A PUBLIC-SCHOOL BOY
I’m visiting Winchester on a sultry summer afternoon, hoping to find why my father hated his public school. So far, I’m charmed.
Nestling behind the grey bulk of the Cathedral, the College hides its beauties as cunningly as Oxford and Cambridge conceal their lovely quads and cloisters. I’d forgotten that Jane Austen died here, in a modest house staring out at a high, hard, pebbled wall. Hawkins (Chawkers to the Wykehamists) is the house in which my father began life at the College in September 1936. The housemaster’s tall, fresh-faced son opens the door. When I explain my quest, he leads me upstairs to peep into the airy dormitories, and down to the Study in which forty boys still carry out their evening work in wooden booths known as Toys. Hawkins House, on a sleepy day in early August, feels unthreatening. The ceilings are clean and high; light pours through large windows. There’s no shade of the prisonhouse here, nothing sinister.
‘Anything else you’d like to see?’ asks the friendly boy. I shake my head, feeling foolish. I’m baffled.
Back to the book of essays, then, to see what can be deduced from a schoolboy’s first year of compositions, complete with the Master’s comments.
The Master had to struggle not to lose his temper with his new pupil. He asked for an essay on comic writing and was rebuked for liking Wodehouse (‘Personally,’ George informed him, ‘I do not particularly admire his style.’) The Master also liked Scott; George expressed scorn. Scott, in his own opinion, was greatly inferior to Harrison Ainsworth: ‘I challenge you to find another book written in such beautiful English . . . There is no other but Windsor Castle.’ This time, the Master showed his annoyance: ‘Nonsense!’ he wrote. The subject of ‘Relations’ gave rise to one of my father’s most florid pieces, inspired by memories of Charlie Byron’s sermons. ‘So does death part us all,’ he wrote. ‘Our relations who love us die and we stay on, and we in our turn have to leave those whom we have helped. So time goes on, and I think a befitting ending for this humble effort at entertaining the reader is the following verse of a favourite hymn of mine: “Time like an ever-rolling stream . . .”’
The Master had begun to lose his temper; angrily, he reminded George Seymour that he was thirteen, not seventy, and ordered him to alter his style. My father didn’t change his style one scrap. The next set topic was ‘Friends’, a tricky one for a boy who had made none. Tellingly, George expressed a preference for artefacts. Pictures, in his opinion, were more faithful than friends. ‘They will still give you all the pleasure within their power. They do their best.’ For him, there was only one prevailing certainty, one friendship that could never falter, never betray: the House. This is true friendship, he wrote: ‘a place of happy memories and a place which seems in itself to welcome one on one’s homecoming.’
Perhaps, on this occasion, the Master felt a little sorry for a boy who had no friendships to celebrate. ‘Rather ponderous,’ he wrote.
The more wretched my father grew at school, the more fiercely he clung to the House. Whatever the subject he was given to write about, he always managed to turn it into a eulogy to the place he thought of as home. (Evelyn Gardens was never mentioned; you would never guess, reading these schoolboy essays, that their author had a London connection.) Trying his hand at story-writing, he remembered Nuthall Temple’s fate and wrote of the destruction by fire of a beloved family home. The features of Thrumpton – tall red-brick chimneys, stone gables, a lake, a library overlooking a garden – are easily identifiable.
At fifteen, my father at last began to acquire a few friends. All of them were younger; all were impressed by his tales of a princely mansion in Nottinghamshire. (Again, not a word had been breathed about Evelyn Gardens.) ‘You rotten worm, aren’t you ever going to ask me to that house of yours?’ wrote one.
It might seem obvious why my father didn’t want to ask friends to stay. Thrumpton was not his home. He feared exposure and ridicule. Another reason helps to explain why his essays dwelt on the House with such intensity. He had, for no reason he could understand, been banished.
It’s possible that Charlie Byron, a capricious old gentleman, was playing cruel games with a nephew who adored his home; it’s more likely, since some distant Byron cousins had revealed themselves just at the time George went to Winchester, that he was rethinking the future. Charlie’s first duty, as Thrumpton’s owner, was to his own family, not his wife’s; the Byron cousins had a greater right to his property than Anna’s nephew. This, it seems, is why Charlie decided to bring an abrupt end to George’s holidays at the House. Other members of Anna’s family paid regular visits during this period; only George was excluded. This unexplained act of ostracism, it seems fair to assume, contributed to my father’s memory of the Winchester years as a time of extreme unhappiness.
Death provided a solution to Charlie Byron’s quandary. The cousinly claimants both died young; George, who may never have known how seriously his hopes of inheritance had been threatened, was restored to favour in the summer of 1939, shortly before the outbreak of war. A rambling and affectionate invitation was issued; he was welcome again. He could visit Thrumpton for as long as he wished.
When war was declared, my father was sixteen years old, with a year of schooling left to run and no expectation that his secure world was about to be overturned. Oliver FitzRoy was preparing to follow his older brother to Cambridge; my father – his academic record at Winchester was poor – had no such plans. He had only one clear objective: occupation of the House he loved and to which he had been welcomed back. Lulled by the tranquillity of a golden autumn, he made a leisurely round of favourite haunts, cycling around the sleepy little villages, fishing by the lake, wandering through the high grass of ungrazed fields where, for hours on end, he lay gazing up at an empty, unthreatening sky.
Writing a letter of reassurance to his mother (he had taken to addressing Vita as ‘Boo’ because, he told her, it made her seem nearer to his age), he took care to relate which of the Thrumpton roses were in bloom, and to tell her that the House – his House – had never looked so lovely.
War? What war? By the time he left Winchester in 1940, he was convinced that all would be resolved. (This certainty, although George did not say so, was based on Charlie Byron’s politically naïve reading of international events.) All that mattered, here and now, on the summer evening of his letter, was the scent of tobacco plants, the deepening blue of the sky, the rich rosy glow of sunlit brick. He felt so safe here, so at peace. Dearest Boo: she must not worry. All was well.