23 Games and photography

Games and photography It was always a surprise to me that I was good at games. It was an even greater surprise that I was exceptionally good at two of them. One of these was called fives, the other was squash-racquets. Fives, which many of you will know nothing about, was taken seriously at Repton and we had a dozen massive glass-roofed fives courts kept always in perfect condition. We played the game of Eton-fives, which is always played by four people, two on each side, and basically it consists of hitting a small, hard, white, leather-covered ball with your gloved hands. The Americans have something like it which they call handball, but Eton-fives is far more complicated because the court has all manner of ledges and buttresses built

游戏和摄影对我来说总是一个惊喜，我擅长游戏。 更令人惊讶的是，我在其中两门课上表现得特别好。 其中一种叫五拍，另一种叫壁球。 在雷普顿，你们中的许多人可能对五号球场一无所知，我们有十几个巨大的玻璃屋顶的五号球场，一直保持着完美的状态。 我们玩伊顿五人球，通常是四个人玩，两边两个人，基本上就是用戴着手套的手打一个小的、坚硬的、白色的、覆盖着皮革的球。 美国人也有类似的东西，他们称之为手球，但伊顿五球要复杂得多，因为球场有各种各样的壁架和扶壁

into it which help to make it a subtle and crafty game. Fives is possibly the fastest ball-game on earth, far faster than squash, and the little ball ricochets around the court at such a speed that sometimes you can hardly see it. You need a swift eye, strong wrists and a very quick pair of hands to play fives well, and it was a game I took to right from the beginning. You may find it hard to believe, but I became so good at it that I won both the junior and the senior school fives in the same year when I was fifteen. Soon I bore the splendid title 'Captain of Fives', and I would travel with my team to other schools like Shrewsbury and Uppingham to play matches. I loved it. It was a game without physical contact, and the quickness of the eye and the dancing of the feet were all that mattered. A Captain of any game at Repton was an important person. He was the one who selected the members of the team for matches. He and only he could award 'colours' to others. He would award school 'colours' by walking up to the chosen boy after a match and shaking him by the hand and

这有助于使它成为一个微妙而狡猾的游戏。 五面球可能是地球上最快的球类运动，比壁球快得多，小球在球场上弹跳的速度快得有时你几乎看不见它。 你需要一个敏捷的眼睛，强壮的手腕和一双非常敏捷的手来打好五分球，这是我从一开始就喜欢的游戏。 你可能很难相信，但我变得如此擅长，在我十五岁的时候，我在同一年获得了初中和高中的五分。 不久，我就获得了“五人队队长”的光荣称号，我和我的球队一起到什鲁斯伯里和乌平厄姆等其他学校去比赛。 我很喜欢。这是一场没有身体接触的比赛，眼睛的敏捷和脚的舞蹈才是最重要的。 在雷普顿，任何一场比赛的队长都是一个重要的人物。 他是挑选队员参加比赛的人。 他，也只有他能给别人“颜色”。 他会在比赛结束后走到被选中的男孩面前，和他握手，给他颁发学校的“颜色”

saying, 'Graggers on your teamer!' These were magic words. They entitled the new teamer to all manner of privileges including a different– coloured hat–band on his straw–hat and fancy braid around the edges of his blazer and different–coloured games clothes, and all sorts of other advertisements that made the teamer gloriously conspicuous among his fellows. Fives Team Priory House A Captain of any game, whether it was football, cricket, fives or squash, had many other duties. It was he who pinned the notice on the

说，‘格雷格斯攻击你的队友!’这些都是有魔力的话语。 他们赋予新队员各种特权，包括草帽上不同颜色的帽带，运动上衣和不同颜色的运动服边缘上的花式辫子，以及其他各种各样的广告，使这个队员在他的同伴中非常显眼。 无论是足球、板球、五人球还是壁球，队长都有许多其他职责。 是他把通知别在墙上的

school notice-board on match days announcing the team. It was he who arranged fixtures by letter with other schools. It was he and only he who had it in his power to invite this master or that to play against him and his team on certain afternoons. All these responsibilities were given to me when I became Captain of Fives. Then came the snag. It was more or less taken for granted that a Captain would be made a Boazer in recognition of his talents – if not a School Boazer then certainly a House Boazer. But the authorities did not like me. I was not to be trusted. I did not like rules. I was unpredictable. I was therefore not Boazer material. There was no way they would agree to make me a House Boazer, let alone a School Boazer. Some people are born to wield power and to exercise authority. I was not one of them. I was in full agreement with my Housemaster when he explained this to me. I would have made a rotten Boazer. I would have let down the whole principle of Boazerdom by refusing to beat the Fags. I was probably the only Captain of any game who has never become a Boazer at Repton. I was certainly the only unBoazered Double Captain, because I

比赛日的学校布告栏上公布球队名单。 是他与其他学校通过书信的方式安排了上课时间。 只有他才有能力邀请这个或那个大师在特定的下午与他和他的球队比赛。 所有这些责任都是在我成为五号队长时被赋予的。 然后出现了障碍。这或多或少被认为是理所当然的，一个队长会因为他的才能而被授予博泽奖——如果不是学校的博泽奖，那么肯定是学院的博泽奖。 但是当局不喜欢我。 我不值得信任。我不喜欢规则。 我是不可预测的。因此，我不是博阿泽的料。 他们不可能同意让我成为学院的花花公子，更不用说学校的花花公子了。 有些人天生就是掌握权力和行使权威的。 我不是其中之一。我完全同意舍监对我的解释。 我会成为一个烂博阿泽。 如果我拒绝打败基佬，我就会辜负整个“泡汤”原则。 我可能是所有比赛中唯一一个在雷普顿没有成为博阿泽的队长。 我肯定是唯一一个没有被“双队长”迷惑的人，因为我

was also Captain of squash-racquets. And to pile glory upon glory, I was in the school football team as well. A boy who is good at games is usually treated with great civility by the masters at an English Public School. In much the same way, the ancient Greeks revered their athletes and made statues of them in marble. Athletes were the demigods, the chosen few. They could perform glamorous feats beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. Even today, fine footballers and baseball players and runners and all other great sportsmen are much admired by the general public and advertisers use them to sell breakfast cereals. This never happened to me, and if you really want to know, I'm awfully glad it didn't. But because I loved playing games, life for me at Repton was not totally without pleasure. Games-playing at school is always fun if you happen to be good at it, and it is hell if you are not. I was one of the lucky ones, and all those afternoons on the playing-fields and in the fives

也是壁球队的队长。 更光荣的是，我还参加了学校足球队。 在英国的公立学校里，一个擅长游戏的男孩通常会受到老师们非常礼貌的对待。 同样地，古希腊人崇敬他们的运动员，用大理石雕刻他们的雕像。 运动员是半神人，被选中的少数人。 他们可以表演常人无法企及的迷人技艺。 即使在今天，优秀的足球运动员、棒球运动员、跑步运动员和所有其他伟大的运动员都受到公众的钦佩，广告商也利用他们来销售早餐麦片。 这种事从来没有发生在我身上，如果你真的想知道，我很高兴没有发生过。 但因为我喜欢玩游戏，在雷普顿的生活对我来说并非完全没有乐趣。 如果你擅长玩游戏，那么在学校玩游戏总是很有趣的，如果你不擅长，那就太糟糕了。 我是幸运儿之一，在操场上和操场上度过了那么多的下午

courts and in the squash courts made the otherwise grey and melancholy days pass a lot more quickly. There was one other thing that gave me great pleasure at this school and that was photography. I was the only boy who practised it seriously, and it was not quite so simple a business fifty years ago as it is today. I made myself a little dark-room in a corner of the music building, and in there I loaded my glass plates and developed my negatives and enlarged them. Our Arts Master was a shy retiring man called Arthur Norris who kept himself well apart from the rest of the staff. Arthur Norris and I became close friends and during my last year he organized an exhibition of my photographs. He gave the whole of the Art School over to this project and helped me to get my enlargements framed. The exhibition was rather a success, and masters who had hardly ever spoken to me over the past four years would come up and say things like, 'It's quite extraordinary'… 'We didn't know we had an artist in our midst'… 'Are they for sale?'

球场和壁球场让原本灰暗忧郁的日子过得更快了。 在这所学校还有一件事给了我很大的乐趣，那就是摄影。 我是唯一一个认真练习的孩子，五十年前，这可不是像今天这么简单的事情。 我在音乐大楼的一个角落里给自己造了一个小暗室，在里面装上玻璃板，冲洗底片，放大它们。 我们的艺术老师是一个害羞的隐居的人，名叫阿瑟·诺里斯，他和其他员工保持着良好的距离。 亚瑟·诺里斯和我成为了亲密的朋友，在我的最后一年，他组织了一次我的摄影展。 他把整个艺术学院都投入到这个项目中，并帮助我把放大的照片装框。 这次展览相当成功，过去四年里几乎没跟我说过话的大师们都会走过来说，‘这太不寻常了’、‘我们不知道我们中间有一位艺术家’、‘他们在出售吗?’