Growing Up In a War (25 page)

I’d’ve died of boredom long ago

If it hadn’t been for Brangwyn.

Teddy reproved me dolefully for this in front of the class, but I had the feeling that the boys were nearer to being on my side than on his.

Every school contains worlds within worlds, and every school has its own distinctive character, but Christ’s Hospital is extra-different in that its history, diversity of intake, physical scale and wealth are all unique. In keeping with this it developed over the centuries a language of its own. The terms sixth form and fifth form were not used: instead there were Grecians and Deputy Grecians; and below them the Great Erasmus and Little Erasmus forms. The school itself was Housey, and this was adjective as well as noun – housey food, housey clothes and the rest. These usages are in the Oxford Dictionary, and other dictionaries too, so they can be said to have entered the English language. As for the slang, it was so extensive that two or three separate dictionaries of it have been published. Among the private slangs of other schools, it is said that only Winchester’s equals it in extent. It would weary my readers if I were to print a mini-dictionary here, but a few
words
will give the feel of it. A fag was a swob, a dormitory feast a bonfast; a blow to the head was a fotch; lavatory paper was bodge. Not surprisingly, the largest special vocabulary had to do with food: bread was crug, butter flab, tea kiff (so the bowls out of which we drank were kiff bowls), waste food was skiffage, or skiff for short. A high proportion of the words were curt, bold and crude-sounding, like Anglo-Saxon. In addition to our own slang we used some ordinary English words in eccentric ways: for instance our all-purpose word of commendation, perpetually on our tongues to mean just good or nice, was genial. Because German was the school’s main foreign language we took everyday words from that too: beautiful was always
schön
, and we as often said
danke schön
as thank you. If a boy was lacking in vitality he was said to be
tot
(the German word for dead, pronounced ‘tote’). About most of our speech there was an unadorned directness that was characteristic of most things to do with the school, not least its buildings; but our sentences were so thick with specially used words that some of what we said would have been unintelligible to outsiders. This encouraged play with language, and there was a lot of that in our conversation.

One way and another, the school constituted an environment that exerted an enormous pressure on its members. A few of them hated it altogether, and a few loved it uncritically, but most of us had divided feelings that were strong in both directions, loving some things and hating others. Never did I wish I were not there – on the contrary, I would always have chosen that rather than any of the alternatives – but there were things about it that I detested. Compulsory chapel came first, but there was an atmosphere of compulsion generally that I resented. Most aspects of our lives were governed by rules and regulations. Compulsory sport and religious services were only two of them, but both put me off for life: I have taken no physical exercise since my earliest undergraduate days, and for years after leaving school I was unable
to
bring myself to go to a religious service. If I was invited to a friend’s wedding I would go to the party afterwards, but not to the service. I can only thank heaven that I had started to see Shakespeare’s plays in live performances in the theatre before they were introduced to me in the classroom: I never thought of them as belonging in class, where they had been dragged from another world. On a desk instead of a stage they were like fish out of water, gasping their lives away.

Compulsory activities brought to the surface disabilities which, whether or not I had had them before, I had not been aware of. Late in middle age I was told by doctors that I had almost certainly had undiagnosed asthma as a small child, and that it had left me with inadequate lung capacity. This would explain why my mother was always going on about me having had ‘a weak chest’ before I could remember. It also explains why, at school, whenever I exercised to the point of getting out of breath, I would get into a distressed condition: I would gasp noisily, and gulp for air, desperate, and have fierce stabbing pains in the chest. At its worst, if I were made to go on, I would become almost distraught. Yet it never occurred to me at the time to think of this as a problem to do with my lungs: I supposed it to be a more general physical weakness, something all over, muscular if anything. I was a little puzzled in that my arms and legs were strong, but beyond that I resigned myself to it in an unthinking way. I just supposed that the other boys were physically hearty, sturdy, in a way I was not, and I felt slightly ashamed of my weakness, and tried to hide it. Any activity that involved sustained running was torture to me. Cross-country runs were among the worst, because we were not allowed ever to stop, so it meant unremittingly driving myself forward into the pain, and they seemed never-ending.

However, there was something more to be feared than cross-country runs, and that was the institution of punishment drills.
These
were like something in the eighteenth-century navy. They were the school’s alternative to corporal punishment, which was not used at all by most masters, who instead gave out these drills. One of our three retired sergeant majors, Sergeant Usher, who was the school’s village policeman, conducted these drills a couple of times a week. The malefactors changed into games clothes but kept their leather shoes on, and reported on the asphalt playground behind the houses. Here Sergeant Usher ran them deliberately to exhaustion over a period of half an hour. His explicit aim was to make them suffer, and this he was skilled at doing. For me the experience bordered on the intolerable. My hatred and fear of these punishment drills was such that, after I had ingested the public-school ethos, there was only one occasion on which I lied when called on to own up, and I did that to avoid a punishment drill. It shamed me profoundly in the eyes of two of my friends, and in my own eyes too.

The other disability that was brought out in me by the school’s physical activities was a psychological one. Again, I had never been aware of it, but I now found myself in extreme terror of anything that would take me, even momentarily, out of control of myself. The simplest example occurred during morning PT. We would be asked to do a headstand – that was easy enough – and then roll over backwards on to our feet again. It was simplicity itself, and the other boys, perhaps after an initial awkwardness, did it with a fluent, effortless movement: they merely let their upended bodies crumple into a roll, and their own weight carried them up on to their feet. But I could not do it, because I could not let myself go. I had a complete mental block against it. If anyone had asked me what I was afraid of I would not have been able to answer. There was no danger of pain or injury. Yet I had what can only be described as a phobic terror of letting go control of my own body, and it was a terror that I could not, by any act of will, overcome. I felt it even more on the rugger field. When I saw
how,
when a boy was tackled, he was swept along off his feet, I felt an unnameable horror of being tackled. It was nothing to do with a fear of being hurt: it was fear of control of myself being taken away from me; and it was panic of an extreme kind. I felt it even when a scrum lifted me off my feet. Being carried along helplessly, not being in control of my body, was intolerable to me: I would willingly have borne any amount of pain in preference to it. So throughout each game, my efforts were focused on never getting possession of the ball, so that I would not be tackled; and also on never being in a scrum; and on disguising as much as I could the fact that I was doing these things. It put me in a very odd relationship to the game.

If I were asked now to explain how I came to have this phobia, my guess would be that I was physically abused by my mother, violently shaken, when I was a baby, and that the experience was an all-engulfing terror from which there was no escape; and that this annihilating sense of powerlessness implanted in me a panic fear of being helpless in someone else’s hands. I am fairly certain that such abuse took place, because it happened also during the period of my earliest memories, and I emerged into consciousness being frightened of my mother. But when I was a pre-teenager at Christ’s Hospital it never occurred to me to make any such connection between these things. I just felt swamped by irrational fear, and then all my thoughts had to go into coping with it on the spur of the moment. I never understood it. And I was concerned to conceal it from others.

All the things I have described in this chapter were elements of daily life. But what I was most conscious of living with was the unique individuality of each of the other boys close to me. Our lives together were full of incident: friendships and rows, feuds and peacemakings, showdowns with authority, misunderstandings, two-day dramas, crazes that swept us all up and then ebbed away leaving no trace, passionate arguments, crimes and punishments,
victories
and defeats, entertainments, diversions, plans, stories from outside, crises offstage at home; it all flowed on like a formless drama, with our relationships among ourselves at the centre. This was what filled my consciousness most of the time. We were learning always from one another, the most important things having to do with living together, coping, managing, getting along, in a variety of different and often stressful circumstances; and this was probably the most valuable part of the education I received at school. In addition to all that, we were learning specific things from one another. One boy, Bailey, had a passion for chess, and through watching him and listening to his stories I learnt the classic openings and defences, and something of the history of the game, and heard the most famous anecdotes about well-known players. Another boy, Garrard, had a gift for caricature: he had a disenchanted eye for the peculiarities of all of us; and to leaf with him through the dayroom’s copy of
Punch
was to get a funny and instructive introduction to the art of the cartoon. One boy was hooked on aeroplanes, so from him we learnt about the different planes on both sides of the war. I was forever talking about music, and I seem to have sparked off an interest in it in one or two of the others. It was a rich soil for us all to grow up in.

In later life, the boys in my house went into nearly as wide a range of occupations as Old Blues had done in the sixteenth century. George Neighbour, house captain in my first term, was to become head of the Performing Rights Society and marry a well-known opera singer. His deputy, Peter Glare, became the leading lexicographer of my lifetime in both Latin and Greek, an extraordinary achievement. Another of the leavers in my early days, Whattoff, became a waiter, and another, Glauert, a chemist who spent most of his life as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Most of the boys went into industry or public service; and a surprising number of those close to me in age became
professional
soldiers, including one, Dick Gerrard-Wright, who became a major general. The range was exceptional; and because we all spent our formative years together, we all benefited from it.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

WHEN THE SCHOOL
holidays came round I would exchange this rich world for Arnos Grove, where I had no world at all except for my family – and I did not see them until the evening of each day. They would get up in the morning and go off to their jobs, leaving me asleep. They preferred it that way: with three of them competing for one bathroom they did not want me using it too, nor did they want to have to get me breakfast when they were in a hurry. So I would wake up each morning in an empty flat. I would get out of bed when I felt like it – which, as so often with children and adolescents, was late – and wash or bath at leisure, and make breakfast for myself. Most days I stayed at home till lunchtime – playing records, listening to the radio, reading the newspaper. Because I got up so late, the mornings were short. I listened to the same records over and over again, playing some of my favourites almost every day. In fact, quite often, when a record finished, I would put the needle back to the beginning and listen to it again. It astonishes me now that I did not get tired of those records. There could not have been more than two hundred of them, and each side lasted only four minutes and a bit, so the total amount of music on them must have been well under thirty hours. Yet for years I played a selection from them almost every day that I was at home.

In those days before refrigerators, it would not have occurred to anyone that I should eat lunch at home, and in any case there
was
food rationing – and in any case again my mother would not have wanted to spend her time preparing anything. It occurred to neither her nor me that I should prepare lunch myself. So I went out to eat. The family was unprecedentedly well off now. After my sister left school there were three earners in the home – and my father had two pay packets. The vital consequence for me was that I had enough pocket money for my needs. It was always given to me by my father, who I am sure was the one who actually paid it. He felt a certain guilt at my being abandoned all day, and realised that I had to go somewhere and do something. He always gave me enough to go into the West End on the tube and get a meal at a greasy spoon. These cheap cafés for workmen were plentiful everywhere in those days – they are still not uncommon – and I nearly always ate my lunch in one. The main dishes were fried, and would include such things as egg and chips, tomato and chips, fish and chips. At the top or bottom of the menu it would often say: ‘Chips with Everything’, a phrase that was later made famous as the title of a play. It was the food I enjoyed most at that age anyway, and we never had it at school. The people around me would include not only workers in overalls but also impecunious office workers and shop assistants, especially women and young girls, and there would be a sprinkling of shoppers too, and perhaps a few retired people, so the clientele was sufficiently variegated for no one to take any particular notice of me.