was granted more for services in the playing-fields than merit as a musician.

Kubelik or Paderewski would have been welcomed with a few polite handclaps. A man in the eleven or fifteen was certain of two minutes’ unceasing cheers.

he had a tender feeling for the good name of the school, and he felt that it was not likely to make Eckleton popular with the other schools that went to camp if they got the reputation of practical jokers.

Practical jokers are seldom popular until they have been dead a hundred years or so.

As for Walton and his colleagues, to complete the list of those who were interested in this matter of the midnight raid, they lay remarkably low after their successful foray. They imagined that Kennedy was spying on their every movement.

Blackburn’s happened to win by four goals and eight tries, a result which the patriotic Kay fag attributed solely to favouritism on the part of the referee.

“I like the kids in your house,” said Jimmy to Kennedy, after the match, when telling the latter of the incident; “there’s no false idea of politeness about them. If they don’t like your decisions, they say so in a shrill treble.”

“Little beasts,” said Kennedy. “I wish I knew who they were. It’s hopeless to try and spot them, of course.”

Fenn had wandered some way when the sound of someone whistling a popular music-hall song came to him through the gloom.

He had never heard anything more agreeable.

“I say,” he shouted at a venture, “can you tell me the way to the High Street?”

“You had better go to bed, Fenn,” said Mr. Kay, disgustedly, at the end of that period. “He must have got back in some extraordinary manner.”

He himself had certainly got back in a very extraordinary manner.

However, he had got back, which was the main point.

He himself had certainly got back in a very extraordinary manner.

However, he had got back, which was the main point.

Once he had run right into Drew, of the School House, and escaped unrecognised. But with Fenn it was different.

Compared to Fenn, lynxes were astigmatic.

He must have spotted him.

and that Fenn had received them in the most ungrateful manner with blows instead of exeats. Strong in this recollection, he was not disturbed by Kennedy’s question. Indeed, it gave him a comfortable feeling of rectitude.

There is nothing more pleasant than to be accused to your face of something which you can deny on the spot with an easy conscience. It is like getting a very loose ball at cricket.

Fenn felt almost friendly towards Kennedy.

and he had fought them all for a term, and looked like winning. Jimmy admired his friend with a fervour which nothing on earth would have tempted him to reveal.

Like most people with a sense of humour, he had a fear of appearing ridiculous, and he hid his real feelings as completely as he was able.

“How is the footer getting on?” inquired Jimmy, remembering the difficulties Kennedy had encountered earlier in the term in connection with his house team.

From which conversation it will be seen that

Kay’s was gradually pulling itself together. It had been asleep for years. It was now waking up.

When the winter term ended, there were distinct symptoms of an outbreak of public spirit in the house.

For three years he had been in the Lower Fourth. Probably the master of that form went to the Head, and said that his constitution would not stand another year of him, and that either he or Perry must go. So Perry had departed.

Like a poor play, he had “failed to attract,” and was withdrawn.

There was also another departure of an even more momentous nature.

… of bank life and thought, and at the end of his first year he might even hope for a rise in his salary of ten pounds, if his conduct was good, and he had not been late on more than twenty mornings in the year.

I am aware that in a properly-regulated story of school-life Walton would have gone to the Eckleton races, returned in a state of speechless intoxication, and been summarily expelled; but facts are facts, and must not be tampered with.

The ingenious but not industrious Perry had been superannuated. For three years he had been in the Lower Fourth.

Kay’s, they would feel, always had got beaten, and they always would, to the end of time.

A house that has once got thoroughly slack does not change its views of life in a moment.

“You played jolly well,” he told his despondent team, as they trooped off the field. “We haven’t got together yet, that’s all. And it was a hot side we were playing today. They would have licked Blackburn’s.”