I have always been grateful that I first read Eric, or Little by Little at the age of nine, when I was able to take it completely seriously. Not for me the attitude of the cynical M'Turk in Stalky & Co, who, when faced with a moral dilemma, said mockingly, 'We don't want any beastly Erickin.' I travelled hand in hand with Eric on every step of his downward path - from his early days with 'bright blue eyes and noble face' to his final degradation 'fair hair matted and tangled, eyes sunken, dead and lustreless' - sinking inexorably into an early grave. John Betjeman, who loved Victorian school stories, wrote in Summoned by Bells:

Those few who read Dean Farrar's Eric now
Read merely for a laugh, yet still for me
That mawkish and oh-so-melodious book
Holds one great truth - through every page there runs
The schoolboy sense of an impending doomÉ
Well it might. Even in the laissez-faire world of the early Victorian boarding school, when at Eton it was considered acceptable to lose one boy every two years by drowning, the mortality rate at Roslyn School must have seemed excessive. Nowadays it would be considered a rich field for the talents of a risk assessment officer. Sometimes the reasons for death seem unconvincing. Eric's noble friend, Russell, stranded on the rocky Stack by the tide, 'had sprained the knee badly and given the tibia an awkward wrench É It was decided the leg must be amputated.' He lingers for a few weeks of prayer and exhortation, with the weeping Eric at his bedside, 'then there was a slight sound in his throat, and he was dead'. One can hardly blame Eric for taking to drink, especially when his little brother, Vernon, falls from the cliff while birdnesting and plunges to his doom on the rocks below. How I sobbed while the ripples of the incoming tide 'played softly with his fair hair as it rose and fell É until they themselves were faintly discoloured by his blood'.

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