The Early Years of Alec Waugh

I went to Sherborne in September 1911. Nearly all boys enjoy their last terms at a public school but I had a good time from the start. I enjoyed every aspect of its life. I was excited by the atmosphere of competition of which I had been deprived at Fernden, where from the start I had been the best classic, the best bowler and one of the two best batsmen--one year my only rival would head the averages and the next I would. Though I had never liked soccer and was never any good at it, I had played in every first-XI match.

I have always been ambitious and now, at Sherborne, I was in the arena. Fernden had been in every sense preparatory. There was no public record of its victories and failures. No one in the big world knew at what preparatory school a man had been. With the exception of the schools in the neighbourhood, I did not know the names of half a dozen other schools. But I knew which public schools had produced my heroes of the cricket field. P. F. Warner from Rugby, R. E. Foster from Malvern, J. N. Crawford from Repton, K. L. Hutchings from Tonbridge. A. W. Carr, the captain of the School House during my first term, had been given his Notts cap the previous summer. I saw myself in the distant future going in to bat at Lord's for Middlesex and reading in the next day's paper that 'the old Shirburnian was at his characteristic best'. On my first evening I looked up at the raised sixth-form table, wondering how long it must be before I sat there.

The road was marked out for me in clear-cut stages; colts cap, colts badge, house cap, seconds, firsts. Every term offered its own prize for winning. A promotion in form, a cap upon the

-28-