Horris Hill was, and is today, an illustrious prep. school of high standing, a worthy peer of its old sports-field rivals the Dragons at Oxford. In situation it is not a true hill, the buildings, grounds and playing-fields covering a slightly raised, rather bare upland a mile and a half south of Newbury, which I imagine must once have formed part of the brackeny, birchy wasteland adjacent to the west.
The school was built and founded in 1888 by a certain Evans - the first headmaster. His son, Johnny Evans, was, in his day, something of a national figure; first as an England cricketer and then, during the Great War, as an intrepid escaper from German prisoner-of-war camps. Later, in collaboration with one Major Harrison, he wrote a book about his exploits, entitled The Escaping Club. He made, I believe, three or four escapes, of which only the last, of course, was entirely successful; that is, he got back to England. For one of his escapes he used a file which was sent to him in a cake baked in Horris Hill kitchen.
During the Second World War, Evans formed part of an army organization in London whose job was encouraging and helping British prisoners-of-war to escape. In the course of his work he came in for criticism which need not be recounted here. Also I have seen the argument expressed that, during Hitler’s war, encouraging prisoners to escape was not altogether a good idea, since it brought about Nazi reprisals (such as the murder of Anthony Hayter and his friends).
Anyway, the foregoing makes clear that Johnny Evans (whom I sometimes saw on his visits to Horris Hill but, although his son Michael was an exact contemporary of mine, never actually met) was a courageous, games-playing, extrovert sort of man - a typical Victorian gentleman and Christian.
The headmaster of my day was Mr J. L. Stow, generally agreed to have been an outstanding prep. school headmaster. He was chairman of the Prep. School Headmasters’ Association, to whom he was known as ‘Daddy’ Stow. At Horris Hill, however, he bore the homelier nickname of ‘Stidge’ (or sometimes ‘Stygo’).
Mr Stow was in every respect a strong personality. Even his gentleness and kindness were in some way powerful, like those of a lioness with her cubs. He possessed in a high degree the two essential qualities for a schoolmaster, warmth and humour; and he had a strong but pleasant voice. He taught well: in fact he was fascinating; it was positively enjoyable to be a member of any class he took. He was the form-master of the top form, of course, but he also taught maths, to the one-from-bottom form - no doubt as a means of getting to know the younger boys and size them up, for he was very keen on that. He knew every boy in the school - there were, in my day, ninety-four — by his Christian name.
Though neither tall nor particularly stout, he was a well-built, heavy, imposing man. (I never saw him run.) In my mind’s eye he is always wearing a double-breasted, grey flannel suit and looking alertly about him from his brown eyes. (His manner was never abstracted or reflective.) He was continually among the boys and could converse with them good-humouredly and amusingly. He knew everybody’s character and he knew everything that was going on.
He was - in that world, anyway - something of a larger-than-life character, generous and magnanimous of mind. He could be both emotional and intimidating. If he saw occasion (such as a fumbled pass in a school soccer match) he would burst out in a roar: ‘Oh, no, no, no! Come along, now, for goodness sake!’ which carried far across the field. I well remember how, playing in my first school match at home, I had the good luck to throw the wicket down from deep mid-off, running the batsman out. ‘Well played, Dicky!’ called out Mr Stow loudly. As good as an M.B.E. any day!
I often reflect, nowadays, how lucky I was to get four years of Mr Stow - to say nothing of his friendship in later life. From the ancient Greeks onwards, a fine schoolmaster has always been recognized as one of the greatest blessings which anyone can have. I had three, of whom Mr Stow was the first. He may have been a man of strong, turbulent emotions and even somewhat prone to angry outbursts, but he put them to excellent use, and he was liked and respected by everyone: the right man to have on your side.
Horris Hill was a school for young gentlemen, and there was much emphasis on the vital importance of truth, honesty and correct behaviour. Perhaps four or five times a term, on Sunday evenings after hymn-singing (of which more anon), Mr Stow would deliver what was known as a ‘pi-jaw’. This might be concerned with all manner of matters - bullying, scatology (we knew nothing at all about sex, of course), behaviour towards the lower classes (kindly, polite, decided, firm and magnanimous), diligence, gratitude, how to show proper respect towards one’s elders and betters and towards ladies, and so on. I recall how once he spoke to us about the wrongfulness of leading smaller boys into misdemeanor out of a desire to show off to them as being rather a devil. He showed how vulgar and unworthy of a gentleman this was, and then, with the most telling effect, quoted Matthew, Chapter XVIII, verse 6, ‘Whoso shall offend one of these little ones … it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.’ I’ve never forgotten it.
At times he could deliver a cutting rebuke without roaring at all. I had a friend called Pawson II, who had a habit of biting the skin on the sides of his fingers - unconsciously, I’m sure. One day, when he was doing it in form, Mr Stow took a minute or two to castigate the nasty habit and point out how objectionable it was. A morning or two later, the wretched boy was doing it again, while Mr Stow was expounding Virgil. He finished the passage and then enquired conversationally, ‘Breakfast nearly over, Pawson?’
During my first term I was dreadfully homesick. Homesickness can be tantamount to a nervous breakdown - that is, you no longer care what anyone else thinks; you weep openly and so on. No one could have been gentler, kinder or more understanding than Mr Stow. He spent what seemed a long time in comforting me and talking to me privately. Later, one bit of this conversation came to be a standing joke between the two of us for years. Between sobs of misery I said ‘Sir, can I say anything I like to you?’ ‘Yes, Dicky, you can say anything at all.’ ‘Well, sir, that Dickens this morning; I didn’t think you read it very well.’ This made me feel enormously better. We were able to talk about something other than my unhappiness, and Mr Stow had shown himself benign and humane.
I remember another incident worth relating. One summer evening Mr Stow was strolling round our dormitory, and by way of making conversation was asking each boy in turn how many runs he had made that day. ‘Fourteen, sir,’ said the dormitory captain. ‘Well done, Michael,’ replied Stidge. ‘Ten, sir,’ said the next lad. ‘You must get another nought on it next time.’ As he came closer to me, I felt apprehensive and horribly embarrassed, for I had been undeservedly lucky. ‘And how many did you make, Dicky?’ ‘Sir,’ I replied in a low, ashamed voice, ‘twenty-eight not out.’ Without a word Mr Stow extended his hand over the end of my bed. I crept forward and shook it.
Horris Hill was not a school of strong religious indoctrination, like an R.C. school or a Woodard. It was straight, unpretentious C. of E. in the manner of that time. There were school prayers morning and evening, consisting of a short reading from the Bible, the Lord’s Prayer and the appropriate collects. On Sundays we walked both to matins and to evensong at one or other of the local churches, Newtown or Burghclere. Usually these were services for the school alone (we filled Newtown church, anyway) but on special occasions, such as Remembrance Sunday, we attended with the village people. We were disgustingly snobbish little boys, and I remember one of my companions imitating the Burghclere choir. ‘Ten thaousand times ten thaousand …’ Finally, on Sunday evenings, after divinity prep., there would be communal hymn-singing from the English hymnal. This was a popular institution. Everyone knew the tunes, and it was almost the only community singing we got. Small boys of that class are - or were - unthinking believers and in many cases deeply sincere about religion. I don’t think we reflected with any intensity or fervour on the words, but some of the verses which come back to me now I wouldn’t want any nine-year-old of mine to have on his mind.
‘I sometimes think about the cross,
And shut my eyes and try to see
The cruel nails and crown of thorns
And Jesus crucified for me.’
‘Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended,
That Man to judge thee hath in scorn pretended?
I, blessed Saviour, I it was denied thee.
I crucified thee.’
I don’t know how much effect this sort of stuff had on other boys, for we never talked much about religion among ourselves, but it shook me all right, and has left me all my life with a sickened horror of Christ’s passion. Some years later, when I tried to talk to my mother about this, she dismissed it as ‘morbid’. I could talk about it to my father, though. He understood and to a large extent shared my feelings; but he didn’t tell me what to do about it.
I wish — and I dare say I am not the only person to have wished — that Christ had not died as He did. (Neither Mohammed, Buddha nor Confucius were put to death.) Nor can I see what good it did for us as Christians. I can see that Christ was the first martyr for Christianity. After all, He could have said to Pilate ‘I won’t do it any more: I’ll go home and keep quiet.’ That would have got him off all right, I think. (John, Chapter XIX, 12.) However, He preferred His integrity, and no doubt He was right in reckoning that His teaching would not be likely to endure if He showed that He valued His own life above it. ‘But if you ask them’ (the clergy) ‘in what way the death of the Landlord’s Son should benefit us, they are driven to monstrous explanations’ (C. S. Lewis). The benefit must, I think, be accepted as purely transcendental in its nature. ‘Almighty God, grant that the death of Thy dear Son may be effectual to my redemption’ (Dr Johnson). However, my own greatest enlightenment and help in these difficult matters were to come many years later, first from Frazer’s Golden Bough, but more positively and inspiringly from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Masks of God.
However, I anticipate. Looking back now, I think the greatest benefit which I derived from Horris Hill was not doctrine (they didn’t indoctrinate us with ideas: ideas are no good to little boys) and still less a religious atmosphere. (There was very little invoking of Christian values to support discipline: Mr Stow’s reference to Matthew, Chapter XVIII, 6, was quite exceptional.) The benefit was a sound knowledge of quite a lot of the Bible. Thanks to Horris Hill, I have a pretty good grip of the synoptic Gospels (John came later), Acts, Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, I and II Samuel and I and II Kings. We didn’t do the prophets or St Paul; too much for small boys. I think that these (expurgated, of course, after the manner of those days), comprised an excellent syllabus for nine- to thirteen-year-olds, and I have always been glad of it.
However, Bible Study was not pushed particularly hard at Horris Hill. There was divinity prep. on Sunday evenings and a divinity period on Monday mornings. Apart from that, revision and preparation for the end-of-term exam, were left to the discretion of the form master.
My introduction to the Bible itself (in contradistinction to the excellent Baby’s Life of Jesus Christ, by Helen Rolt, which my mother had read to me, and the Bible stories told by Miss Langdon) was somewhat unusual. Horris Hill’s syllabus for the academic year 1928—29 was the synoptic Gospels and the Acts; but I had arrived in the summer term, and consequently was plunged straight into Acts for starters. However, I already knew enough about Jesus’s life, death and resurrection to have a reasonable idea of where we were and, as with The Pilgrim’s Progress, I found it stimulating and exciting to think that I was reading, in the authentic, grown-up text, one of the great books of the world. I enjoyed the way of teaching, which, as well as explanation, was largely based on training you to identify, comment upon and remember memorable contexts. ‘Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.’ ‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? … It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.’ (Explain about donkeys.) ‘And Gallio cared for none of these things.’ ‘Hast thou appealed unto Caesar? Unto Caesar shalt thou go.’ As Rudyard Kipling said of Uncle Remus, ‘The book was amazing, and full of quotations that one could hurl like javelins.’ It’s an admirable training in the appreciation of beautiful prose.
At the end of my first term, there was what was known as a ‘massed divvers exam’. That is to say, the whole school took the same examination paper. The littler boys, of course, were not expected to do as well as the senior boys: they just did the best they could. I remember that the exam, began with fifty one-word answers, the questions being given out orally - of which the first was ‘Where were the apostles first called Christians?’
This divinity paper, to my own enormous surprise, turned out to be my first academic success. When the list went up, I was thirtieth out of the ninety-odd participators. The name of the top member of each form was underlined, and mine was above that of the top boy of the form above my own. Of course, my father was delighted, having been no inconsiderable biblical scholar himself; and remained one, too.
I should have explained earlier that Horris Hill and my home at Wash Common lay about a mile and a quarter apart as the crow flies and only about two miles apart by road. My father was the school doctor and of course I came in for a certain amount of ragging on this account — some of it rather spiteful. No doubt he got special financial terms for me, but I rather think there may have been other reasons behind his decision to send me to Horris Hill. We have always to remember the never-mentioned influence of poor Robert. If I was at Horris Hill, my father could keep an eye on me and if necessary even be there in a few minutes. Also, I know that he was not satisfied with the way in which the education of my brother (now sixteen) was turning out at Sherborne. John had gone to Sherborne prep. school at the age of nine. My father had chosen Sherborne because it lay close to his own old home at Martock and he knew the district, the public school and its reputation. However, John had been unhappy there and had not done particularly well: nor was he getting on any better at Sherborne itself He never seemed to act like a normal, happy boy. He was abstracted, self-conscious and preoccupied; worse, he did not get on well with my father, with whom his relations were always distant and cool. The two of them seemed to have little or no rapport. I think my father reckoned that, taking all things into account, there was much to be said in my case for a different boarding-school, nearer home.
Why not a day school in Newbury? the reader may ask. Don’t be silly! Only lower middle-class boys went to day schools. If you didn’t go to a boarding-school you weren’t a gentleman, and on top of that you would grow up to be a wet and a weed. Worse still, you wouldn’t be able to wear an old school tie and begin your career by being able to say ‘I was at Wrykin’ (or wherever). It would be an unthinkable social disadvantage, and reflect badly upon your parents. Such values were in those days unquestioned.
Horris Hill, whatever its merits - and they are considerable - was not and is not a beautiful place. The buildings are downright ugly — tall, gaunt, asymmetrical and horribly institutional in appearance. Although it is in open country, there is precious little pleasure in nature (or none such as I was used to) to be found in the grounds. A gravel playground adjoining what is called ‘the lower field’; and an upper field which in my day was used only for nets, cricket, football and golf; a sloping pinewood on one side of the lower field and a thin belt of half-starved trees along the other; these were our confines. The whole place formed a bare upland, inhospitable alike to wild-flowers, birds and animals. Years later, when as an adult I visited the prep. school called Elstree, near Woolhampton, to watch Horris Hill play them at football, I was struck by the charm and beauty of the place (it is basically a sixteenth-century manor, with delightful grounds) and could not help wondering how much influence the ugliness of Horris Hill and the beauty of Elstree respectively had upon those who unconsciously soaked up their environs during four impressionable years of boyhood.
Horris Hill’s domestic facilities would strike any parent today with amazement. There were adequate water-closets, certainly, and wash-hand basins a little way off; but that was about all. On one side of the changing-rooms were some stone troughs, which you could fill with cold water to wash the mud off your arms and legs after football. However, this activity was neither supervised nor compulsory and few bothered with it. Everybody got one hot bath a week.
In the dormitories there were no taps; only carafes of cold water. Everyone cleaned their teeth into the same wash-bowl, to facilitate the task of the maid who came round to empty it and rinse it out. Under each bed was a chamber pot, and these must have been emptied and cleaned by the maids as part of morning bed-making drill. In one corner of each dormitory was a lidded, wooden commode, for use by anyone who might be taken short in the night. I never knew one to be used; though during my time I knew three or four people to have involuntary ‘accidents’ in their sleep and beds.
In the mornings, winter and summer alike, there were cold baths. In those days cold baths were a common institution of all boarding-schools. We’d have despised any school that didn’t have them. (I believe Bryanston and Dartington Hall didn’t: they were ‘progressive’ and ipso facto ‘weedy’.) Two or three baths in the bathroom were filled with cold water and thither we proceeded in our dressing-gowns. You had to get in and out carefully, not to spill any water — a degree of deliberation which lengthened the nasty process. Cold baths, as well as evening hot baths, were supervised by the under-matron, Miss Archer, a spare, leathery, middle-aged, unsmiling woman who was universally liked and respected because she never raised her voice and was the same to everyone; firm, consistent and fair, and impossible to bamboozle. We never thought it in the least disconcerting to be naked in front of Miss Archer; and she herself was equally equable in the matter.
In those days there was much less fuss about nakedness. If some occasion, such as bathing, cold baths or the doctor, required you to be naked, you simply undressed without a second thought. Only ill-bred people were self-conscious about nakedness. As is well-known, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) used to photograph the little daughters of his Oxford friends naked, and they were delighted for him to do so, as he did it very well. Any innuendo about it would have been met with silence, raised eyebrows and an immediate change of subject: the offender wouldn’t have been invited again.
Like most other people, I hated the cold baths. But from the school’s point of view they had their advantages. To start with, Mr Stow didn’t have to pay for hot water in the mornings. Secondly, they saved labour and were a quick, convenient way of getting ninety-odd boys up, washed and wide-awake. Thirdly, we never seemed to get colds and our general resistance to cold was good.
There was no electricity anywhere in the school. Downstairs there were gas brackets with incandescent mantles. Some had low pilot jets which burned all day, but these were only in relatively dark places such as storerooms, where they might need to be turned up at any time. At dusk, the pantry boy would go round the entire ground floor with a taper on a stick, turning on and lighting the gas. I still like to see a mantle, for instance on a Tilley lamp, take on its brilliant, dazzling glow: it tells of cosy snugness (not that we had any curtains), falling twilight and attention to books. I like the smell, too.
At Horris Wood, a house providing extra dormitory accommodation about three hundred yards away and situated just beyond the pine-wood I have already mentioned, there wasn’t even any gas. As evening fell Vera, the buxom, pleasant, gentle-voiced maid, would light a whole battery of paraffin lamps and range them together on a tray. This she carried from room to room downstairs - hall and corridors too. Each had its place and each burned on until lights out. Sometimes one or another would suddenly flare and smoke, requiring quick adjustment from the nearest passer-by. These lamps had a smell all their own. It is one of pleasant associations for me, since I was - when the time came - happy at Horris Wood, as I will relate. Paraffin lamps at evening - that soft light, illuminating print, knitting or mending, but leaving friendly gloom in the room’s corners - well, I’m sorry, reader, that you should have been denied the blessing of this gentle, homely change from the rhythm of the sun to the rhythm of nightfall. This is something vanished for ever, as surely as the dust on the hedges.
The routine of going to bed never varied. After prayers in the big schoolroom, a mug of milk and two biscuits were dished out to each boy. Then, after a reasonable interval, Mr Stow, standing at the big invigilation desk, would call out ‘One!’ The captain of One (always a second-year boy set over a new boys’ dormitory) would lead his little file up to shake hands with Mr Stow, who said ‘Goodnight, Trevor’, ‘Good-night, Basil’, to each. They would be followed by Two, Three and so on, until the last, Ten. The biggest dormitory had about twelve boys in it, but the two smallest had only four. The make-up of each was a cross-section of the school. The dormitory captain (whose responsibilities were vague but whose authority most certainly was not) would be a relatively senior boy, while the rest ranged gradually down in seniority to the ‘dorm. squit’, who might be a mere second-termer. This system, on the whole, worked well, for it meant that you had some regular company other than your contemporaries, and that you learned how to deal with your elders (and, in due course, your juniors).
When you had said good-night to Stidge and climbed the stairs (sometimes with your biscuits still hoarded in your pocket) there would, in winter, be a single candle burning in each dormitory. (In summer, the fading daylight was enough.) Initially silence obtained, and everyone knelt by his bed to say his personal prayers. The silence lasted for about three or four minutes and I never knew it to be abused. It was taken very seriously (though we never received any actual instruction about private prayer). Then a little, hand-held, tinkling bell was rung by the master on duty and undressing, tooth-cleaning and the rest proceeded. We got about twenty or twenty-five minutes for talk before being ‘shut up’ for the night. Reading, except on long lie-in on Sunday mornings, was not allowed.
To Horris Hill’s lack of electric light I owe more than I can tell. Indeed, it may very well have been the greatest blessing of my life, for it was this which made me a dormitory story-teller. The shadowy, candle-lit dormitories of winter; or those same dormitories in the fading twilight after sunset; these were settings for a storyteller such as no electrically lit room could ever have provided. They possessed what Padraic Colum has called ‘the rhythm of the fire’ (the story-teller’s rhythm, as opposed to the rhythm of the sun, the worker’s rhythm). Often, at the beginning of term, a captain would ask his bunch, with whom he was not yet familiar, who could tell a story. It was unwise for the squit to volunteer; usually a boy of middling seniority would take up the business. As a rule the stories were homespun enough in narration - told conversationally, with little real sense of climax or flow. Still, I have since heard adult Irish and Scottish story-tellers with equally conversational and even bathetic styles. A true folk-tale teller is usually rather colloquial. Many listeners don’t like a dramatic style of narration, especially from someone they know personally. It embarrasses them. They consider it pretentious and false. The dormitory stories nearly always lacked originality, too. They were likely to be paraphrases of Bulldog Drummond or Sherlock Holmes, or of some play the narrator had seen in the holidays or heard on the wireless. Ghosts were always popular, but were often laid on rather too thick. (‘The door opened and in came a clanking skeleton …’ Sometimes this sort of thing drew mocking interjections: ‘… who said “Good morning, boys: baths!”’ - Miss Archer’s invariable reveille.) All the same, good story-tellers did crop up from time to time. I remember how, when I was in Dormitory Seven, two boys called Wilkins and Meredith used to enact, vocally (we weren’t allowed out of bed) nightly episodes of a whole serial play. It was about a stolen diamond, I recall, and continued, to much acclamation, for two or three weeks. At intervals the protagonists had to be in a car or an aeroplane, and another boy called Job - a nice chap who was later killed in World War II - was required to maintain continuously the Brrrrr of the engine. I didn’t envy him. On the whole, dormitory talk could be amusing, informative and a lot of fun. You heard much about life in the school at levels other than your own.
You never knew what dormitory you were going to be in until, at the beginning of each term, you went upstairs to the locker-room and asked Sister. (Sister’s name was Miss Wood. She was a strange, uncertain lady of emotional crushes and odd moods; she was not terribly popular. Looking back, I think now that her naturally passionate temperament was badly frustrated, poor woman.)
After some two years, at the age of about eleven-and-a-half, I became one of those selected to go over to Horris Wood. My dormitory captain of the previous term, S —, had been a bully and a beast: one of his devices had been to make you strip your pyjama-top off so that he could pour the hot candle-grease onto your back. Then you had to put your top straight on again. When you woke in the morning, the congealed grease tore the skin off your back.
I remember Sister Wood calling out across the crowded locker-room ‘You’re over at the Wood, Dicky!’ I could have danced for joy; it was such an anxiety off my mind. I knew S— wouldn’t have been sent over to the Wood: he was too senior. Either you went when you were about half-way up the school, or else not at all. Selection was entirely random. What was more, once you had gone to the Wood you remained there for the rest of your time.
Horris Wood was a soft option, and those who went there were, on the whole, envied. To be a Wooder set you a little apart, for it was a world of its own, with separate ways and a separate atmosphere. To start with, it was much smaller than Horris Hill, with only about thirty boys in five dormitories. Stidge was not the resident genius loci, but the third master, Mr Liddell (known as Twid). Twid could keep order all right, but he was unpredictable in his emotions. Most of the time he was gentle and kind-hearted to a fault - he hated punishing anybody - but he was apt to break out into sudden rages which could be frightening. The angrier he got, the less he could pronounce his ‘r’s’, and I treasure a memory of my friend Jim Wilson imitating him with a cry of ‘Oh, you howwible little bwat, can’t you wealize it’s a pawallelogwam?’
After evening milk and biscuits, instead of waiting to say goodnight to Stidge, Wooders went off to the boot-room and put on overshoes, kept specially for them. These were not galoshes, but a sort of rubber-soled ankle-boot fastened across with a clip: I’ve never seen them anywhere else. Then you sallied forth into the night — starlight, fog, moonlight, rain, even snow, sometimes — to cross the three hundred yards to the Wood.
Matron-wise, the Wood wasn’t run by Sister Wood and Miss Archer, either. No; it was run by May Gozzer - beloved, adorable Gozzer - whose regime was, I am inclined to guess, more motherly, kind, warm and indulgent than anything which a lot of those boys had known in their lives; I can tell you, many of the mothers I saw visiting on parents’ days, tight-lipped, impersonal, unsmiling, fur-coated and lipsticked (‘Don’t do that, Geoffrey’), made me feel jolly glad that none of them was my mother. Gozzer was warmth and benevolence personified.
Her position as matron to thirty boys at the Wood - a sort of half-job - was typical of the kind of semi-official arrangement that could so easily be set up in those days when distances were greater, places more isolated, parents less critical and headmasters undisputed rulers of their own realms. The three Misses Gosling - Moggy, May and Ethel — were maiden ladies - patients of my father — who lived in a good, solid, Victorian house called ‘Gorsefield’ (or ‘Gosfield’ by the facetious) across the Common and about three-quarters of a mile from the school. They had the pleasant, sizeable house and they had a competence of sorts, left them by their parents, but it was too small for more than a modest establishment. They were of good family, but none of them had ever married (though the man who married May would have been lucky). Once, when I asked my mother why, she replied sardonically ‘No one was ever good enough for them.’ Now, appreciating my mother’s own class background and marriage, I can see the force of her answer - an implied but very valid criticism of a silly social system. Be that as it may, the three Gozzers, though indulgently made a little fun of behind their backs, were popular and respected in the neighbourhood. They sometimes gave tennis parties on a court which was so mossy that the balls would hardly bounce, and at which they gave you ‘lemonade’ consisting of a lemon sliced up into a jug of water. They were dears. Ethel, the youngest, was deaf, and Moggy, the eldest, was an Oxford Grouper. But I am concerned now with May — ‘Gozzer’ to hundreds of Horris Wood boys of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties.
I don’t believe Gozzer had any nursing qualifications and I’ll bet she was paid next to nothing; yet I can’t remember anything ever going medically wrong at Horris Wood. People got ‘flu in the spring term — common in those days. Gozzer put them to bed in the sick-room, made them beef tea, spoiled them and fussed over them. My father came and looked at them and they duly got better. That was about the extent of it.
I suppose Gozzer - the tears come to my eyes as I write of her –wasn’t altogether good for us, really. A matron needs to have some sort of authority, and Gozzer exercised virtually none at all. Yet bestowed upon her, as it were, like a nimbus, was the natural authority of a person universally loved. We all addressed her as ‘Goz’ as a matter of course. Once, Mr Liddell gave us a talking-to about it, but it made only a temporary difference. In any case, Gozzer didn’t really care for Mr Liddell exercising much discipline. The punishment for talking after lights out was invariably beating (and with a cane, in pyjamas, that hurts a lot). Gozzer would, as often as not, get wind of Mr Liddell’s intention to ‘go round’ after lights out to hear whether anything was going on; and when she did, she would tip off the captains of the dormitories. If it was to be a boy’s birthday, others in the dormitory would let Gozzer know, and when she made her rounds to us in bed, with her tray of laxatives, medicaments, plaster and cotton wool, there would be ‘celebrations’ (known as ‘celibries’). Gozzer, strictly against the rules, would give out butter drops all round (known as ‘brown pills’). I have never known anyone - not even Miss Langdon – from whom sheer kindness and benevolence poured in such a stream. She loved to be kind. You could tell her anything: you could weep on her sympathetic shoulder. Perhaps, in that tightly disciplined world, that was her real secret. She loved us for the dangers we had passed, and we loved her that she did pity them.
If there came a point, as there sometimes did, when things got out of hand and something simply had to be put a stop to, she would go into a ‘Goz fluster’. Speech would pour from her in a stream of unfinished sentences - ‘No, no, no - you really mustn’t – now stop, dear, stop – quite wrong – very bad for you, too – if Mr Liddell got to know -’ (We knew he wouldn’t.) A Goz fluster always worked - calmed things down - simply because it was so embarrassing to see this charming lady out of countenance; we knew we’d abused her indulgence, and would pull ourselves together.
Gozzer’s diction was very U and correct, in the Victorian/Edwardian manner which even then was old-fashioned. She always dropped the final ‘g’ of present participles: So-and-so was ‘charmin’: he was comin’ over on Saturday’ etc. Perhaps he was goin’ to play ‘goff, for this was another of her turns of speech. People were liable to have nasty ‘cawfs’. Marian Hayter was ‘an awfully jolly girl’. I recall now that the Gozzers had a brother, known as ‘the Major’, who played tennis with a racket which had a fish-tailed handle. I’ve never seen another.
I cannot refrain from relating the story Gozzer once told me about her visit to Chartres before the Great War. ‘We were goin’ to see the Cathedral and then we were goin’ on for a picnic and some fishin’. We got orf about ten o’clock and the only thing that was worryin’ me was that we hadn’t got anything to put the bait in, so it was messin’ everything up. And then, as we were comin’ out of the Cathedral, I saw this man sellin’ bottles full of water, with round tops like jamjars. So I said to Ethel, “Look, the very thing for our bait!” So I bought two - although they seemed rather expensive - and poured out the water on the ground; and I was just puttin’ the bait in when all these French people started makin’ a terrible fuss and chatterin’ away: we couldn’t understand a word they said. But then it turned out that what they were sayin’ was that it was holy water, and we had quite a business gettin’ away from them. Well, how were we supposed to know about their silly old holy water?’
Poor Gozzer suffered from a spinal curvature. When I first knew her, this caused her to do no more than hold her head on one side, a little bent at an unnatural angle. My father explained to me in his usual brusque way. ‘It won’t get any better,’ he said. ‘It’ll get worse.’
It did. As the ‘thirties went on, Gozzer became more and more bent over, until she was bent like a hunchback without a hump. She had to give up Horris Wood, her boys and her sweet maid, the strong-armed Vera - who was worth any three other girls (and who lent me King Solomon’s Mines). The last time I saw Gozzer was when I visited Gorsefield in 1949, to introduce my fiancee to her. It was a hot day. The door was standing open, but I rang the bell. After a few minutes May came half-running up the hall. She was literally bent double; almost to the ground. The top half of her body was horizontal, her right hand held out before her (to shake hands) and her face actually turned upward to greet us. Ethel was now permanently in bed downstairs, and wandering in her mind. She thought I was the bishop of Worcester and conversed with me accordingly. I cannot remember about Moggy. She may have been out. That day wrung my heart.
I never saw Gozzer again. She left me £25 in her will. I used it to buy a set of Staunton chessmen, carved by the famous Mueller in about 1885; ivory, the kings four inches tall. An awfully jolly thing, don’t you know: I’m still playin’ with it today.
But I was speaking of my initiation as a story-teller. The first night I got to the Wood I found that I was the squit in Dormitory One, which had only four beds. The captain was a certain Tony Priestley, a forceful but quite genial character with a reputation as a bit of a daredevil. The others were McCrum, a gentle, kindly, popular boy, and Geoffrey Hunter, who was later killed in the war. Sure enough, Priestley demanded from someone a story and I, seeing it was such a free-and-easy atmosphere and wishing to ingratiate myself, took the job on, squit or no squit. The story was the Breton tale of Peronnik and the Castle of Kerglas (Andrew Lang’s Lilac Fairy Book). To my gratification it met with warm approval, and the following night Priestley required another. This time it was M. R. James’s ‘Lost Hearts’. I remember, at the end, Hunter asking ‘But what happened? I felt enough self-confidence to give him my sister Katharine’s usual reply, ‘Think it out’. ‘Oh, I hate having to think it out!’ said Geoffrey, who was inclined to be rather self-indulgent. But he didn’t cuff my head for cheek, as he well might have.
The stories were insisted upon night after night. One way and another, they were dredged up from everything I had ever read. Sometimes, when Twid came round to ‘shut us up’ (it was always known as this, since there were no lights to put out: what happened was that the door was shut for the night; ‘no more talking’), Priestley and the others would beg for another minute or two so that Adams could finish, and with this the good-natured Twid would often fall in. Sometimes he knew the story, since it might be ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, ‘The Bottle Imp’ or some such, and would stay to hear it out himself.
By about half-term I could find no more stories to tell. I said as much, but this had no effect on Priestley. ‘Adams, this is my watch, see? Slipper coming over unless you start in half a minute.’ This, as Dr Johnson would say, concentrated the mind wonderfully.
In the end I was forced to make them up. There was nothing else for it. They had to have proper climaxes and conclusions, too. A thing on the lines of Frank Stockton’s ‘The Lady or the Tiger’ wouldn’t have done at all. I would find odd moments, during the day, to think about what I would try to embark on that evening. In the event it turned out not to be too difficult, for my audience were not over-critical, and by this time I had a tolerable standing. I remained in One for about three terms and, thanks to Priestley, his watch and his slipper, I never dried up.
But I did once get beaten for talking after lights out. It was all very sudden. I was finishing a story in whispers, to Hunter only, in the adjacent bed, when the door was abruptly thrown open and Mr Liddell, torch in one hand and cane in the other, said ‘Who’s talking in here?’ ‘I am, sir,’ I said. ‘Get out of bed: bend over: right over.’ And so, with the torchlight playing on my bum, I received four. ‘Next time it will be much harder,’ said Twid, and left as sharply as he had come.
By our schoolboy code Hunter ought to have owned up too. After all, you can’t be talking to nobody, and Twid should have thought of this and pressed enquiry. But what I believe now is that he hated beating people so much that he wasn’t really thinking judicially and just wanted to get it over as quickly as he could. Mr Stow or Mr Morris would have got to the bottom of the matter.
Mr Morris was the Second Master. He was odd and frightening: at least, he frightened me - and a number of others, though not all. He looked as strange as he was, and it is clear to me now that he was perverted. He was about fifty, tall, the top of his head bald in the middle, like a tonsure in the sparse circle of grey hair. His long face had a drawn, ascetic look - a bachelor’s face - with a high, prominent nose and wrinkled cheeks. He was loose-limbed and shambling. His clothes were the oldest and untidiest I have ever seen on an adult; almost rags. His silent stare was intimidating enough, but his anger was worse.
Bungey, as he was known, had a way of playing cat-and-mouse which never failed to reduce me, for one, to trembling and stammering incoherence (known in the school as ‘Bungey dread’). Bungey dread was an involuntary, intuitive thing. Either you felt (though sexually ignorant) that there was something queer and frightening about him, or else you just didn’t. (Most didn’t.) He would often begin in a low key. ‘Talking: yes, talking. I rather think you were. Perhaps you’d better stand up. And what were you talking about, I wonder.’
‘Sponge cake, sir.’ (Titters. It always seemed to be something that made you look absurd and ignominious; small boys have not yet learned to lie or temporize under hostile questioning.)
‘Sponge cake. Do you think it might enlarge your knowledge to compose two elegiac couplets on the subject and read them to us tomorrow morning?’
(Better than being beaten, anyway. But what on earth could be the nearest Latin equivalent for ‘sponge cake’? ‘Spongia’ was a substantive, but it would need to be turned into an adjective, wouldn’t it? And ‘cake’ - er -)
A sudden roar from Bungey. ‘Well? Am I to wait here all day for you to give me an answer?’
‘No, sir. Yes, sir.’
‘Hoity, toity, horrible mess!’ (He really did say ‘hoity toity’: the only person I have ever heard do so.) Approaches and picks up ragged, ink-stained Ovid by one corner in finger and thumb. ‘This is your property?’
‘Yes, sir. But I haven’t written any words in it, honestly, sir.’ (One of the most heinous crimes you could commit was to write English translations of Latin words in the margins of text books.)
‘Did I say you had?’
‘No, sir.’ (Class now much enjoying the spectacle of an abject demonstration of Bungey dread - the victim defending himself in anticipation of an accusation as yet unmade.)
This sort of thing could sometimes go on for quite a long time. I remember an incident which took place when I happened to be a member of a dormitory situated just outside Bungey’s upstairs study. One evening, as we were undressing, three fairly senior boys came up the stairs, grinning with bravado, halted outside Bungey’s domain (he hadn’t arrived yet) and announced to us, through the open dormitory door, ‘We’re going to get spanked.’ Naturally we all felt, while waiting, a certain amount of vicarious tension. Eventually, Bungey came loping up the stairs, two at a time, strode down the passage and invited the culprits to step inside. For what seemed a long time we could hear only his low voice talking, though one couldn’t distinguish any words. Then, suddenly, we heard him cry out, in a tone of impatience and excitement, ‘No, kneel, kneel, kneel, kneel!’ Then followed the sound of the blows. They told us afterwards that they had each been required to crouch upon the carpet, with their bare buttocks elevated, while Bungey beat them sitting in his armchair.
‘Spanking’, as we called it, had a kind of tabu aura around it. It was the subject of bated-breath jokes, little doggerel rhymes and so on, rather taking the place of sex jokes among boys too young to know about the latter. (‘My son, my son, it must be done. Down with the trousers, up with the bum.’) The instruments used were personal and various. Mr Stow used to spank on the bare buttocks with a thing called a fives bat, which is rather like a table-tennis racket but bigger, and longer in the handle. Bungey used to use the ‘jack’ of an old-fashioned wooden shoe-tree - the removable, handled bit that is thrust into the middle. He, too, beat on the bare buttocks. Mr Liddell, as I have said, used a cane.
For very serious offences there would be what were known to us as ‘public spankations’. Of these, there were only two during the four years I was at the school. The first took place after a weak assistant master had entirely failed to control a prep. which gradually dissolved into a general, anarchic rag. Everyone was wondering why the master was apparently doing nothing. In fact, he was taking names to report to Mr Stow. After evening prayers that night three of the principal offenders, picked at random, were told to come up to the front and take down their trousers. They were then beaten hard with the fives bat, before the eyes of the whole school. The second occasion was when three quite senior boys, members of one of the classes who were supposed to do their prep uninvigilated in their classroom, climbed out of the window and went for a night walk on the near-by common. As ill luck would have it, they ran into the Headmaster’s brother, Sir Alexander Stow, who happened to be taking a walk. Naturally, he reported them. They, too, were publicly spanked - five each with the fives bat. One thing about this I have never forgotten. Mr Morris’s place at prayers was at the back of the big schoolroom where we assembled. During the pause while the culprits were taking down their trousers and Mr Stow had gone out of the room to get the fives bat, the silence was broken by the sound of Mr Morris shambling up the length of the room. He drew out a bench and placed it exactly at a right angle to the desk over which the three boys would have to bend. On this he sat down, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands together, with the air of a connoisseur who was not going to miss anything.
The junior masters were not allowed to beat, but an open-handed\cuff across the head or even a kick up the backside were regarded by us as all in a day’s work. Mr McIntyre, the veteran master of the new boys’ form, refrained from cuffing, but used to grab people by the hair (‘Ow, sir! Ow, sir!’) and hold them forth at arm’s length for questioning and derision. Notwithstanding, he was respected and popular, for he too possessed warmth and humour, and he taught well.
Everybody nowadays talks about the ‘humiliation’ of corporal punishment, cuffing and so on: but we never felt humiliated. A cuff was neither here nor there, if you knew it was merited. As for a spanking, you felt rather proud of having endured it well, and would hasten away to describe it in detail to your friends. I remember walking over to Horris Wood with ‘Paddy’ Ewart, on the evening when he had been one of those publicly spanked.
‘Did it hurt, Paddy?’ I asked.
‘Yes, it did,’ he replied in a casual tone. ‘Quite a lot, actually.’
I knew that for him to say this it must have been agonizing. The junior masters were virtually all young men in their twenties, some of them at a loose end, not particularly able and without any real sense of vocation. In the cases of some, it was apparent even to us that they were not particularly committed. Most stayed a few terms and then moved on to things like the Colonial Service, Australia or Malayan rubber. Mr Stow’s nephew, referred to as Mr Monty Stow, was a permanency, but he was expecting to take over the headmastership in due course. It’s surprising, really, how much we did learn from those half-interested young men and from old Miss Jarvis. But one must bear in mind two factors. First, by modern standards, the syllabus was limited; and these were little boys, who were learning their rudiments; almost any reasonably intelligent grown-up could have taught them with the help of a good text-book. Secondly, there were rarely more than nine or ten boys in a class. I’m sure that it is to this pupil-teacher ratio that I owed my relative academic success - if it can be so called. There’s nothing like a good start and the early inculcation of a serious approach. You couldn’t help but attend and work seriously with only nine or ten people in the class and the master less than five yards away.
I was speaking, however, of the commonplace nature of punishment and physical coercion in those days; and here I must mention one exceptional figure, since with him alone (and one other, later, as I will tell) I have remained, as you might say, stuck - e.g., in dreams and in revenge fantasies after a few drinks. (My daughters, when they were little, used to say ‘Strobe lights for Daddy’s hate spot!’) Mr Peter Delmé-Radcliffe was to all outward appearances a straightforward prep. school master of the day - about twenty-six, tall, a good cricketer and intellectually perhaps a shade above normal, for he taught quite a senior form. He was completely humourless, with a cold, sneering, sarcastic manner which made him hated throughout the school. He handed out punishments right and left. He seemed to dislike everyone, including himself. I recall another, kindly master called Denzil Young, who was a personal friend of my brother, remarking to him once, during the holidays, that it was a great pity that ‘Delmé’ had ever taken up teaching.
One afternoon, I and eight or nine others were enduring a history lesson in which ‘the Rad’, as he was called, was expounding the feudal system. Having written ‘King William’ at the top of the blackboard, he was proceeding to illustrate how estates and manors were held by barons, knights and the like from their feudal lords. ‘And Geoffrey,’ he said, writing as he spoke, ‘holds two manors of his lord Stephen.’
Sitting across the room from me was my friend Stephen Whitfield. I caught his eye and smiled. The next moment, in two strides, Delmé-Radcliffe was down on me, uttering I know not what about ‘laughing in my class’. He repeatedly beat my head from side to side, first with the book he was holding and then with his open hand, until I was dazed, and fairly badly hurt. It seemed unreal, as in a dream. When he finally stopped, the class sat in a kind of stunned amazement. As I recovered, my sense of resentment and abuse actually led me as far as a kind of cryptic protest: I sat muttering ‘Phew!’ and looking from one companion to another. Everyone seemed shaken.
On another occasion I was seated two or three places away from Delmé-Radcliffe at lunch. (The masters sat at the ends of the long tables.) Speaking across the table to another boy, I said, ‘I expect Monty will be there,’ meaning Mr Stow’s nephew.
‘Who do you expect will be there, Adams?’ interposed Delmé-Radcliffe.
‘Sir,’ I answered with some embarrassment. ‘Mr Monty Stow.’
‘Yes, well, now you’d better go and stand in the corner, Adams,’ said Delmé-Radcliffe. ‘I for one shall be better off without you for the time being.’
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.
‘Me that have sailed leagues across
Foam haunted by the albatross …’).
I put a friend, whom I judged to be likely, on to the book, and for weeks we conversed in references, proper names and quotations. We came within half a plank of worshipping Tishnar, but that would have been dangerous (and too revealing: we had no wish to hear her traduced).
Since those days I have read the book many, many times. Often I have set out to read it aloud to various people. My mother loved it, but I could never get my feeling for the book across either to my father or to my sister. Indeed, they teased me. This surprised and somewhat upset me. It was the first time that I had had the experience which I reckon that as we grow up we all undergo in one way or another. We find that even our intimates, and those we love very much, do not always understand or empathize with things which we ourselves feel deeply: either they don’t feel them at all or else they see them differently. In the deepest recesses of the imagination we must expect to find ourselves often alone, separated even from our closest friends. (I was once in love with someone who hated Jane Austen.)
That wasn’t, however, by any means all there was to Walter de la Mare during this time. One of the masters, Denis Fussell — may his name be blest for ever — had acquired the newly published Poems for Children (1930), comprising ‘Songs of Childhood’, ‘Peacock Pie’ and about forty other poems; and somehow the book came my way. By gum, some ‘poems for children’ those are! They flung open the door upon a numinous, night-blue world of incessant danger, wild beauty, loss, fear and death; no pretence or dressing-up (like M. R. James), but deeply felt and sincere, and all cast in words of storm, rainbow and wave. They struck into my heart the full realization of humanity’s ultimate ignorance and insecurity in this world; and this has never left me, having since been endorsed again and again by just about everyone from Beethoven to William Golding.
‘Who said, “Peacock Pie”?
The old King to the sparrow:
Who said, “Crops are ripe”?
Rust to the harrow:
Who said, “Where sleeps she now?
Where rests she now her head,
Bathed in eve’s loveliness”? —
That’s what I said.
Who said, “Ay, mum’s the word”;
Sexton to willow:
Who said, “Green dusk for dreams,
Moss for a pillow”?
Who said, “All Time’s delight
Hath she for narrow bed;
Life’s troubled bubble broken”?
That’s what I said.’