The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (24 page)

"Angel!". . .

"Williamson!". . .

"Gaunt!". . .

"Trice!"
. . .

In this manner, six boys selected at
Mr
Pople's
whim were dispatched to the lavatories to do their
duty. Nobody asked them if they might or might not be ready to move their
bowels at seven-thirty in the morning before breakfast. They were simply
ordered to do so. But we considered it a great privilege to be chosen because
it meant that during the headmaster's inspection we would be sitting safely out
of reach in blessed privacy.

In due course, the headmaster would emerge from his private quarters and take
over from
Mr
Pople
. He
walked slowly down one side of the corridor, inspecting each boy with the
utmost care, strapping his wristwatch on to his wrist as he went along. The
morning inspection was an unnerving experience. Every one of us was terrified
of the two sharp brown eyes under their bushy eyebrows as they
travelled
slowly up and down the length of one's body.

"Go away and brush your hair properly. And don't let it happen again or
you'll be sorry."

"Let me see your hands. You have ink on them. Why didn't you wash it off
last night?"

"Your tie is crooked, boy. Fall out and tie it again. And do it properly
this time."

"I can see mud on that shoe. Didn't I have to talk to you about that last
week? Come and see me in my study after breakfast."

And so it went on, the ghastly early-morning inspection. And by the end of it
all, when the headmaster had gone away and
Mr
Pople
started marching us into the dining-room by forms,
many of us had lost our appetites for the lumpy porridge that was to come.

I have still got all my school reports from those days more than fifty years
ago, and I've gone through them one by one, trying to discover a hint of
promise for a future fiction writer. The subject to look at was obviously
English Composition. But all my prep-school reports under this heading were
flat and non-committal, excepting one. The one that took my eye was dated
Christmas Term, 1928. I was then twelve, and my English teacher was
Mr
Victor
Corrado
. I remember him
vividly, a tall, handsome athlete with black wavy hair and a Roman nose (who
one night later on eloped with the matron, Miss Davis, and we never saw either
of them again). Anyway, it so happened that
Mr
Corrado
took us in boxing as well as in English
Composition, and in this particular report it said under English, "See his
report on boxing. Precisely the same remarks apply." So we look under
Boxing, and there it says, "Too slow and ponderous. His punches are not
well-timed and are easily seen coming."

But just once a week at this school, every Saturday morning, every beautiful
and blessed Saturday morning, all the shivering horrors would disappear and for
two glorious hours I would experience something that came very close to
ecstasy.

Unfortunately, this did not happen until one was ten years old.
But no matter.
Let me try to tell you what it was.

At exactly ten-thirty on Saturday mornings,
Mr
Pople's
infernal bell would go
clangetty
-clang-clang.
This was a signal for the following to take place:

First, all boys of nine and under (about seventy all told) would proceed at
once to the large outdoor asphalt playground behind the main building. Standing
on the playground with legs apart and arms folded across her mountainous bosom
was Miss Davis, the matron. If it was raining, the boys were expected to arrive
in raincoats. If snowing or blowing a blizzard, then it was coats and scarves.
And school caps, of course -- grey with a red badge on the front -- had always
to be worn. But no Act of God, neither tornado nor hurricane nor volcanic
eruption was ever allowed to stop those ghastly two-hour Saturday morning walks
that the seven-, eight- and nine-year-old little boys had to take along the
windy esplanades of Weston-super-Mare on Saturday mornings. They walked in
crocodile formation, two by two, with Miss Davis striding alongside in tweed
skirt and
woollen
stockings and a felt hat that must
surely have been nibbled by rats.

The other thing that happened when
Mr
Pople's
bell rang out on Saturday mornings was that the
rest of the boys, all those of ten and over (about one hundred all told) would
go immediately to the main Assembly Hall and sit down. A junior master called
S. K.
Jopp
would then poke his head around the door
and shout at us with such ferocity that specks of spit would fly from his mouth
like bullets and splash against the window panes across the room. "All
right!" he shouted. "No talking! No moving! Eyes front and hands on
desks!" Then out he would pop again.

We sat still and waited. We were waiting for the lovely time we knew would be
coming soon. Outside in the driveway we heard the motor-cars being started up.
All were ancient. All had to be cranked by hand.
(The year,
don't forget, was around 1927/28.)
This was a Saturday morning ritual.
There were five cars in all, and into them would pile the entire staff of
fourteen masters, including not only the headmaster himself but also the
purple-faced
Mr
Pople
. Then
off they would roar in a cloud of blue smoke and come to rest outside a pub
called, if I remember rightly, "The Bewhiskered Earl". There they
would remain until just before lunch, drinking pint after pint of strong brown
ale. And two and a half hours later, at one o'clock, we would watch them coming
back, walking very carefully into the dining-room for lunch, holding on to
things as they went.

So much for the masters.
But what of us, the great
mass of ten-, eleven- and twelve-year-olds left sitting in the Assembly Hall in
a school that was suddenly without a single adult in the entire place? We knew,
of course, exactly what was going to happen next. Within a minute of the
departure of the masters, we would hear the front door opening, and footsteps
outside, and then, with a flurry of loose clothes and jangling bracelets and
flying hair, a woman would burst into the room shouting, "Hello,
everybody! Cheer up! This isn't a burial service!" or words to that
effect. And this was
Mrs
O'Connor.

Blessed beautiful
Mrs
O'Connor with
her whacky clothes and her grey hair flying in all directions.
She was
about fifty years
old,
with a
horsey
face and long yellow teeth, but to us she was beautiful. She was not on the
staff. She was hired from somewhere in the town to come up on Saturday mornings
and be a sort of babysitter, to keep us quiet for two and a half hours while
the masters went off boozing at the pub.

But
Mrs
O'Connor was no baby-sitter. She was nothing
less than a great and gifted teacher, a scholar and a lover of English
Literature. Each of us was with her every Saturday morning for three years
(from the age of ten until we left the school) and during that time we spanned
the entire history of English Literature from A.D. 597 to the early nineteenth
century.

Newcomers to the class were given for keeps a slim blue book called simply
The Chronological Table,
and it
contained only six pages. Those six pages were filled with a very long list in
chronological order of all the great and not so great landmarks in English
Literature, together with their dates. Exactly one hundred of these were chosen
by
Mrs
O'Connor and we marked them in our books and
learned them by heart. Here are a few that I still remember:

A.D.
597 St Augustine lands in
Thanet
and brings Christianity to Britain

731
Bede's
Ecclesiastical History

1215 Signing of the Magna
Carta

1399
Langland's
Vision of Piers Plowman

1476
Caxton
sets up first printing
press at Westminster

1478 Chaucer's
Canterbury
Tales

1485
Malory's
Morte
d'Arthur

1590 Spenser's
Faerie
Queene

1623 First Folio of Shakespeare

1667
Milton's
Paradise Lost

1668 Dryden's
Essays

1678 Bunyan's
Pilgrim's
Progress

1711 Addison's
Spectator

1719 Defoe's
Robinson
Crusoe

1726 Swift's
Gulliver's
Travels

1733 Pope's
Essay on
Man

1755 Johnson's
Dictionary

1791
Boswell 's
Life of Johnson

1833 Carlyle's
Sartor
Resartus

1859 Darwin's
Origin of
Species

Mrs
O'Connor would then take each item in turn and
spend one entire Saturday morning of two and a half hours talking to us about
it. Thus, at the end of three years, with approximately thirty-six Saturdays in
each school year, she would have covered the one hundred items.

And what
marvellous
exciting fun it was! She had the
great teacher's knack of making everything she spoke about come alive to us in
that room. In two and a half hours, we grew to love
Langland
and his Piers Plowman. The next Saturday, it was Chaucer, and we loved him,
too. Even rather difficult fellows like Milton and Dryden and Pope all became
thrilling when
Mrs
O'Connor told us about their lives
and read parts of their work to us aloud. And the result of all this, for me at
any rate, was that by the age of thirteen I had become intensely aware of the
vast heritage of literature that had been built up in England over the
centuries. I also became an avid and insatiable reader of good writing.

Dear lovely
Mrs
O'Connor! Perhaps it was worth going
to that awful school simply to experience the joy of her Saturday mornings.

At thirteen I left prep school and was sent, again as a boarder, to one of our
famous British public schools. They are not, of course, public at all. They are
extremely private and expensive. Mine was called
Repton
,
in Derbyshire, and our headmaster at the time was the Reverend Geoffrey Fisher,
who later became Bishop of Chester, then Bishop of London, and finally
Archbishop of Canterbury. In his last job, he crowned Queen Elizabeth II in
Westminster Abbey.

The clothes we had to wear at this school made us look like assistants in a
funeral
parlour
. The jacket was black, with a cutaway
front and long tails hanging down behind that came below the backs of the
knees. The trousers were black with thin grey stripes. The shoes were black.
There was a black waistcoat with eleven buttons to do up every morning. The tie
was black. Then there was a stiff starched white butterfly collar and a white
shirt.

To top it all off, the final ludicrous touch was a straw hat that had to be
worn at all times out of doors except when playing games. And because the hats
got soggy in the rain, we carried umbrellas for bad weather.

You can imagine what I felt like in this fancy dress when my mother took me, at
the age of thirteen, to the train in London at the beginning of my first term.
She kissed me good-bye and off I went.

I naturally hoped that my long-suffering backside would be given a rest at my
new and more adult school, but it was not to be. The beatings at
Repton
were
more fierce
and more
frequent than anything I had yet experienced. And do not think for one moment
that the future Archbishop of Canterbury objected to these squalid exercises.
He rolled up his sleeves and joined in with gusto. His were the bad ones, the
really terrifying occasions. Some of the beatings administered by this Man of
God, this future Head of the Church of England, were very brutal. To my certain
knowledge he once had to produce a basin of water, a sponge and a towel so that
the victim could wash the blood away afterwards.

No joke, that.

Shades of the Spanish Inquisition.

But nastiest of all, I think, was the fact that prefects were allowed to beat
their fellow pupils. This was a daily occurrence. The big boys (aged 17 or 18)
would flog the smaller boys (aged 13, 14, 15) in a sadistic ceremony that took
place at night after you had gone up to the dormitory and got into your
pyjamas
.

"You're wanted down in the changing-room."

With heavy hands, you would put on your dressing-gown and slippers. Then you
would stumble downstairs and enter the large wooden-floored room where the
games clothes were hanging up around the walls. A single bare electric bulb
hung from the ceiling. A prefect, pompous but very dangerous, was waiting for
you in the centre of the room. In his hands, he held a long cane, and he was
usually flexing it back and forth as you came in.