Owning Up: The Trilogy (25 page)

Cousin Emma, having greeted me personally and affectionately, much to my satisfaction, asked me to introduce her to the Captain and then showed us round herself. Captain Banks bobbed and smarmed about her in the oiliest fashion; confirming her judgement, leaping back from the pictures as if he had just completed them himself, stressing constantly how privileged we were to be there. As we were putting on our coats and caps in the hall, under Aimee’s suspicious eye, he took her aside and engaged her in earnest conversation. ‘No thank you, Captain Banks,’ I heard her say firmly, ‘I’m afraid I don’t feel able to take up your kind offer to paint either the house or myself.’

She told Maud later that she believed Captain Banks had arranged the whole outing in the hope of netting this commission. I was sorry for him – even at nine I could recognise pathos – but equally I was rather embarrassed.

13

The rest of the personnel at Parkfield were a cook whom we never saw, a maid-of-all-work who did everything except empty Twyne’s chamber-pot, and a ‘groundsman’ who mowed the playing field and rolled the cricket pitch. There was also a matron called Miss McClaren. It was surely unnecessary in ‘a pestilential day school’ to employ a matron but I suppose she could have been responsible for the catering. She was dressed, however, as a proper matron in a kind of hospital uniform with a cap, and I think she was hired to bolster up Twimbo’s dream of running a real boarding school in the West Country. She was very kind-hearted, and when Twyne knocked anyone about, a. look of distress and anger crossed her open Scottish features. One term she was not there any more, nor was she replaced, but Mr Twyne, when we asked him what had become of her, dismissed her, with great bitterness and in defiance of her gender, as a ‘
proditor, proditoris,
masculine, a traitor’. What had she done, we wondered? Had she perhaps threatened to report himtotheNSPCC?

A term or two later we acquired an even less necessary addition to the staff – a staff sergeant. His name was Rutter and he had been in the Mozambique Rifles. Thinking back on his appearance I believe he may have had some black blood: his nostrils were very wide, his mouth generous, and he had crinkly hair. His head was large, his body broad and compact, but what was perfectly obvious, to anyone with even an inkling of such things, was that he was a screaming queen. Didn’t Twyne, with his phobia about effeminacy, recognise this? Is it just conceivable that he was Twyne’s lover? Certainly his duties were light enough. He took PT in the concrete yard. He taught us shooting in the long wooden shed. On very wet days he would lecture, with slides, on life in the African bush. He helped out Twimbo on the playing-field or during boxing in the basement. He also cut our hair. A barber had always come in to do this during term-time, but now Sergeant Rutter took his place. His haircuts were drastic. ‘Oh no!’ cried my mother in only partially mock anguish when Bill and I came gooseberrying home after the Sergeant’s radical application of the clippers.

He was a kind man though, and stopped Mr Twyne from throwing boys into the swimming bath by insisting on teaching them himself at the shallow end. While patently gay, he was not – and boys always know even if they don’t know what they know – at all pederastic. My parents could not believe it. Sensing Maud’s fascination and liking for homosexuals, he used to rush up to her on sports days or on meeting her in the street shrieking: ‘Bless you, Mrs Melly,’ a sentiment Twyne, who both mistrusted and disliked her, would never have endorsed. My father, on his return from the office, would sometimes imitate this greeting, And he always referred to Sergeant Rutter, although naturally never to his face, as ‘Pansy’ Rutter. After a couple of years he left and we were sorry to see him go. Perhaps for the reason I have tentatively and with no positive evidence suggested, ‘Pansy’ had acted as a restraining influence on the excesses of W. W. Twyne.

Much as I dreaded Twyne in the class-room I was at least in part protected there by others, some of them ‘promising’ athletes who were as unenthusiastic and idle when it came to mastering ‘Letin prose’ as I was myself. It was on the playing-field that some of our worst confrontations took place and it was cricket especially that brought out what he called the ‘bolshie’ in me.

During rugger matches, by running about a lot and making sure, as discreetly as possible, that I was in the wrong place, I could at least present the illusion of involvement. What I hated about rugger was not so much the games, which at any rate lasted a specific time, but the scrum practices on Saturday afternoons. These, when I was longing to get home, went on and on, well into the dusk, and were made all the more frustrating by Twimbo’s reiterated and mendacious promise that each successive scrimmage was to be ‘the last scrum of the day’. ‘Show some guts, you little forwards,’ he would bellow as an excuse for prolonging the muddy tedium another ten minutes. ‘Guts’ was the strongest language I ever heard him use, and even here he would qualify it later at tea by telling us that it was a word ‘justifiable on the rugger field but not in the drawing-room’ even though ‘these days duchesses swear like bargees’.

His attitude to women was, I suspect, deeply hostile, and he covered this by excessively formal politeness which some mothers, but not Maud, found charming. Sometimes he would instruct us on how to greet a lady in the street. He would borrow one of our caps, which on his large bald head was already a dangerously risible spectacle, and would then pretend to walk in a somewhat military fashion for some paces before recognising an imaginary aunt or ‘another boy’s mother’. He would stop, smile rather savagely, and raise the cap into the air with his right hand. ‘Good afternun, Mrs Clutterbuck,’ he’d enunciate clearly before replacing the cap and resuming his even pacing. We were then expected, either individually or collectively, to repeat this absurd exercise, ‘Mrs Clutterbuck’ and all.

It was, however, in relation to sport that his misogynism became nakedly manifest. He told us that women were, by temperament, totally unsuited to playing anything, illustrating his thesis by citing the behaviour of a certain M’mselle Suzanne Lenglen, a French tennis champion of the twenties, who several times at Wimbledon had ‘thrown down her reckit in pure rege’. He also told us that we must never play any game with a girl, ‘not even tennis, not even with your own sister’ because of the unacceptable possibility of being beaten.

Cricket, however, was a male preserve and he took it for granted that any man who had no interest in it was totally beyond the pale. Had I been more circumspect or less obstinate I could have faked it, expressed some enthusiasm if no aptitude, learnt at least the positions on the field, but I made no such concessions. If, when arranging the fielding, he directed me to silly mid-off or square-leg I made it patently obvious that I had no idea in which direction to aim. During test matches, when we were expected to sit through lunch or tea in rapt silence, listening to the commentary on the wireless, I emanated boredom and, if questioned, total ignorance as to the state of play. He could slipper me as often as he liked, but my rejection of the mystique of ‘King Willow’ remained absolute, the centre of my integrity.

Once, when batting, I scored a four, but was relieved, although also rather hurt, when he dismissed it contemptuously as ‘a cow shot’. ‘There are only two strokes in betting, Melly Major,’ he remonstrated, ‘Forward and beck!’ He demonstrated these alternatives with an invisible bat: ‘Forward and beck!’

I still know nothing about cricket, but retain and cherish a single sentence of his on the subject, not because of its content, but because of the way it was expressed – Twyne at his most baroque. ‘When Jessop was betting,’ he used to say, ‘nursemaids would leave their charges.’

The boys who assembled under Twyne’s threatening shadow came from a fairly wide social spectrum. Some were the sons of professional men: doctors, lawyers, architects. The majority of us were the children of business men. A few had fathers who had succeeded in trade – fishmongers, market gardeners, coal merchants – who had decided they could afford to turn their sons into gentlemen. Twyne was not in a position to be selective. He needed a full school to keep his shaky financial position from collapsing.

None of us was actually what he would have chosen; even the doctors and lawyers were Liverpudlians. Ideally his pupils would have been the sons of small Wessex landowners, military men and colonial administrators. He had no dreams of running a fashionable school; in fact he despised ‘Society’, foul-mouthed duchesses and all. He had no ambitions to boast that his boys went on to Eton or Harrow. The public schools he favoured were those modelled on Dr Arnold’s Rugby: Marlborough, Repton, and of course Clifton. His ideal boy ‘worked hard and played hard’. The quality he most valued was
esprit de corps.

Naturally he became apoplectic at the idea of progressive education, reserving his especial venom and verbal exuberance for the Montessori System. This he described as ‘a pimply youth in a velvet suit doing crochet in a deckchair’.

He made no secret, either, of his dislike of the industrial working classes; ‘
Sperno profonum vulgus
’ (I hate the common people), a Latin tag ascribed to Coriolanus, was frequently on his lips. Nevertheless he believed that they, or at any rate their children, were useful in offering us a practical opportunity to apply the lessons we had learnt in ‘the noble art of self-defence’ in the school basement.

It was the custom of gangs of small and ragged boys from the back streets of Lark Lane and Aigburth Road to lie in wait in the driveways of the big houses near Parkfield in order to duff us up on the way home. Twyne referred to these children collectively as ‘oiks’, and indoctrinated us with the idea that if we took them on one at a time and applied the Queensberry Rules, we would automatically establish our superiority. Unfortunately the ‘oiks’ appeared to be unaware of the Queensberry Rules. They used their elbows, heads and boots, and were not prepared to take us on man to man. Their intention was never to hurt us badly. What they hoped to do, and frequently succeeded in doing, was to humiliate what I heard one of them describe as ‘dem posh kids wid dair daft caps and dair toffee noses in de ur’. It was Twyne who lusted for reports of broken noses and smashed teeth.

Despite the legendary exploits of an old boy called Barlow Major who, according to Twyne, had left three large ‘oiks’ unconscious and stacked neatly around a lamppost like a picture in a comic strip, most of us preferred to rely less on our pugilistic expertise than on safety in numbers. The ‘oiks’ were usually in gangs of three or four at most and so if we walked home in groups of five or six they usually left us alone. One evening in 1935, however, I set off by myself because I had obtained special permission to meet my father on his way home from the office and, although it was termtime, go with him into a shop in Lark Lane to buy my first bike. Twyne was standing outside the gates of Parkfield smoking his pipe, something he frequently did in the summer to make sure that we neither dawdled nor ran, at any rate until we were out of sight, and Tom, I could see, was waiting on the corner of Ivanhoe Road, some two hundred yards away. When I was approximately equidistant between them, three minute ‘oiks’ rushed out of a driveway and set about me. Aware of the proximity of Twyne I assumed the classic prizefighter’s stance: right fist guarding the face, left arm extended, while they ran rings round me, kicking my shins and elbowing me in the ribs. There was a bellow from Twyne as he became aware of the fracas. He ran down Parkfield Road, an intimidating if absurd spectacle, yelling: ‘Keep a straight left, Melly Major!’ Seeing and indeed hearing him coming, the ‘oiks’ scampered off, passing within a few feet of my father, towards the safety of Lark Lane. One of them was triumphantly waving my cap. Tom was convulsed with laughter, Twyne out of his mind with rage. ‘Why didn’t you stop them, Mr Melly!’ demanded the furious Twimbo.

‘Because I was laughing too much,’ said my father. Twyne turned silently on his heel and strode off back to Parkfield. Despite the fact that Tom had been educated at Marlborough, Mr Twyne obviously believed that he was wanting in
esprit de corps.

Although I didn’t like being duffed up, I envied the ‘oiks’ their freedom, their torn jerseys, the fact that they could stay up as late as they liked and roam the streets. I know this incident took place in 1935 because that night, lying in bed, my beautiful new bike in the little shed in the back-yard, I could hear some of them, possibly even the same gang, singing profane words to a Salvation Army hymn as they swaggered back down Parkfield Road.

Will you come to Abyssinia will you come,

Bring your own ammunition and your gun,

Mussolini will be there

Popping bullets in the air.

Will you come to Abyssinia, will you come.

14

I forget which boy it was that, when I was about nine, suggested that he put his hand up my trouser leg and ‘rubbed up my dick’. I resisted his invitation initially, it seemed both meaningless and ‘rude’; but when he promised me I’d like it, and furthermore I somehow began to feel curiously excited at the idea, I let him do it. As soon as he started to tickle and rub my privates I could feel my ‘dick’, small as it was, grow hard, and a minute or two later a delicious sensation, starting at the base of my spine, flooded through my whole body. I had experienced, although I’d no idea what it was, my first induced orgasm, but naturally, as I was still several years from puberty, there was no sperm. I felt no hesitation therefore in gratefully doing him the same service. I watched with interest how his eyelids fluttered and he gave a little moan when he achieved what he called ‘the funny feeling’. Although temporarily incapable, I couldn’t wait to do it again.

I soon discovered that this habit was widespread throughout Parkfield, especially among the older boys. It had, I learnt subsequently, been imported by a boy called Warren, the school’s best cricketer, as it happens, and big for his years. He had learnt about it from an older brother who was at public school. There were a few boys in the school who would have no part of it, but most of us were at it all the time – in the outside lavatory, in the changing-rooms, even during class behind the high tip-up desks. It didn’t take very long, and we’d no idea of its significance beyond the pleasure involved, but we never stopped. It was like a comforting secret to set against the harsh and spartan world of Twyne.