The top form (called the first form, not the sixth form), had certain specified lessons every week taken by Waterfield, and he did not teach regularly in other forms. But he was liable to make meteoric appearances soon after the beginning of a lesson in the big schoolroom where the next three forms were at work, and take any lesson himself. A hush fell as he strode in, and we all cowered like partridges below a kite, while he glared round, selecting the covey on to which he pounced. This was a subtle plan, for you could never be sure that it would not be he who would hear any particular lesson, and the chance of that made it most unwise to neglect any preparation altogether.
The school got its fair share of public-school scholarships, so I suppose the teaching of the other masters was sound, but I cannot believe that a stranger set of instructors were ever got together. Rawlings, who taught the first form, used habitually to read the _Sporting Times_ in school with his feet up on the desk until the time came for him to hear us construe. Daubeny, the master of the second form, had no thought but for the encouragement of a small moustache; Davy of the third form used mostly to be asleep; Geoghehan of the fourth form (called “Geege”) had lost his right arm, and used always to have some favourite in his class, who sat on his knee in school time and was an important personage, for he could, if you were friends with him, always persuade Geege not to report misconduct to Waterfield. One such boy, now a steady hereditary legislator, I well remember: he pulled Geege’s beard, and altered the marks in his register, and ruled him with a rod of iron. Geege was otherwise an effective disciplinarian, and had an unpleasant habit, if he thought you were not attending, of spearing the back of your hand with the nib of his pen, dipped in purple ink. Then there was a handwriting specialist called Prior who gave out stationery on Saturdays. His appearance was always hailed by a sort of Gregorian chant to which the words were, “All boys wanting ink, go to Mr. Prior.” Then came Mr. Voltaire, the gay young Frenchman, and these with one or two more of whom I cherish no recollection all lived together at a house in East Sheen called Clarence House, and were, I think, a shade more frightened of Waterfield than we.