THE Eagle School was a brand new boarding school set high among the conifers of the Vumba Mountains, near the border with Mozambique, in Southern Rhodesia (now the sick joke dictatorship of Zimbabwe). I use the past tense because the school closed for ever during the conflicts that later beset that unhappy country. It was founded by Frank (‘Tank’) Cary, a former housemaster from the Dragon School in Oxford, I think the largest and arguably the best prep school in England, with a wonderful spirit of adventure and a remarkable list of distinguished alumni. Tank had come out to seek his fortune in Africa, and his school was a faithful scion of the Dragon. We had the same school motto (Arduus ad solem, a quotation from Virgil) and the same school song, to Sullivan’s tune for ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’: ‘Arduus ad solem / By strife up to the sun’. Tank had visited our family in Lilongwe when he was on a tour trying to drum up business from Nyasaland parents: mine liked him and decided that Eagle was the school for me, as did Dr and Mrs Glynn for David, and we went there together.
My memory of Eagle is hazy. I think I was there for only two terms, including the second term of the school’s existence. I remember being there for the formal opening of the school, which was much talked about in advance as the ‘Opening Day’. This mystified me because I took it to be an allusion to ‘O God our help in ages past’:
Time like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.
Hymns made a big impression on me at Eagle, even ‘Fight the good fight with all thy might’, sung to a stupefyingly dreary tune more appropriate to dozing than fighting. All parents were told to equip their sons with a bible. My parents, for some reason, gave me The Children’s Bible, which was not the same thing at all, and I felt rather left out and ‘different’. In particular it was not divided up into chapters and verses, which I felt as a terrible deprivation. I was so intrigued by the biblical method of subdividing prose for easy reference that I went through some of my ordinary story books, writing in numbered ‘verses’ for them too. I have recently had occasion to look at the Book of Mormon, fabricated by a nineteenth-century charlatan called Smith, and it occurs to me that he must have had the same fascination with the King James Bible, laying his book out in verses and even imitating the sixteenth-century English style. Incidentally, it is a mystery to me why that last fact alone didn’t instantly brand him a fake. Did his contemporaries think the Bible was originally written in the English of Tyndale and Cranmer? As Mark Twain cuttingly remarked, if you removed all occurrences of the phrase ‘And it came to pass’, the Book of Mormon would be reduced to a pamphlet.
My favourite book at Eagle was Hugh Lofting’s The Story of Doctor Dolittle, which I discovered in the school library. It is now widely banned from libraries for its racism, and you can see why. Prince Bumpo of the Jolliginki tribe, steeped in fairy tales, desperately wanted to be the kind of prince that frogs magically turn into, or that falls in love with Cinderellas. Concerned that his black face might frighten any Sleeping Beauties he should chance to awaken with a princely kiss, he begged Doctor Dolittle to turn his face white. Well, it’s easy enough to see now why this book, unremarkable and uncontroversial in 1920 when it was published, fell foul of the shifting Zeitgeist of the late twentieth century. But if we must talk moral lessons, the splendidly imaginative Doctor Dolittle books, of which I think the best is Doctor Dolittle’s Post Office, are redeemed of their touch of racism by their much more prominent anti-speciesism.
In addition to its school song and motto, Eagle took over the Dragon School’s tradition of calling the teachers by their nicknames or Christian names. We all called the headmaster Tank, even when being punished by him. At the time I thought the name meant the sort of tank that holds water in your roof, but I now realize that it almost certainly referred to the relentlessly unstoppable military vehicle. Probably Mr Cary acquired, during his years at the Dragon, a reputation for dogged persistence, moving forward in a straight line regardless of obstacles. Other masters were Claude (also a migrant from the Dragon), Dick (who had the popular duty of handing out a blessed ration of chocolate during our afternoon rest every Wednesday) and Paul, a darkly jovial Hungarian who taught French. Mrs Watson, who taught the most junior boys, was ‘Wattie’ and the matron, Miss Copplestone, was ‘Coppers’.
I cannot pretend that I was happy at Eagle, but I was probably as happy as a seven-year-old sent away from home for three months can expect to be. Most poignant was the fantasy which I think I indulged almost daily when Coppers used to do her quiet morning rounds of the dormitories and we were still dozing: I imagined that she would somehow magically be transformed into my mother. I prayed incessantly for this – Coppers had dark curly hair like my mother, so in my childish naivety I reasoned that it wouldn’t have taken a very big miracle to effect the transformation. And I was sure the other boys would like my mother just as much as we all liked Coppers.
Coppers was motherly and kind. I like to think that her report on me at the end of my first term was not entirely lacking in affection: I had, she wrote, ‘only three speeds: slow, very slow and stop’. She did scare me once, without the slightest intention of doing so. I had a horror of going blind, having once seen an African with white blank-staring eyes like the ends of hard-boiled eggs. I used to fret that one day I would become either totally blind or totally deaf and I decided, after much painful deliberation, that it was a close-run thing but that going blind was the worst thing that could possibly happen. The Eagle School was modern enough to have electric light, driven by our own generator. One evening, as Coppers was talking to us in the dormitory, the generator engine must have died. As the light faded into total darkness, I quavered fearfully, ‘Have the lights gone out?’ ‘Oh no,’ said Coppers with breezy sarcasm, ‘you must have gone blind.’ Poor Coppers, she little knew what she said.
I was also terrified of ghosts, which I pictured as fully articulated, rattling skeletons with gaping eye sockets, sprinting towards me down long corridors at immense speed and armed with pickaxes, whose blows they would aim with devastating precision at my big toe. I also had weird fantasies of being cooked and eaten. I have no idea where these awful imaginings came from. Not from any books I had read, and certainly not from anything my parents had ever told me. Maybe tall stories recounted by other boys in the dormitory – of the type that I was to meet at my next school.
For Eagle was also my first exposure to the boundless cruelty of children. I wasn’t bullied myself, thank goodness, but there was a boy called Aunty Peggy who was mercilessly teased, seemingly for no better reason than his nickname. As if in a scene from Lord of the Flies, he would be surrounded by dozens of boys, dancing around him in a circle and chanting ‘Aunty Peggy, Aunty Peggy, Aunty Peggy’ to a monotonous playground tune. The poor boy himself was driven demented by this, and would blindly rush at his tormentors in the circle, fists flying. On one occasion we all stood around and watched him in a serious and prolonged fight, rolling around the ground, with a boy called Roger, of whom we were in awe because he was twelve. The sympathy of the crowd was with the bully, who was good-looking and good at games, not the victim. A shameful episode, all too common among schoolchildren. Eventually, and not before time, Tank put a stop to this mass bullying, with a solemn warning at the morning assembly.
Every night in the dormitory we had to kneel on our beds, facing the wall at the head, and take turns on successive evenings to say the goodnight prayer:
Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night. Amen.
None of us had ever seen it written down, and we didn’t know what it meant. We copied it parrot fashion from each other on successive evenings, and consequently the words evolved towards garbled meaninglessness. Quite an interesting test case in meme theory, if you happen to be interested in such things – if you are not, and don’t know what I’m talking about, skip to the next paragraph. If we had understood the words of that prayer, we would not have garbled them, because their meaning would have had a ‘normalizing’ effect, similar to the ‘proofreading’ of DNA. It is such normalization that makes it possible for memes to survive through enough ‘generations’ to fulfil the analogy with genes. But because many of the words of the prayer were unfamiliar to us, all we could do was imitate their sound, phonetically, and the result was a very high ‘mutation rate’ as they passed down the ‘generations’ of boy-to-boy imitation. I think it would be interesting to investigate this effect experimentally, but have not so far got around to it.
One of the masters, probably Tank or Dick, used to lead us in community singing, including ‘The Camptown Races’ and:
I have sixpence, jolly jolly sixpence,
Sixpence to last me all my life
I’ve tuppence to lend and tuppence to spend
And tuppence to take home to my wife.
In this next one we were taught to sound the ‘r’ in ‘birds’, for reasons that I didn’t understand at the time, but perhaps it was presumed to be an American song:
Here we sits like brrrds in the wilderness
Brrrds in the wilderness
Brrrds in the wilderness
Here we sits like brrrds in the wilderness
Down in Demerara.
Some of the Dragon School’s famous spirit of adventure had been exported to Eagle. I remember one exciting day when the masters organized the whole school into a large-scale game of Matabeles and Mashonas (a local version of Cowboys and Indians, using the names of the two dominant Rhodesian tribes) which had us roaming through the woods and meadows of the Vumba (‘the mountains of the mist’ in the Shona language). Goodness knows how we managed not to get lost for ever. And although the school had no swimming pool (one was built later, after I left) we were taken to swim (naked) in a lovely pool at the foot of a waterfall, which was far more exciting. What boy needs a swimming pool when you have a waterfall?
I made one journey to Eagle by plane, quite an adventure for a seven-year-old travelling alone. I flew in a Dragon Rapide biplane from Lilongwe to Salisbury (now Harare), from where I was to go on to Umtali (now Mutari). The parents of another Eagle boy, who lived in Salisbury, were supposed to meet me and set me on my onward journey, but they failed to show up. I spent what seemed like a whole day (with hindsight it cannot have been that long) wandering around Salisbury airport by myself. People were nice to me, somebody bought me lunch, and they let me wander into hangars and look at the planes. Weirdly, my memory is that it was quite a happy day and I wasn’t at all frightened of being alone or of what might happen to me. The people who were supposed to meet me finally turned up and I got to Umtali where, I think, Tank met me in his Willys Jeep station wagon, which I liked because it reminded me of Creeping Jenny and home. I’ve told this story as I remember it. David Glynn has a different memory, and I’m guessing there were two journeys, one with him and one on my own.