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Updated: June 2, 2025
He says I am to forget, and he forbade me to talk about Crayshaw's, and said I was not to trouble my head about anything that had happened there. He kept saying, 'Forget, my boy, forget! Say GOD help me, and look forward. While there's life there's always the chance of a better life for every one. Forget! forget!" Lewis departed with his uncle. Charlie went for two nights to the moors.
My great-grandfather's memory was not evoked on this occasion, and my father frankly confessed that his personal knowledge of Crayshaw's was very small, and that the man on whose recommendation he had sent us to school there had just proved to be a rascal and a swindler. Our mother had certainly heard rumours of severity, but he had regarded her maternal anxiety as excessive, etc., etc.
Many such hints have I heard, for the 'White Lion' was next door to the sweet-shop, and in summer, refreshment of a sober kind, with conversation to match, was apt to be enjoyed on the benches outside. The good wives of the neighbourhood used no such euphuisms as their more prudent husbands, when they spoke of Crayshaw's.
The injustice which I felt so keenly was, that my father reproached me with having what he called "kept him in the dark" about the life at Crayshaw's. At my age I must have seen how wicked the man and his system were. I reminded him that I had run away from them once, and had told all that I dared, but that he would not hear me then. He would not hear me now. "I don't wish to discuss the subject.
That Snuffy was bland to cringing before my father did not give me hope that I should escape his direst revenge; and the expression of Lorraine's face showed me, by its sympathy, what he expected. But we were both wrong, and for reasons which we then knew nothing about. Cruelty was, as I have said, Mr. Crayshaw's ruling passion, but it was not his only vice.
It puzzles me, even now, to think how my father could have sent Jem and me to Crayshaw's school. Crayshaw except the parents of pupils who lived at a distance. I do not think it was merely because "Crayshaw's" was cheap that we were sent there, though my father had so few reasons to give for his choice that he quoted that among them.
Old Crayshaw's desk had got a lot of canes on one side of it and a most beastly dirty snuffy red and green handkerchief on the other, and an ink-pot in the middle. He made up to Father like anything and told such thumpers. He said there were six boys in one room, but really there's twelve. Jem and I sleep together. There's nothing to wash in and no prayers.
Crayshaw's face for once assumed a genuine expression, one of alarm.
And the old gentleman managed his own affairs to ninety-seven, and threw the doctor's medicine-bottles out of the window then. In short, we were sent to "Crayshaw's." It was not a happy period of my life. It was not a good or wholesome period; and I am not fond of recalling it. The time came when I shrank from telling Charlie everything, almost as if he had been a girl.
Crayshaw's cruelty crushed others, it made liars and sneaks of boys naturally honest, and it produced in Lorraine an unchildlike despair that was almost grand, so far was the spirit above the flesh in him. But I think its commonest and strangest result was to make the boys bully each other.
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