Aside from its prison-like aspect (for us boarders at least), Sandford Park School in retrospect has an air of music hall and high farce for me. Of course, remembering those old British POW Colditz movies and the prisoners’ desperately jolly stage shows, this is appropriate. The teachers at Sandford Park, as much as the boys, sometimes took major roles in these theatricals. Some of them, no doubt, like us, were in fear of Dudgeon. And I imagine that, apart from the several genuine eccentrics, these teachers sometimes clowned around or behaved oddly whenever Dudgeon wasn’t about as a release from his all-seeing beady eye, his endless diktats and prohibitions. Fear finds a ready release in farce.
So when in a benevolent mood I look back on the place, the bizarre personalities and antics of some of the staff come first to mind, overlaying the pain. Like an old music hall playbill I see the various star turns: Froggy Bertin, the small, portly caricature of a French teacher, a Belgian refugee from the Great War who had stayed on in Dublin, a near replica of Monsieur Poirot indeed; Furness, the lanky Northerner, who did Maths; Cookman, one of the idealistic young housemasters from Wexford; Len Horan, the very decent, tall, muscular and fiercely moustachioed Irish teacher and rugby coach who had once played prop forward for Ireland; and Peter Allt, Yeats scholar and my grandfather’s literary friend who had unaccountably come to teach junior English. Unaccountably, since he was a brilliant academic, had taken a First at Trinity College, had a Lectureship there in French and English and among many more original and imaginative academic gifts could apparently quote from memory every poem that Yeats had ever published – and the ones he hadn’t.
Allt came into the category of genuine eccentric. My first experience of him was in the fourth form, in the big assembly hall, the old ballroom with its minstrels’ gallery to one side where discarded school books were stored. Allt was taking us for poetry, and we’d had to memorize Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’. He went up the stairs to the gallery, lay flat out on his back among the old books, and one by one, down below, we had to quote the poem from memory a verse each. And each time that any of us forgot a word or a line a book would fly down, tossed willy-nilly by Allt from his recumbent position, hitting this boy or that or flying off the far wall, a saturation bombing raid that went on for most of class till the floor below was littered with copies of Kennedy’s Latin Grammar and Durrell & Fawdry’s Mathematics. I can remember Tennyson’s poem almost in its entirety to this day.
But this aerial sport was only an entr’acte to Allt’s subsequent floor shows. Later on that winter term we had a grammar class. I’ve mentioned the tall, red-hot, cast-iron stove at one end of the hall. Allt on this occasion put it to educational use. There was a boy called O’Grady in our class, an owlish innocent swot, with pimples and spring-wired specs that clipped on behind his ears, a boarder from County Cork with a shock of black hair that would never lie down so that he greased it heavily with Brylcreem every morning – a natural victim in short, who fell foul of Allt that day in the matter of some grammatical construction. Allt wore a grubby tattered black gown, one arm of which he had tied into a hard knot.
‘That is not the answer, O’Grady,’ he said ominously. He then proceeded to whack the desk in front of the boy with the knotted sleeve. Whack! Whack! ‘The answer, O’Grady is …?’ No reply. O’Grady was stunned. ‘Come, O’Grady, perhaps we may tease the answer out of you in some other manner. Come.’ Bringing a chair with him, he beckoned O’Grady up to the stove. ‘Stand on that chair, O’Grady, and take your spectacles off.’ O’Grady did as he was told. Allt opened the top of the roaring stove, and taking O’Grady’s head started to push it down towards the fiery opening. ‘The mood we were curious about, O’Grady, was the …?’ ‘Please Sir!’ O’Grady was petrified now. And then there was the smell, a burning perfumed smell – it was the Brylcreem on O’Grady’s mop of hair, beginning to warm and singe. ‘The mood, O’Grady?’ ‘Please Sir! It was the pluperfect.’ ‘It was not the pluperfect.’ The head was pushed a little closer. O’Grady started to yelp out answers any old how. ‘It was the past tense!’ ‘No.’ ‘It was the future indicative!’ ‘No.’ ‘It was the past perfect!’ ‘No.’ The head getting closer to the fiery furnace. ‘It was the subjunctive, Sir!’
Allt pulled back O’Grady’s head. ‘It was indeed, O’Grady. Sit down.’ O’Grady descended, mopped his brow and sat down. Allt glared at the rest of us. ‘The subjunctive. I suggest you don’t forget it.’
These days, of course, Allt would have been arrested. But then these days most pupils don’t know any grammar. What Allt, with his academic brilliance, was doing at a less than third-rate school, where he stayed for a year, I’ve no idea. Perhaps he needed the money. Many people did in Ireland in those days, and teaching jobs in the few Protestant schools were scarce. In any case he went on to Cambridge, where earlier my grandfather had introduced him to the Yeats scholar T. R. Henn, who appointed him Senior Research Student at St Catherine’s College. Here Allt worked for several years on the great Variorum Edition of Yeats’s poetry, and, in 1954, absentmindedly, he stepped off the wrong side of a London suburban electric train, onto the live rail where, more than the hapless O’Grady, he frizzled.
It was a tragic end for Allt. Yet I have to see him as part of the jollier times at Sandford Park, these lighter incidents (though O’Grady would not have seen it that way), so as not to harp on the background terrors. I see a disconnected medley of such bizarre moments, like clips from a farcehorror movie that was never released.
Froggy Bertin, moving gently up and down, warming his tummy and privates on the central radiator in one of the garden classrooms, while reciting verbs: ‘j’ai, tu es, il a …’ ‘Ha! Ha!’ from a tease in the back of the class. ‘Zat boy will take fifty lines: “I must not make zee monkey out of zee French teacher.”’
Mr Furness, the tall, somehow mysterious, crinkly-haired Maths teacher from Belfast (there was a rumour that he’d had some unfortunate experience with a woman – or women!), getting in a terrible bate and clipping me over the ear one evening when I was playing ‘Oh Rose I love you!’ on the assembly hall piano. ‘Why, Sir? There’s nothing wrong with the song.’ ‘It’s a dirty song, Hone. That’s why.’ (I didn’t learn why until later when Wilshire, an older, knowing day boy, told a group of us round the stove the dirty version of it: ‘Oh, Rose, I love you, won’t you let me come and have a screw?’) Lots of prurient sniggering, before Wilshire turns to me. ‘Go away, Hone, you’re too young for this sort of talk. Move off.’
Mr Cookman, the genial young housemaster from Enniscorthy, testing the new pulley-and-sling fire escape from the top dorm window; the other part-time housemaster, Mr Elliot from Sussex, forever studying medicine in Trinity, and all us boarders, looking up expectantly. Cookman puts the canvas sling under his arms, gingerly pushes himself out the window, lets go, and falls like a stone. He hits the ground hard, lying prostrate. It looks like he’s broken his leg, or at least twisted his ankle. We hope. In some pain certainly. We are all agog, doing nothing. Mr Elliot moves forward, giving medical succour to Cookman, gently feeling his ankle. ‘Get Matron’, he says. ‘Matron’s out, Sir. She’s gone to the pictures.’ ‘Can we go to the pictures, Sir? Tonight at the Sandford cinema? They’re showing a very educational film, The Blue Lagoon, about fishes and things in the south seas.’ Mr Elliot looks up. ‘I’m not quite the fool you think me, Mather. Fishes and things … here, help me with Mr Cookman.’ Half a dozen of us rush forward now, helping Mr Cookman up, carrying him indoors. And Mr Elliot breaks into song, while we struggle along, Cookman squeezed uncomfortably amongst us like a side of beef. ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow! For he’s a jolly good fellow … and so say all of us! And so say all of us!’ We all join in, a loud chorus, all of us happy now, with the exception of Mr Cookman, no doubt.
Lugging Cookman up the stairs to where he had his room next to our dorm on the top floor, another dream-like clip comes to mind. The dorm was a long room with six iron beds running along either side, and another curtained-off bed for the dorm captain at the end, and a big cupboard against the far wall where we kept our clothes. And in it, since we now went to Cubs at Sandford Church Hall along the road, were our Cubs outfits: the cap, scarf, toggle, green pullover with its badges of merit, short trousers, long woolly socks with the penanted garters and so on. There was a boy called Thompson in the bed opposite me, at the other end of the room by the window, a small boy, new to the school, who spoke hardly at all. That his parents were out east, his father a rubber planter in Malaya, was among the few facts we’d managed to get out of him. I woke one night and, with the moonlight from the badly-curtained window, I saw the small figure of Thompson making a slow and stately progress down the centre of the dorm between the beds. I supposed he was going to the lavatories, or that he was sleepwalking. But then I saw that he was completely dressed in his Cubs outfit. I got up and whispered to him, ‘It’s not Cubs night, Thompson. Where are you going?’ ‘Back to Malaya,’ he said in a sensible voice. ‘I got my pathfinder’s badge last week, you see.’ ‘Don’t be stupid, Thompson, Malaya is thousands of miles away. Get back into bed before someone hears us.’
Someone did hear us, the dorm captain, out of bed and on his feet now. ‘What are you two doing? Get back into bed at once.’ And then Thompson shrieked out, ‘No, I can’t! You see I’m going home to Malaya. I am! I am!’ he yelled. And then the whole dorm was awake, with Mr Elliot in the room and the lights on. Sensation! Subdued chatter. ‘Thompson’s going back home to Malaya!’ ‘He’s mad!’ ‘How’s he going to get there?’ ‘He’ll fly BOAC, from Heathrow, in one of their new Stratocruisers.’ ‘No, he’s going to walk, it’ll take him months, and he’ll have to learn to walk on water.’
‘Shut up all of you.’ Mr Elliot led Thompson out of the dorm. He brought him downstairs to Matron, we heard later, where the boy spent the rest of the night in her room. Next day Thompson wasn’t there. He’d left the school. Walking on water all the way back to Malaya! What a laugh, we thought. Thompson was a great joke for all of us over the next week. I didn’t see then, as I see now, that Thompson’s shrieks for home were mine as well. But I kept my mouth shut, hated the Cubs evenings, and never got a pathfinder badge to find my way home with.
And another vivid clip – Len Horan, the kind-hearted, hugely muscular Irish teacher with the glary eyes, bristling dark eyebrows and fierce moustache, at the high desk during second prep in the heavy sighing silence one evening. He’s seen something and is stalking a boy at a back desk, light and soundless on his feet. The fat boy Louis Watson, with his head down, is fiddling with something in his lap. Horan pounces on him. We all turn. It’s nothing more than a handkerchief in Watson’s lap, which he’s been screwing round in his hands. I wasn’t far away from him. I see his face, all stained with tears when he looks up.
There were always tears before bedtime at Sandford Park.
Few things saved me from the awfulness of the school. One was sports, which I became good at – cricket, rugby, tennis, table tennis, and particularly athletics, under the enthusiastic tutelage of Len Horan: the sprints, high and long jump and especially the seven-pound shot. Horan had been an Irish champion at the senior, sixteen-pound level in the shot and he showed me how to do it in a far corner of the park – how, crouching right down, with one’s back almost to the field in front, one had to skip across the circle at great speed, then let fly by straightening up, torso, arm and wrist moving one after the other at an ever greater speed, in one flowing movement, which ended in my hopping about on one foot, at the front edge of the circle, watching the little cannonball disappear over the horizon. Well, not quite. But I became pretty good at the shot and athletics generally, winning more or less everything at the annual school sports, and the same with cricket.
This success gave me some immunity from the bullying and dismissive attitude of the other boys. The all-knowing, derisive, wiseacre Wilshire, for example, who did no sports at all, always carried a letter from his mother saying he had asthma or flat feet or something. But my athletic gifts put me out of his reach and on a level with older boys in the senior sports teams.
To be good at sports was, and still is, a way out of the pain and boredom of school, and any failure at school learning. And a way of being admired, by the other boys and some of the teachers. I was grudgingly admired – grudgingly because I always felt at Sandford Park, and later when I went to St Columba’s College, the public school up in the Dublin mountains, that this admiration for my sporting prowess was mixed as much with cynical surprise – for it became well known in both schools, by boys and masters, that I was a wicked and lazy lot in most other ways. Smoking behind the bicycle shed or the cricket pavilion, being caught out of bounds intent on a bit of shoplifting down Ranelagh Road, skiving off this and that and doing little or no work, and being beaten regularly for all these things.
So there was ironic comment that in the field of sports I was tops. This didn’t add up for the authorities. I think it seemed unfair to them that, being clearly a bad lot, I should win those most admired things in schools of the time: all the glittering sports prizes. If you were bad, then you should be bad at everything. And if you were well behaved, then you should be good at everything. That was the natural order of school expectations in those days. I was an insult to that order. This annoyed the authorities. And pleased me.
I was bad at schoolwork, except in writing English and History essays and doing elaborately coloured geography maps. Indeed in English I once won the form prize in a short story competition set by a new English master, the delicate, wispy-voiced, literary-minded Mr Sheehan. But this was largely achieved through prior advice from some of the other more knowing boys, who must have recognized my gifts as a fantasist long before I did, and encouraged me to write reams of fiction, much more than was asked for, about a mad schoolboy who does all sorts of mad things, including eating a mound of marshmallows and then nearly drowning in a lake of liquid chocolate. I wrote at such length simply because Mr Sheehan had told us that whoever won the prize would read his story out in the next class. And of course, as we saw, the longer the story lasted the less difficult grammar work would have to be done that day. And we all remembered the near immolation of O’Grady in his failure to identify the subjunctive, so that my story, when I came to read it out, lasted the whole fifty minutes of class. The boys cheered me at the end – for being let off parsing and analysis, not for the story, I’m sure.
Dudgeon, in due and painful course, disappeared from Sandford Park, before my five years of incarceration there ended. Did he resign, or was he removed by the Governors? Years later someone told me that he’d become headmaster at a public school in England. Perhaps in those days there were still some public schools where Dudgeon’s subtle tortures and open brutality would have been welcomed.
In any case Sandford Park, by 1949, was in a poor way. And it was at that moment, aged twelve, that I should have been removed from it, and sent somewhere else. I wasn’t. Meanwhile the Governors, deciding to cut their losses, put the lease on Sandford Park up for sale. It was bought by a Major Wormell, middle aged and recently retired from the British-Indian army. The Major was in retreat from the Labour government to Ireland perhaps, as many British were at that time; he probably bought the lease for a song, given its few pupils and very doubtful reputation. And now another complete transformation occurred, the school changing character from Dudgeon’s sadist bunker to British military circus.
Major Wormell – the Mad Major as we soon dubbed him – was tall and of great girth, with crinkly brown hair parted severely in the middle. Yet his face was relatively small and he had curious, slanty eyes – a monkey face that jerked alarmingly every few minutes, a nervous tic (the result of an old war wound) accompanied by a grimace, giving him the air of a huge puppet on strings being badly handled. An impression emphasized by the quick tiny steps he took, arms swinging, as if heading a parade of sepoys in Chandrigar. He walked like this with particular speed, we soon noticed, after the day boys had gone home at three o’clock, down the laurel drive, to McCaulay’s public house near the school gates.
He had a younger, leggy, wasp-waisted, blonde and bosomy wife, a woman the like of whom we had not seen before – a Betty Grable gorgeously swum into our ken. We eyed her with the confusions of half-awakened sexual greed whenever she was on parade, which was rarely since she kept to herself in the new head’s quarters, a bedroom made over from Matron’s old room, and in the ornately gilded drawing-room next door. The previous matron had been dispensed with, since there were now only about six boarders, and Mrs Wormell was to take over her matronly duties. We all hoped to be ill, so as to test what we thought would surely be her stimulating ministrations. Unfortunately I was never ill.
The Major, with the end of Empire in India, was clearly keen to continue things in the imperial manner at Sandford Park. Indeed he must have thought the Republic still part of the Empire. He found a Union Jack in the attic and brandished it about of a summer evening, well oiled from sessions at McCaulay’s, when he would take we few boarders for military drill in the old ballroom together with a new teacher, a nice but rather ineffectual ex-army friend of his, a Captain Villiers. The two of them, among other military drills, put us through the slow march of one of the Guards regiments the last few inches of each step being slid forward, airborne, just before touching the ground. By now there were only four boarders, myself and the two small Brownlee brothers and another bigger boy called Bowden. Up and down we went, the length of the ballroom, between the desks, a ragged, out-of-step troop. I see the Mad Major now, annoyed with our progress, showing us how to do the Slow March – a huge figure, light but unsteady on his feet, swaying slightly on one leg before the touch down with the other, Captain Villiers with the Union Jack rampant behind him.
The following year, with the boarders now reduced to three and the day boys to about thirty, the Major must clearly have seen that he would have to take dramatic steps to increase the school rolls or go bust. And what better way to this end than by improving the recreational facilities? So with the help of potent sundowners in McCaulay’s and the large supply of bottled lager that he kept in the little pantry next to his study, he hit upon a splendid scheme: since there was no swimming pool, he would drain the pleasantly exotic garden pond and turn it into a pool. But discovering that this would be both expensive and impractical, he reduced his ambitions: he would convert one end of the pond, by the little covered boat house. Or rather the boys would, boarders first thing before breakfast (with the promise of an extra fried egg) and day boys in their lunch hour.
The pond was drained and then in a ham-fisted and literally sloppy way, over months of the spring term, with shovels and wheelbarrows, the mud was lifted from the boathouse end; with little effect, for overnight the squelchy liquid from the rest of the pond would seep across into the cleared area and we had to begin all over again, emerging each morning for our extra fried egg covered in green slime. The day boys made themselves scarce over lunchtime, pleading dentists’ or doctors’ appointments. Progress was slow. Eventually, however, with a sort of wooden coffer dam to keep the squelch away, one end was cleared, cement and a concrete mixer were obtained, and, with the Major himself now in daily charge, we started to concrete the bottom and replace the coffer dam with a brick wall halfway along the pond.
The Major got a plumb line and large wooden set squares from the carpentry shop and gave us an inspiring talk about how he’d been in charge of Army Engineers out in India, constructing rope and pontoon bridges over roaring torrents and great rivers; and how, by comparison, this building work would be easy. It wasn’t. With water seepage from beneath, the concrete on the bottom failed to set, the unsteady, half-built brick wall tended to collapse overnight, and the Major got into mighty tizzies, his neck twitch going into overdrive as he shouted commands like an overblown pyramid slave master. ‘Brownlee! Have you no idea how to set a brick on a brick wall straight?’ – Brownlee up to his ankles in damp, unset concrete at that moment.
I will give the Major one thing – he was persistent. The pool was completed and very slowly filled with water from a number of leaking, thrashing garden hoses, with which we had good fun, deluging each other when the Major was taking ‘refreshments’ in his pantry. We swam in the pool only half a dozen times, for there was a distinct problem in attempting any full immersion. Owing to various miscalculations the pool was only about two feet deep or three at the most, so that any proper swimming was impossible. And it soon emerged that the pool had several other basic faults: there was no water inlet, no outlet back into the main pond and no chlorine cleaning, so that soon the water became stagnant and slimy, peesmelly and very uninviting.
The pool and swimming lessons were tactfully forgotten and the Major set his mind to another means of increasing the school rolls – by improving our academic work, in face of the Irish Ministry of Education’s Intermediate exams which were to take place the following summer. The Major knew that in one particular subject we (apart from Wilshire) were real dunderheads: Latin, in which we were required to get at least a pass mark of over forty per cent or fail the exam, and find our future careers severely blighted. Most of us were likely, and me especially, to get about ten per cent in Latin, if that.
Faced with this problem the Major pulled off what proved to be an academic masterstroke: he employed as Latin teacher a Mr Carpenter, a small, mild-mannered, apologetic, clerkish gent who always wore a long black overcoat, even in class, and always carried a briefcase. A caricature of a civil servant. In fact this was just what he had been, having spent a previous career with the Ministry of Education in Dublin. The Major’s unintended masterstroke (or was it intended?) was based on the fact, as I learnt later, that Mr Carpenter had filled his days at the Ministry in the department that dealt with the setting of public exam papers – in his case, as it conveniently happened, with the setting of the Latin papers. We half-dozen boys in the Intermediate year knew nothing of this at the time, of course. And Mr Carpenter, of course, made no mention of his previous career at the Ministry.
We continued to struggle thought the Latin syllabus – ‘Amo, amas, amat’, endless sentences from Latin into English and vice-versa, together with Virgil’s Aeneid and Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Even with the forbidden cribs we had for the Aeneid and the Gallic Wars all this was pretty well Greek to most of us.
The June week of the Intermediate exam approached, to be taken at another school in the suburbs. Latin was the first exam. Someone, Wilshire very probably, had told me that if I only managed to put my name, school and date at the top of my exam paper I would at least get two marks out of a hundred, since the authorities were keen never to give a zero mark. I expected to get two marks.
There was a tradition at Sandford Park that the subject master gave us a final revision class on the night before the exam, in one of the garden classrooms. Mr Carpenter brought us all together on that bright summer evening. I remember the fluttery golden light on the old apple and pear trees, for this part of the grounds had been an orchard. What did failure in the Latin exam matter? I’d failed at most subjects in Sandford Park. I gazed at the trees from the window, the wind stirring the leaves, dreaming. Mr Carpenter politely interrupted my reverie.
‘Hone, you might care to pay attention – all of you. I’m going to give you, on the board, a mock outline of the sort of Latin exam you may expect tomorrow. Six sentences English into Latin, six Latin into English.’ This he proceeded to do on the blackboard – translating each sentence into the appropriate language. We started to take notes of his translations. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No writing down. Just memorize these translations.’
Now though some of us realized that something important was happening, we weren’t sure what. ‘Memorize these sentence translations carefully.’ Mr Carpenter went on in his mild, self-deprecating way. ‘Take a good look at them,’ he said, ‘while I’m outside for a moment.’ He left the classroom for a cigarette. And now we realized what was happening. Mr Carpenter had been giving us part of the Latin paper for tomorrow morning. We said nothing, of course, when he came back and rubbed all the sentences off the blackboard. At the end the class he said, ‘Oh, and by the way, boys, take a good look at the first paragraph of Chapter Seven in the Aeneid and the same with the third paragraph of Chapter Two of the Gallic Wars. We knew, of course, that we could get the English translations of these paragraphs from our cribs. ‘Good luck tomorrow, boys!’ Mr Carpenter said in as bright a manner as he could ever muster, and left the classroom with his briefcase.
The day boys rushed home to consult their cribs for a session of intense memory work. And I did the same, back in the boys’ common room, being the only boarder doing the exam, for now there were only three boarders, me and the two small Brownlee brothers. But there was a problem. One of our class, a day boy, a genial friend of mine, Charlie Culley, had been absent from the revision class. I would have to telephone him and at least give him the chapter numbers and paragraphs of the two set books for the exam. Here was another problem. The only telephone in the school was in the Major’s study. Since it was now around nine o’clock I was pretty certain he’d be engaged with his bosomy wife, on the other side of the hall in her gilded boudoir, downing whiskey sodas prior to other stimulations.
I was right. There was no light or sound from the study. The study had two doors, one leading in from the hall and a side door leading out to the Major’s private drinks pantry and the back stairs. I crept into his study by the side door and phoned Charlie, giving him the chapter and paragraph details. At the end of transferring my vital information, I heard the Major’s footsteps coming across the hall, so I bolted out the side door of the study, making for the back stairs. But the Major was coming towards me, along the back corridor. I was standing in the doorway of his forbidden private pantry. All hell broke loose. He was well on, eight parts cut and sweating, his nervous neck tic in sudden ominous movement. ‘So, Hone, caught in the act getting at my drinks! You blackguard!’ He dragged me into his study, got the cane out in an instant, and whacked me half a dozen times. Whack! Whack! Whack! Then he marched me up to the top dorm where the two junior Brownlee brothers were getting ready for bed. ‘You two,’ he shouted. ‘I want you to keep Hone under house arrest until he goes to the exams tomorrow morning. Close arrest’, he added. ‘Yes, Sir!’ ‘Yes, Sir!’ they said, terrified. Since the Brownlee brothers were small and I was quite the hulking athletic brute, this idea of their managing to keep me under house arrest seemed unlikely if I decided to make a break for it. I didn’t. I wrote down and memorized as much as I could of the Latin/English sentences and the two set book passages, and went to the Latin exam next morning.
Sure enough the Latin paper was exactly as Mr Carpenter had outlined it, and sitting on my sore backside I answered all the questions with relative ease. When the results came out I had failed in most subjects – but in Latin I passed with honours, with something just over 60 per cent. Wilshire got 96 per cent, having had to make mistakes, he told us later, not to get 100 per cent, which would have been suspicious. I thought then how lucky it was that I’d been caught by the Major next to his drinks pantry, his thinking I was thieving his lager. Had he caught me in his study on the telephone he would have wanted to know who I was phoning – and why. And the truth of Mr Carpenter’s tactful help might have emerged.
In any case I see that Mr Carpenter probably gave us the Latin paper in advance in order to make sure that we would all pass the exam, so that the school rolls and reputation might be increased and he would keep his job at Sandford Park. Full-time Latin school-teaching in Dublin, in a Protestant school, was likely hard come by then. Like Peter Allt, Mr Carpenter was simply keeping the wolf from the door. ‘All Gaul is quartered equally in three parts’ – what I remember is the old chestnut about how the first sentence of the Gallic Wars went, though as far as the Irish Examination Board was concerned I ended up being reasonably good at Latin.
But thinking of that Latin exam now, of Mr Carpenter and the Major, I see another side to things – some understanding of all their mad and dishonest efforts: the Major valiantly trying to keep the school going, pouring himself another chota peg in the gilded boudoir, dreaming of creating a great British prep school in republican Dublin; Mr Carpenter, in some small, lace-curtained suburban villa, equally brave in his very risky academic deception, simply trying to make up on his overdue mortgage payments.
Finally, I imagine the Major dying penny-pinched in a faded south coast hotel, with a last dream of Empire, and loyal sepoys marching to Kabul, his head resting happily on what I hope were those still-bouncy bosoms of his wife. And Mr Carpenter in his suburban villa likewise, expiring carefully, arms crossed on his chest in his single bed, one of his old students reading Tacitus to him – ‘Fortune favoured him, in the opportune moment of his death’ – as indeed it had, his having just the week before paid off his mortgage. These things matter, a good or bad death – not crazy swimming pools and not deceptions over exams. Not even my great and unexpected success in that Latin exam. (I wonder if I might have got into Balliol?)
Neither the Major nor Mr Carpenter did us boys any real harm at Sandford Park. Nor did the other teachers with their sometimes bizarre behaviour, which probably came as a result of their having to take on the-atrical roles, in order to endure the dull process, year in and out, of teaching dim and unwilling boys. The teachers, like the boys, had to put on the motley now and then to survive.
So there was benefit in these comedies for us boys, a touch of extra-curricular drama from the teachers, giving us, or me at least, an early experience of the marvellous quirks of human nature, more valuable and lasting than the messages in Caesar’s Gallic Wars: a first sense of the world’s strange foolishness and excitements – from Froggy Bertin and ‘Dirty Songs’ Furness, from the fiercely kind Len Horan, wispy Mr Sheehan keen on Katherine Mansfield and Peter Allt of the lofty Yeatsian surmise, from jovial young Mr Cookman and the chronic medic Mr Elliot. And I think of Bull Cordner, too, when I first came to Sandford Park, looking out on the playing field at the house cricket match – ‘Ah, the boys in their whites. Their summer whites …’
The Bull is a spectator now, I hope, in a deck chair, at the edge of some Elysian cricket field, watching an endless game, with the poet Francis Thompson, the two of them reunited with the great cricketing heroes of their youth:
For the field is full of shadows as I near the
Shadowy coast.
And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of
A ghost.
And I look through my tears on a soundless-
clapping host,
As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,
To and fro –
O my Hornby and my Barlow long ago!
Now those great players are no longer ghosts for the Bull. He’s with Hornby and Barlow, watching them hit sixes for eternity. Goodbye, Mr Chips to them all. It was only Dudgeon who caused us real harm at Sandford Park. I hope he’s in some fiery scholastic underworld now, writhing in pain, with all the other sadistic headmasters and teachers.
As to Sandford Park and the Major, unfortunately our academic success in Latin didn’t help him. He was gone by the next term, and I was gone at last from the painful and bizarre school as well. Fresh woods and pastures new. There were other pastures grazed, though, upon during those Sandford Park years, at home in Maidenhall and in Dublin.