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[The following passage is from C. S. Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy, 1955, and is linked to the phrase, “there is a taste for cruelty and moral numbness that is cumulative.”]

Those first days, like your first days in the army, were spent in a frantic endeavour to find out what you had to do. One of my first duties was to find out what “Club” I was in. Clubs were the units to which we were assigned for compulsory games; they belonged to the Coll [Malvern College] organisation, not the House organisation, so I had to go to a notice-board “Up Coll” to get my facts. And first to find the place—and then to dare to squeeze oneself into the crowd of more important boys around the notice-board—and then to begin reading through five hundred names, but always with one eye on your watch, for of course there is something else to be done within ten minutes. I was forced away from the board before I had found my name, and so, sweating, back to the House, in a flurry of anxiety, wondering how I could find time to do the job to-morrow and what unheard-of disaster might follow if I could not. (Why, by the way, do some writers talk as if care and worry were the special characteristics of adult life? It appears to me that there is more atra cura [black care] in an average schoolboy’s week than in a grown man’s average year.)

When I reached the House something gloriously unexpected happened. At the door of the Pres’ Room stood one Fribble; a mere House Blood, it is true, even a minor House Blood, but to me a sufficiently exalted figure; a youth of the lean, laughing type. I could hardly believe it when he actually addressed me. “Oh, I say, Lewis,” he bawled, “I can tell you your Club. You’re in the same one as me, B6.” What a transition from all but despair to elation I underwent! All my anxiety was laid to rest. And then the graciousness of Fribble, the condescension! If a reigning monarch had asked me to dine, I could hardly have been more flattered. But there was better to follow. On every half-holiday I went dutifully to the B6 notice-board to see whether my name was down to play that afternoon or not. And it never was. This was pure joy, for of course I hated games. My native clumsiness, combined with the lack of early training for which Belsen was responsible, had ruled out all possibility of my ever playing well enough to amuse myself, let alone to satisfy other players. I accepted games (quite a number of boys do) as one of the necessary evils of life, comparable to Income Tax or the Dentist. And so, for a week or two, I was in clover.

Then the blow fell. Fribble had lied. I was in a totally different Club. My name had more than once appeared on a notice-board I had never seen. I had committed the serious crime of “skipping Clubs.” The punishment was a flogging administered by the Head of the Coll in the presence of the assembled Coll Pres. To the Head of the Coll himself—a red-headed, pimply boy with a name like Borage or Porridge—I can bear no grudge; it was to him a routine matter. But I must give him a name because the real point of the story requires it. The emissary (some Blood a little lower than the Head himself) who summoned me to execution attempted to reveal to me the heinousness of my crime by the words, “Who are you? Nobody. Who is Porridge? THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON THERE IS.”

I thought then, and I still think, that this rather missed the point. There were two perfectly good morals he could have drawn. He might have said, “We are going to teach you never to rely on second-hand information when first-hand is available”—a very profitable lesson. Or he might have said, “What made you think that a Blood could not be a liar?” But, “Who are you? Nobody,” however just, seems hardly relevant. The implication is that I have skipped Club in arrogance or defiance. And I puzzle endlessly over the question whether the speaker really believed that. Did he really think it likely that an utterly helpless stranger in a new society, a society governed by an irresistible class on whose favour all his hopes of happiness depended, had set himself in the first week to pull the nose of The Most Important Person There Is? It is a problem which has met me many times in later life. What does a certain type of examiner mean when he says, “To show up work like this is an insult to the examiners”? Does he really think that the ploughed candidate has insulted him?

Another problem is Fribble’s share in my little catastrophe. Was his lie to me a hoax, a practical joke? Was he paying off some old score against my brother? Or was he (as I now think most likely) simply what our ancestors called a Rattle, a man from whose mouth information, true and false, flows out all day long without consideration, almost without volition? Some might think that, whatever his motive had originally been, he might have come forward and confessed his part when he saw what I was in for. But that, you know, was hardly to be expected. He was a very minor Blood, still climbing up the social stair; Burradge was almost as far above Fribble as Fribble was above me. By coming forward he would have imperilled his social position, in a community where social advancement was the one thing that mattered; school is a preparation for public life.

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