Otherwise the relations between staff and boys were by and large cordial and run-of-the-mill. With one exception. There was one young master, popular with the boys, who distinguished himself in our eyes by demonstrating a clear sense of his own sartorial style—a worn leather greatcoat, knitted ties, Chelsea boots—and who, we guessed, possessed a source of income separate from his school salary. He had his own car, something sporty, went abroad in the summer—there was generally a debonair and confident manner about him that we responded to. Then, one evening in my dormitory a junior boy returned from a late-night punishment lesson (malefactors copying out lines in a classroom) in tears. When quizzed by the dormitory leader he confessed that this particular master had “fiddled” with him. The boys had been in dressing gowns and pyjamas; when this fellow approached the master—the invigilator of the punishment period—with his completed lines the man had slid his hand into the fly of the boy’s pyjamas. The seniors of us in the dormitory—I was probably thirteen by then—consulted. We reported the matter to the head boy who decided he would have to tell the headmaster. We watched him go downstairs and knock on the door of the headmaster’s study. In the morning the young master had gone, not a sign, not a trace of him left. A brief, bland announcement was made about his sudden departure, “a family crisis” had called him away, and it was never spoken of further. We, as I recall, were not so much outraged by the molestation as by the breaching of convention: it was not so much the act itself but the collapse of general principles it betokened—principles of decorum and staff-pupil relationships rather than anything more highly moral—this sort of thing really wouldn’t do. We were pompously pleased that he had been sent packing and no more fuss was made.
Sex was definitely in the air as I approached the end of my prep school years. I remember a very young under-matron—no more than seventeen or eighteen—supervising ablutions in the shower room, inspecting the fingernails of naked, hirsute, mature thirteen-year-olds and, as I waited my turn, I caught myself wondering if she found it a bit embarrassing, standing there fully clothed with fifty assorted sizes of cocks and balls on display. And I think she did. Sexually we were insatiably curious: more advanced boys were envied for their masturbatory prowess; there would be the odd thrilling torchlit striptease cabaret in the dormitories late at night, and some more daring souls crept into each other’s beds for mutual stimulation, but their numbers were few and they were regarded as mild eccentrics rather than pariahs.
As the time came for our transition to the main school a certain tension became evident in those about to make the move, uneasy at the idea of exchanging a small pond for a much larger one in which we would be conspicuous minnows. There was a rite of passage that took place in the final week of our final term and which symbolically marked this impending alteration in our status. It was known as “P.D.” and was a one-on-one solemn discussion with the headmaster about the facts of life.
The initials referred to “Pandrops”—a name peculiar to Scotland, I believe, which was given to a brand of large round white peppermints. These the headmaster would feed the boy throughout his faintly embarrassed disquisition in the strange belief that the peppermint would prevent any unseemly arousal. Where he discovered this faith in the anaphrodisiac properties of peppermint I have no idea, but anyway, there one sat, dutifully sucking on a succession of mints, as he tediously ran us through the familiar mechanics of procreation. At the end he would ask peremptorily: “Have you any questions?” This was what we were waiting for, the tacit understanding being that the headmaster was duty-bound to answer everything—everything—we wanted to know. Consequently medical textbooks, dictionaries and novels were scoured in advance for sexual arcana: “Sir, what are the symptoms of tertiary syphilis?” “How do you do soixante-neuf, sir?” The aim was to make the P.D. session last as long as possible, a fact which, rather than displaying the appalling extent of one’s ignorance, was instead perceived to convey the impression of massive virility. There was a record for the longest P.D.—an awesome interrogatory effort which had endured for most of an afternoon, was abandoned and resumed after breakfast the next day—but no one in my year lasted much more than an hour.
So I left the world of the prep school after four years and everything changed, but my memories of that period of my life seem fixed and anchored in my first year at Wester Elchies; perhaps because of my coming from Africa everything about it was so strange and new and its impact inevitably left deeper traces. Recollections of my first summer there are particularly resonant because by then I had settled in, I had explored my world and was at home in it. And, I suppose, I was happy. It was a kind of idyll living in that remote and rather beautiful Scottish estate, for all its strangeness. I remember on summer nights after supper we would gather around the teachers sitting out on the grass tennis court, lounging beneath the cedar tree (or was it beech, or have I just planted it?), pestering them, chatting and playing, before the bell was rung and we were summoned inside for prayers, then bed. A wash and a teeth clean standing on the wooden duckboards in the washroom, then into the cool dormitory high under the eaves of the house. Lights out at 8.00, not that it made much difference, the thin curtains drawn vainly against the sunny northern skies. In reality I couldn’t have spent more than a few dozen summer evenings at Elchies but it is that particular limpid northern atmosphere—the sun still stubbornly in the sky but the shadows long and with the warmth just beginning to go—that my memory most associates with the place and that time of my life. The ambience is always conjured up by Auden’s haunting poem, “Summer Night,” written—coincidentally—while he was teaching at a prep school in Scotland himself:
That later we, though parted then,
May still recall those evenings when
Fear gave his watch no look;
The lion griefs loped from the shade
And on our knees their muzzles laid
And Death put down his book.
1998
The Hothouse
I have known few large buildings as intimately as I knew my house at school; after all, I lived there, day in, day out, for five years. All public schoolboys can claim a similar familiarity, but in almost every case you will find there is no nostalgia for the building itself. Apart from my parental home I have never lived in any one house for longer than three years, but I remember the shabbiest and most transient student bedsits with more affection. It is not all that surprising: the living quarters of your average public schoolboy are at best functional and soulless, and at worst utterly disgusting. If Borstals or remand homes were maintained in similar conditions, there would be a public outcry. I recently visited several famous public schools, and nothing I saw there made me so depressed as the dormitories and the thought that for so many years I had slept so many nights in such dismal and depressing circumstances.
It is, I think, a retrospective revulsion. Adolescent boys are not much preoccupied with personal hygiene, let alone the care and maintenance of their living quarters. But now, when I recall the concrete and tile washrooms and lavatories, the pale-green dormitories with their crude wooden beds, I form a new respect for the resilience and fortitude of the adolescent spirit.
Not that the conditions we experienced at school were the worst I have seen. At one school that I visited in Scotland some of the studies were in a converted greenhouse, which the boys had lined with egg boxes in an attempt to provide some insulation. Older buildings in older schools give rise to prospects of damp and decay that are almost Dickensian in their extravagance; the dormitories look like wards in some Crimean war hospital.
Anyway, we were fortunate, if that is the right word, in that our house was newish and made of wood. It looked rather like an army barracks, a large, single-storey frame building, creosoted brown, with a tar-paper roof, constructed around a square, grassy courtyard. There were four very long terraced corridors with rooms off each side. One edge of the square expanded to contain a large locker room, towel and shower room and lavatorie
s; one corner contained the housemaster’s flat. We ate in a dining room a mile away in the main school, an old, rather attractive, stone manor house whose fine architectural proportions had suffered when a Second World War fire destroyed its mansard roof.
When I arrived at the school, aged thirteen, in 1965, everything about the house was functional and anonymous. The floor, throughout, was brown linoleum; the lampshades were white plastic. Curtains at dorm windows were made from the same drab material. Only in the studies was individual decoration permitted, but as this consisted almost entirely of pictures of women scissored from lingerie and swimwear advertisements, they too had a homogeneous air.
Prospective parents being shown round the house often found the unrelieved wallpapering of brassière and corset ads (interspersed with the odd film star or motor car) something of a shock, and from time to time the housemaster or the headmaster would initiate a clean-up campaign. Shortly after I arrived new regulations were issued. (1) Nudity was banned. Even the most decorous and coy picture from a girlie magazine (or nude mags, nude books, skin mags, as we called them) was not permitted: the pin-up must be clothed. (2) Only three pin-ups were allowed on the wall per person. (3) As a special concession, a fourth pinup could be kept concealed in a drawer for furtive, private consultation. This is true.
It was vain legislation and constantly had to be reinforced. But as years went by attitudes relaxed, and by the time I left every boy’s study looked like a Soho bookshop or soft-porn emporium. Indeed, in terms of fixtures and fittings the history of my house, and of all the other six houses in the school, was one of prettification and improvement. Carpets were introduced; studies were subdivided into cubicles or converted to study-dormitories; painting and wallpapering were encouraged. Taste, as might be expected, was execrable. I remember that in one of my studies we lowered the ceiling by two feet by tacking string to and fro from one wall to another and laying brightly coloured crêpe paper on top of the resulting web. In the five years I lived there the character of the house altered by stages from that of some sort of penal institution to that of a moderately prosperous South American shanty town.
Much of this home decorating was subsidized by profits from the house shop. This sold nothing apart from sweets, soft drinks and ice cream and did a roaring trade. It was considered completely normal, in the hour of free time between end of prep and lights out, for one person to consume, say, a litre of Coca-Cola, a packet of Jaffa Cakes and a packet of digestive biscuits, a Mars bar, a slab of chocolate, some packets of crisps, some strips of liquorice and a couple of dozen aniseed balls. Everybody, while his money lasted, seemed to eat constantly. As one rose through the ranks kettles were permitted and, along with them, “brewing” privileges. By the end of my school career I was allowed a toaster. During an average day I might drink between twenty and thirty mugs of instant coffee and eat two large white sliced loaves of bread.
Apart from eating and drinking, the other memory I retain of living in the house was the noise. Certain periods of the day were radio hours. As if on command, dozens of radios and record players would start up. Very little classical music was played. In my era the sophisticated public schoolboy listened to Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead and Cream.
We had a television (black-and-white) in the house common room. Its use was very restricted. Far and away the most popular programme was Top of the Pops. I am sure its producers have no idea of the profound influence and effect this programme had on a generation of public schoolboys. I do not know if it commands the same allegiance today, but I would wager that during the last five years of the 1960s 99 percent of public schoolboys religiously watched the programme every week during term time. Everything stopped for Top of the Pops. In the entire school nothing moved. In our house sixty boys would somehow cram themselves into the common room to watch it on Thursday nights. And, pathetic as it may seem today, we didn’t watch it so much for the music but for the girls in the studio audience. The programme was accompanied throughout by the grunts and groans, the whoops and sighs, of group passion. It was, I believe, in every public school in the land, a spontaneous, countrywide expression of terrible lust.
The house was large, but it felt curiously constricted. In the summer one could get outside, but during the winter there was nowhere else to go. Curiously, there was not much traffic between houses, except at senior level. Going into another house in the school was like going into another country, but with the added disadvantage that its inhabitants constantly drew attention to your strangeness. Few events were more unsettling than, as a junior boy, to have to deliver a message to a boy in another house. To be jeered at as an alien was the best you could expect; more often you would be set upon. We were members not so much of different houses as of different tribes. The houses all had different atmospheres, almost different ideologies. One house was corrupt, full of villains; one was full of eccentrics; one house was obsessively self-interested. My house, at least when I first joined it, was very hard.
We had had a succession of popular and ineffectual housemasters. There was no discipline. A new housemaster was strenuously trying to impose his authority. But when he retired to his flat at the end of the day the old regime established itself. The source of the problem was a group of boys in the sixteen-to-seventeen age bracket. They were “bad” in the sense that they had no interest in promotion. In the evenings they terrorized juniors with a kind of candid ruthlessness that I still find chilling to recall. They would roam the junior studies, four or five of these roughs, and beat people up at random, extort money or food, rifle letters and lockers in search of diversion. One felt in a way rather like a medieval peasant during the Hundred Years War: one never knew when another marauding army might march by, randomly distributing death and destruction. It was comparatively short-lived, this period of capricious thuggery, but it provided me with a full catalogue of the resourceful cruelties of the adolescent mind. Later the attitude of the house changed to something altogether more genial, but I will always remember my years as a junior, even though I was relatively unscathed. W. H. Auden said he detested fascism because at public school he lived in a fascist state. It is rarely a constant state of affairs, but it is not difficult for private life in a boarding school temporarily to take on certain fascist characteristics. It is the sense of being a victim, or potential victim, that lingers on: the way a house can become at certain moments a place of genuine terror and fear; the way you sacrifice all principles in order to save your skin; the ease with which the ideology of the dominant group seduces you. This is, of course, the private, unadministered life of a boarding house, but in a crucial sense it is the reality of being a boarder in a boys’ public school. Its opposite is what I call “the prison governor’s view of the prison.” That has a reality too, but it is for public and official consumption. The inmates experience something entirely different, vital and basic.
If you are lucky, everything changes at school as you grow older, stronger and more senior. Those few to whom this transformation and relaxation does not apply are the saddest products of the system. But for the majority the tenor of the daily round eventually establishes itself as tolerable. However, the last year or two at school, although the most privileged, can also be the most irritating. Most people experience this, and no doubt most people have their own reasons. On reflection, I wonder if my own vague disquiet was not to do with a subconscious reaction against the unrelenting absence of privacy that one experiences as the norm in a boarding school. Looking back at it now, years later, I realize that of my nine years at boarding school I actually spent three years on holiday and a full six at school. So for those six years, for example, I usually bathed and showered in the company of eight or a dozen other people; I relieved myself in what was effectively a public lavatory; I dressed and undressed, to order, in a crowded locker room; and, except for my final year, I slept in a room that never had fewer than four people in it and on occasions had fourteen. As a way of life—I am trying to be objective abou
t it—this seems to me to be positively bizarre, not to say noisome and rebarbative. Five years in the same house is not only five years of crowding personalities; it is also five years of enforced proximity to the bodies that accommodate those personalities. The house was not a place for the fastidious.
Few people ever wield power as absolute as that possessed by a public-school prefect. Perhaps if you are an officer in the army, it may be similar, but really I feel it is more akin to something you might encounter in a feudal or totalitarian society, in so far as your power is subject to your whim. Boys may not be allowed to administer corporal punishment, but apart from that the head of house at a public school can—or certainly could—exercise a degree of control over the sixty boys in his charge that, day by day, could be said to be greater even than that of the housemaster.
The power operates on two basic levels. First, you can order people to do things: to shave, to repolish their shoes, to comb their hair, to have their hair cut, to run instead of walk and so on. On the second level you can deprive them of things: their freedom (by enforcing detention), their pleasures (you can forbid them to watch TV or ride a bicycle, reduce their pocket money, confiscate their possessions). A prefect may not be able to beat anybody, but if he works at it, and if the transgressions persist, he could probably have a boy beaten. Conceivably, if the circumstances were right, he could get a boy expelled. It is perhaps sufficient to say that, if he feels like it, a head of house can make the life of anybody in his house absolute hell.