Growing Up In a War (13 page)

The decision was made that I should go along with the rest of the class in all subject matter that was new to me – a new book, a new dictation, anything I had not done before – plus all those activities in which repetition was of value, such as singing and Bible-reading; but for the rest of the time the headmaster would teach me separately. This seemed a good idea. The headmaster, Mr Ogle, said he would introduce me to the next level of mathematics, called algebra. The trouble turned out to be that he could not remember it himself. He had never had occasion to teach it. Algebra was not part of the junior-school curriculum, and in any case he had done no teaching throughout the years I had known him. I would find it impossible to say what he had been doing with all the hours of his day in Market Harborough, where he had three assistant
teachers
in a school consisting of two classes. There can have been little administration.

The Baptist assembly rooms that had offered us a home were ample for our needs, and the building had an open, wall-enclosed space at the back that served as a playground. Virtually the whole of the first floor was an assembly hall. It could be divided into two by a sliding, folding partition, which we used to create the spaces for our two classes. At the back of my bit was a dais which had been the hall’s platform, and was to become my personal territory. To one side of this was the door by which we entered, to the other a tiny room which was the headmaster’s study. Although that was so small that it was difficult for more than three people to get into it at the same time, the headmaster spent all his day in it, and was seldom seen. If a boy was sent to him to be punished, the two of them would have to come out into the classroom to have enough space for the swing of the cane. Mr Ogle was given to periodic explosions of anger, and he had a huge voice, so occasionally a lion-like roar would come from that miniature room. The most volcanic eruption ever to be heard was not against a boy but against a boy’s mother, who had gone in to talk to him privately. What she said I shall never know, but his voice came from behind the closed door in an unbelievable shout. ‘How
dare
you! How
DARE
you! Get out! Get out this minute.’ The door crashed open and a good-looking woman was pursued by him into our classroom. To say that his eyes were blazing is not a cliché: it looked as if fire was coming out of them. The woman hurtled into the room and stopped, bewildered, not knowing which way to run. He guided her by chasing her towards the exit door, still shouting: ‘How dare you say a thing like that to me! Don’t ever show your face in here again.’

At the time I was unable to imagine what she could have said to provoke such a reaction. The only thing I could think of was something obscene, yet somehow she did not look like that kind
of
woman. Today the thought occurs to me that she might have offered him sexual favours in return for help to a son in serious trouble with the police, or with the courts. That was the way things were sometimes done in pre-war Hoxton. Be that as it may, the class, which at the time was under Mr Hickford, reacted in a typically British way by carrying on as if nothing were happening. The incident was never referred to. When I asked Mr Hickford a day or two later why it had happened, he said he did not know, though I could see from his eyes that he did.

Mr Hickford was a broad man with a broad face and an overbalancing aquiline nose. At the time there was an actor called Frank Cellier, still to be seen in old British films, who reminded me of him. Hickford’s trouser legs ended several inches above his shoes, and people’s attention was drawn to this by his habit of moving up on his toes as he walked. His nickname was Jumpy. He spoke with a regional accent which was neither London nor Wales: I think it was from somewhere in the Midlands, though not the part we were in. He was a good teacher, full of common sense, effortlessly able to keep order without menace. A lot of what I now think of as level-headed attitudes – liberal yet realistic, down-to-earth yet tolerant – were inculcated by him, and it was the first time I heard some of them expressed. In this respect he was like my father; but being a schoolmaster he was in the habit of addressing us impersonally, about life in general, people in general, society, religion, politics, the past. He had fought in the First World War, and this had scarred him. He believed that war against Hitler was necessary, but discouraged in us any chauvinistic or romantic attitudes towards it.

At the beginning of the new year I was given a desk all alone on the dais at the back of the class, looking at Mr Hickford over the heads of the other children. This enabled him to include me in what was going on whenever he wanted to, while leaving me free at other times to get on with my own work. It was the first
time
the school had treated me differently from other children, and Mr Hickford tried to ease this with humour, referring to me jokingly as ‘the Professor’. Actually, the fact that I was behind the other children meant that they did not see me during lessons, and were unaware of me for most of the time, so my separate and elevated position – far from causing antagonism, as he had feared – scarcely impinged on them. It was my situation outside the classroom that changed with the new year. For the first time since I had gone to school at the age of three I was the same age as most of my classmates, and this resulted in my being not just a leader but the leading leader, a sort of informal head boy, which I had never been before. I was tall for my age, aggressive, and still quite given to fighting, provided I was sure of winning; and now I could beat anyone in the school. These were the things that really counted with the other children; and it was in those terms that they now saw me – and I came to see myself – as top dog.

The biggest gang in the playground formed itself round me. Mine was the main voice in deciding what we played, and who did what in the game. I made rapid strides in learning how to handle people. But I led them only in what they had always done and expected to do. I lacked the confidence to innovate – with the result that the free and enquiring spirits detached themselves and went off to do their own thing, while the run-of-the-mill majority remained with me. I was a popular conservative leader, but not an exciting or radical one, and certainly not a pioneering or innovative one.

For me, those hours in the playground were marvellously fulfilling. I had, so to speak, come into my own. Having been one of the pack all my life, I was now its leader. The ethos of the pack remained as it had always been. We pursued our ends by any means we could get away with: violence, lying, breaking promises, stealing. The rules, the ways we were
supposed
to behave, were used by us chiefly as a cloak for deception: they represented what
others,
usefully to us, expected us to do, and we pretended we were doing, but actually did only in so far as we had to: they were our mask, our alibi. Our word was worth nothing, and we looked on anyone who accepted it as a fool. Basically, we were tribal. Our most brutal punishments were meted out to those of our own members who let us down. These got what we called ‘torture’ – arm-twisting, knuckle-rubbing, Chinese burns – before being cast into outer darkness, or let back in under caution. There is something basic to the human psyche in all this, and in adult life I have found myself recalling it when I have had to concern myself with criminal organisations, especially criminal governments and regimes. They have helped me to understand how naturally and deeply rooted these practices are in a universal and primitive human psychology.

Like all boys of that age who are looked up to as authorities by their mates (I am tempted to say like all authorities), I was a source of much misinformation. The most egregious example I now remember concerned the anatomy of girls. We had had some introductory lessons on anatomy from Mr Fink, during which he told us that every part of the human body served a necessary purpose except for our appendix, which had no function at all but merely gave us appendicitis. Apart from that, he said, everything we had was there because we needed it. I was much taken by this, and gave it a lot of thought. I did not see any problem in girls not having cocks, because what they had and cocks were meant to fit one another for an obvious purpose. What about balls, though? You weren’t supposed to put those inside a girl; in fact you couldn’t. So the reciprocity thing didn’t apply to them. I had no idea what they were for, but according to Finky it had to be an indispensable function, whatever it was; and this meant that girls had to have them. Since they did not have them hanging outside their bodies in the ways boys did, this could only mean that they had them inside. The conclusion was logically
inescapable
; and it provided a neat explanation of why girls looked the way they did: what boys had outside, girls had inside. So I informed my followers that girls had balls, only you couldn’t see them, because they were inside. To do my followers justice, there were some who said ‘
Garn!
’ But I continued to believe that women had internal balls until I made the discovery of what balls were for. I must, I suppose, have been already an intellectual in the making.

It would not be fair to attribute the blame for that misunderstanding entirely to Finky; but I suffered for a much longer time from one other for which he was directly responsible. He was taking a Bible class in which we were reading the marvellous lament of David that comes near the beginning of the second book of Samuel, and starts with the words: ‘The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places. How are the mighty fallen. Tell it not in Gath. Publish it not in the streets of Askelon. Lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice. Lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.’ I put up my hand and said: ‘Please, sir, what does “uncircumcised” mean?’

‘Well, er,’ said Finky, ‘the point of what it means here is “unclean”. The Israelites thought all people other than themselves were unclean. So what David is really saying here is that the Philistines are unclean.’ For years after that I thought I knew that ‘uncircumcised’ meant ‘unclean’ because I had been told so in class by a schoolteacher. This meant I also knew that ‘circumcised’ meant ‘clean’.

Among the treasures I carried away with me from what was then truly a bog-standard state school was not just a solid grounding in the three Rs but also a familiarity with many parts of the Bible in the King James version. We read the Old Testament with Finky, the New with Hickford. With Finky we picked out the best of the short stories from the books of Judges, Kings, Samuel and Chronicles, and with Hickford we read the teachings of Jesus, especially the
parables,
and the key incidents in his life and death. We also learnt by heart the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, the one beginning ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels …’ Although I never believed any of it as religion, I thought it terrific stuff. The stories were simply great stories: and pervading all of it there was something hauntingly memorable, unforgettable. It would not have occurred to me to give any conscious consideration to the quality of the language – I would not have known what that meant – but it might have had something to do with my response, because I have always found alternative translations uninteresting, impossible to re-read, however much more accurate they might be. Some of it affects me in the way music does – and there is very little language that does that.

The purveyor of this priceless material, at least as far as the Old Testament was concerned, was not a nice man at all. Finky’s stick was never out of his hand, and he enjoyed hitting us. At the same time he tried to curry favour with us by being foul-mouthed in our idiom, but this made us think less of him. He was broad and red-faced, with a thin moustache, and eyes that glittered behind gold-rimmed glasses. On one occasion I was standing alone with him between periods, about to tell him a dirty joke (I got a kick out of doing this to a master, though it would have to be a master I did not respect), when the headmaster came up out of nowhere and joined us. To tell a dirty joke in front of the headmaster was unthinkable, so I tried to make an excuse and slip away, but they both said no, no, stay here and go on with whatever it was you were going to say. That was out of the question. I was covered with confusion. I was not sufficiently master of the situation to come up with something else on the spur of the moment. I became tongue-tied, and went bright red. I have an idea that the headmaster may have interpreted this aright, and that Finky also realised that he did, because both at once became embarrassed and told me to run along.

Years later, when I was a young adult on a visit to Mr Ogle, he told me that Finky had been a ‘twister’. He regularly collected money from the other teachers on behalf of an insurance company that offered to top up their pensions, and more of this went into his own pocket than should have done. He was endlessly fiddling with his accounts, and did it at his desk in class while making the children get on with work of their own.

At the beginning of my last school year, Ogle used to have me in his kiosk of a study every day to work on algebra, the two of us filling the room by sitting side by side at his desk. He explained to me what an equation was, and how it could be either valid or invalid, and then set me some simple ones to solve. Unfortunately he omitted to tell me how to do it. I failed completely to get the hang of it by myself. I kept eliminating
x
from both sides and ending up with 0 = 0. When he tried to show me where I had gone wrong, and what I ought to have done, he found he could not. For a while he hoped I might somehow hit on it for myself, if I went on trying long enough, and he encouraged me to struggle, but eventually he decided that there was no point in this, so I gave up. He was perfectly happy about that. ‘You’ll be doing algebra next year anyway,’ he said contentedly, as if nothing we had been doing had been of any consequence.

From then on I was left to my own devices whenever the rest of the class was doing something I had done before. Provided I could be seen seated at my solitary desk in the middle of an otherwise empty platform, apparently occupied, it made no difference to anyone else what I did. Occasionally a teacher would wander up and enquire, but he always wandered off again and left me to it.