WE ARE IN THE HEART OF KELLOGG’S COUNTRY: BATTLE CREEK, MICHIGAN. HOME OF CEREAL KILLERS. WE CAME BATTLING IN EARLY THIS MORNING AGAINST STRONG HEADWINDS AND A FLURRY OF SNOW. THE WEATHER DROPPED THIRTY DEGREES between the start and the end of our show in Columbus, Ohio. We were performing at the exquisite Southern Theatre, a gem of an old opera house that has been perfectly restored and reopened only five years ago. Backstage it is clean and efficient and very cozy, and front stage it is all royal blue velvet seats and hardwood flooring and gold Napoleonic wreath carpeting. It is a joy to play, and the crowd are noisy and very responsive.
We are finally heading west. We have been doodling around in circles and swoops all over the East Coast, what ’Lish calls “a dartboard tour,” with a sudden dash across country to St. Louis and then back up to Buffalo. Our course makes sense only to a greedy bastard William Morris agent. But I have to say that at least hairdresser Marc has steered us clear of all bad weather, so perhaps he knows what he is doing. He is a little upset that I talk too freely about the promoters. It’s a fucking diary. You’re supposed to tell the truth. That’s the whole bloody point. Peter says he has to watch what he says in case it ends up in here…. What is it about Yanks and freedom of speech?
Hans the Webmaster is away for the weekend, so of course, I’m late with my diary. It’s like being back at school. You don’t have to hand in your prep, as the master’s gone off for the weekend, so you don’t do it. You had to be quite tough as a teacher to survive the kids at my school. Many masters suddenly departed with nervous breakdowns in the middle of term.
At seven I was sent to a bleak English boarding school in Wolverhampton. That’s not quite the end of the world, but you can see it from there.
I was there for twelve years. You get less for murder.
I was dumped in my boarding school in Wolverhampton at the age of seven. I knew that a suitcase had been packed, with carefully marked items, but I still felt I had some choice in the matter. I was playing happily in the playground when a loud bell rang. Uhoh, better go now. Don’t want to stay here overnight. But no, too late! My mum had already gone, slipped away “to avoid creating a scene.” No farewell. No fond “see you.” Just “You boy get along inside and change your shoes.” It was twelve years before I managed to escape.
That’s really what we did all day: change shoes. To go inside, you put on your indoor shoes. To go and play outside, you take off your indoor shoes, put your indoor shoes inside a cage, and then put on your outdoor shoes. When you come in, you take off your outdoor shoes, put your outdoor shoes in the cage, and then put on your indoor shoes. To go upstairs, you take off your indoor shoes and put them in the cage with your outdoor shoes, and then you put your slippers on. When you have finished in the dormitory, you come downstairs, take off your slippers, and put on your indoor shoes, unless you are going outside, in which case. …Four years of that and you are ready for the senior school. Here you can become a fag. Stop there! A fag is not the same thing as in America. Not at all. So stop all that snickering.
Boarding school didn’t do me any harm. It made a man of me. And it made a man of my wife.
While there was a lot of sexual tampering with the young, and I certainly didn’t escape it, a fag in a British boarding school is an honorable tradition. As a fag you were a slave, a skivvy, to a prefect. You fetched him toast, you pressed his army uniform, polished his boots, shone his brasses, blancoed his webbing, cleaned his shoes, washed his sports kit, brought him books from the library—basically waited on him hand and foot. Bullying was endemic, beating common. You could be beaten for anything—being late, being early, being tired, being funny, for silent insolence (my favorite), or for simply being a boy. Beating by prefects was by slipper on the ass. Masters could beat you with canes, usually six of the best across the backside from the headmaster. In the junior school one of the worst beatings was on the hand with a wooden ruler—that hurt like hell—or, even worse, across the back of the calves with a ruler. A sadist called Mrs. McCartney beat me so badly in junior school because I got a math problem wrong that forever after I was hopeless at math.
The first night at school I remember the sound of abandoned kids in their beds sobbing. “Blubbing,” it was called, and we soon learned to avoid it, the punishment being intolerable mockery from your peers. In this way we learned to hide our emotions. All good training for adult British life. I remember the freezing cold walk to “the petts” at night, the urinals that constantly overflowed on the cold stone floor, so to “take a slash,” you had to leap about barefoot, dodging the pools of piss. Naturally we turned to gangs to defend ourselves from this harsh environment. Our form (class) became a highly evolved gang in the senior school, efficient and cynically corrupt. For instance, we never took a straight exam. They locked the exam papers in a heavily padlocked cupboard, but overnight we simply unscrewed the back of the cupboard and removed the question paper. We never touched the lock! We stole the special answer paper, too, so some kids stayed up all night writing out their answers in a neat hand. Then they smuggled the completed papers in under their sweaters and swapped them over when the master wasn’t looking.
Once, the science master, a man we called Heap (because his real name was Everest, and Everest is a big heap), suspected that there had been cheating in an exam. So he made us sit it again and he brought the paper in at the last minute so we didn’t have time to steal it like we usually did. We thought resitting this exam was jolly unfair (i.e., the big bullies were fucked), so we made a plan to simply screw it. The entire class sat and stared at the Heap for an hour and a half without lifting a pen, until he finally cracked and said, “All right, you made your point, just answer the final question.” So the cheats were never discovered until GCE finals, which were outside exams and couldn’t be stolen, since they arrived by special mail on the day of the exam. Of my class of thirty-two, only six made it through to the next term! I, who had had my answers constantly cribbed for four years, turned out to be top, passing all eight “O” levels with flying colors. The rest of the boys simply disappeared.
The strangest thing is that my school was founded as an orphanage in 1850 by a man called John Leese (!). Our school hymn went
Honour to John Leese our founder
Builder he in bygone day.
How weird is that?