At St Paul’s I became a Scout in order to avoid being drafted into the Officers’ Training Corps, the OTC, which would have meant wearing an insufferably itchy uniform that was blanket thick. As a Scout I learned to light a fire with one match and to use a felling axe without dismembering myself. On Saturdays we engaged in bloody night battles with other troops of Scouts in the swamps of Wimbledon Common. In the holidays we went camping in the beautiful parks of gentlemen’s country seats. Because I got on with Jews – I still do, I think they find my lack of subtlety restful – I was given command of a Jewish patrol. One of them, who was as prickly as a present-day Israeli, refused to wear Scout uniform and appeared at our open-air meetings wearing a double-breasted overcoat, a bowler hat and carrying a rolled umbrella. Another, who used to charge his mother half a crown to kiss him good night, was always loaded down with silver. On one occasion, when there was a danger of our losing one of the outdoor games known as ‘wide games’ (which necessitated covering large tracts of ground on foot) another member of my patrol whose family owned a huge limousine in which he used to arrive at wherever was the meeting place, summoned the chauffeur who was parked round the corner, and six Scouts whirred away in it to certain victory.
In the spring of 1936, when I was sixteen years old, my father announced that, as it appeared unlikely I would pass the School Certificate Examination (the then equivalent of O-levels), in mathematics, a subject in which it was obligatory to pass, he had decided to take me away from St Paul’s at the end of the summer term and ‘put me into business’. I did fail. I was sorry about this decision. I was good at English, History, even Divinity, and I had dreamed of reading History at Oxford.
Apart from an innate inability to cope with mathematics the only disadvantage I laboured under at St Paul’s, and being a Scout made not the slightest difference, was that I had a curious sense of humour which meant that if anything came up in class with a suggestion of double entendre it caused me to dissolve into hysterics, for which I was punished, sometimes quite severely. In other words I had a dirty mind.
For instance, on one occasion, when we were reading Scott’s Marmion aloud, it became obvious to myself and everyone else in the classroom that by the working of some hideously unfair natural process of selection it would fall to me to read a completely unreadable part of the romance in Canto Two, entitled ‘The Convent’, which concerned the blind Bishop of Lindisfarne. And you could have heard a pin drop when I got to my feet.
‘No hand was moved, no word was said
Till thus the Abbot’s doom was given.
Raising his sightless balls to heaven …’
was all I could manage before going off into peals of mad laughter and to be beaten by John Bell, the High Master, a hedonist who showed in as marked a way as possible in the circumstances where his sympathies lay by beating me as hard as anyone else sent to him for punishment, and then giving me a shilling. I have never forgiven Scott.
My childhood was at an end. I had no complaints. I had been an only child and what was certainly an excess of loving care and attention had always been lavished on me. I had found it difficult to excuse my parents’ visits to me in their motor car with Lewington at the wheel when I was away camping, something my fellows did not let me forget. It is true that I suffered from a sense of inferiority, an inability to be ‘good at figures’, as my father put it, and a marked reluctance even to attempt to row seriously and be chosen for the school eight and row at Henley, for which I had both the style and the physique, having learned to row before I learned to scoot a scooter. These were the only fields in which my father really wanted me to excel, fields in which I, too, would like to have excelled but somehow felt incapable of doing so. Thinking about them I felt like the man with the inferiority complex who is told by his consultant that he really is inferior. There was no one else I could blame. I was only sorry that I had disappointed my father. My mother didn’t care whether I excelled in them or not.
During eighteen months spent learning business methods, I survived several office purges of the kind that take place frequently in advertising agencies when they lose an important account. I survived them not because I was astute but simply because I was paid so little as ‘a learner’ that there was not much point in giving me the sack. However, when the agency lost an important breakfast cereal account, and when all my best friends went overboard with it, I decided that I too wanted to go overboard with them. I had had enough of learning business methods.
That August in 1938, with an international crisis building up in Europe over Czechoslovakia and the Germans mobilizing, I went on holiday to Salcombe in south Devon. Diving in Starehole Bay near Bolt Head, I saw what remained of the four-masted Finnish sailing barque Herzogin Cecilie of Mariehamn, which had crashed into the Ham Stone in April 1936 with a cargo of grain from Australia on board, eventually becoming a total loss. And on the way back to London, while changing trains at Newton Abbot, I wrote a letter to the owner, Gustav Erikson, in Mariehamn, asking him for a place in one of his grain ships.
To become an Erikson apprentice I had to be at least sixteen years of age (birth certificate required), of strong constitution (two doctors’ certificates), and of good moral character (one clergyman’s certificate, which he signed without setting eyes on me). If I died from natural causes, by falling from the rigging, or by being washed overboard, my father would get back a proportion of the £50 ($250) which he paid to make me an apprentice. I was also to be subject to Finnish law and custom. My wages were to be 150 Finmarks a month, at that time the equivalent of 50p ($2.50). Even the captain only received about 4000 Finmarks (£20 or $100).
On 16 September, at the height of the Munich crisis, the day after Chamberlain visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden and a week after the French had called up their reservists, by which time it was beginning to look as if it was not going to be a particularly good year to be at sea in an engineless sailing ship, my father received the following letter:
H. Clarkson and Company Limited
52 Bishopsgate,
London EC2.
15 September, 1938
George A. Newby, Esq.,
Messrs Lane and Newby,
and Mantle Manufacturers,
54, Great Marlborough Street,
London W1.
S/V Moshulu.
Dear Sir,
We now have a letter from Captain Gustav Erikson advising us that he wishes your son to join this vessel which is discharging at Belfast on the 26th September.
If you will now send us the £50 [$250] premium, we shall send you a contract for his service in this vessel …
As your boy will be arriving in Belfast in the early morning on the steamer from Heysham he will be able to go direct to the ship which is discharging her cargo in York Dock.
Yours truly,
For H. Clarkson and Co. Ltd.
A. S. Calder