A Very Private School, page 11
Meanwhile the senior four years of the school processed to ‘the bogs’, a cavernous double-cube of a room with bare brickwork, situated off a dog-leg corridor between the masters’ common room and the boys’ changing rooms. You entered the swing doors of this most functional of spaces, to find the urinal facing you across the room. This was wide enough for six boys to use at a time and had no barriers to protect you from another’s unintended spray or prying eyes. The bogs had a high ceiling, under which hovered a fug of low smells.
To the right were a half-dozen wooden, light-grey booths, for defecation. You stood in line against the wall till the door of one of these opened and the prefect on duty ushered the next boy in to do his business. Inside, there was a hook for our jackets, but no lock on the door. There was also – unusually for such a place – no graffiti. ‘Those who scrawl graffiti are invariably feeble failures,’ Jack once decreed, before evening prayers. ‘They make a mess on walls to feel better about themselves, and about their inadequacies. I absolutely will not have any such unacceptable nonsense at Maidwell.’ There was enough menace in this proclamation to keep the school’s walls graffiti-free.
If the supervising prefect felt that a loo’s occupant was taking too long with their bodily functions, he’d raise one of his feet and push it, aloft, through the open space under the door, while asking, ‘In?’ The boy within was obliged to say his name out loud for all to hear, before the prefect made it clear that more urgency and effort were required from the booth’s occupant.
After the bogs, we’d go outside. In the winter, we were often perishingly cold, shivering in our inadequate outdoor clothing and needing to keep moving for warmth. If you wanted a companion to walk with you, the Maidwell custom was to ask, ‘Would you like to “go round” with me?’ In a world where family were exiled to a parallel world, this formal invitation to spend time together had real meaning. It was a sign of friendship desired, and a validation of trust earned. Here lifelong attachments could be formed and strengthened. The two of you might amble round the lake or into the Wilderness, chatting. Alternatively, you could kick a ball about or perhaps throw a frisbee, or fly a model plane. On weekdays this gentle free time was ended by sharp blasts of a whistle. It was time for ‘drill’.
Drill was the most militaristic part of the Maidwell day, a fifteen-minute exercise session during which the school was divided into six columns – a dozen pupils in each, the ganglier twelve- and thirteen-year-olds at the front, tapering down to the tiny seven- and eight-year-olds at the back. All faced the front of the school, while a single master in charge kept an eye on every one of the pupils at once, as he paced across the front of each column, checking we were all joining in.
He shouted out the exercises: stretching our hands to the sky, touching our toes in a repetitive bob, flinging our arms out wide for chest expansion, running on the spot, and energetic star jumps. Anyone who dared to ridicule drill, or tackled it half-heartedly, would be called out to the front for an earbashing, before being made to sprint round the entire school – sometimes twice – before rejoining their column, breathless and chastened. Sometimes Jack would appear during drill, in camp commandant mode, hands behind his back and look on as we exercised. He had a beady eye and wore an expression of aloof sourness that seemed to dare us to do something wrong so he could punish us.
Drill was meant to wake us up – ‘put some oxygen in yer brains’, as the master in charge would say – before lessons began. However, I suspect it was also a way of instilling parade ground discipline into us all, five times a week. The favourite barked order was: ‘Squad – attention!’ before ‘Stand at ease!’ At this, seventy-odd boys would launch their right feet outwards in unison, so they landed as one in an almighty crunch in the gravel. This was the sound of institutional conformity.
After drill, it was time to head back inside for the first lesson. We each had our own allotted classroom and class teacher, although other members of staff came by to lead lessons where their specialist knowledge might help. There were also weekly classroom incursions that we dreaded.
The roots of these went back to Tuesday lunchtimes, when Jack sat scouring the dining room for anyone whose hair was touching his shirt collar. He’d scribble their name down, in pencil, on one of the scraps of paper he always had to hand, and this list would be collected by the barber when he arrived at Maidwell on Wednesday mornings.
Part of my end-of-school-holiday ritual, along with a visit to the dentist, would be a descent into the basement of Harrods, for a haircut. I despaired when the hair on either side of my head was hacked too far back, as my chubby cheeks would then appear even plumper. My hair has always been quick to grow back so, as the term progressed, I knew the day had to be approaching when there would be a knock on my classroom door and a freshly cropped boy would enter, saying, ‘Sir, can Spencer please go for a haircut now?’ I’d trudge up the stairs to the washroom, where the barber would beckon me to climb onto his tall stool. His radio would be playing The Jimmy Young Programme, a middle of the road BBC radio show that seemed to have ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’ and the Carpenters on a loop.
Since we weren’t there as customers, who might need to be charmed or to offer a view on how the cut was progressing, the barber didn’t talk, smile or use a mirror. He just cut away, so chunks of hair rolled to the floor before he applied a vibrating electric razor that slid high up your neck with greedy, chattering teeth. It was now your turn to summon the barber’s next victim, and boys would collapse in giggles at the sight of you, freshly and mercilessly shorn, as you entered their classroom.
The rest of the academic day was less disruptive. It consisted of three lessons in the first part of the morning, followed by a thirty-minute break, at the end of which ‘grog’ would be served. Grog was a hearty snack – of bread and jam, or cold leftovers from the previous evening’s supper – laid out by the service hatch to the dining room, alongside giant metallic jugs, containing orange squash in the summer and hot chocolate in the winter.
In our tiny Maidwell world, where obedience was all, a ‘grog orderly’ was appointed to oversee the food’s fair distribution. He ensured that nobody helped themselves to seconds until everyone had had their first turn at the table. The grog orderly was an eleven-year-old, with twenty prefects and sub-prefects senior to him in the school list. But during his ten minutes on duty, the grog orderly outranked all the other pupils, including the head boy.
After grog it was back to the classroom, and a further two lessons before heading to the washrooms to get ourselves clean for lunch. We used coal tar soap whose harsh smell stayed on the hands for hours, and pumice stones to attack the stubborn ink stains on our fingers, before brushing our hair in front of a communal mirror.
In the passage outside, with the school boiler hissing to our right, we lined up in front of a prefect for inspection. We approached this senior boy, one by one, with our hands outstretched as if bearing an invisible tray. He’d look down at them, tell you to turn them over, then he’d look up at your hair. I can still remember the three words he’d utter to those who met his standards: ‘Over … Yes … Yes.’ If there was still ink on your hands or your hair was untidy, you were sent back to try again.
This was all done against the clock. While we washed, brushed and submitted to inspection, the head boy stood on the side of the foot baths next to the showers, counting slowly down from ten to let us know how long we had to be clear of the washrooms. Over perhaps three or four minutes he would shout out: ‘Ten … nine … eight … seven … six … five … four … three … two … one…’, and then not ‘zero’ but the idiosyncratic Maidwell culmination of ‘… going … going … gone … now!’ Any boy not fully out of the washroom by ‘now!’ would be held by a prefect, who put a cross against his name on the school list before releasing him. Too many crosses in a term saw you being sent to Jack for a beating.
Lunch was the best of the meals, presumably because it was the only one where the teaching staff ate with us. We knew, from playing sports against other private schools in the area, that we had the best food around, thanks to Annie and her careful management of the kitchen budget. The finest of the dishes were familiar to us, from home.
For Sunday lunch we had ‘roast’ – beef, pork or lamb, with roasted potatoes, gravy and a vegetable. Leftover meat from Sunday lunch reappeared in different forms over the following few lunches: on Mondays it was ‘cold roast’, with the same type of meat resurfacing in rissole form on Tuesdays, and then as shepherd’s or cottage pie on Wednesdays. On Thursdays or Saturdays, it might be warm Scotch eggs with baked beans, or another British evergreen, toad in the hole, or perhaps deep-fried Spam fritters. Friday lunch was always fish – either plaice (which swam in thick grease), or fish pie, served rather dry, in square pastry parcels.
The only lunch that caused general alarm was liver, served in a thick, sharp gravy. We were given this once or twice a term. Occasionally a boy would slice open his liver to reveal a thick tube running through it. That, and the occasional appearance of the bitter root crop swede as the vegetable of the day, made for a long lunch, as boys really struggled to finish what was on their plates.
Puddings were generally heavy on the carbohydrates. Rice pudding with a crisp brown skin was more popular than its poor relation, semolina, despite the latter being served with a vivid dollop of strawberry jam. Spotted dick, a dried fruit and suet staple of the British Empire, always provoked schoolboy smirks at the table because of its name, though it was generally consumed with gusto. Arctic roll – vanilla ice cream swathed in a tight wrapping of jam-laced sponge – was also a crowd-pleaser, as was chocolate sponge pudding, because of the chocolate custard that accompanied it. Trifle lightly sweetened our summers.
After lunch we were obliged to read, under supervision, in classrooms, while we digested the solid fare. Many boys brought a book or two from home, and we could help ourselves to a book at a time from the well-stocked school library that stood opposite the dining room. The works of Willard Price were particularly popular. His heroes, Hal and Roger – improbably young zoologists – took time off school to travel widely and collect rare animals. Their adventures – to the South Sea, along the Amazon or on safari – allowed us to imagine a world far removed from the rigid confines of a traditional boarding school in the English Midlands.
During the period of reading, we were allowed to eat tuck. Twice a week Granny Ford would man the tuck shop, unlocking a cupboard at the back of fourth form and laying out the contents on a table before her. A boy would sit at a nearby desk and act as her scribe, recording each boy’s purchases in a textbook. Our tuck allowance was up to seven pence on a Sunday and eight pence on a Wednesday. This expense would be deducted from the £3 of pocket money we brought to school at the start of each term.
There were tall, clear plastic jars containing Bonbons and Fruit Salads, and Black Jacks (whose liquorice stained the tongue). You could buy four of any of these for a penny, or indulge in pricier options, of which the most decadent was the Golden Cup, a bar of chocolate-coated caramel that set you back three pence. Tuck became the bartering currency of Maidwell, like cigarettes in a prison. Tuck went missing from our unlockable lockers, but being discovered to be a ‘tuck thief’ guaranteed universal condemnation, as well as a caning from Jack.
Once a term, Jack would appear during ‘reading’ and tap you on the shoulder, before beckoning you to follow him. You’d walk, silently, down the dread corridor to ‘the wing’, and into Jack’s study. I found this ‘term talk’ a gloomy affair, Jack asking general questions and zeroing in on any failings in work, sports or conduct noted by his staff. He demanded justification or a promise to do better. I don’t recall him smiling or offering any encouragement during these uncomfortable termly encounters, and I couldn’t wait for them to end. Then I’d exit the sinister study, relieved that there’d be no recurrence of this unsettling encounter for four months or so.
One appointment with Jack had to be contended with weekly, though.
Every Sunday morning, before church, he compelled us to learn by heart a passage from the Bible or Common Prayer Book and recite it in front of him, with the rest of the school in attendance. Whether the Creed or the Beatitudes, or a catechism, I found memorising these texts extremely difficult. Jack would sit at his desk in the school’s central classroom, then call us forward in pairs, so we could declaim alternate verses as he sat there, eyes drilling into us, irritably correcting small errors. If someone lost his way, or the tiny mistakes mounted up, Jack would wave his arm dismissively and bawl at the flustered child: ‘Oh do learn it, you blithering idiot! Why do you waste my time? Next!’ And the boy would retreat to his desk to study the words some more, before joining the back of the line for a further opportunity at passing this ordeal, made so much harder by the curled lip of the irascible headmaster.
Compulsory organised ‘games’ took place on most afternoons. There was one, main team sport per term: football in the spring, cricket in the summer, while rugby was contested in the Michaelmas mud. The best players in each discipline competed on a pitch called ‘first game’, while the standard deteriorated through second and third games, down to the juniors battling it out in merry confusion on ‘fourth game’. The masters rarely seemed engaged in these encounters, except when taking charge of first game, having accepted that ours was a school where we were very likely to be defeated when playing against any other, since we had so few pupils.
There were also homegrown Maidwell sports, played when the playing fields were waterlogged by rainfall or frozen. ‘Scaramouche’ and ‘Subs & Cruisers’ both had few rules but they each required a lot of running round the school grounds, so were useful for getting small boys to expend excess energy in quick time.
If a child was under the weather, or recovering from an injury, he would be declared ‘off games’. Unless seriously unwell – when he would either be confined to the dormitory called ‘sick bay’, or be sent home – he would be given ‘front gate-back gate’, an obligatory blast of fresh air, during which he had to walk – at a decent pace, and a set number of times – the third of a mile between the school’s main gateway and its service entrance. There was always a suspicion among the staff that boys enjoyed faking illness to get off games, so front gate-back gate delivered the mind-numbing payback foisted on supposed hypochondriacs and malingerers.
One term, when several members of the grounds staff were absent ill, Jack made the boys who’d been declared sick work in the gardens in their place. He reported to the parents how ‘Those boys “off games” have been acquiring a deep respect for those who regularly toil about the grounds; instruction in estate work is yet another Extra for which no charge is made.’ This was the same ‘nudge-nudge, wink-wink’ humour that he deployed when writing his sly termly reports. It was all part of the smokescreen he blew around Maidwell to keep its worst side hidden from view, and to make it look like a fun place that he administered with a smile, rather than with the cold, intimidating stare that I will always remember him by.
On Thursday and Sunday afternoons there were no organised sports. Instead, we had ‘muck-about’, when we were left to our own devices in the school grounds, while a single member of staff patrolled on foot. This was often the happiest of times, when pupils’ friendships were strengthened, and the tight control of the school was relaxed for a few hours.
During muck-about boys wore hardwearing denim boiler suits over their sports clothes, to minimise the need for expensive laundry as we ventured out into Maidwell’s sweeping grounds.
The youngest boys might spend muck-about playing with their toy boats and model soldiers in Dinky Farm, a muddy offshoot of the ornamental lake. Part of Dinky Farm was composed of a viscous grey clay that sucked greedily at your wellington boots. When you managed to pull your foot free, the morass belched out a foul-breathed protest of methane and sulphur.
During September and October, the first months of the school year, many of us would spend this free time conker-fighting. A giant horse chestnut tree stood at the top of the lawn, on the edge of the Wilderness, and we were allowed to throw sticks up into it, to dislodge the conkers. These we drilled through, threaded with string, then brought for fierce competition in a makeshift amphitheatre in a cut-through bounded by the main school and the concrete steps leading up to Miss Best-Shaw’s form.
In the small corner of the grounds that bordered the village churchyard, boys might spend their muck-about afternoons tending their individual garden – tiny patches a few feet square where they grew fruits and vegetables, which they were allowed to eat with their friends during the school’s teatime. Boys able to grow strawberries found that their summertime popularity bloomed.
We could be inventive with our fun. At the height of summer, over four days, break and muck-about were given over to the ‘Maidwell Grand National’. For this we gathered the grass cuttings left by the school’s giant gang mowers and piled them into half a dozen ‘fences’ that were to be jumped over in a succession of hurdling sprints. At the end of the fourth day, the gardeners retrieved the grass and added it to the mulch that fed what remained of Oliver Wyatt’s famed flowerbeds.
The Maidwell Grand National was unsupervised by masters. Perhaps that’s why so many of my contemporaries still remember it with such affection: it was our creation, entirely free from the stern control the school usually exerted, so we cherished it.
After muck-about or organised games, we shed all our clothes in the changing room and walked naked to a pair of foot baths where we sponged the mud off our legs in some nine inches of muddy, tepid water. We weren’t allowed to progress to the showers till our bodies had been inspected by the staff member on shower duty. It was noticeable that the same two masters seemed almost to take it in turns to be on shower duty – a voluntary responsibility, which they chose to sign up for repeatedly.
