THE PETERITE Vol. LIII
MAY, 1961
No. 357
EDITORIAL A school magazine is an institution, a regular occurrence, a shortlived novelty which appears every term, to be seized avidly, read selectively and cast aside casually by the majority of boys, whilst Old Boys greet it with a glimmer of nostalgia, rapidly skim through it in search of anything sensational and then add it to the pile of other literary productions of varying merit to be read in an hour of leisure, which never comes. Such, all too often, is its fate : what then is its purpose? It is, we think, fourfold. Firstly, it is a chronicle, a factual record of the doings of the School to be preserved in the archives and serve as the basis of any future history or as a work of reference. Hence the necessity for a certain amount of apparently uninteresting and unnecessary facts and figures, but hence also the importance of full, concise and accurate accounts of the progress of societies, games and other out-of-school activities. Secondly, not necessarily in importance, the magazine acts as the link for Old Boys with the School and each other. In it they should be able to discover how the School is changing (always for the worse in their eyes) and also what their more successful contemporaries are doing; there is a strange pleasure in seeing a name and picturing its owner, whom you saw every day for many years but have not seen for many more—a pleasure not very often realised on meeting the same person and finding that you no longer have very much in common, however hard you try to recapture that youthful friendship. The third function of the magazine is to present a contemporary picture of the School to parents (how many of them read it, I wonder?) and other friends of the School. For this purpose a balance must be struck between dry factual accounts and verbose, tautological effusions, which give the whole work a turgid, stodgy effect. There is, incidentally, a distressing tendency in schoolboy prose to use six words where two will do and to consider no article complete without a liberal sprinkling of clichés. 1
