BEGINNING at any new school is bewildering. On the very first day I became aware that there were new words to learn. ‘Puce’ puzzled me. I saw it written on a wall and wrongly thought it must be pronounced ‘pucky’. I eventually worked out that it was derogatory, synonymous with ‘wet’, also a favourite word, both meaning feeble. ‘Muscle’ meant the opposite: ‘I was born in muscle India, Africa is puce’ (in that era, many children who went to that kind of school were born in one or the other of those areas coloured Imperial pink on the map of the world). ‘Wig’, in the same school dialect, meant penis. ‘Are you a roundhead or a cavalier? You know, your wig, is it a mushroom or a bootlace?’ Such anatomical details were not confidential anyway, for we had to line up naked every morning for a cold bath. As soon as the rising bell sounded, we had to leap out of bed, take off our pyjamas, pick up our towels and stumble to the bathroom, where one of the three baths was filled with cold water. We plunged in and out as quickly as we could, supervised by the headmaster, Mr Galloway. From time to time the same bell was used to rouse us in the middle of the night for a fire practice. On one such occasion I was so dizzy with sleep that I went mechanically into morning getting-up routine, took my pyjamas off and had reached the bottom of the fire escape completely naked and carrying my towel before I noticed my mistake – everyone else was wearing pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers. Fortunately it was summer. The cold baths were not the only baths we had, of course. We had a proper hot bath in the evening (I forget how many times per week) in which we stood up to be washed by a matron, which we quite liked, especially when it was the pretty under-matron.
It was a time of austerity, close enough to the end of the war for many things still to be rationed. The food, with hindsight, was pretty horrible. Sweets were among the goods rationed by the government, and this had the paradoxical effect – presumably to the detriment of our teeth – that we actually had more sweets than we otherwise would have, because our sweet ration was scrupulously handed out after tea. I gave most of mine away. Now that I think about it, why was the wartime sweet ration anything other than zero? Couldn’t what little sugar survived the U-boats have been put to better use?
My feet were frequently cold, and I suffered terribly from chilblains. Smells are notorious triggers of memory, and the eucalyptus smell of the chilblain liniment with which my mother supplied me is irrevocably associated with Chafyn Grove and the torment of itchy toes. We were often cold in bed at night, and we tried to stave it off by putting our dressing gowns on our beds. There was a chamber pot under each bed to obviate the need to go along the corridor during the night. I wish I had known at the time the North Country word for this object: gazunder (because it goes under).
Only one master was still at Chafyn Grove from my father’s time: H. M. Letchworth, a kindly old Mr Chips-like figure who had fought in the First World War and had once been joint headmaster. We called him Slush, but not to his face, because Chafyn Grove didn’t have the Dragon/Eagle convention about nicknames. The only exception was during the annual Scout Camp, when he liked to be called Chippi, an older nickname which I think dated from long before when he had known Baden-Powell. He didn’t like the name Slush. One Latin lesson the word tabes appeared in the vocabulary that we had to learn. Mr Letchworth was testing us and when the time came for a boy to translate tabes (‘slush’ in the context of the text we were reading) we all started sniggering. Mr Letchworth told us sadly that the name stemmed from that very passage of Livy (‘All those years ago . . . that very sentence . . . all those years ago . . .’), though he never told us how it had come to stick to him.
The headmaster, Malcolm Galloway, was a formidable figure (maybe headmasters become formidable ex officio) whom we called Gallows. As befitted his nickname, he was not reluctant to use the extreme penalty, which in the case of Chafyn Grove was the cane. Unlike Eagle’s ‘bacon slice’ beatings with a ruler, Gallows with the cane really hurt. He was reputed to have two canes, Slim Jim and Big Ben, and the punishment varied between three and six strokes depending on the severity of the misdemeanour. I never had Big Ben, thank goodness, but three strokes with Slim Jim was painful enough and caused bruises which we used to show off with pride, like battle scars, in the dormitory afterwards. They took several weeks to fade, turning from purple to blue to yellow on the way. Boys joked about stuffing an exercise book down the pants to soften the blows, but of course Gallows would have detected that instantly and I am sure it was never really tried.
Nowadays corporal punishment is illegal in England, and hindsight suspects teachers who employed it of cruelty or sadism. I am convinced that Gallows was guilty of neither. We have here an example of the speed with which customs and values change – an aspect of what I called, in The God Delusion, the ‘shifting moral Zeitgeist’. Not under that name, the shifting moral Zeitgeist over a great span of history is massively documented by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature.36
Gallows was capable of great kindness. He would go around the dormitories before lights-out like a genial uncle, cheering us up, calling us by our Christian names (then only: never during the school day). One evening Gallows noticed the Jeeves Omnibus on a shelf in my dormitory, and he asked whether any of us knew P. G. Wodehouse. None of us did, so he sat down on one of the beds and read a story to us. It was ‘The Great Sermon Handicap’, and I suppose he must have spread it over several evenings. We loved it. It has remained one of my favourite Jeeves stories, and P. G. Wodehouse one of my favourite authors, read, reread, and even parodied to my own purpose.
Every Sunday evening, Mrs Galloway used to read to us in the family’s private sitting room. We had to leave our shoes outside and we all sat on the floor, cross-legged amid a faint smell of damp socks. She would read a chapter or two each week, and would get through a book a term. They were usually stirring adventure stories like Moonfleet or Maddon’s Rock or The Cruel Sea (the ‘cadet edition’ with the sex scenes removed). One Sunday, Mrs Galloway was away and Gallows read instead. We had reached the bit of King Solomon’s Mines where the gallant pith-helmeted heroes were confronted with the twin mountains called Sheba’s Breasts (fascinatingly, this name was censored in the film version starring Stewart Granger, a version which, bizarrely, included a woman on the expedition). Gallows paused to explain to us that these mountains were the Ngong Hills. (I say, you fellows, that’s utter rot. Gallows is just showing off that he’s been to Kenya. King Solomon’s Mines wasn’t set in Kenya at all. Race you upstairs to the dorm.)
When there was a severe thunderstorm at night, Gallows went up to the most junior dormitory, switched the light on and comforted the tinies (small enough to be allowed teddy bears) who might have been frightened. Halfway through each term, on ‘Going Out Sunday’ when parents came to take their sons out for the day, there were always one or two boys with no visitors, perhaps because their parents were abroad or ill. It happened to me once. Mr and Mrs Galloway took us out with their own children, in their big old 1930s touring car called Grey Goose and their little Morris 8 called James. We had a lovely picnic by a weir, and it makes me almost tearful remembering how kind they were to us, especially given that they might have preferred a day out with just their own children.
But as a teacher, Gallows was frightening. He would bellow at the top of his powerful voice and his stentorian scorn could be clearly heard in all the other classrooms throughout the school, provoking conspiratorial smiles between us boys and the other masters. ‘What do you do when you meet “ut with the subjunctive”? . . . STOP AND THINK!’ (Though, come to think of it, rules like that are not the way language really works.) Mr Mills, one of several who taught Latin, was more frightening still: too alarming even to have a nickname. He had a menacing presence and insisted on total accuracy and flawless handwriting: one mistake and we had to write the whole passage out again. Miss Mills – no relation – plump, sweet and motherly, with pigtails tied up in a sort of halo around the back of her head, taught the tinies and called us all ‘dear’. Mr Dowson, the jovial, bespectacled maths master, was nicknamed Ernie Dow. We none of us knew where the ‘Ernie’ came from until one day he read us a poem and ended up telling us the author: Ernest Dowson, of course. I don’t remember which poem it was, possibly ‘They are not long, the weeping and the laughter’, but it was certainly wasted on us anyway. Ernie Dow was a good teacher who, in his faintly northern accent, taught me most of the calculus I was ever to know. Mr Shaw didn’t have a nickname, but his teenage daughter was called ‘Pretty Shaw’ for no better reason than to justify the puerile joke that inevitably followed when anybody said ‘I’m pretty sure . . .’ There was a continuous turnover of young masters, presumably students waiting to go up to university or just come down from it, whom we mostly liked, probably just because they were young. One of these was a Mr Howard, Anthony Howard, who later became a distinguished journalist and editor of the New Statesman.
My first term, in Form II, I was taught by Miss Long, a thin, angular lady of middle age with straight hair and rimless glasses, very kind like most of the teachers. Apart from Form II, she mainly taught the piano. Indeed, my first music lessons were with her, and I boasted to my parents that my progress was much faster than it was. Since the truth was sure to emerge eventually, what was the point of such boasting? I shall never know.
It became apparent that, if my parents had been pessimistic about the academic standards of Eagle in Southern Rhodesia, they were wrong. I had been only average among my contemporaries at Eagle, but found myself well ahead when I first arrived at Chafyn Grove. Embarrassingly so, to the extent that, since academic ability was not admired, I would pretend to know less than I did. Asked for the meaning of a Latin or French word, for example, I would pretend to um and er uncertainly, rather than instantly show what I knew and risk losing face with my peers. This tendency became positively illogical the following year in Form III, when I foolishly decided that, since the muscle boys who were good at games were mostly not very good academically, the only way for me to become good at games was to perform poorly in class. Actually, now that I think about it, that attitude was so stupid it’s pretty self-evident that I didn’t deserve to do well in class anyway.
I was evidently very confused about what it meant to be good at games. There were three brothers, Sampson ma, Sampson mi and Sampson min (major, minor and minimus), who were all good, especially Sampson min who was brilliant at all sports and once ‘carried his bat’ all the way from opening to when he ran out of partners, and then made a miraculous catch at silly-mid-on. It ludicrously occurred to me that the resemblance of the Sampson name to that of the famous muscleman of the Bible could be no accident. My naive mind conjectured that the Sampsons must surely have inherited their sporting prowess, if not from the biblical hero himself, then from some medieval strongman ancestor who had earned the name in the same kind of way as ‘Smith’ or ‘Miller’ – or, indeed, ‘Armstrong’, which really does derive from a nickname for a man with strong arms. Among many other things I got wrong here was my assumption that noticeable hereditary qualities go back more than a couple of generations – the same ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ error I mentioned in the first chapter.
The Sampsons’ father, who had only one eye – the other one having been pecked out by a heron (or so we were implausibly told) – owned a farm in Hampshire, on which the Chafyn Grove Scout Troop held its annual camp, supervised by Slush, with assistance from Gallows and a portly gentleman called Dumbo who was drafted in for the occasion. Scout camp was a high spot of the year for me. We put up our tents, dug our latrines, and made a hearth for our fire on which we cooked delicious dampers and twists (lumps of dough charred in the fire). We learned how to lash sticks together with elegantly turned sisal string, and lashed up all manner of useful camp furniture, from mug trees to clothes horses. We sang songs around the camp fire, special Scout songs like ‘Dai’s got a head like a ping pong ball’, taught us by Slush/Chippi and not difficult to learn, most of them being very short:
Gaily sings the donkey, as he goes to grass.
Who knows why he does so, because he is an ass.
Ee aw. Ee aw. Ee aw, ee aw, ee aw.
Some of them had no tune and were yells of solidarity rather than songs:
There ain’t no flies on us.
There ain’t no flies on us.
There may be flies
On some of you guys
But there ain’t no flies on us!
Pièce de résistance was an epic saga about a bad egg, sung by Chippi. I’ve reproduced it in the web appendix, in the sentimental hope that some of my readers might want to sing this otherwise forgotten song round a camp fire, and metaphorically stir the ashes of Henry Murray Letchworth MA (Oxon), Royal Dublin Fusiliers, alias Slush, alias Chippi, the benign and wistfully sad Goodbye-Mr-Chips patriarch of Chafyn Grove. In 2005, for my father’s ninetieth birthday party in the Master’s Lodgings, Balliol College, I faithfully wrote out the egg song for a bravura performance by the lovely soprano Ann Mackay and her piano accompanist, and my father jovially, if less tunefully, joined in.
At Scout camp we earned badges for accomplishments such as axemanship, knot-tying, semaphore and Morse code. I was good at Morse, using a technique perfected by my father in wartime Somaliland when signalling from his armoured car. For each letter, you learn a phrase beginning with that letter. Single-syllable words represent dots, longer words dashes. G, for instance, was ‘Gordon Highlanders go’ – dash dash dot. I could construct no such mnemonics for semaphore and that was perhaps why I was bad at it. Or it may have been because I have low spatial intelligence: I do well on IQ tests until I hit the spatial rotation questions at the end, and they pull my score right down.
The other high spot of the year was the annual school play, always an operetta, always produced by Slush, in a tradition that had been going at least since my father’s time. My uncle Bill later explained to me that he was ‘auditioned for the part of a bulb, but was found wanting’. The lead roles went to boys who could sing, and I was one. The Willow Pattern Plate, in which I played the female lead in my last year, was typical. The scenery backdrop consisted of a large painting of the famous blue plate design. The pagoda was the residence of the royal princess; she had died, and to avert the threat of a republic, the three little men on the bridge had long conspired to keep her death a secret. Their plot was threatened when a handsome Tartar prince sent word that he was galloping on his way as a suitor. At this point I, as the village maiden, appeared and sang my big number describing, with hammed-up histrionic gestures towards the scenery, the blue ceramic world in which we all lived:
Blue is the sky above my aching head.
The grass is blue beneath my weary feet.
Blue are the trees that o’er the blue path shed
A deeper shade of everlasting blue.
And all the world is clothed in robes of blue.
The restless sea is of the self-same hue.
That last line is quite witty (wasted on us schoolboys, of course), and I’d like to think it got a laugh from the adult audience, which consisted almost entirely of devotedly tolerant parents plus the reporter from the Salisbury Chronicle (who, by the way, gave me a very nice but undeserved notice).
The royal pagoda glistens in the sun.
The footballs grow on yon preposterous tree.
(The song has several verses more to run
But that’s the lot in my poor memory.)
The three little men on the bridge seized their opportunity and bundled me into the pagoda to impersonate the dead princess, just in time before the Tartar prince bounded onto the stage with black moustache drawn on his face and sword drawn from its scabbard. I can’t remember how the happy ending was achieved, but the prince ended up slinging me over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift and carrying me off back to Tartary.
Moments of acute embarrassment linger in memory and wring an audible groan out of me when I recall them. At Chafyn Grove we had a sit-down tea every day, where we ate bread and butter. While we were lining up to file into the dining room the duty master would sometimes read out a list of names, supplied by a boy whose birthday it was. The named invitees would drop out of the line and go to a special table set aside for birthdays at the end of the dining hall, laden with birthday cake, jellies and other good things sent by the loving mother. I understood the principle, and I understood about supplying the duty master with the list of your friends’ names. That was very clear. What slipped my attention was the small point that you had to arrange for your mother in advance to send the cake and jelly. On my birthday – perhaps my ninth – I wrote out the list of my friends and gave it to the duty master, who read it aloud. My chosen friends walked eagerly into the dining room, surveyed the empty table and . . . even after all these years embarrassment prevents me from describing the scene any further. What still baffles me is why it never occurred to me to wonder where the cake was supposed to come from. Perhaps I vaguely thought the school cook would provide it. But even so, shouldn’t I have wondered how the cook was supposed to know it was my birthday? Perhaps I thought it materialized by supernatural magic, like sixpenny bits when you put a tooth under your pillow. As with my Zomba Mountain hide-and-seek story, this incident reveals a sad lack of anything remotely approaching critical or sceptical thinking in my childhood years. Even though I find these examples embarrassing, the lack of ability to think through the plausibility of things is a human trait common enough to be interesting. I’ll return to the theme.
I was an exceptionally untidy and disorganized little boy in my early years at Chafyn Grove. My first school reports dwelt insistently on the theme of ink.
Headmaster’s Report: He has produced some good work and well deserves his prize. A very inky little boy at present, which is apt to spoil his work.
Mathematics: He works very well but I am not always able to read his work. He must learn that ink is for writing, not washing, purposes.
Latin: He has made steady progress but unfortunately when using ink his written work becomes very untidy.
Miss Benson, my elderly French teacher, somehow managed to omit the ink Leitmotiv, but even her report had a sting in the tail.
French: Plenty of ability – a good pronunciation and a wonderful facility in escaping work.
Ink? Well, what do you expect if you equip every desk with an open inkwell and give the children dip pens that might have been designed to flick ink all over the room, or at least to deposit great round glistening drops of ink all over a page – drops which I would then draw out in spider shapes, or turn into Rorschach blots by folding the paper? No wonder the row of washbasins was strewn with pumice stones (we thought they were pummy stones) for cleaning ink stains off fingers. I’m afraid the ubiquitous ink somehow managed to spread itself over more than just my exercise books. I would desecrate printed textbooks too. I’m not talking about changing Kennedy’s Shorter Latin Primer to Shortbread Eating Primer: everyone did that automatically, of course. My ink habit went further than that. I doodled all over the school textbooks, filling in letters with ink or drawing little cartoon figures in the top right-hand corner of the pages so that they moved cinematically when you flicked through the book. The books didn’t belong to us: we had to hand them back at the end of every term ready for the next cohort to inherit. And I knew I would be in trouble when the time came for me to hand in my ink-encrusted textbooks. Worrying about this kept me awake at nights, it made me seriously unhappy and put me off my (admittedly pretty nasty) food, yet I still went on doing it. I recognize that there is a sense in which the book-desecrating child was the same individual as my present bibliophile self, but this perverse childhood behaviour is beyond my understanding today. As is my erstwhile reaction, and that, I suspect, of just about all my contemporaries now, to bullying.
Much of the apparent bullying was pure braggadocio, futile threats whose emptiness was attested by their invocation of an indefinite future: ‘Right! That does it. I’m putting you on my beating-up list’ was about as nebulous a threat as ‘You’ll go to hell when you die’ (though, alas, not everybody treats the latter threat as nebulous). But there was real bullying too, the especially unkind form of bullying where gangs of sycophantic henchmen rally around a bullying leader, courting his approval.
The ‘Aunty Peggy’ of Chafyn Grove was even more seriously bullied than the one at Eagle. He was a precociously brilliant scholar, large, clumsy and ungainly, with an unharmonious, prematurely breaking voice and few friends. I won’t mention his name in case he should happen to read this and the memory is still painful. He was an unfortunate misfit, an ugly duckling doubtless destined for swanhood, who should have aroused compassion, and would have done in any decent environment – but not in the Goldingesque jungle of the playground. There was even a gang bearing his name, the ‘anti- –––– gang’, the sole purpose of which was to make his life a misery. Yet his only crime was to be awkward and gangling, too uncoordinated to catch a ball, unable to run except with a graceless staggering gait – and very, very clever.
He was a day boy, which meant that he could escape to his home each evening – unlike today’s victims of bullying, who are pursued beyond the school gates on Facebook and Twitter. But there came a term when, for some reason – perhaps his parents went abroad – he became a boarder. And then the fun really took off. His torment was exacerbated by the fact that he couldn’t stand the cold baths. Whether it was the cold water or the nakedness I don’t know, but what the rest of us took in our stride reduced him to a state of whimpering, abject horror, clutching his towel to him, trembling uncontrollably and refusing to let go. It was his Room 101. Finally, Gallows took pity on him and excused him the cold baths. Which, of course, did wonders for his already rock-bottom popularity among his peers.
I cannot even begin to imagine how human beings could be so cruel, but to a greater or lesser extent we were, if only through failing to stop it. How could we be so devoid of empathy? There’s a scene in Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza where men recall with shame and bewilderment their bullying of a similar ugly duckling in the dormitory at their old school. Perhaps the guilt, which I and presumably all of my Chafyn Grove friends who remember the episode feel, goes some little way towards helping us understand how guards in concentration camps could possibly have done what they did. Could the Gestapo represent a sort of retention into adulthood of a psychology that is normal in children, giving rise to an adult psychopathy? That’s probably too simplistic, but my adult self remains baffled. It’s not as though I was without empathy. Doctor Dolittle had taught me to empathize with non-human animals to a degree that most people would consider excessive. At the age of about nine I was fishing from a boat out of Mullion harbour with my grandmother when I had the misfortune to catch a mackerel. I was immediately filled with tearful remorse and wanted to throw it back. I cried when I wasn’t allowed to. My grandmother was kind and consoled me, but not kind enough to let me throw the poor creature back.
I also empathized, arguably again to an excessive extent, with schoolfellows who were in trouble with the authorities. I would go to ridiculous lengths – actually rather courageously foolhardy lengths – to try to exculpate them, and I have to regard this as evidence of empathy. Yet I didn’t lift a finger to stop the grotesque bullying that I have just described. I think this was partly due to a desire to remain popular with dominant and popular individuals. It is a hallmark of the successful bully to have a posse of loyal lieutenants, and again we see this brutally manifested in the verbal cruelty and bullying that has become epidemic on internet forums, where the abusers have the additional protection of anonymity. But I don’t recall feeling even secret pity for the victim of the bullying at Chafyn Grove. How is that possible? These contradictions trouble me to this day, together with a strong feeling of retrospective guilt.
Once again, as with the ink, I am struggling to reconcile the child with the adult that he became; and the same struggle, I suspect, arises with most people. The apparent contradiction arises because we buy into the idea that the child was the same ‘person’ as the adult: that ‘the child is father of the man’. It is natural to do this because of the continuity of memory from day to day and, by extension, from decade to decade even though, we are told, no physical molecule of the child’s body survives the decades. Since I kept no diaries, it is precisely that continuity that makes it possible for me to write this book. But some of our deepest-thinking philosophers, for example Derek Parfit and others cited by him in Reasons and Persons,37 have shown, with the aid of intriguing thought experiments, that it is by no means obvious what it means when we say that we are the same person through time. Psychologists such as Bruce Hood have approached the same problem from other directions. This is no place for a philosophical disquisition, so I will content myself with the observation that continuity of memory makes me feel as though my identity has remained continuous during my whole life, while I simultaneously feel incredulous that I am the same person as the young book-despoiler and the young empathy-failure.
I was also a games-failure, but the school had a squash court and I became obsessed with squash. I didn’t really enjoy trying to win against an opponent. I just liked knocking the ball against the wall by myself, seeing how long I could keep going. I had squash-withdrawal symptoms during the school holidays – missed the echoing sound as ball hit wall, and the smell of black rubber – and I kept dreaming of ways in which I might improvise a squash court somewhere on the farm, perhaps in a deserted pig sty.
Back at Chafyn Grove I would watch games of squash from the gallery, waiting for the game to end so I could slip down and practise by myself. One day – I must have been about eleven – there was a master in the gallery with me. He pulled me onto his knee and put his hand inside my shorts. He did no more than have a little feel, but it was extremely disagreeable (the cremasteric reflex is not painful, but in a skin-crawling, creepy way it is almost worse than painful) as well as embarrassing. As soon as I could wriggle off his lap, I ran to tell my friends, many of whom had had the same experience with him. I don’t think he did any of us any lasting damage, but some years later he killed himself. The atmosphere at morning prayers told us that something was up even before Gallows made his grim announcement, and one of the woman teachers was crying. Many years later in Oxford, a large bishop sat next to me at high table in New College. I recognized his name. He had been the (ah me, much smaller then) curate at St Mark’s church, to which Chafyn Grove marched in crocodile for Matins every Sunday, and he was evidently in touch with the gossip. He told me that the same woman teacher had been hopelessly in love with the paedophile master who had killed himself. None of us had ever guessed.
While Sunday morning service was in St Mark’s, every weekday morning and every evening we had prayers in the school chapel. Gallows was extremely religious. I mean really religious, not token-religious: he truly believed all that stuff, unlike many educators (and even clergymen) who pretend to do so out of duty, and politicians who pretend to do so because they are under the (I suspect exaggerated) impression that it wins votes. Gallows usually referred to God as ‘the King’ (he pronounced it ‘Keeng’, surprisingly because his speech was otherwise standard English ‘received pronunciation’). I think that, when I was very young, this led to a certain confusion in my mind. I must have been aware that King George VI was not really God, but there was a certain almost synaesthetic confusion in my mind between royalty and godhead. This persisted after George VI’s death into the coronation of his daughter, when Gallows instilled in us a deep reverence for ceremonial nonsense such as anointing with holy oil. I can still conjure an echo of the same reverence when I see a 1953 coronation mug, or hear Handel’s magnificent anthem ‘Zadok the Priest’, or Walton’s ‘Orb and Sceptre’ march, or Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’.
Every Sunday evening we had a sermon. Gallows and Slush took turns to preach it, Gallows in his Cambridge MA gown with white hood, Slush in his Oxford MA gown with red hood. One extraordinary sermon sticks in my memory. I can’t remember who preached it. Whoever it was told the story of a squad of soldiers drilling by a railway line. At one point the drill sergeant’s attention was distracted and he failed to shout ‘About turn!’ So the soldiers continued to march on – right into the path of an oncoming train. The story can’t have been true, and I now think it also can’t be true that – as I seem to remember from the sermon – we were supposed to admire the soldiers for their unquestioning obedience to military authority. Perhaps it is a failure of my memory. I certainly hope it is. Psychologists such as Elizabeth Loftus have shown that false memories can be indistinguishable from true ones, even when deliberately planted by unscrupulous therapists seeking, for example, to persuade distressed people that they must have been sexually abused as children.
One Sunday a junior master, a nice young man called Tom Stedman, was cajoled, obviously with the utmost reluctance, to do the preaching. He clearly hated it. I remember his frequent repetition of ‘What’s a heaven for?’ It would have made more sense if I had realized – at the time, instead of years later – that it was a quotation from Browning. Another popular young master, Mr Jackson, had a fine tenor voice. He was persuaded one day to sing Handel’s ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound’, which he also did with extreme reluctance, evidently realizing – correctly – that his art was wasted on us.
Also wasted on us were the occasional visiting lecturers and performers, although I suppose the fact that I have remembered them must say something. The ones that stick in my memory are R. Keith Jopp on ‘It’s there still’ (archeology), Lady Hull playing the upright piano in the dining hall (Schumann’s Faschingsschwank), somebody talking about Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions, somebody else showing flickering black and white films of athletes of the 1920s and 1930s, including Sydney Wooderson, and a trio of Irish troubadours who set up a little stage for themselves and sang ‘I bought my fiddle for ninepence, and that is Irish too’. One lecturer talked about explosives. He fished out what he claimed was a stick of dynamite. Casually saying that if he dropped it the whole school would go sky high, he threw it up and caught it. Of course we believed him, gullible little naïfs that we were. How could we not believe him? He was an adult, and we were brought up to believe what we were told.
We didn’t believe only adults. We were gullible too in the dormitory, where the resident yarn-spinner fooled us nightly. He told us King George VI was his uncle. The unfortunate king was held a prisoner in Buckingham Palace, from where he smuggled out desperate messages in code with a searchlight to our dormitory raconteur, his nephew. This young fantasist terrified us with stories of a horrible insect that would leap sideways from the wall onto your head, dig a neat round hole the size of a marble in your temple and bury a bag of poison in the hole to kill you. He told us, during a violent thunderstorm, that if you were struck by lightning you would be completely unaware of the fact for fifteen minutes. Your first inkling would be when blood started trickling out of both ears. Shortly after that you would be dead. We believed him and waited on tenterhooks after each lightning flash. Why? What reason did we have to think that he knew any more than we did? Was it even remotely plausible that you would feel nothing when you were struck by lightning, until fifteen minutes later? Once again, that sad lack of critical thinking. Shouldn’t children be taught critical, sceptical thinking from an early age? Shouldn’t we all be taught to doubt, to weigh up plausibility, to demand evidence?
Well, perhaps we should, but we weren’t. On the contrary: if anything, gullibility was positively encouraged. Gallows was extremely keen that we should all be confirmed into the Church of England before we left the school, and almost all of us were. The only exceptions I can remember were the one boy who came from a Roman Catholic family (and went to a different church every Sunday in the envied company of the pretty Catholic under-matron), and the one precocious boy who struck awe into us by claiming to be an atheist – he called the Bible the Holy Drivel and we expected thunderbolts daily (his iconoclasm, if not his logic, carried over into his style of geometric proof: ‘Triangle ABC looks isosceles, therefore . . .’).
I signed up for confirmation with the rest of my cohort; and the vicar of St Mark’s, Mr Higham, came to give us weekly confirmation classes in the school chapel. He was a handsome, silver-haired, avuncular figure and we went along with what he said. We didn’t understand it, it didn’t seem to make sense, and we thought this was because we were too young to understand. It is only with hindsight that I realize that it didn’t make sense because, quite simply, there was no sense to make. It was all invented nonsense. I still have, and frequently have occasion to refer to, the bible I was given on my confirmation. This time it was the real thing, the King James translation, and I have some of the best bits in my head to this day, especially Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs (not of Solomon, needless to say).
My mother has recently told me that Mr Galloway telephoned the parents individually to say how keen he was to have us confirmed. He said that thirteen was an impressionable age, and it was a good idea for children to be confirmed early, in order to give them a steady base in religion before they had to confront counter-influences at their public schools. Well, you can’t say he wasn’t honest in his designs on naive young minds.
I became intensely religious around the time I was confirmed. I priggishly upbraided my mother for not going to church. She took it very well and didn’t tell me, as she should have, to take a running jump. I prayed every night, not kneeling at the bed but curled up in a foetal position inside it, in what I confided to myself was ‘my own little corner with God’. I wanted (but never dared) to steal down into the chapel in the middle of the night and kneel at the altar where, I believed, an angel might appear to me in a vision. If I prayed hard enough, of course.
In my final term, when I was thirteen, Gallows made me a prefect. I don’t know why this pleased me so much, but I walked on air for the whole term. Later in my life, when the head of my department at Oxford was knighted by the Queen, I attended his celebratory party. I asked a colleague whether our professor was pleased by the honour and received the memorable reply: ‘Like a dog with three pricks, old boy.’ That’s pretty much how I felt on being made a prefect. Also on being accepted into the Railway Club.
The Railway Club was the main reason I had been pleased by my parents’ decision to send me to Chafyn Grove. It was run by Mr K. O. Chetwood Aiken, not really a teacher except on the rare occasions when a boy would opt to learn German. A melancholy man with a long, sad face, his real love and apparently sole pastime was his Railway Room (although I recently learned, on Googling him, that he had been a known Cornish artist). One room in the school was set aside for him and he built there a magical simulacrum of the Great Western Railway, 0-gauge electric, with two terminuses called Paddington and Penzance and one station halfway between called Exeter. Each engine had a name, Susan or George for example, and the two dear little shunting engines were both called Boanerges (Bo One and Bo Two). Each station had a bank of switches, each switch activating its own portion of track, red switches for the Up line and blue for the Down. When a train arrived at Paddington, you had to uncouple it from the big engine that had pulled it, then drive one of the little shunting engines from its siding to move the train from the Up line to the Down, then send the engine to the turntable to turn it around, then couple it to the new front of the train and send it back along the Down line to Penzance, where the whole process would be reciprocated. I loved the smell of ozone that came from the electric sparks, and I adored working out which was the right combination of switches to flick on and off for each operation. I think the pleasure I got from it was similar to that which I later derived from programming computers, and also from soldering the connections in my one-valve radio set. Everybody wanted to get into the Railway Club, and all who did so doted on Mr Chetwood Aiken despite his lugubrious mien. With hindsight I think he may already have been very ill, for he died of cancer not long after I left. I don’t know whether the Railway Room survived his death, but I think the school would have been mad to let it go.
Much as I enjoyed the Railway Club and being allowed to sashay uninvited through the door of the prefects’ study, the time came when I had to move on to another school and start at the bottom again. When I was only three months old my father had put my name down for Marlborough, his old school, but was told that he was too late: I should have been put down at birth (how long before that sentence is quoted out of context?). Marlborough’s snooty letter was quite hurtful to him as an old boy, but he put my name on the waiting list anyway, and when the time came I could have gone to Marlborough. Meanwhile, however, my father’s thoughts had turned in another direction. He was impressed by the technical skills of the next-door gentleman farmer, Major Campbell, who had a well-equipped workshop and was an expert welder. My father naturally thought that I might become a farmer, and workshop skills give great advantages in that career (as I have recently learned from one of the most successful and certainly the most unconventionally enterprising of farmers I have ever met, the redoubtable and heroic George Scales).38
Major Campbell had acquired his expertise at his old school, Oundle in Northamptonshire. Oundle had the finest workshops of any school in the country, and its great headmaster from 1901 to 1922, F. W. Sanderson, had initiated a system whereby every boy spent one whole week of every term in the workshops, all normal school work suspended. Neither Marlborough nor any other school could boast anything like that. My parents therefore put my name down for Oundle, and I took the scholarship exam in my last term at Chafyn Grove. I didn’t get a scholarship, but I did well enough to get a place, and Oundle was where I went, in 1954, aged thirteen.
I don’t know, by the way, how much else Major Campbell had picked up during his time at Oundle. I presume his robust approach to recalcitrant underlings came rather from his days in the army. He caught one of his workers in petty theft, I think of a tool from his workshop, and fired him in somewhat literalistic terms: ‘I’ll give you fifty yards’ start before you get both barrels.’ Of course he wouldn’t have carried out the threat, but it makes a good story and another fine illustration of the shifting moral Zeitgeist.