24 Goodbye school

Goodbye school During my last year at Repton, my mother said to me, 'Would you like to go to Oxford or Cambridge when you leave school?' In those days it was not difficult to get into either of these great universities so long as you could pay. 'No, thank you,' I said. 'I want to go straight from school to work for a company that will send me to wonderful faraway places like Africa or China.' You must remember that there was virtually no air travel in the early 1930s. Africa was two weeks away from England by boat and it took you about five weeks to get to China. These were distant and magic lands and nobody went to them just for a holiday. You went there to work. Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours and

告别学校我在雷普顿的最后一年，母亲问我:“你毕业后想去牛津还是剑桥?”在那些日子里，只要你付得起钱，进入这两所名牌大学都不是难事。 “不，谢谢，”我说。他说，我希望毕业后直接为一家公司工作，把我送到遥远的非洲或中国等美妙的地方。你必须记住，在20世纪30年代初，几乎没有航空旅行。 从英国乘船到非洲需要两周的时间，而到中国需要大约五周的时间。 这是一片遥远而神奇的土地，没有人去那里只是为了度假。 你去那里工作。现在你可以在几个小时内去世界上的任何地方

nothing is fabulous any more. But it was a very different matter in 1934. So during my last term I applied for a job only to those companies that would be sure to send me abroad. They were the Shell Company (Eastern Staff), Imperial Chemicals (Eastern Staff) and a Finnish lumber company whose name I have forgotten. I was accepted by Imperial Chemicals and by the Finnish lumber company, but for some reason I wanted most of all to get into the Shell Company. When the day came for me to go up to London for this interview, my Housemaster told me it was ridiculous for me even to try. 'The Eastern Staff of Shell are the crème de la crème,' he said. 'There will be at least one hundred applicants and about five vacancies. Nobody has a hope unless he's been Head of the School or Head of the House, and you aren't even a House Prefect!' My Housemaster was right about the applicants. There were one hundred and seven boys waiting to be interviewed when I arrived at

没有什么是神话般的了。 但1934年的情况完全不同。 所以在我的最后一个学期，我只向那些肯定会把我送到国外的公司申请工作。 这三家公司分别是壳牌公司(东部员工)、帝国化学公司(东部员工)和一家芬兰木材公司，这家公司的名字我已经忘了。 帝国化学公司和芬兰木材公司都录用了我，但出于某种原因，我最想进的是壳牌公司。 当我去伦敦参加面试的那一天到来时，我的舍监告诉我，即使我去尝试，也很荒谬。 他说，壳牌的东部员工是cr<e:1> de la cr<e:1>。 “至少有100名申请者，大约有5个职位空缺。” 除非当过学院院长或学院院长，否则谁也没有希望，而你连学院级长都不是!”我的舍监对申请者的看法是对的。 当我到达时，有107个男孩在等着面试

the Head Office of the Shell Company in London. And there were seven places to be filled. Please don't ask me how I got one of those places. I don't know myself. But get it I did, and when I told my Housemaster the good news on my return to school, he didn't congratulate me or shake me warmly by the hand. He turned away muttering, 'All I can say is I'm damned glad I don't own any shares in Shell.' I didn't care any longer what my Housemaster thought. I was all set. I had a career. It was lovely. I was to leave school for ever in July 1934 and join the Shell Company two months later in September when I would be exactly eighteen. I was to be an Eastern Staff Trainee at a salary of five pounds a week. That summer, for the first time in my life, I did not accompany the family to Norway. I somehow felt the need for a special kind of last fling before I became a businessman. So while still at school during my last term, I signed up to spend August with something called 'The Public Schools' Exploring Society'. The leader of this outfit was a

伦敦的壳牌公司总部 有七个地方需要填补。 请不要问我是怎么得到这些地方的。 我自己也不知道。但是我做到了，当我回到学校告诉舍监这个好消息时，他既没有祝贺我，也没有热情地和我握手。 他转过身咕哝着说:“我只能说，我很庆幸自己没有持有壳牌的股票。”我再也不在乎舍监怎么想了。 我都准备好了。我有自己的事业。 它很可爱。1934年7月，我将永远离开学校，并在两个月后的9月加入壳牌公司，那时我正好18岁。 我要去东航实习，每周工资五英镑。 那年夏天，我平生第一次没有陪家人去挪威。 不知何故，我觉得在成为商人之前，我需要一种特殊的最后放纵。 所以，当我还在学校的最后一个学期，我报名参加了一个名为“公立学校探索社会”的活动。 这个组织的首领是个

man who had gone with Captain Scott on his last expedition to the South Pole, and he was taking a party of senior schoolboys to explore the interior of Newfoundland during the summer holidays. It sounded like fun. Without the slightest regret I said goodbye to Repton for ever and rode back to Kent on my motorbike. This splendid machine was a 500 cc Ariel which I had bought the year before for eighteen pounds, and during my last term at Repton I kept it secretly in a garage along the Willington road about two miles away. On Sundays I used to walk to the garage and disguise myself in helmet, goggles, old raincoat and rubber waders and ride all over Derbyshire. It was fun to go roaring through Repton itself with nobody knowing who you were, swishing past the masters walking in the street and circling around the

他和斯科特船长最后一次去南极探险，当时他正带着一群高年级学生暑假去纽芬兰内陆探险。 听起来很有趣。我毫不后悔地永远告别了雷普顿，骑着摩托车回到了肯特郡。 这台绝妙的机器是500毫升的艾瑞尔发动机，是我去年花18英镑买的。我在雷普顿的最后一个学期里，我把它秘密地存放在两英里外威灵顿路旁的一个车库里。 星期天，我常常步行到车库，把自己伪装成戴着头盔、戴着护目镜、穿着旧雨衣和橡胶涉水鞋，骑着马走遍德比郡。 咆哮着穿过雷普顿，没有人知道你是谁，嗖嗖地从街上走着的主人身边经过，绕着

Got the job with Shell! dangerous supercilious School Boazers out for their Sunday strolls. I tremble to think what would have happened to me had I been caught, but I wasn't caught. So on the last day of term I zoomed joyfully away and left school behind me for ever and ever. I was not quite eighteen.

得到了壳牌公司的工作!危险的、目空一切的学校混混们星期天出去散步。 一想到如果我被抓住了会发生什么，我就发抖，但是我没有被抓住。 因此，在学期的最后一天，我高高兴兴地离开了学校，永远地离开了我。 我还不到十八岁。

I had only two days at home before I was off to Newfoundland with the Public Schools' Explorers. Our ship sailed from Liverpool at the beginning of August and took six days to reach St John's. There were about thirty boys of my own age on the expedition as well as four experienced adult leaders. But Newfoundland, as I soon found out, was not much of a country. For three weeks we trudged all over that desolate land with enormous loads on our backs. We carried tents and groundsheets and sleeping-bags and saucepans and food and axes and everything else one needs in the interior of an

我在家里只待了两天，就随公立学校的探险队去了纽芬兰。 我们的船八月初从利物浦启航，花了六天时间才到达圣约翰。 探险队大约有30个和我同龄的男孩，还有4个经验丰富的成年领队。 但我很快就发现，纽芬兰并不是什么了不起的国家。 三个星期以来，我们背着沉重的负担，在那荒凉的土地上跋涉。 我们带着帐篷、遮地布、睡袋、平底锅、食物、斧头和其他一切在室内需要的东西