Stowe was an eighteenth-century palace set in an exquisitely laid-out park containing lakes, woods and ruined temples buried beneath undergrowth uncleared for years owing to the lack of able-bodied gardeners during the war. The classical landscape had returned to wilderness.
The school’s first headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh, was still running the place when I went there two years after the war ended. A flamboyant classics scholar, he owned thirty-two suits and dressed impeccably in a different one every day, a fresh silk handkerchief blooming colourfully from the breast pocket. The rule that the teaching staff must all be unmarried had relaxed a little by the time I got there, but the faculty was still dominantly homosexual. ‘One man’s meat is another man’s passion,’ Dr Humphries, the divinity tutor, lugubriously informed us. ‘David and Jonathan …’
A number of the boys there lived in Kenya, Nassau or Bermuda, and many of my fellow pupils had parents who were what Mother termed nouveaux riches and Father called ‘revolting spivs’. Well-dressed, sometimes rather raffish couples turned up at school on Sundays to whisk their sons off to lunch in shiny new Lagondas and Jaguar saloons – Jewboys’ Bentleys, Father called them. To my relief, my own parents visited seldom. When they did they came by train as we had no car. After Sunday morning chapel I walked three miles down the dead straight drive to meet them at the White Hart in Buckingham, and it was disheartening to do so with other boys flashing by in expensive motor cars, headed for the same destination. And it was embarrassing to lunch in the White Hart’s restaurant with parents dressed so differently from anyone else, a mother who spoke in such a piercing upper-crust accent, and a father who insisted on stowing his rucksack under the table and invariably had a violent row with the waiter.
My contemporaries at Stowe were more sophisticated, travelled and experienced in the world than I. Their parents gave them an allowance and bought them good clothes, the latest skis, sometimes a horse. They appeared more fortunate than myself, and the very lucky ones, I noticed, had not just one set of parents but two competing for their affection with the offer of holidays in St Moritz or Bermuda.
I had no experience in mixing with my peer group, but during my time at the school I made two friends I would continue to see on and off for the rest of my life. Nigel Broackes was a tall blond boy with a grave manner and measured voice, the same age as myself. Our bond sprang from a shared fascination with explosives. His prep school had been requisitioned by the army during the war and the grounds were littered with detonators, ammunition and unexploded grenades. More enterprising than myself, he manufactured his own gunpowder and was looking for a source to supply him with hydrochloric and nitric acid so he could produce gun-cotton. I was wildly impressed to learn he’d set fire to his prep school’s gym.
‘What charges did you use?’ I asked, fascinated.
‘For that an incendiary bomb,’ he replied, and roared with laughter. He’d found it in the bushes and taken it to the gym to dismantle it when it ignited.
‘What happened?’ I asked, enthralled.
‘Thirteen strokes on the bare bum with a steel-tipped dog whip.’
‘Better to be expelled,’ I said.
‘No,’ he corrected me firmly. ‘Then they wouldn’t have accepted me at Stowe.’
Another friend was Alex Howard, who intrigued me from the first because he dressed differently from anyone else. Slight, square-shouldered and stiffly upright, he sported a cravat in place of the usual tie and wore stylish lace-up ankle boots in tooled leather. ‘Finest Northumberland calf. Handmade,’ he told me proudly. He had an oddly explosive way of talking, staccato and emphatic.
‘Where can one get them?’ I asked.
‘Lobb. Can’t now. Made for my grandfather,’ he explained. They were the most beautiful shoes I’d ever come across but they were a little tight for him, you could see they pinched in the way he walked.
While getting to know him I learned his mother was a novelist. She’d published several books, but the literary life she and Alex’s family lived in London didn’t sound remotely like Father’s or our own. ‘She throws parties. Sort of open house. Lots of interesting types, John Davenport, Dylan Thomas, Gerald Hamilton, who was the model for Mr Norris in Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains … You must come along sometime,’ he suggested.
Alex was promising. Mother had said to me, ‘You mustn’t accept any invitations, we’ll only have to ask them back,’ but I’d deal with that when I came to it, I thought.
I had a home in London now, we used Arisaig only for summer holidays. Father was living in Milan but Mother had bought a house off The Boltons in South Kensington. An eight-bedroom, one-bathroom Victorian mansion with garden, it was an imposing house but in poor condition, for the building had been damaged when a bomb had fallen further down the street, and the masonry had been glued back in place with cheap mortar.
It was here that Nigel came to tea one day, meeting Mother and my nine-year-old brother David over toast and margarine with Marmite. We’d been talking for a little while before Mother asked, ‘Don’t you find it lonely being an only child, Nigel? Don’t you wish you had brothers and sisters to play with?’
‘Not really, Mrs Scott,’ Nigel answered in the slow considered way he spoke even then. ‘You see, I will inherit a trust fund of £30,000 when I’m twenty-one, and if I had brothers and sisters I’d have to share it with them.’
Later during those same school holidays I was asked by Alex to his home. We’d been to the cinema and afterwards walked there along the Fulham Road. Part of a terrace of what once had been workmen’s cottages, the house stood back from the street in a small untended garden.
Margot, his mother, had long dark hair, a pale thirties face and a distracted manner; the living room where she sat knitting was untidy and cluttered. Alex had breezed in cheerfully to introduce me but I felt we weren’t really welcome. Perhaps it was a bad moment. Papers were scattered over the floor and the walls were scrawled with notes written with soft pencil in a large spiky hand. Alex gamely did his best to get a conversation started but there were awkward pauses. In one of them the ball of wool Margot was using rolled off her lap on to the floor. Reaching out a hand to the table beside her, she picked up a hypodermic syringe, leaned down to spear the ball and fished it back on to her lap to continue knitting.
Soon afterwards Alex said we would move on. ‘Not one of her good days,’ he observed when we were in the street. But I was thrilled, I felt I’d penetrated Bohemia, and my impression of the exotic was enhanced by meeting Alex’s father a few days later. Formally dressed in blue suit, stiff collar and Guards’ Brigade tie, he radiated a smiling bland imperturbability. In fact I got the impression he actually enjoyed the chaos of his household. ‘What does your father do?’ I asked Alex.
‘Works for the War Office. Can’t say more,’ he explained succinctly.
Was he a spy? I wondered, and couldn’t wait to be invited again to this tumbledown house where people led such emancipated lives and I might meet Dylan Thomas. It seemed to me a place of infinite possibility.
Decadence was harder to come by during term. Classes took up the morning, evenings were filled by prep, and in the afternoons sport was compulsory.
Father was disgusted by my loathing of all games. I’d made the mistake of telling him I thought competitive sport brought out the very worst in people, and he’d been so incensed I thought he was going to have a stroke. But the school contained an active anti-hearty movement and I was not alone in my views. Nigel disliked team sports as much as I did, but when we’d been there two years he was made captain of the house rugger team. I was shocked to read the announcement on the bulletin board and challenged him about it.
‘I detest rugger,’ he admitted. ‘But when I leave here I’m going to have to lead people – and that means to inspire and organise them. I despise games as much as you do, but one needs to learn how.’
Instead of playing rugger or cricket, I ran. Living among so many people felt alien to me and I longed for privacy; running, I was alone. Each afternoon I jogged for miles through a classical landscape, across a Palladian bridge, down the Graecian valley overlooked by a temple standing in a grove of trees … all of it man-made, overgrown and ruined. When I returned to shower and change, the rest of the school would still be at games. Taking a book with me, I walked through the woods to where a small stream tumbled into one of the lakes. A mossy grotto had been built here overlooking the water and here I sat and read:
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green …
I was addicted to poetry and Dylan Thomas’s words spoke directly into my open heart; I reached a strange exalted state as I murmured them, a sort of ecstasy. I could achieve the same mood at evensong: O Lord support us all day long of this troublous life until the shades lengthen and the evening comes, the busy world is hushed, the fever of life over and our work done …
We attended chapel twice on Sunday, and evensong three times a week. Services were taken by two ordained ministers who were masters at the school. I was drawn to neither, put off by the mournful lechery of one and the jaunty worldliness of the other. Unlike Hurst Grange the thrust of the sermons was not spiritual but reflected the purpose of the school: to train a boy for dominance in whatever field, for power. Success meant wealth, position and authority. But by then I knew I didn’t like power or authority. I disliked being told what to do, and I loathed the obvious relish those with power derived from exercising it. I had no wish to push others around myself.
And, though I dreamed of entering a more glamorous and amusing milieu, I had no desire for riches either. I wanted some stylish clothes and enough cash in my pocket to pay for drinks, but I didn’t want wealth. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God … The faith in which Mr Pope had ensnared me was explicit on the point. And money was what my parents had been arguing about constantly for as long as I could remember; I’d determined never to talk about it myself or to let it affect me. But the sermons at Stowe struck a different note. Yes, the eye of the needle is a narrow gate but it was perfectly possible for a well-laden camel to get through it, the mournful minister assured us. It depended on the skill of the camel driver.
I yearned to be grown up, to be a part of that scintillating world I’d read about and briefly glimpsed in Davos. Most specifically, aged fifteen, I longed to lose my virginity. The opportunity to do so was presented by a visit to Paris during the summer holidays. The place seemed absolutely appropriate, for what I knew about sex came from reading Henry Miller and his books about untrammelled life on the Left Bank.
I was in Paris for only one night, a stopover on my way to the headwaters of the river Loire. Father had by now moved on to run the British Council in Belgrade, but even from that far away he continued to exert a baleful influence upon my life, devising adventure holidays it took all my ingenuity to avoid. This latest, which coincided with one of his brief visits to England, had proved inescapable.
From some army-surplus depot he’d bought me an inflatable rubber boat. It was a dismaying present. Designed to carry the entire fourteen-man crew of a B52 Flying Fortress obliged to ditch in mid-Atlantic, even deflated the thing barely fitted into two gigantic rubberised sacks. Father’s plan was that I should haul the unwieldy mass of it to the source of the Loire, fill it with air, and sail down to the sea 400 miles away. He gave me £30, telling me not to return to England for a month.
I needed someone with me, if only to carry the other rubberised sack. Nigel emphatically did not want to come, Alex was equally appalled by the idea. Brian Calvert was a late choice, I didn’t know him that well.
The rubberised bags and our rucksacks meant each of us was carrying a load of about sixty pounds. Arriving at the Gare du Nord in the early evening, we had a fearful job getting the inflatable boat across Paris on the Métro during the rush hour. We checked into a cheap hotel on the Left Bank, us and the boat. The narrow street contained a seedy bar and a poky restaurant, the area had the authentic Henry Miller ambience, I thought. Over the set menu I told Calvert of my intention to lose my virginity after dinner.
Discouraged by the boat/train journey and the problems we’d had getting the huge rubberised bags across Paris, he was less thrilled by my plan than I’d expected. ‘So what am I supposed to do while all this is going on?’ he asked.
‘You can lose your virginity too,’ I suggested helpfully, but he remained cool to the idea. ‘It’s beastly inconsiderate of you,’ he complained.
Dinner over, Calvert returned sulkily to our hotel room and the blow-up boat, and I set off alone for the Champs Élysées. Crowded with people en promenade, the wide avenue with its bars and sidewalk cafés looked a vision of glamour to me. Emerging from the subway, I’d hardly started up it before being propositioned by an Arab. Badly dressed, unshaven, with rotted teeth, it was obvious he was what Nanny called a ‘ruffian’. I thanked him politely for his alarming suggestion and continued on my way.
Already in a state of considerable disquiet at the idea of what lay ahead, looking back I realise I was not as composed or discriminating as I should have been. And of the many women in the street which, if any, were prostitutes? How did you recognise one for sure? When a middle-aged woman in mesh stockings, high heels and a great deal of make-up swayed out of the crowd to murmur, ‘Bon soir, tu veux faire l’amour avec moi?’ I was wound so tight I said yes at once.
I began to regret it as I walked with her to a nearby hotel. She had already told me the price, and when we’d climbed the stairs to her squalid room I paid her the 50 francs she’d asked for. ‘It’s normal also to give a tip,’ she said.
A tip! Henry Miller hadn’t mentioned that. I explained about the long voyage downriver that lay ahead of me, I really couldn’t afford a tip.
‘Huh, Monsieur Minimum,’ she said scornfully. ‘OK, I must wash you.’
I sat on the bidet while she did so. I was appalled by the woman I’d chosen, she was stout and old and hideous. Overcome by dismay, my heart was still thudding with terrified anticipation.
Having done with washing me, the woman dried my already overheated parts with a skimpy towel. Then in a bored, vaguely resentful way she removed just her skirt, putting it on to a hanger before clambering a little stiffly on to the bed. ‘OK, come here,’ she said wearily, and spread her legs.
I stared in awe, terror and horrified fascination at a huge black animal covered in coarse spiky hair, crouched upon her belly. ‘Come here!’ she repeated impatiently.
I climbed on to the bed. So alarmed, so tense I could scarcely breathe, I positioned myself on top of her. Every muscle, every tendon in my body was stretched to breaking point. We lay there still, I did not dare to move.
‘Il faut faire jig-jig,’ she said crossly.
Jig-jig! the time it takes to say the word already was too much. One jig … and that was it. Instant deforescence. It was all over in less than five seconds.
Next day Calvert and I took the train to Roanne, some distance from the source of the Loire. Hauling our unwieldy baggage to the riverbank, we spent an hour inflating the several compartments of the boat with a foot pump, launched it and set sail downstream.
My disillusion and disappointment with sex lasted for several days and the incident hung heavy between us, but our voyage down the river proved so magical it finally drove the unhappiness from my mind. The weather was hot and sunny, beneath blue unclouded skies we drifted through an idyllic countryside of trees and fields and cows, occasionally passing through a small town.
Blown up, the boat turned out to be circular – it was impossible to steer. Wearing only swimming shorts, we sat opposite one another, straddling the inflated sides and using a paddle to keep the craft more or less in the middle of the stream. Towards evening, when the light filtering through the trees dappled the smooth surface of the water with shadows, we watched out for a riverside inn. Spotting one ahead that didn’t look too grand, we paddled hard cross-current to reach the bank and tie up there. We rented their cheapest room and ate dinner in the restaurant.
It was too good to last, of course. In ten days most of our money was gone and it began to rain heavily. It continued to rain while we shopped for the cheapest food and camped by the riverbank. On the towpath a man ran his bicycle over the tomatoes we had bought for lunch. It went on raining and I became discouraged. The river had grown wider as we descended, it flowed more slowly now and was interrupted periodically by a barrage. I’d constructed a tent from the rubberised bags and groundsheet and lay under this reading Harold Nicolson while the boat revolved slowly as it drifted downstream in the rain. Every few miles it would bump up against a barrage. I’d emerge to help Calvert carry it round the obstruction and relaunch it below the barrier, then return to my book in damp ill humour. ‘You’re not even trying!’ he accused, and it was true. I must have been insufferable.
A third of our floorspace was now flooded. I’d accidentally burned a hole in one of the inflated compartments with a cigarette. Part of the hull had collapsed and dragged behind us in the water, it was hopeless attempting to control the boat’s course. Calvert tried though, perched on the side in the driving rain and thrashing the river with his paddle while I sulked reading in my tent. A man after my Father’s heart, he was thoroughly cheered up by our adversities, he loved camping and challenging discomfort and hoarding our diminishing resources. Our daily rations were reduced to subsistence level so we could reach the sea.
We got down to our last 20 francs with twenty miles still to go. I didn’t give a damn about reaching the sea by now. I told Calvert we were giving up and going back to England. He was furious. Burning with resentment he would not speak a word to me throughout our train journey to Paris. He seethed in angry silence, but as we were dragging those frightful rubberised sacks across the city his indignation got too much for him and he burst out, ‘Fifty francs! If only you’d controlled yourself we could have made it to the Atlantic!’
All actions entail consequences – a lesson I was about to learn. Losing my virginity in Paris led to what Nanny called ‘ructions’, not with Father as usual, but with my housemaster.
It was a week after the start of term. I’d gone to the doctor because I believed the wages of sin had found me out and that I had tertiary syphilis and was going mad. After a deeply embarrassing test he assured me the infection was not as serious as I’d feared. ‘Give you some tablets. Clear it up jolly quickly. But we do need to know you know … I mean, some other chap’s got the same little problem as yourself and we have to know where it’s coming from and to help him too. Who was it, Scott? Come on, it’s best you tell me.’
I hesitated, ‘Actually, it wasn’t a school chap sir,’ I said.
‘Not a local chap, surely?’
‘Actually it wasn’t a chap at all, sir,’ I told him.
A girl! He was shaken by the news, though his reaction was as nothing compared to my housemaster’s. Mr MacDonald was a shambling, untidy man with a moustache, who spluttered when angry. He was already exhibiting signs of strain as he received me in his study. A few minutes later he seemed completely to have lost control of himself. ‘Filthy, degraded thing to do,’ he raged. ‘You’re vile Scott, you have put your person where I wouldn’t put the ferrule of my umbrella!’ He paused, choked by the enormity of what I’d done and struggling to master his emotions. ‘I’ll have to beat you, of course. Bend over that chair.’
I did. He did. And not for the first time. I’d been beaten for smoking, for drinking, for cutting sport and for reading Henry Miller. Now these were six strokes too far. I ran away from Stowe, never to return. I was just sixteen years old; I had one shilling and two bars of nut chocolate in my pocket, and I was headed for Paris to become a barman in a nightclub and write a novel about lowlife, like Henry Miller.