Such, Such were the Joys

George Orwell once wrote an account of his years at an English Preparatory School ‘Such, Such Were The Joys’. It portrayed his prep school years as unremitting, squalor,  misery and cruelty  - a version which most people now accept was largely fictional, and certainly deeply misleading. It is also very amusing, and really ought to have been a novel. People have claimed that this school was the model for ‘1984’ , and I know that they mean. There was something more than slightly totalitarian about old-fashioned boys’ boarding schools.  

 

I think many members of the English middle class like to melodramatize their schooldays. From Tom Brown onwards it’s been a branch of English literature.  Even today, I’m always interested by those celebrities who say they were ‘expelled’ from their schools. Does anyone check these claims? I suspect that in most cases they’re not true, though the headmasters involved are probably too dead to confirm or deny . Actual expulsions are quite rare in fee-paying establishments, where the school is not terribly anxious to lose the income or attract the notice. Mutual agreements that this can’t go on any longer ( such as I reached with one of my schools) are rather more common. But expulsion makes the expellee into a sort of hero. And most of us like to cast ourselves as the heroes of our own lives. I can think of one or two recent memoirs form my generation which very much do this, turning (quite interesting) parents into minor and rather cardboard characters in the heroic life of the memoirist.

 

Could it be, I ask myself as I read these accounts, that this is all the wrong way round? That the real heroes and heroines of the story are not the narrator, but others?

 

So beware of these miseries. I was certainly not the hero of my own childhood, being pretty careful to avoid confrontation or trouble, in the certainty that he who kept his head down had the easiest time. Nor did I overpower gigantic bullies with my plucky little fists (though I had a good line in delayed and deadly revenge).   I must say I didn’t terribly like any of my boarding schools (I experienced three) , but I viewed them as necessary preliminaries to a satisfying life, and put up with the. In some important ways, I was right. I don’t think I could ever have attempted, let alone succeeded in, several of the most important tasks of my life if I hadn’t endured the early separation from home, and the resulting ability to endure moments of despair in the knowledge that they would pass. Also, a certain amount of minor physical privation – hard beds, chilly dormitories, generally Spartan conditions and a lot of supervision - teach you many useful things, including the fact that discomfort can actually be quite enjoyable, especially if you laugh at it. They also make you more adaptable in a crisis. One of the other things they teach you is the ability to find privacy in the most unlikely circumstances, and to retreat into the imagination when reality is unappealing. The old joke that boarding school veterans can cope quite well in prison is perhaps true, though I suspect the real problem in modern prisoners is the noise and the chaos, rather than the austere diet and the lack of freedom. There was a basic order in these places.

 

I’ve been driven to thinking about this by the news that one of my old schools, a long-established Devonshire institution, is to merge with a neighbouring (much larger) school. I wish the combined schools good fortune, but I can’t help thinking that something will be lost in the process, and that the place which did so much to shape me is about to fade away. I wonder if they’ll preserve the corridor in which departing leavers carved their initials and dates, and where mine are to be found not far from those of a former Foreign Secretary (his inscription is far bigger than anyone else’s. Did he know he was destined for high office?).  It’s the second experience I’ve had in the last two months (I’ll write about the other in the summer) in which a piece of my own life has been consigned to the absolute past. It becomes, in a strange way, unreachable and lost. In practice, this was so anyway, but I somehow managed to keep in my mind the idea that this piece of my life was still accessible, if I could only manage to catch the old Atlantic Coast Express one autumn morning.

 

Of course, the Atlantic Coast Express,  with its dark-green ‘Battle of Britain’ class  locomotives named after RAF squadrons, stopped running nearly half a century ago. And the rails on which it ran have been mostly torn up west of Exeter, or west of Okehampton anyway,  and the track is now choked with weeds and wildflowers. The old 1920s vintage black tin trunk, used by my father in his Naval years, with its vicious sharp corners, which I used to send ahead of me by a system known as ‘Passengers’ Luggage in Advance’, was long ago casually chucked away, one of those unnoticed moments of loss, too dented and scratched to be of any more use.  (There’s a description of this lost moment in every pre-Beeching boarding-school family’s life late each summer, when the trunks came out of the attic, were packed and were sent down to the station for PLA, in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel ‘In a Summer Season’, which I found oddly moving. (No, not that Elizabeth Taylor. The other one. I recommend her work) . It was the first sign of approaching autumn, a warning that the ease and indolence of the long summer holiday – and in those days they went on into the third week of September – were coming to an end).

 

 

 

This physical destruction of daily things, trains,  trunks, older calendars, symbolises rather well the changes which lie between me and then, the impossibility of communicating to any modern person the smells, sensations, sounds and sights of what was perfectly normal to me.  On a visit to South Africa in 1993, just as the old regime was vanishing, I was rooted to the spot when I arrived at Pretoria station from Johannesburg by suburban train (safe in those days) and heard the unmistakable sound of an ordinary, scheduled, steam-hauled passenger express leaving the station. This wasn’t some special trip on a preserved line, or a vintage run, surrounded by cocoons of organised nostalgia. This was the real, everyday thing. I was transported back several decades. I think if I hadn’t been immediately distracted by something else , a whole chestful of memories might have been revived.

 

What was it like? I had a go at describing some of it in my book ‘The Rage Against God’, where I tried to recapture the wet foggy cosiness of the winter term, the extraordinary ceremony of Remembrance Day and the unexpected pleasures of Christmas, or the pre-Christmas week, among strangers.

 

The day of transition from home to school could be tough . I always remember being allowed to call home from the Headmaster’s study an elegant, austere. Edwardian room with a tremendous view of river, woods and hills, usually not entered unless in dire trouble, my brother placing the call through the operator, the brief endearments, the click of the heavy receiver being replaced and my brother, who liked to dramatise things, saying glumly ‘Last link with the outside world’. Waking up the next morning in the hard bed and the chilly dormitory was always the worst bit. But I was too busy to be homesick for long.

 

 

The food was mostly awful (that is to say, I thought it was ; it was perfectly wholesome but unattractively presented and uninspiringly cooked, but adults of that era reckoned that plentiful food of any kind was a luxury, and were understandably baffled by fussiness ), and I contrived not to eat most of it (there were always others ready to help) , though the breakfasts, with plenty of fried bread and frequent kippers, were excellent, and I survived on them. There was semolina. There was gristle.  I think there were prunes, but not in the virulent, militant and aggressive form so wonderfully described in the Molesworth books of Ronald Searle and Geoffrey Willans, which are works of genius, funnier by far than Wodehouse,  for those of us who went to such places.

 

We were made to work in several different ways. We learned a lot.  The teachers, mostly male ex-servicemen, were figures of fear, not because they ever struck us or were otherwise cruel, though they would throw bits of chalk at our heads (with painful accuracy)  if we failed to pay attention, were ruthless about marking down bad work, and correcting mistakes. They always insisted that work set to be done in the evening was handed in on time, and always marked it swiftly. So itwas always done.  But their real power flowed from the awful authority of the headmaster who stood behind them. He was given to explosions of wrath (usually about people leaving their games clothes on the floor of the changing rooms, a thing he seemed unable to abide) which rumbled through the school buildings like man-made thunder, and could be detected from far away, and sniffed, like ozone, as one entered the building after a day away.

 

To us small boys these moments had the atmosphere of a purge in a totalitarian country with sudden, arbitrary unexpected summonses to the headmaster’s study, where beatings were reasonably rare, but certainly not unknown. And there would be collective punishments – no toast at Saturday teatime unless the culprit of some offence owned up, often accompanied by terrible, guilty silences Again, it is amazing how seriously we took all this. Something of the overanxious, intense atmosphere of such schools is described in the early pages of L.P. Hartley’ s remarkable book ‘The Go-Between’.

 

We also worked in other ways, formed into work gangs to sweep the floors, polish the doorknobs etc after breakfast – a few privileged boys had less demanding tasks , the checking of the rainfall gauge and thermometer in the Stevenson Screen, the checking and adjusting of the majestic barometer in the front  hall. At weekends we would clear fallen branches in the extensive woods, or pick stones from the newly-levelled fields which were constantly being converted into playing fields, collecting them I huge catering-sized jam tins. Over time, I learned how to avoid much of this, when to disappear and how to stay out of sight. Any sort of idleness or inactive time was regarded as sinful, another feature of totalitarian utopias. But surveillance was lax, and haphazard. It seldom occurred to anyone even to look into the library, a room I usually had to myself. And footsteps can be heard a long way off in uncarpeted wood-floored corridors.

 

There were compulsory sports. I wasn’t any good at them (except that I could run quite fast in rugby) , and learned early on that an old-fashioned leather football in the face (especially in wet weather) can spoil your whole day. But I learned to swim, and I could have learned to sail on our small lake if I had had the sense. There was also a fully-equipped darkroom, where the camera club learned to develop film, enlarge and print in the strange glow of a red light-bulb, skills now wholly useless. My love of, and interest in architecture was learned from the headmaster, who would give special classes on the subject in the evenings. The place was to some extent domesticated by the presence of his dog, a large and rather grumpy golden retriever called Winston.

 

Occasionally (nothing like often enough) we were read to. Sometimes there were lectures or recitals by celebrities – Peter Twiss, the first man to fly at over 1,000 mph, came to visit. So did Leon Goossens, the great oboist. There were occasional film shows, often the headmaster’s own films, but almost no television –  except for Winston Churchill’s funeral in January 1965, when the headmaster’s private set was brought downstairs and placed on a high shelf in one of the dining rooms. We had daily prayers, with hymns and lessons from the Bible (I know dozens of hymns thanks to this daily exposure). These were enlivened by what for many years I wrongly imagined was a roll-call, in which we answered ‘yes’ in piping voices to our names. It was only much later that I discovered that we were being asked if we had been to the lavatory, an inquiry I thought then and think now was improperly intrusive. This was revealed to me when a boy called…oh, I had better not say, even now, though as it happens his is one of the few names of my schoolfellows I can still recall with complete certainty, anyway, he said, in a voice of strangled gloom ‘No!’ , and (after a storm of laughter)  was hurried away to be dosed with Syrup of Figs by our terrifying matron, whom we all thought must be called ‘Gertrude’, though in fact I later learned that she had another, quite different Christian name, which didn’t suit her nearly so well. Did she know we called her ‘Gertrude’? As in all totalitarian societies, it is impossible to know how much the rulers knew of what the ruled really thought of them.

 

How did we put up with the shared bathwater and the dormitories named after Great Seadogs,  with their hard beds and windows open in all weathers.? Well, we did. It seemed normal.  

 

There was also an elaborate Sunday service which must have been conducted according to the Book of Common Prayer, though I wasn’t then aware of it. Each of us was given a threepenny bit from small pocket-money accounts, which we would put in the collection, for some good cause. And on Saturday afternoons we were allowed to stuff ourselves with toffee (does anyone else remember Palm Toffee Bars and other tooth-wrecking comestibles now vanished) , provided we also bought some fresh fruit.

 

It also helped that the place was a physical paradise. The core of the school was a jewel of an 18th-century gentleman’s house, built on a west-facing hilltop so that it shuddered in the Atlantic gales, but also commanded marvellous views deep into the ‘old brown hills’ of Cornwall, and down into the charming little town into which we rarely ventured. At the back, though much messed about by extensions, was a beautiful stable block, with clock-tower,  kennels and mounting block, coach house and stalls. Behind them lay another semicircle of workshops and store-rooms from the old estate. Behind that a high beechwood sheltered us from any east winds that blew down across Dartmoor, whose mysterious Tors and bogs, full of adventure and beauty, began almost immediately after the back drive ended. A small but lively river marked our northern boundary, the sort of river where the water has run off a peaty moor and is the colour of tea, and chatters over large mossy stones and there was a spot where you could watch the salmon (I think they were salmon) leaping upstream, using a specially constructed ‘ladder’. We were taken for adventurous expeditions on the moors, or in thhe Headmaster's ancient yawl (or was she a ketch?) up the Tamar or out into Plymouth Sound, then still crowded with men of war.  

 

There were the enthusiastic young temporary masters, not much older than us, fair and with a ruddy countenance withal, with varsity scarves and optimistic manners, a bit like sporting heroes from Frank Richards books.  One of them,  famously, had driven a great black Rolls-Royce funeral car all the way to Moscow. There was  the retired army sergeant (at least, we always assumed he was )  with the thick Devon accent and the withering reproofs, who chivvied us mercilessly through PT on frozen mornings (what would today be called ‘PE’, but for us and for him it was definitely ‘training’) taught us how to shoot straight in an old attic, , and then instructed us in the joys of carpentry.

 

The whole thing was, like so much of my childhood, a window into the past. I often compare it to that strange feeling you have if you find yourself  (as I did a few months ago in New Zealand) on a train where you can look out of the window at the back, watching the landscape fly away backwards and the rails lengthen out behind you towards a horizon that was the here and now only a few minutes before. UI may not have known  was seeing the past disappearing, but I suspect I did. My non-electronic, cane-haunted, hard-learning, sexually innocent schooldays , whose textbooks were often 30 or 40 years old, and whose teachers had grown up in the days when Stanley Baldwin vied with Ramsay Macdonald and telephones were a novelty, had far more in common with the schooldays of a 1930s English boy than they do with those of any British child today. We read and learned scripture.  We knew the names of the English counties and  the names of the great battles of the British empire, and we knew which tree was which. We were at one with the English landscape. The objects we used tended to be made of wood, leather and brass rather than plastic and chrome. Things were heavier, used, older, harder. Also people.

 

I refuse to complain about it. I have benefited from it in a lot of ways.   I didn’t wholly enjoy it, but I enjoyed a lot of it (certainly far more than I enjoyed my subsequent two years a public school) and was encouraged and given huge opportunities .

 

I have yet to recover from the shock I encountered when, after being nurtured in this rough but safe place, I was pitched, aged 13 into the middle of the 1960s. When people ask how I became a revolutionary Marxist, the best explanation I can ever come up with
is that the gap between the world I had been brought up for, and the one that actually existed, was the source of such an enormous disillusion that I needed a new home for the passionate disappointed patriotism and faith with which I had been brought up.

 

I’ve been back once or twice. The place is much, much nicer than it was when I was there, as well it might be or modern parents would never send their young there. But it cannot be as much of an adventure as I had. Am I glad it’s all gone?  Sort of. Am I sorry it’s all gone? Not really? Am I glad I was born early enough to see it before it departed? Very.