Growing Up In a War (22 page)

We had other masters for biology (which we called bilge) and geography (which we called jogger); and we were streamed separately for mathematics, Latin and modern languages; so in each of those last three subjects I was with a different lot of classmates. One peculiarity of the school was that German was its main modern language: only the top stream learnt French, the other four German. When this was explained to me I asked if I could learn German – my reason being, though I did not say so, that I was hooked on some of my father’s Wagner records and wanted to understand the words – but I was told no, my name had already been placed in the top stream, and this could not now be changed. So I started on French. Most of the other boys had been learning
it
in their prep schools already, so I found myself at, or very near, the bottom of the class. The same thing happened in Latin.

Our French master, Mr Bazeley, was an Englishman who had grown up in France, and lived there until the outbreak of war, speaking English so seldom that he had a slight French accent. He was a weak man, unable to keep order. Apparently he was a good teacher for older boys, who did not need discipline, but to us he was of little use. Our Latin master, Mr Tidmarsh, was so notorious for picayune meticulousness that his name had become a word in the school’s slang to mean precisely that. Once, when we were supposed to have our heads down, I saw him spend a long time contemplating the classroom clock with his chin in his hand, then finally get up, go to the back of the room, pick up an empty chair, carry it to the front, set it down under the clock, step up on to the chair, open the glass case and with great delicacy of touch put the minute hand back by half a minute, then go through all the same operations in reverse. That was tidmarsh. His appearance, too, was tidmarsh: small, neat, precise, smoothly brushed, everything in place and correct. The people least likely to think well of such a characteristic were schoolboys, and their use of his name was always disapproving, in sentences like: ‘For God’s sake don’t be so tidmarsh.’ Even so, he was a good teacher. Not only did he set the basics of Latin grammar before us with unparalleled lucidity, he gave what for me were the only lessons I ever received in English grammar. He explained what a verb was, and a noun, and an adjective. He explained what the subject of a sentence was, and its object. His lessons, unlike those of Teddy Edwards, were humourless, but they were of such clarity that they compelled interest by that fact alone.

Our mathematics teacher, Mr Humphrey, introduced us to the Socratic method. If a boy asked a question, Humph, instead of answering it, would ask the boy a question in return, and then another, and then another, so that after three or four steps the
boy
would find himself answering his own initial question. And Humph would then cry: ‘There you are. I didn’t tell you, you see. You knew the answer yourself all along.’ What we knew all along was that we could not have reached the answer without Humph, because we did not know what questions to ask. But that was the most valuable lesson of all – that the acquisition of useful knowledge depends on asking the right questions.

The teaching I got at Christ’s Hospital was of an altogether different standard from anything I had previously received. All the classroom staff were Oxbridge graduates, and the best of them were exceptionally good teachers. I had never met such people before. Up to now I had been taught by men who had themselves left school at fifteen or sixteen and then done a two-year training course, which was the only extension of their own education that was open to them. The difference was brought home to me towards the end of my first term, when I received letters of congratulation from Mr Hickford and Mr Howell (my best teachers in Hoxton) on being at Christ’s Hospital – the news had just reached them. Being used to my new environment, I realised as I read these letters that their syntax and idiom could not have come from my present teachers. They were moving letters, the more so because they were not wholly idiomatic or well educated: they were written by men I respected, and owed something to, who were now taking pleasure and pride in the fact that I was enjoying a level of opportunity that had been denied to them.

My process of adaptation to Christ’s Hospital was seamless. It must, of course, have been largely unconscious. Time did its work. At that age a child adapts to more or less anything, and the school was so used to absorbing children from unusual backgrounds that it was a process taken for granted. I knew that other people were conscious of the way I spoke, but they were good-humoured about it, and I was never able to hear my own accent. As a lively, quick-talking kid I must have been a real-life cockney sparrow, the myth
made
flesh. When I talked, people looked at me open-eyed, incredulous, delighted; and when they bumped into me unexpectedly they beamed and said things like ‘Wotcher, cock’, ‘’Allo, mate’, and ‘Blimey, ’ow goes it?’ To them it was all a great joke. To me it was, if anything, a cheap success, because all I had to do was talk normally for them to think it was wonderful. I could not quite make out why they had never heard anyone talk like me before, and thought they must have led narrow lives, but at least it had the effect of making me a character. However, they eventually got used to it. And so did I. The joke wore out and faded away: they stopped being aware of how I spoke, and stopped reacting to it; and I stopped being aware of their reaction. But in all that time no one had ever, not once, been unkind to me about it. The remarkableness of that did not dawn on me until many years later.

My first winter at the school was a harsh one. Sussex was covered with snow, and our normal outdoor games became impossible. Out of some deep, dark recess of the house came two giant toboggans, steel-rimmed juggernauts, each big enough to carry an unbelievable number of boys. We went whooping off with them to nearby hills, where we organised pitched snowball battles between teams each of which had its own toboggan as well as its foot soldiers – an even more cunning and fluid form of warfare than release. I had never done anything like this, or been in this kind of landscape, and was made very happy by it. Because we had to spend so much of our time indoors, the school organised a great deal of entertainment for us. There were film shows – I remember
The Good Companions, Boys Will Be Boys, The Ghost Goes West
and
The Lady Vanishes
. There were debates, one led by two Grecians whom I got to know in adult life, Bob Pitman and Ted Kenney. There were visiting lecturers whose job was to amuse as well as instruct us. There were recitals in the Prep Hall, and gramophone concerts in Big School. These things all carried on after the snow had cleared.

But then, too, rugger came back into its regal position in the school’s life. The boys cared immeasurably more about sport than about classroom work, and to most of them the king of sports was rugby. The members of the First XV were the royal family of the school – not the house captains, nor the school monitors, nor the Oxbridge scholarship boys, nor the stars of any other game. The entire eight hundred and something of us would turn out to watch them whenever they played at home against a neighbouring school: Dulwich, Tonbridge, Whitgift, Brighton and the rest. We would crowd several deep along the touchline yelling ‘Housey! Housey!’ (our name for the school, the ‘s’ voiced like a ‘z’). I was quickly disappointed with rugger as a spectator sport. About every thirty seconds the game came to a dead stop for a scrum, a kick or a throw-in, and this killed the continuity. I considered soccer more interesting to watch; but when I said this I was shouted down. Soccer was despised, a namby-pamby game in which it was almost impossible to get hurt, they said: a weed’s game. People laughed at the idea of playing it. But during a later winter the ground froze so hard that it was like playing on asphalt; bones were broken; rugger was suspended; and soccer was brought in as a temporary expedient – but then as a game played in gym shoes.

The playing fields of Christ’s Hospital were unusually extensive; altogether the school covered a larger area than any I have seen since (and I have seen most of the famous ones). This mere fact of space was important to me, because although we were confined to the school, and not supposed to go out of bounds, I still had the feeling of inhabiting a capacious environment. If I wanted to be by myself I could go off somewhere and have a range of choices, not only of open country but of copses and woodland. And if I slipped out of bounds I was still on school land. Not far from the station lay the school’s farm, the biggest in West Sussex, providing us with seemingly unlimited quantities of thick,
ivory
-coloured milk. A couple of miles in the opposite direction lay its reservoir on Sharpenhurst Hill, still on school land. (The redbrick tower that was the tallest of the school’s buildings was its water tower, built to the height of Sharpenhurst.) One could roam far and wide and still be in the school’s hinterland, with most of the houses inhabited by people who worked for it.

There were non-academic sub-worlds within the school. Throughout the war there was the Home Guard, and organised fire-watching every night to protect the school’s buildings (luckily it was bombed only once). I was never old enough to take part in that. The school infirmary – again surprisingly big, run by Dr Friend and his staff of nurses – was a purpose-built hospital, kept continually supplied with fractures and infectious diseases. I did a couple of stretches there as an in-patient. Its morning surgery was always crowded, and its dentist and optician served the whole community. The market garden was run by a man whose name, incredibly, was Mr Seed, and it was each boy’s wartime duty to work there for one afternoon a week. The Manual School, a large separate building, contained an iron foundry, carpenters’ workshops and a bookbindery, and these skills were taught to the younger boys: I learnt carpentry and bookbinding, though I was never any good at either. Another large building was the Art School, where each boy was required to study art for a couple of years – I was hopeless at that too. Another was the Music School, with its many practice rooms and teachers, and a bandmaster who would teach any wind instrument free to any boy who wanted to learn. Christ’s Hospital was at that time barred from entering the annual public schools’ band competition because it had invariably won when it did. The Officers’ Training Corps (OTC), nominally run by masters who had fought in the First World War, was actually run by a real-life sergeant major who controlled the armoury and the shooting range. In a position corresponding to his were the sports professionals, retired now from the real thing
and
teaching teenagers instead. There was a Scout Hall. There were little staffs, like those in the tuck shop and the post office, and big staffs, like that in the kitchens behind the dining hall. When to all these were added the domestic servants in the houses, and the estate workers out of doors, they made up a large and highly variegated population. Christ’s Hospital may have been an enclosed world, but it was a big one, and any realistic consideration of its staff had to include not only the masters: the eighty or so of them were merely the better-paid end of a wide spectrum. A boy at the school would, in all sorts of ways, continually come up against a wide selection of the others, though not all of them. I personally never had anything to do with the Scouts, nor was I ever good enough at any of the sports to be taught by the professionals.

What I missed most was the daily intake of music to which I had been accustomed, and which I felt I needed. My dominating love of orchestral music and opera was now established, but at school I had no access to either of them, nor to a radio or a record player. Some houses had a radio in the dayroom, but Snugs refused to let us have one in Barnes A. The only music to be heard was that in the chapel, plus chamber-music recitals given by the music teachers. Actually some of these teachers were good players, and their recitals were of a high quality. However, the outstanding instrumentalist in the school was not a teacher but a boy, Colin Davis, who played the clarinet. It was not his technique so much as his musicality that gripped everyone. He played the music as if he were inside it, communicating from somewhere within it. He was so good that when he gave a public performance he was accompanied not by other boys but by music teachers. The first time I heard the Brahms Clarinet Quintet, soon after I arrived, it was played by him, and I carry the sound of that performance in my mind’s ear. He was to become an internationally famous conductor. Another boy who was in an altogether higher
class
than his teachers was David Mason, in my house, who played the trumpet. We all used to say, in our ignorant and parochial way, that he was the best trumpet player in the country, but he very nearly was: when Sir Thomas Beecham created the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra only some four years later he engaged Mason as a permanent member from the start. The first time I heard the tune of Cherubino’s aria from Act II of
The Marriage of Figaro
it was played by him, in the house music competitions of my first term. This had the bizarre consequence that that tune is permanently engraved on my mind in the sound of a trumpet. (Among opera-lovers it is referred to as ‘
Voi che sapete
’, but on our programme sheet it was ‘Say ye who borrow’, and that is how I still think of it.) These music competitions took place once a year, with each house putting on a short concert. Mine won it in my first term, and again the following year, which made me think I had come to the right place.

As far as music in chapel went, there were the hymns and psalms, of course, but not many of those had interesting tunes. Vaughan Williams had composed a service specially for the school, but that was performed only occasionally. Worth listening to on a daily basis were the organ voluntaries, which were played while we all trooped in and out. The one at the beginning would just arbitrarily stop when the service was ready to begin, but the one at the end was played through to the end, so if you wanted to hear it you could slip into an empty pew on the way out and stay until it finished. Most of the organ-playing was shared between the head of music, Dr Lang (nephew of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, about whom there was a well-known piece of doggerel ending: ‘Auld Lang Swyne, how full of Cantuar’), and a Mr Cochrane, known to the boys as Corks for his addiction to the bottle. Corks was at that time a blond and handsome young clergyman with a beautiful baritone voice. The first time I heard Brahms’s
Four Serious Songs
they were sung by him, very movingly.
In
chapel he tended, quite rightly, to play the most popular classics of the organ repertoire, so it was from him that I first heard them, ranging from Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor to such recent moderns as Karg-Elert (who dedicated one of his works to the school). He also played his own arrangements of popular classics from the orchestral repertoire: Borodin’s overture to
Prince Igor
was a favourite of his, and became one of mine. If he was drunk he would play one of his much-loved pub songs at the end of a service – say, ‘Moonlight and Roses’ – in an improvised arrangement that would be suitably enriched and lachrymose. It always delighted the boys, who would look at the headmaster to see his reaction, but he affected not to notice. Music-starved as I was, I certainly got some pleasure out of all this organ music; but the snag for me was that I did not really care for the instrument itself; indeed I never have. The organ in the Christ’s Hospital chapel was thought to be of special interest, having five manuals and an unusually wide range of stops, and I suppose I feel a certain gratitude towards it.