There were two sorts of masters at Eton—those who could keep order and those who couldn’t. With those who could, there was never any question of ragging. Boys knew at once what was impossible and accepted it. They also knew in a moment when it was possible, and they lost no minute of their opportunities, and at once began to harass the wretched master with importunate, absurd, and impertinent questions, seeing how far they could go in veiled insolence without overstepping the line of danger. It was the masters who taught mathematics and French who had the worst time, with the exception of Monsieur Hua, who was an admirable teacher and stood no nonsense.
In Remove we did science. There were three science masters—Mr. Porter, Mr. Drew, and Mr. Hale (Badger). I was taught by them all in turn. Mr. Drew used to produce a mysterious and rather dirty-looking bit of stony metal or metallic stone, and say in a confidential whisper: “Do you know what that is? It’s quartz.” Badger Hale had only one experiment. It was a split football which was made to revolve by turning a handle, and proved, but hardly to our satisfaction, the centrifugal tendency of the earth. Mr. Porter’s science lectures, on the other hand, were fraught with excitement. Apparatus after apparatus was brought in, and experiment after experiment was attempted, sometimes involving explosions. Sometimes they failed. Sometimes, just at the critical moment we would laugh. Mr. Porter would say: “I have been three days trying to get this experiment ready, and now you have spoilt it all.” “Please, sir, we were not laughing,” we would say. “You were looking as if you were laughing, and that disturbs me just as much,” Mr. Porter would answer. It was no use accusing us of laughing, because we always denied it at once, and after a time he would always say: “Write out the verbs in _mi_ for looking as if you were laughing.” At the end of the half, Mr. Porter gave what was called a “Good Boys’ Lecture,” at which the first nine boys of all the various sets he taught attended, if their work had been satisfactory throughout the term. I went to three of these or more. They were lectures with coloured magic-lantern slides, showing views of places all over the world, from Indus to the Pole. Never have I enjoyed anything more. There was a slide of Vesuvius in eruption, and slides of Venice and New Zealand, which were entrancingly beautiful. But one half, the Good Boy Lecture was confined to Mr. Porter’s holiday trip to the Isle of Skye, and the slides were not coloured. This lecture was a disappointment, and I am afraid, from the boys’ point of view, a failure. Another remarkable lecture Mr. Porter gave was on soap-bubbles. Films of soap bubble were projected by some device on to a screen, so that you saw the prismatic colours enlarged and as vivid as rainbows. While this was going on, a boy called Harben, who had a fruity alto voice, sang a sentimental song into a tube; the vibrations of the sound had a strange effect on the soap-bubble films, and made them change rapidly into a multitude of kaleidoscopic shapes and gyrations and symmetrical patterns. So Mr. Porter was the precursor of Skriabin’s Symphony, in which the music is assisted by visible colour.