Owning Up: The Trilogy (23 page)

I didn’t learn riding in Sefton Park, although I could have, and in the winter I did my best to avoid toboganning and snowball fights. I loved watching the snow fall from inside the warm nursery and the way it made the houses in Ivanhoe Road glow a specially intense shade of sooty-red, but I hated ‘winter fun’ and, unlike Bill who was lethal, I couldn’t throw a snowball. I have never seen the pleasure of being wet, cold, uncomfortable and possibly hurt.

*

One morning, when I was about seven and a half and in my last term at Camelot, I went into my parents’ bedroom and found them looking at glossy ‘curricula’ for Liverpool’s preparatory day schools. They’d rejected St Christopher’s although it was just round the corner, and the junior wing of Liverpool College, and decided on a school called Parkfield in Parkfield Road only a few hundred yards away. ‘Your cousin John was there,’ Tom explained, ‘and Ronnie was quite satisfied. The headmaster, who’s called Twyne, is a pompous ass, but most schoolmasters are. No, we think it’s probably the best choice.’

That holiday I went with my mother to George Henry Lee’s and bought the school uniform: grey flannel shorts and blazer, football shorts and two sweaters – one white, one black – cricket shirts and flannels, black shoes and house-slippers, a belt with a snake buckle, a cap and tie in alternate stripes of Oxford and Cambridge blue. I wasn’t especially apprehensive. I’d be home every night and all day on Sundays. It was only round the corner. I could tease Bill for still being at a kindergarten ...

I didn’t know it then, but I was soon to be very, very grateful for my ability to keep the different areas of my life in separate compartments. Even the prospect of writing about Parkfield, evoking Mr Twyne, induces a mood combining gleeful rage and retrospective terror.

12

W. W. Twyne, the headmaster and proprietor of Parkfield, was a big man. Of course to children everyone looks big but he seemed so in relation to other grown-ups. He was burly but not fat, and smouldered with malevolent energy. Bald with a ruddy-brown complexion, his features were in themselves handsome, but his expression was usually one of petulant and disappointed frustration and his rages, which were frequent, distorted his face into a hideous and terrifying mask like a Japanese warrior in a print. When he was in a rare good mood, he could be surprisingly gentle and amiable. We basked in his good humour, fawned like puppies in the hope of sustaining it; but we watched him warily, knowing only too well that it wouldn’t last for long.

He was a very physical man with a large store of what would now be called body language. During his rages he would pace rapidly up and down as though in a cage, turning heavily on his heel every four paces. Simultaneously and continuously he would shoot his cuff, insert the digit finger of his right hand into his collar to loosen it and then shoot his frayed cuff again. We sat frozen during this performance, wondering on whom or on how many his retribution would fall. He would accompany this ritual with a series of oaths, mild enough, even comic in themselves, but delivered with such explosive venom that we felt no urge to smile. ‘My Godfathers!’ he would shout, ‘Ye Gods and little fishes! You people really are the limit!’ and always in conclusion, ‘It’s the pestilential day-school system!’ When we were alone together, as a form of exorcism, we frequently imitated this performance. Mr Twyne’s absurd nickname, ‘Twimbo’, was another way we hoped to reduce him in our minds to less intimidating proportions.

The forms his physical retribution took escalated from pulling you up to your feet by grasping either the short hair over the ears or the fatty part of the cheek between thumb and forefinger and then shaking you like a rat, through knocking you rapidly and repeatedly across the side of the skull with his knuckles or the bowl of his pipe, to slippering you with your own house-slipper. Little did I think, when casually trying on a pair of those house-slippers in George Henry Lee’s with Maud, that such apparently innocuous objects were to become the instruments of pain and humiliation.

‘Give me your slipper!’ Twyne would shout to the offender, ‘Bend over!’ Anything between one and six heavy blows with the heel of the slipper might be anticipated depending, not on the seriousness of the offence, but on the rage of the executant. There was nothing, and I am unable to decide if it was better or worse, premeditated in Mr Twyne’s assaults. You were never sent for and beaten in cold blood for a specific crime. Nemesis was instant and completely unpredictable. Sometimes he would slipper the entire school (about forty in number), explaining to each boy, as the blow descended, the individual shortcoming which justified his inclusion in this holocaust. ‘You don’t do enough work.’ ‘You talk too much.’ ‘You’ve got a cold,’ etc. This last may appear especially unfair, but it was Twyne’s belief that catching a cold was a matter of choice and indicated some kind of moral failure. It was just one element in an eccentric mental system of quite extraordinary rigidity.

Twimbo was not well dressed. His wardrobe seemed to be confined to one rather shiny brown suit, although I suppose there may have been a second or even a third of identical cut and shade. He wore heavy brown shoes, a little down at heel and, in the street, a greasy trilby hat. His only tie, thin, crumpled and stained, confirmed the fact, frequently referred to in conversation, that he had been educated at Clifton College. He was rather dirty in his habits. In the winter, having blown his nose vigorously, he would bend down to dry the steaming greyish handkerchief at the gas fire, and in doing so revealed that the crotch of his trousers had worn through, allowing us the doubtful pleasure of staring in some awe at his pendulous testicles.

In one of the class-rooms, every morning at about nine fifteen, we could hear outside a loud and puzzling splash. One day, the master or mistress having left us alone ‘on our honour’, one of the bolder boys decided to solve this conundrum and cautiously put his head outside the window. Twyne’s quarters were at the same height and on the same side of the school and, to the minute, his hand emerged from his.bedroom window grasping a full chamber-pot which he emptied precipitately into the ivy below. The mystery was solved. This rather eighteenth-century gesture, while the subject of prolonged ribaldry, seemed to us out of character, but I realise now it was probably to do with his almost Swiftian disgust at bodily functions. If we needed more lavatory paper we had to approach him and, after handing it over, he would order us to carry it under our coat ‘in case the Matron might see it’. One of his many aphorisms ran as follows: ‘Anyone who uses a public lavatory except in a case of dire necessity is a filthy pig!’

His emptying of the chamber-pot into the ivy was presumably because it would have embarrassed him to allow the maid to do it, although at that time this was considered perfectly acceptable practice, and if he’d gone to the bathroom to do it himself there was the possibility of meeting her en route. His statement as to the only justifiable use of a public lavatory illustrates his curiously formal and indeed memorable use of language. No great lover of literature-his revealed taste was for ‘rattling good yarns’
(Treasure
Island,
Sabatini, Ballantyne, John Buchan, A. E. W. Mason, Rider Haggard were all he advised us to read in our leisure hours) – he nevertheless, even in his rages, relished an ornate phrase. His favourite quotation, which he ascribed to Dr Johnson, was: ‘Sir, you are intoxicated by the exuberance of your own verbosity.’ His own verbal reactions to a given situation were almost equally elaborate.

His voice was slightly rasping, becoming more so as his temper rose. His accent was received middle-class of the period, clipped rather than drawling but with a southern bias which sounded alien to our northern ears. All his ‘a’ sounds came out as ‘e’s’. He pronounced ‘back’ as ‘beck’, and he shortened his double ‘o’s’ while lengthening his single ‘o’s’. ‘Afternun,’ he’d say, and, for ‘often’, ‘orfen’. Today it is only by listening to British films of the thirties and forties that you can hear this accent in its prime, but there is a distinct echo of it in the voices of the more elderly tennis and cricket commentators on TV.

He was no highbrow. Musically, while detesting what he called ‘jazz’, by which he implied any form of modern dance music, he expressed enthusiasm for nothing beyond Gilbert and Sullivan and ‘the old-fashioned waltz’. In his relaxed moments he admitted, with revealing candour, to a delight in the character of Dickens’s Wackford Squeers and, less culpably, a liking for the work of Will Hay, a contemporary comedian who usually appeared in the role of a blustering but ineffectual schoolmaster. Indeed, although very infrequently and only at his most expansive, Mr Twyne would admit, ‘despite its deplorable vulgarity’, to a weakness for the music-hall.

It may seem perverse that while there were no borders at Park-field, he should have insisted that everything that enraged him was the result of ‘the pestilential day-school system’, but his school and its geographical situation were, in his eyes, far from ideal. He detested the North of England, making an exception only for the village of Kirkby Lonsdale on the edge of the Lake District, and ideally he would have chosen to be the headmaster of an all-boarding preparatory school in Somerset or Wiltshire, not too far from his beloved Clifton. Why and how he had landed up in Liverpool was one of the several mysteries surrounding him. We knew nothing of his family, although there were rumours of two sisters. Of his previous career all he told us was that for a time he had been an assistant master at Terra Nova, a prep school for which he admitted warm admiration despite the fact that it was situated near Southport, a rather grand resort ringed by golf clubs, but only thirty miles away.

Given that Parkfield was a day school, Mr Twyne did all he could to control his pupils even after we returned each evening to ‘the softening influence of home’. We worked on Saturdays. We were forbidden to go to the theatre or cinema or even into a shop, or to associate with children from other schools, not only during the term, but for a week before the end of the holidays. For a time he even made us assemble at Parkfield on Sunday mornings to attend the eleven o’clock service at Christ Church, Linnet Lane,
en masse,
thereby adding to the boredom of the ceremony the fear of earning retribution for giggling or not paying enough attention. Some parents, however, objected to this practice, either because they wanted their children to go to their own local church or because, if they attended Christ Church anyway, they preferred to go
en fam-ille,
and eventually Twyne reluctantly agreed to abandon the church parade.

Why did I put up with it? Why didn’t I complain to Maud and Tom who would certainly have taken me away from Parkfield and sent me to a gentler establishment? In part I suppose, as in the case of May and Hilda, I had too much pride to whine, but largely it was because Twyne stressed frequently and menacingly that anyone who left had to give a term’s notice and in the case of several boys who did, he offered the rest of us a practical demonstration of just what to expect. Never missing an opportunity to enlarge our knowledge of Latin, he would accompany their increased ration of hair-pulling, cheek-pinching, knuckle-bashing, pipe-welding and slippering by intoning rhythmically the while:
‘Proditor, Proditoris,
masculine, a traitor’.

‘We’d have paid the term and you wouldn’t have had to go,’ Maud said to me later when, Parkfield behind me, I told her about the extent of Twyne’s physical violence, but I didn’t know that at the time and wonder, even if I had, whether I’d have taken advantage of it. I have always been very obstinate and perhaps my hatred of the man had a certain ambivalence. I half-cherished his dislike of me. If I couldn’t seduce him I would make quite sure I stood for everything he disapproved of.

Twyne had no degree and, so far as I know, had not attended a university, but there was no question of his knowledge and love of Latin, the only subject he taught. Any boy with a facility for the language or who worked hard at it, while not exempt from assault, tended to attract less of it. If he were also ‘promising’ at rugger or cricket or – even better – at both, he was in an even stronger position. Bill, arriving three years in my wake, fulfilled all these qualifications. He had in consequence a much easier ride.

‘Rugger and Latin prose are all a gentleman needs,’ Twyne told us – inappropriate advice I would have thought for the sons of business men and prosperous tradesmen who were his pupils. He would certainly have added cricket if it wouldn’t have spoilt the rhythm of the sentence. I had immediately decided that Latin was . one of those subjects in which I had no interest and was not prepared to do a hand’s turn; I hated the mud and potential for injury on the rugger field and feared the speed and hardness of the cricket ball. I was a ‘duffer’ in the classroom and a ‘rebbit’ at games. These, however, were negative failings. I would quite often go out of my way to needle him.

My method was never direct. The lad I admired most in the whole school, a rather stupid and unimaginative boy called Frazer, on one occasion, during a full-scale assault from Twyne, broke loose and shouted ‘Lay off!’ in a loud defiant tone. I’d never have dared do that. My strategy was to prattle on in apparent innocence about what I knew was calculated to enrage him – my mother’s friends in the ballet, for example. He had a profound and just conceivably suspect hatred of any activity he considered effeminate, and the ballet ranked high. I knew that Twyne would be unable to criticise my mother directly, but of course I didn’t win. ‘Melly Major,’ he asked me, ‘would you rather go to the ballet or watch a good game of rugger?’ I could see the trap, but was at this point unable to recant. ‘I’d rather go to the ballet, sir,’ I told him. ‘Give me your slipper, Melly Major!’ he bellowed.

Sometimes I enraged him by accident. One teatime he heard me commiserating with a boy because his birthday always fell during termtime. Twyne beat the wooden trestle-table for silence, told the school what I’d said, and then asked every one of the forty boys whether they would sooner have their birthdays during the holidays. Each of them replied, some a little shame-facedly, in the negative. I was then hauled to my feet and beaten, my punishment confirmed by this cowed consensus.