The Day Gone By (25 page)

I duly stood in the corner until the meal was over and everyone had left the dining-room. Then Delmé-Radcliffe called me out to him and told me that I could spend the afternoon (it was a half-holiday) writing out ‘I must not be insolent' three hundred times.

This type of imposition was a common punishment at Horris Hill, but the tariff was usually fifty times. A hundred times was regarded as severe. This was unheard-of and, to an eleven-year-old, mind-boggling. It was like being told to move ten tons of earth. I can't remember whether I said anything in reply.

To write ‘I must not be insolent' in a fair hand takes about ten seconds. Allowing for natural pauses, one might perhaps say that five a minute would be good going. Remembering that this was an eleven-year-old and that the task was a long one, let us say he could hope to average four a minute. Mathematically the job should take an hour and a quarter (to do him justice, perhaps this is what Delmé-Radcliffe thought) but I remember it as taking rather longer than that. No one in the school had ever heard of three hundred times.

Enough of Delmé-Radcliffe: I've never come across him since. It was all due to a sense of insecurity, I expect, and no doubt he had his own troubles. But I wish he hadn't left a sort of lasting bruise on my memory. One ought to be able to overcome these things. I've even known people who have achieved it in regard to the Japanese at whose hands they suffered, so I've really got no case against poor old Delmé.

Talking of injuries, I suffered three physical ones during my time at Horris Hill, and I think these are worth recounting, as they may make some parents realize how easily quite nasty injuries can be sustained by little boys at boarding-school. The first occurred while I was arguing about some nonsense with a slightly older boy - who wasn't, actually, a bad fellow, though rather uncertain and unpredictable. We grew more and more heated and may even have scuffled a little. Anyway, suddenly T— seized my thumb and bent it violently backwards. It threw me to the ground. It remained painful for a good week or two and got better only by slow degrees.

The second occasion, though nasty, was pure bad luck, with no malice involved. It was the last day of term - the day before breaking-up day - and we were all carrying our small personal belongings up from our lockers to our dormitories to be packed in our trunks. I had my things - writing-paper and envelopes, a box of dominoes, some crayons and so on — in a small pack, which I was holding on my back with a hand over each shoulder. As I entered the dormitory I was singing, and this tempted my friend Derek Seth-Smith, without the least unfriendliness and with a cry of ‘Whoops!' to put out a foot to trip me. He meant me only to stumble, but unfortunately I fell prone. My hands being where they were, I could not put them out to save myself, and fell full on my mouth and chin. My lower left canine tooth drove into my upper lip, and my top left front incisor took a knock which I felt sure must have broken it. I screamed in shock, Seth-Smith began to whimper with fear, and both Gozzer and the master on duty came hurrying. I was bleeding quite dramatically and looking like Dracula, but a quick trip to the dentist in Newbury showed that nothing needed to be done. It was bad enough, though: I have had a hard little lump in my upper lip ever since, while the incisor has remained slightly wonky. I wouldn't care to tap it with a pen, for instance.

The third thing was just plain stupid, but it shows how unreflecting small boys can be. It happened before I had gone over to Horris Wood and while I was a member of Dormitory Four, the biggest dormitory at Horris Hill itself. One morning I committed some misdemeanour while Harrison, the captain of the dormitory, was still along in the cold bath room. The dormitory second, a boy called Meredith, decided to deal with me himself, and made me stand still, with my hands behind my back, while he boxed my ears. When Harrison came back he was told what had happened and said that he himself would now box my ears again, which he proceeded to do.

It is the truth, believe it or not, that it did not occur to me to connect this with what followed. A day or two later I began to have earache in my right ear. I was no stranger to earache, of course: once more there was a garden in my ear. I went up to Sister Wood, who felt that my father ought to have a look at it. He in turn decided that he would like an examination by a London specialist, which surprised and rather startled me, for in our family the general policy was to make light of indispositions and take them in your stride. He had a friend of student days at Bart's, a Mr E. D. D. Davis, who had become an ear, nose and throat specialist in Harley Street. So to Mr Davis - a little, dark, alert man like an Aberdeen terrier - I was taken, dressed in my best suit and pleased to have a day off in the middle of term. I can't remember much about it, except that he was very nice to me; but what followed was that I was taken home and kept a week in bed. All I knew was that I had seen on some piece of paper or other that I had ‘otitis' (which means inflammation of the ear). When I returned to Horris Hill, I got teased quite a bit for malingering, and Mr McIntyre, having picked up the ‘otitis', nicknamed me ‘old osteophitis' (but it didn't stick).

It was not until years afterwards, as I was talking one day to my mother, that she told me that Mr Davis had said that I must have received a very severe blow to the head; and that Mr Stow, tackled by my father, had maintained that that was quite impossible. I think that it may have been at this time that the cooling of their relationship began: for a cooling there certainly was, and in his later life I often heard my father speak disparagingly of Mr Stow. Certainly, if Mr Stow had a fault it was that he would never hear a word against Horris Hill. For instance, the food (I now realize) was unimaginative and not good, but the slightest criticism - even a mere leaving on the plate - invariably brought Mr Stow down on the offender like a wolf on the fold.

The Horris Hill curriculum of those days would, I am sure, strike a lot of people now as, simply, incredible. Its purpose was to get as many boys as possible into Winchester. Other schools were not ruled out and boys who were obviously not up to the Winchester entrance were not sent away, but merely hived off to finish their time in a special form (no Greek) taken by Mr Liddell. Nevertheless, entrance to Winchester was what Horris Hill was all about. Before breakfast, fortified by cocoa and biscuits, we did forty minutes' early school, which was usually devoted to hearing or correcting last night's prep. The first period after breakfast lasted an hour and a quarter, and was devoted to Latin or, in the upper three forms, to Greek. This meant Kennedy's
Latin Grammar,
Caesar, Ovid and Xenophon. After this there was an hour's French, then an hour's break (nets in summer, puntabout in winter) and then another three-quarters of an hour's Classics. Into this lot English literature, divinity and poetry could be inserted at the whim and discretion of the form master - and that went for the setting of the evening's prep., too. After lunch, four days a week, there would be an hour's maths., followed by an hour's history or geography - two of each every week. These were taken rather easy, since everyone knew that what really mattered was the Classics. I can still remember my gender rhymes to this day (and very sustaining they are, too).

‘A, ab, absque, coram, de,

Palam, clam, cum, ex and e,

Sine, tenus, pro and prae.

Add super, subter, sub and in,

When state, not motion, 'tis they mean.'

‘Abstract nouns in “io” call

Feminina, one and all …'

One of the things that I enjoy in Benjamin Britten's
The Turn of the Screw
is the play made by the little boy, Miles, with the gender rhymes and the Benedicite:

‘Aninis, axis, caulis, collis,

Clunis, crinis, fascis, follis, bless ye the Lord.'

All this, really, was the old Victorian classical education. Science, biology and any sort of technology were of no account in the education of young gentlemen. The general idea was that if you had a mind which could translate ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus' into Latin elegiacs, then you had a mind which could tackle anything appropriate for a gentleman.

For ‘gentlemen' was what mattered and no error. I have never, before or since, lived in such a class-conscious and snobbish atmosphere. Among the parents of these boys the snobbery was somewhat masked; the edge taken off a bit, as it were, by euphemism (‘Well, perhaps that's not quite the sort of thing we …'), reserve, moderation and restraint. Among the boys it was open, articulate and undisguised, virtually the principal value in life. The Horris Hill word for anyone not considered a gentleman was a ‘rustic'. This automatically included all workmen, shopmen, servants and so on; servant-girls were ‘skivs', and no other word was in use. But beyond this distinction lay the finer business of penetrating disguise, pretence, imposture. Might someone purporting to be a gentleman really be a rustic? I came in for a certain scrutiny here, for my father was the school doctor - a sort of servant - and though I retained friends, I did not entirely escape calumny. Thank goodness! For that saved me from becoming drawn into - or at any rate from subscribing to - this scale of values. Recognize it I could not avoid doing — in the same way that one can recognize stinging nettles. Yet to this day I cannot help silently applying the criteria. Endorse them I never did. ‘Your mater does the cooking, doesn't she, Adams?' asked a thirteen-year-old who was with me in the top form at Horris Hill. When I replied that that was so, he turned away with a snigger.

There were really two criteria. Speech, obviously: this had to conform to the southern upper middle-class norm, although a slight admixture of Scotch or Irish was acceptable in boys who might come from those parts. But clothes were almost as important. These had to be ‘right'. For example, to wear a school cap in the holidays was really bad form, and I well recall the embarrassment and distaste made plain to me on this account when I once ran into two Horris Hill boys at Newbury races. To be convicted of acting like a rustic was virtually a
moral
condemnation. Indeed, it was stronger than several sorts of real moral condemnation. A single act, showing that someone had been a bully or a sneak, would be roundly condemned but fairly soon forgotten; yet to be a rustic would have been an ineradicable stigma. I say ‘would have been' because I can't remember anyone at Horris Hill who actually
was
a rustic. (I expect Mr Stow saw to that.) This outlook didn't, however, rule out becoming friendly with the boot-boy, the drill corporal or the school carpenter. They were ‘jolly decent rustics': i.e., they recognized the social distinction.

The other main ingredient of our society that I remember is, I reckon, universal among little boys at all social levels, never has changed and never will. In adult society, people commonly avoid contradiction, contention and argument, and refrain from correcting others. Boys aged nine to thirteen are unremittingly contumacious, contradictory and condemnatory, for ever squabbling, bandying words, picking bones and setting each other to rights. There had been very little of this at Miss Luker's. At Horris Hill it was incessant. I got to know the gentler, milder boys - Tim Reynolds, George Glossop, Tony Pawson - who didn't go in for dropping on everyone for any little thing, and made friends of them. But since you had to live in school society as a whole, nothing could keep you entirely out of the way of the sharp-tongued and the captious. On this account alone, prep. school life is something one can feel happy to have outgrown. I have noticed that when one does occasionally run into old Horris Hill boys out of that generation - about 1927 to 1934 - they are not usually particularly forthcoming with happy memories.

My greatest comfort and pleasure during this time continued to lie with books. There was a reasonable amount of leisure in which you could read, especially on Sundays, which, in accordance with the system, were days of ‘rest', i.e., inactivity. But over and above this, I devised a crafty scheme for reading during evening prep. One of the books with which we were issued was a very good verse anthology. I can't remember what it was called, but I wish I still had it. You could add this to the Latin grammar, maths, book and so on which you were taking from your locker to your desk for prep. Unless the invigilating master happened to be your own form master (and the odds were against it), he wouldn't know but what you had some verse to read or learn as part of your prep. With a bit of effort you could get the hour's prep. done in three-quarters of an hour, which left fifteen minutes for reading the verse book. This was really supportive, a true escape.

‘O, young Lochinvar is come out of the West.

In all the wide border his steed was the best …'

‘Whenever the moon and stars are set,

Whenever the wind is high …'

‘Hamelin town's in Brunswick,

By famous Hanover city.

The river Weser, deep and wide …'

‘William Dewey, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough …'

Oddly, I became fond of the few Hardy poems in the book - ‘This is the weather the cuckoo likes', ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse', ‘Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock'. I knew nothing, of course, of the autobiographical and personal background to ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse', but I grasped clearly enough that the writer had had some marvellous, transcendental experience; and that was sufficient. Hardy's standing as a fine poet needs no boost from me, but I think it lights up, as it were, a further corner of his genius that he made this direct appeal to a ten-year-old who didn't even know who he was or anything about him.

My greatest discovery at this time - the one which added a new dimension to awareness - was Walter de la Mare. I found in the school library a hardback copy (paperbacks hadn't been invented) of
The Three Mulla-Mulgars,
with the two coloured illustrations by E. A. Monsell. This was, in the event, to turn out to be one of the most important influences on my whole life, though of course I could have had no inkling of that at the time. I became entirely rapt, lost in the book. It seemed more real to me than my surroundings. There were no other books: this was the only real book. I was Nod in the snow, puny but nevertheless possessed of some strange, numinous power. Beyond the boring outward world this other, valid world of the imagination really existed; a remote, dangerous place, with its own animals, trees and plants, where all the inhabitants were animals (except Andy Battle, of course, and he, too, was remote; a shipwrecked sailor.