Growing Up In a War (23 page)

There was a school orchestra, and I heard it at the end of my first term. Although I had been hearing live orchestras since I could remember, mostly in theatres, where some of them were truly dire, I was unprepared for anything so awful. It was a revelation that an orchestra could be so bad. Even so, the music somehow managed to convey itself to me in spite of its performance; indeed it was that occasion that gave me my first conscious lesson in the distinction between a performance and the work being played. The work in this case was the first movement of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, and I thought it was marvellous. When I went home for my first school holiday I was given some money as a Christmas present, and bought a recording of this symphony – which meant I then heard the second movement for the first time. It was the first classical recording I bought for myself.

Although Christ’s Hospital could claim to be a musical school, my love of music developed mainly at home, during the holidays, through playing my father’s records, listening to the radio, and going increasingly to operas and concerts. The school extended my range to other areas of music – mostly chamber music and the organ repertoire – but these were areas I was less interested in, and on the whole the performances were not up to the same standard.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE OVERRIDING EXPERIENCE
of being at any boarding school in those days was that the school was your life while you were there – and this was for most of the time. Since then, most of them have become more integrated with their surrounding communities: parents want to go on seeing their children during term, and send them to schools that are not too far away, and the children go home at weekends. In those days there was no going home during term, and half-term did not exist. You visited your family three times a year; and the total amount of time you spent with them added up to about a quarter. For three-quarters of the year, in uninterruptedly long stretches of time, you were at school, and not allowed out of bounds. So it became your world. This made it a more conditioning experience than it is now. And at Christ’s Hospital that conditioning went deeper than at other public schools, because it started younger and went on for longer: for the other schools the normal age of intake was thirteen, but at Christ’s Hospital it was eleven, in order to co-ordinate the state and private systems. For a lot of individuals it was younger still, because the school had its own preparatory school, at one end of the Avenue, and this fed most of its output into the main school. Boys who left Christ’s Hospital at eighteen had been there for between seven years and nine, as against the usual five.

The fact that the school existed for children with a special need for boarding education increased still further the difference it
made
to them. They were not problem children, but a sizeable majority came from problem homes, mostly well-educated families that had fallen on hard times – this, of course, being before the welfare state. Perhaps father had died, or become chronically ill, or was a failed businessman (of whom there were many during the Depression); or mother was an invalid; or there was a seriously handicapped sibling living permanently at home – there was no end to the variety of circumstances that could bring a boy to Christ’s Hospital. In all such cases the boy’s being there significantly improved his situation, and this increased the school’s importance to him. It was also likely to be his only chance of getting the sort of public-school education that alone in those days opened up all the doors of opportunity.

If you go to a day school, being at school consists mostly of being in a classroom, but if you live at school you are in a classroom for only a small proportion of your time, so it constitutes a much smaller part of the experience. For most of us, I think, it was not all that important – it was never my chief concern. I was brimming over with interest and curiosity, but not for the sorts of things that were taught in class. In fact I was distantly perplexed by the fact that what was of greatest interest in life – things like music, theatre, politics, ideas in general – were not what schools were most concerned to teach you. The things they cared most about bore little relationship to anything else: they were just what you did at school, that’s all. My own attitude towards them was that they must be expected to be boring, but would be less so if you paid attention to them than if you did not. Most of the time I did. I performed well enough in my work to keep out of trouble, and those two considerations, rather than interest in the work for its own sake, constituted my main motive for doing it. I could see no point in a lot of it – I could not, for instance, see any point in learning Latin (though I am pleased now that I did). I think these are, or were, normal attitudes
among
schoolboys, and were the attitudes of most of my fellows. A small number of them had an active interest in work – they positively enjoyed Latin, say, and would put in extra time on it – but I thought they were dull dogs: anyone who preferred doing Latin to being in the hurly-burly of a dayroom talking nineteen to the dozen with his friends, or sitting alone reading some work of imagination, perhaps an adventure story, was a grey creature, I thought. That anyone could prefer classroom work to music was incomprehensible to me.

Since I did enough work to stay out of trouble, my position in the class drifted lazily upwards. Having in my first year been near the bottom in those subjects that the boys around me had been doing before, by the end of my second I was quite near the top, though without actually being top at anything. I found that this was a good position to be in, because it meant that I was mildly approved of by the masters without their paying any special attention to me – I did not want to come under pressure to perform, or make a show of interest. So I stayed very happily there, and allowed myself to float along with the current.

The first subject to ignite my imagination was geometry, in my second year. It was so counterintuitive as to be thrilling. Even the most elementary things in it were amazing. When you considered that the variety of shapes a triangle could have was infinite – and how bizarrely shaped a lot of them were – it was almost incredible that their angles should always and inevitably add up to 180 degrees. I learnt to prove that it was so, but I found it almost impossible to believe. And the fact was that if you made a right-angle between two lines, each of which was one unit long, and then completed the triangle by joining up the ends, it was impossible even in theory to give a precise measurement of this third line: its length, in whatever your units, was the square root of two, and that was an irrational number, inexpressible in either fractions or decimals. Again I knew that this was so, but found it
mystifying.
There the line was, in front of you, just a line, one of the three making up this simplest of triangles, and yet, unlike the others, you could not measure it exactly. Why not? If you could measure the other two, why not this one? I found it so peculiar that I could not get my mind round it. And yet I could
prove
it.

When, also in the maths periods, we did what we called statics and dynamics, I felt the same combination of fascination and puzzlement. That everything around me should consist of a balance of forces, and that counter to every one of these forces was an equal and opposite force, which was why things were as they were, took my breath away. It meant that this apparently stable world was really an almighty struggle of forces going on all the time, everywhere in everything, and that stability existed not in spite of that but as an outcome of it, created by it. Each new piece of information that the master gave us was equally astonishing. For instance, if you dropped something, it would fall towards the centre of the earth with the same acceleration regardless of what it was – minus, obviously, the effect of whatever forces there might be acting against it; that went without saying. It meant that in a vacuum a feather would fall at the same rate as a ton of lead. This seemed self-evidently impossible: surely if other things were equal, the heavier a thing was, the faster it would fall. But that was not so. In lesson after lesson, mathematics and the mechanical sciences were revealing the world around me to be quite contrary to what any thinking person would assume – and therefore contrary to common sense. There was something hugely exciting about all this – the unexpectedness of it, the experience of perpetual discovery, the sense of revelation. Never before had I felt like this in a classroom.

No other subject was to have this effect on me until I started doing physics. Meanwhile the next most interesting, in my second year, was chemistry; but that was because it was about sex. The school followed a laudable plan of giving every boy an
introduction
to biology in his first year, to chemistry in his second, and to physics in his third; but for reasons to do with our age (for most of us it was the last year before puberty) the chemistry got diverted into the biochemistry of human reproduction. What is more, we were taught by a woman, and an unmarried one, Miss Harvie. Perhaps this needs to be explained before we get to the sex.

When the war began, the senior school had only ever had male teachers, all of them graduates of Oxford or Cambridge. The younger able-bodied ones, and some of the others too, were quickly called up, and could not be replaced. This created a problem that lasted throughout the war. The school tried to solve it in three successive ways. First, it invited retired masters to come back out of retirement. Several volunteered, but most of these (not all) no longer had enough energy to do the job properly, and to us boys they seemed ancient, a collection of old buffers and duffers. In any case, one or two of them proceeded to get ill or die. So
that
arrangement was unsatisfactory. The school then took what it considered the adventurous step of taking on women, young ladies not long out of Oxford or Cambridge. There had, I believe, been a woman teacher in the prep school, so the decision was not altogether without precedent. Nevertheless, having women in the closed world of a male boarding school led to problems – not chiefly with the boys, I understand, although one woman was thought to have been to bed with several of them before she was dismissed. With that, and in the depths of the war, the school was pushed into thinking the unthinkable, and took on a male graduate from a university that was not Oxford or Cambridge – Leeds, would you believe it – but found him so unassimilable that it reluctantly fell back again on Oxbridge women as a lesser evil. In the final stages of the war, the school’s original masters started to get special release from the forces so that they could come back and teach, and the problem began at last to resolve itself.

I lived through all these phases, and had experiences with each of them. The first of the two old buffers who taught me called himself – absurdly, it seemed to me – Captain or Major (I forget which) Blamire-Brown, I assumed because he would wish any invading Germans to know what rank he had held during his previous encounter with them. He was a pig, boorish and fierce; and I still remember some of his more unpleasant remarks, not that any of them were directed at me. He terrorised his classes. But despite his defects of character he did teach me some Latin. He also taught me one of the mnemonics that have stuck in my mind ever since, one that explains which Latin nouns and proper names carry inflected meanings without the use of a preposition:

With island small, and little town,

We put no preposition down;

Also with
humus, rus
and
domus

We cast the preposition from us.

I do not think there has been a single occasion when this has been of any use to me. I sometimes think I have a bigger store of useless knowledge than anyone I know – but that comes inevitably from having a good memory.

The first of the two women I was taught by was Miss Harvie. She was clear, efficient, likeable and cool. She took it for granted, as she needed to in her situation, that we knew already about the mechanics of sex, and confined herself to explaining the biochemistry of it. Actually, I am not sure that we did know all that much about the mechanics, beyond the basic fact of penetration; but I do not blame her for not trying to tell us. What she explained was the structure and functioning of spermatozoa and ova, telling us what chromosomes were, and genes, and what was known about inherited characteristics, and how they were transmitted; and also a bit about how a baby develops in the womb. So it was not so
much
about sex as about the consequences of sex. It was fascinating and highly informative; but there was nothing there about emotions or relationships, or the social aspects of any of it. And nobody ever attempted to talk to me about those things. My parents never said anything, in fact never mentioned sex at all: they just started assuming, after I had reached a certain age, that I knew about it.

Sex was a subject of obsessional fascination among us juniors; but when I think of how much time we spent talking about it, I am struck by how little we actually knew. I knew a bit more than the others, being streetwise for my age, and they hung on my every word; but I must have given them at least as much misinformation as information. It shows how little free talk there can have been about such matters between the younger and the older boys – a lot must have been known to the older ones that was unknown to us. I had only the dimmest, most distant ideas about orgasm, and did not know of the existence of masturbation. I was taken aback when I went for the first time to the school swimming baths, where most of the boys swam naked, and saw pubic hair on the older boys. It looked grotesque to me, not at all aesthetically pleasing. I had liked it on girls, but that was different. This was ugly. Given all this ignorance, little of our sex-talk in the house was about the realities that were going to face us in the near future: most of it was speculation and dirty jokes, the casual, flippant and yet obsessive obscenity common among boys. New jokes, riddles, limericks and songs kept arriving from goodness knows where to keep our supply of such things refreshed. I suppose most of it must in fact have trickled down from the older boys, but new items were continually coming in from outside the school. I contributed a few myself, having a capacious background of this sort of thing in my Hoxton street lore. But it was all very infantile.