However, the people who bore the brunt of our lewd interest were the maids. These were local girls, I think, and were hired—so public-school rumour famously has it—solely on the grounds of their ugliness. It made little difference. Their encounters with the boys, three times a day at meals, were characterized by a one-sided traffic of sexual banter of the vilest and coarsest sort. Given the opportunity, more daring boys actually molested them—squeezing, pinching, feeling. The girls were remarkably tolerant. I never heard of any boy disciplined as a result of a complaint made by one of them. I think our attitudes to them brought out the very worst in our natures: it was male lust at its most dog-like and contemptuous, tarnished further by a brand of wilful class disdain and mockery that was almost dehumanizing. I dare say any male sodality—rugby team, army platoon, group of Pall Mall clubmen—can descend to this level for a while, but what is depressing and degrading about the male boarding school is the unrelieved constancy of the tone, year in, year out, for at least five years. It must have some effect.
There was also, it is true, a brand of passionate romanticism about our sexual curiosity that was slightly more amusing. Nobody ever admitted to being a virgin. By tacit consent conversation about the great day was always rather vague and woolly—it was just taken as read that everybody was, well, pretty experienced. There was one boy who made the mistake of confessing, at the age of seventeen, that he had still to lose his virginity. He became a laughing stock in the house. Little boys of fourteen would howl, “Virgin! Virgin!” at him. He came back the next term claiming to have lost it in the holidays, but it was too late. His greatest mistake was to have admitted it—the only honest man among shameless liars. And it was easy to lie—no one could prove that you were not the satyr you claimed to be, come the holidays. It was quite important, however, to live up to your reputation on the rare occasion when the company was mixed. Many a self-appointed stud came to grief at school dances, for example.
There was also the problem of letters. If you boasted of having a girlfriend, some evidence needed to be furnished: a photograph at the very least or passionate letters. We liked our letters from our girlfriends to be as conspicuously feminine as possible—coloured paper and envelopes with deckle edges and illustrations and drenched in scent. Post was distributed after lunch in the common room. A letter was inhaled, fondled, groaned and swooned over—exhibit “A” in the defence of your virility.
One boy, a jolly, rowdy person called Dunbar, used to exchange clippings of pubic hair with his girlfriend. In the dormitory the little tufts would be passed round like holy relics. We begged him to go further—the girl was French after all. At our crass prompting he finally did what we required. Together we composed a touching letter requesting a photograph in the nude. The girl was deeply offended, and the relationship shortly fizzled out.
Some boys, though, had exceptional good fortune. A friend of mine “got off” with the headmaster’s au pair, a pleasant Norwegian girl called Ingrid—a fabulously exotic creature to us. Another had an affair with his housemaster’s daughter, provoking fraught dilemmas of divided loyalty. The rest of us had to rely on rare opportunities provided by school dances or the biennial Gilbert and Sullivan, when the girls were bussed in to play the female chorus.
The school dance was little more than a meat market. By the time the girls arrived all the boys were well-fortified with alcohol. At the first slow number they pounced. The occasion degraded everybody. The Gilbert and Sullivans were more fun and more decorum reigned. We were meant to be rehearsing, and we saw the girls quite regularly over a period of a month. Courtship rituals were rather primly observed, and the alliances that were struck up remained for a good while on a rather chaste level—one was often invited to the girl’s house for tea on Sunday afternoons to meet her parents, for example. This more sustained contact usually provoked the dormant, romantic side of our nature, and many of us fell deeply in love as a consolation for being denied any physical release. That came, eventually, usually as the dates of the performances approached, a sense of time running out—as with soldiers due to return to the front—affecting both boy and girl. These wistful encounters were not so shaming. They were like any adolescent affair—cute, thrilling, melancholic—a brief foray into real life. They ended after the show as the barriers of the single-sex boarding school were reimposed. The only real victim was the Gilbert and Sullivan, in my memory always appalling, for the simple reason that none of the chorus had joined for the singing.
Every boy who leaves his boarding school has been shaped and formed, like it or not, by his years in that hothouse society. Of course, each individual will be affected to a different degree, but the only effective way of resisting the legacy is to get out early. My generation of schoolboys (class of 1970) was entirely typical not only of every other school but also of the generations that preceded us. We left school as unreflecting snobs—we had a very acute perception of “us” and of “them.” “They” were all the yobs, oiks, lefties and deviants who hadn’t been to public school. We were also racist, in a robust, cheery, easy-going manner, as the blacks and Arabs at school could testify. “Wog” was the commonest of nicknames and, to us, devoid of pejorative intent. We thought of women quite simply as sexual objects. We were politically naive—which is to say, knee-jerk Tories of the old squirearchical model. We had our moody rebels, true, but they were influenced by Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac rather than by any political faith. I knew only one boy at school who claimed to vote Labour—we thought him a ludicrous poseur at best, a patent moron at worst. Although most of us had done “A” levels, and the more successful were trying to get into university, we were afflicted with a brand of philistinism that manifested itself as a grave suspicion of “pseuds” or anyone who was too intellectual by half. Also many years of group loyalty, to the school, the house, the team, the power elite, had engendered a mistrust of the individual—indeed, “individualist” was often employed as a term of abuse. The maverick, the odd one out, the not easily assimilable, were to be regarded with caution. Not the best set of values with which to rejoin the world in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
So what happened? I think that, usually, the shock of encountering real life stimulated a hasty course of unlearning. Most public schoolboys have to start a stringent programme of re-education almost as soon as the school gates close behind them. This assumes, of course, that the society in which you are compelled to mix operates under different codes. There are still many walks of life in contemporary Britain where the transition from schoolboy to adult is imperceptible—the attitudes that served you well at eighteen will see you nicely through to retirement.
When I left school I went to live on my own in France for a year. The signal inadequacies of my education swiftly presented themselves to me, and I suppose it was then that I began to look back on the strange institution in which I had spent half my life and to wonder at it.
I often found the focus of my thoughts coming round to one boy, a little younger than me, who had been in my house. This person, a sallow, weak boy called Gibbon, had been hated by everybody, myself included. I have no idea why; he was just very unpopular. He was never really persecuted, just spurned. Sometimes a gang would descend on him, demolish his desk, push him around, but most of the time the punishment was verbal. He was a whipping-boy for the house. He appeared to take it in reasonable spirit, was not abjectly miserable, and so there seemed no real cause to change attitudes. He had no friends and walked everywhere by himself. He was so disdained that even other unpopular boys in the house would not associate with him in case the taint was contagious.
My own school career was, in a banal way, a successful one, comparatively untroubled and orthodox, but I kept wondering what it had been like for Gibbon during his five years. When he went home in the holidays and his parents asked him how he was getting on at school, what did he say? And, more important, what effect would those five years have on him as an adult? Would he shrug them off? Struggle on
regardless? Carry them like a yoke? When I looked at my contemporaries, boys who had had a far easier time, and saw them, years later, still living in the heavy shadow of their school days, still wrestling with aspects of their personalities that were somehow corrupted, undeveloped or warped, I doubted, somehow, that old Gibbon would be the breeziest and most carefree of fellows.
1985
The First World War
It was a piece of metal, dark grey, about three inches by one inch, with curious scalloped edges which resembled the crude working of a stone-age tool. In fact it was a chunk of German shell casing which, one night in October 1917, in no man’s land, during the third Battle of Ypres, hit my grandfather—William Boyd—full in the back.
I have held that piece of shrapnel in my hand but I never had the chance to ask my grandfather—who survived this incident and the war—what it was like, because he died in 1952 when I was a week old. I never had the chance to ask him what was going through his mind during that wiring party (he was a sergeant in the Royal Engineers) as he unspooled fresh rolls of barbed wire in front of the British trenches, freezing motionless as the starshells came over from the German lines. Perhaps he heard the unmistakable noise of incoming artillery—he had been two years on the Western Front by 1917—and wondered, as everybody must have done, if this time his number might be up.
When he came to, when he realized he was only wounded—not about to die, not hideously maimed—perhaps he thought of his brother, Sandy, who had also been wounded, a year previously, in August 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. The Boyd brothers were both sergeants, but Sandy was in the Australian Army—the Australian Imperial Force—having emigrated to Australia in 1914, only to be sent back to Europe two years later to fight for the Empire. Sandy’s wounds earned him a medal—the DCM—as he had received them rallying his company in the face of a German counterattack at Mouquet Farm, organizing the remains of the company (all the officers were killed and wounded) and leading them out of harm’s way. Sandy was shipped back to Australia to convalesce and was duly presented with his medal by the Governor General at a parade in a park in Melbourne. The two brothers never saw each other again—Sandy died of a heart attack in 1940.
What united them, and what united huge numbers of their generation, was the unique and terrible experience of the Great War. It wasn’t actually very long ago, the First World War, just over eighty years, yet it seems to be preserved in our contemporary memories—as the twentieth century slips into the twenty-first—as something almost ancient, a mythic tale of bygone times. Those monochrome or sepia images still have the power to haunt and move, but I think we forget just how proximate they are and how the events they reflect have shaped and still shape our own times.
I remember, as a child, hearing stories about my grandfather’s and my great-uncle’s war experiences as I weighed in my hand the piece of shrapnel that finally got my grandfather out of the trenches. He was lucky, incredibly lucky, hindsight tells us, just as his brother Sandy was lucky—the only physical reminder of their respective ordeals was patches of fading scar tissue—though no one can really evaluate what the psychological wear and tear would have been; memories and images that would undoubtedly prove a more enduring legacy of their experience of battle. And perhaps my generation is the last one to feel any real closeness to those world-shattering events of 1914-18. It was oddly destabilizing, as I tried to track down an early photograph of my grandfather the other day, to hear one of my uncles referring to him casually as “Dad.” Indeed, had William Boyd senior lived a few years longer (he was only sixty-two when he died) I might have had my own memories of that stout, mustachioed figure I have seen in family photographs. Not merely my grandfather, after all, but a man who managed to survive two years in the trenches.
I think it is that closeness, that familial proximity, that provoked my own abiding interest in the Great War. For me, fundamentally, it is the un-knowingness, the unimaginability of that conflict that triggers the imagination. We have the newsreel images and the photographs, we have the memoirs, the regimental histories, the poetry and so on, but despite all this evidence the questions always remained only partially answered: what was it really like?
I can’t speak for other novelists who have taken the Great War as their subject but sometimes the best way to arrive at the truth is to lie—to invent, to fictionalize. The curious alchemy of art—rather than the diligent assembling of documentary fact—can be a swifter and more potent route to understanding and empathy than the most detailed photographs or the most compendious documentation. You have to do your homework, sure—authenticity has to be striven for—but in the end it is the fecundity and idiosyncrasy of the novelist’s imagination that will make the thing work—or not.
I first wrote about the First World War in my 1982 novel An Ice-Cream War. This was a forgotten corner of the Great War, an interminable struggle between the British and German colonies in East Africa (mirroring the larger one in Europe)—a surreal but bloody little affair that resembled the counterinsurgency conflicts of the sixties and seventies more than the traditional image of huge, immobile armies facing each other across 600 miles of trenches.
I turned to the Western Front proper in my novel The New Confessions, which was published in 1987. Here I tackled the battle where my grandfather had been wounded, the third Battle of Ypres, or Passchen-daele, as it is more popularly known. In the course of my research I spent weeks in the Imperial War Museum in London, watching contemporary newsreel pictures.
For obvious reasons, most of the sequences were filmed well behind the lines—endless shots of Tommies marching through French villages, artillery blasting away at distant targets and so on. There was very little that was what you might call authentic front-line footage. It was dangerous in those trenches, after all, and the photographers wisely kept their distance. Yet many of the images that are routinely screened on our televisions around Armistice Day are patent fakes—“action” staged in training camps with soldiers playing dead. The real stuff, when you can find it, is unmistakable, but it is rare—and of course it is mute.
One day, by chance, I ordered up a sequence about a burial party, just a few minutes long, of young soldiers lugging in dead bodies after a battle and dumping them by temporary graves. The misery and nauseated dread on the faces of the living is highly distressing and, just for a moment, because the cameraman was there, I was vouchsafed a tiny glimpse of the reality of what these young men, these boys, were going through.
It was during those weeks of watching miles and miles of newsreel that the idea of making The Trench was born. We forget that the First World War took place in glorious Technicolor, so familiar are we with its monochrome version. We forget also that those smiling faces, chatting, brewing up, puffing on their Woodbines, also spoke. The silence—and the sepia—distance the event from us profoundly, and it seemed to me one of the great values of making a film about the trench experience of the First World War at the end of the twentieth century would be that, at the very least, we would see it and hear it approximately as it must have been.
And perhaps, more importantly, it would be of some significance, as we leave the century behind, to attempt once again to come to terms with one of its defining events. It can be argued, with some conviction, that the twentieth century actually began in 1914, not 1900. Or, even more pertinently, that it began on 1 July 1916 at 7.30 in the morning as the barrage lifted and the first waves of Kitchener’s Army left their trenches and walked across the dense untended meadows of the Somme valley, the misty morning sun beating down upon them, to their sudden, messy deaths.
Philip Larkin’s great poem “MCMXIV” contains the mordantly resonant line, “Never such innocence again”—but the innocence that the hundreds of thousands of eager volunteers possessed in 1914 remained intact until the hideous debacle of the Somme in 1916. Sixty thousand were killed and wounded that first day—the bloodiest day of slaughter in the history of the British Army; perhaps even the bloodi
est day of slaughter in any battle between armies, ever.
In the event, whether the world would have changed anyway, the battle usefully marks the great watershed. Without the disaster of the Somme the allies might well have brokered a peace with the Germans in 1916. But the terrible carnage of the Somme (400,000 British casualties, 175,000 French, 600,000 German) meant that the war had to be fought on, and fought on to be won. The cost of the war continuing for another two years—in every dimension (lives, damage, money)—exceeded everything that the first two years had balefully notched up. And as for the war itself, after 1918, nothing in the Western world could ever be the same again—socially, economically, sexually, politically, geo-politically, culturally—the twentieth century was full-throatedly under way.
This may explain why in the past two decades British novelists, at least, may have felt like re-exploring those turbulent four years. But I have a feeling that what may be whizzing about in the zeitgeist doesn’t necessarily produce good art: good journalism, yes, good non-fiction, undoubtedly, but most novelists are drawn to a subject by the small scale, rather than the large. (How can you write a novel about the deaths of 9,000,000 people over a period of fifty-two months?)
The writer—the film-maker, the playwright—is drawn to a subject, I believe, by character and story, by their potential and by the imaginative possibilities of elaborating on them. One needs only to glance at any portrait or snapshot of the soldiers of the Great War to sense in yourself that burgeoning curiosity, to set those same questions running—who are you? Who did you leave behind? How frightened were you? Did you think you would die? How would I have coped if it had been me instead of them? And so on—the answers to which provide the foundations upon which the fiction will rise.