A Very Private School, page 14
The second occasion on which Goffie was the butt of laughter was, I’m pleased to say, my fault. He had a particular dislike of me, which perhaps stemmed from my family’s local prominence. Whatever his reason, he was a terrifying menace during my time at Maidwell, so I count this occasion as one of the high points of my early life. It was my sole moment of one-upmanship, against a powerful and relentless adversary.
I was one of the pupils who Goffie would physically hurt. He lashed out at me during class time, thumping me across the head with his wide, hairy hands so that I reeled with a dizziness and throbbing pain that I’d not known since the wall- and head-bashings that Nanny Forster had meted out at Park House. He wore a chunky, gold-coloured signet ring, and on several occasions he caught me with this during his thunderous slaps, intentionally rolling his hand over at the last second so the ring’s front would cut open my scalp.
He got away with this because, back then, I had a thick mat of red hair, and the trickles of my blood would congeal into the roots before drying there, invisibly. One of my classmates, Daniel Blagrave, wrote to me recently, ‘I remember clearly the vile Goffe hitting you and drawing blood. It was physical abuse pure and simple.’
At the time I calculated that, Goffie being in his mid-thirties, he was twenty-five or so years older than me. I knew that I had no hope in a contest with someone more than twice my size, but I was comforted by a promise that I made to myself: when I got to be in my mid-thirties, I would seek out this thug and dish out suitable revenge at a time when my tormentor’s strength must have waned.
Goffie was in charge of the school’s football team, but that was my weakest sport, so I never entered his orbit on the playing field. However, we were destined to be repeatedly thrown together in the classroom: he was the master in charge of history, my favourite subject. Yet our common love of the past failed to bring us together, except in jolting duels.
Goffie liked to teach in a structured, linear way, which was effective in its prime task of getting Maidwell boys to pass exams that gave access to their parents’ choice of senior school. But this spoon-feeding of information left little latitude for, or appreciation of, pupils who had a love of the subject that extended beyond the rigid syllabus.
I devoured history books from the school library, and my parents sent me others on all aspects of military history. Jack wrote to my parents at the end of one term, when I was eleven: ‘[Charles’s] own private reading continues to be wide …’, before he noted, ‘[but] things have not gone as well as they should in his history lessons; I rather suspect, perhaps wrongly, some element of personal conflict [with his teacher].’
The headmaster knew of the tensions between Goffie and me but, to the best of my knowledge, chose never to address them in person. Perhaps he thought it risky to take to task a tricky master, whose silence about Maidwell’s dirty secrets he greatly appreciated. It was certainly safer for him not to upset such a volatile figure as Goffie. In any case I was left to defend myself against a formidable, adult bully, without help from above.
One term we’d been studying early eighteenth-century English history. During this course, Goffie took us through the Battle of Blenheim, a crucial but little-taught engagement in which John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, defeated the supposedly invincible forces of France’s Louis XIV. By chance, I had been given a book on that battle by my father, because we had a family connection to the victor. My father was so amused by my fascination with the engagement that he took a photograph, which I still have, of me reading this book while on a family holiday in Paris, the Sun King’s capital.
In a written test a few days later, Goffie set as one of his questions: ‘Put down as many generals who fought in the Battle of Blenheim as you can, apart from the Duke of Marlborough.’ He was seeing if we could remember the names of the French and of the Austrian commanders, both of which he’d mentioned to us earlier in the week. Unbeknown to Goffie, I’d recently studied Blenheim’s battle plan in great detail and had found myself intrigued by the exotic names of many of the leading players from that fateful summer’s day in 1704.
At the end of the test, Goffie told us to swap papers with the pupil sitting nearest to us. I exchanged mine with Richard Ingoldsby, and when we got to the answers to his question about Blenheim’s generals, Goffie said, ‘Marshal Tallard of France and Prince Eugene of Savoy.’
‘Sir?’ said Ingoldsby, holding up his hand. ‘Spencer has put down twenty-four generals’ names for this one!’
Goffie looked at me as though I was either a lunatic or a fantasist. Sensing that my humiliation was guaranteed either way, he smiled a thin smile and lay back in his chair, hands on stomach, and said, ‘Read ’em out!’ So Ingoldsby did: ‘Eugene, Tallard, Marsin, the Elector of Bavaria’, and so on, through my list, till ending with ‘Churchill’.
‘Aha! No marks, Spencer!’ Goffie shouted, triumphantly. ‘I said, “apart from John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough” and you’ve put down Churchill. You should listen to the question, next time, me little cock robin!’
‘But, sir,’ I replied, ‘I haven’t included the Duke of Marlborough. The Churchill I’m referring to is General Charles Churchill, Marlborough’s brother …’
Goffie looked at me incredulously. He blinked and gulped hard, before slowly flushing with rage and embarrassment. The whole class whooped with delight at the spectacle of a brutish master being publicly humiliated by the boy he particularly picked on.
Of course, Goffie’s nastiness towards me increased after that, but it was worth it. At Maidwell, we pupils were always outgunned by the most malicious members of staff; but I’ve always been grateful to the Battle of Blenheim for giving me one rippling broadside of success that I could treasure forever.
Mine proved a small victory in a losing campaign – after that day, when I looked up in class, I often found Goffie staring at me with cold fury – but it kept my morale high. I view this as a token win against one of Maidwell’s most frightening teachers.
But what were these men thinking, when exerting all their adult power against defenceless prepubescents? And surely it shouldn’t have been up to mere boys to stand up to men as obviously wicked as Goffie, Maude and Jack?
* This was between the boiler room and the changing room, and was where we kept our wellington boots, and footwear for rugby, cricket and football.
8
Potential Saviours
The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.
– General Norman Schwarzkopf
The only way in which such an alarming trio as the headmaster, his aristocratic sidekick and the thuggish history teacher could have been neutralised would have been if another adult at Maidwell had stood up to them and acted as whistle-blower.
There was never any hope that the deputy headmaster, John Learmont, could have made such a brave stand. His senior position gave him an unobstructed view of the rottenness that ran through Maidwell’s core, but he was a weak-willed man who was unlikely to have ever addressed it. I suspect that’s why Jack chose him as his second-in-command.
We called Learmont ‘Leo’, but he had none of the lion-like qualities that his nickname suggested. Rather, he seemed consumed with disappointment and resentment. Leo was a strange-looking man. The top of his head was a bald, pink dome that flaked under the summer sun, while lower-down white curls abounded, looping like the piping on an improbably ornate wedding cake. He had the tonsure of a monk, but the demeanour of a man who had yet to find his vocation.
It’s hard for a small boy to judge a man’s size, but I reckon Leo must have been six feet tall and weighed around seventeen stone. He carried his mass cautiously, on rigid legs that ended in buffed, laced brown leather shoes of great robustness. They had hobnails in their soles, which made an important noise when he walked on hard surfaces.
The headmaster gave his deputy demeaning duties. At the summer sports day, when all the parents descended on the school, he was deployed as the scribe, noting down the result in every heat of each competition. This prevented his interacting with the adult visitors.
In the winter, when the lake froze, Jack would ask him to use his bulk for the good of the school. ‘The heaviest master called Mr Learmont is going to walk on the lake to see if the ice is thick enough for us to skate,’ I wrote to my mother excitedly in December 1973, after two days’ snow.
To counter such humiliations, Leo tried to impress the pupils. While we abandoned swimming in the unheated pool in October, when its temperature dipped below forty-eight degrees, Leo would make great play of taking his daily dip for a further month. He liked to boast that there was no need for towels, except for a quick final rub, since you could brush most of the water off you with the flat palms of your hands – a trick he said he’d learned when serving in the Navy.
Leo was proud to identify as a Yorkshireman, subscribing to the cliché that Englishmen from that northern county are no-nonsense, tough and to the point. He told us often of his allegiance to Leeds United, in those days one of the more successful football teams, again from Yorkshire. Equally, he enjoyed declaiming music hall acts from decades past in his native county’s distinctive brogue.
I suspect all this relentless Yorkshireness was his way of distancing himself from what he saw as the softness of this pampered, southern school, where he served without distinction. It is his tragedy that he never understood just how distinguished he would have been if only he’d chosen to call time on the abuses all around him.
One of my Maidwell friends asked me recently, ‘Why didn’t Leo do something to help us? He was the deputy, and it was down to him to report what was going on.’ But Leo wasn’t made of the right stuff.
As was normal with such a small teaching staff, Leo’s responsibilities were many and varied. He was in charge of French, of the school rugby team, of the choir and of teaching the violin. French was one of my better subjects, I was in the rugby team and in the choir, and I scratched away at the violin, so our paths crossed frequently. What I saw was an uninspiring man, so disappointed in his own limitations that he raged impotently at the world.
An older classmate remembers the deputy headmaster as being ‘In the same bracket as Porch: serious and slightly scary. Nobody ever fucked about in his classes.’ When Leo appeared on the rugby field in shorts so tight around the crotch that another of my classmates recalls them as ‘grotesque’, we whispered about them rather than openly mock them.
Leo played the piano fluently and led the school’s weekly hymn practice. But if we failed to hit the right notes, he would quickly become furious. His face flushed, and his eyes and lips constricted, while his stout hands thumped the piano keys with a force that betrayed his tightly wound inner workings. At such moments the nastiness that infused many of Maidwell’s masters broke the surface.
Leo never threatened us with physical violence, but I don’t remember him once being kind, and he could be curiously sharp, while his quick temper made him prey to misjudgements.
One winter’s morning, when walking with friends in Maidwell’s front courtyard, I started blowing on my hands and said I’d be back soon, as I wanted to nip back into the school to get my gloves.
A younger boy, George Monck, mentioned that he was heading back to get his own gloves and said he’d pick up mine at the same time. I told him there was no need, but he kindly insisted and I thanked him. I’d have done the same for him, but he got his offer in first.
A couple of minutes later, Leo appeared, bristling with anger, Monck scurrying to keep up by his side. ‘Who do you think you are, you insignificant worm?’ Leo bellowed at me. ‘How dare you send another boy to get your things for you?’
‘But I didn’t, sir,’ I said, and explained what had happened.
‘Spencer’s right, sir,’ confirmed Monck, leaving Leo stumped, the victim of his own biting prejudice against a pupil with a particularly privileged background. He harrumphed and chose to stomp off, rather than apologise.
Such an unfocused, self-regarding figure was never going to have the resolve or spine to confront Jack. But others, of lesser status in the school, were braver. In my second year at Maidwell, while in Jack’s sixth form, I was taught maths by a warm, middle-aged teacher who possessed a kind, quiet charm. Miss Vecqueray would dip in and out of the school in a small car – she insisted on living at home so she could care for her ailing parents. During her workday at Maidwell, she would leave her adoring dog, Andy, in her car, his ears pricked on alert watch for his mistress’s return.
Miss Vecqueray was a gifted teacher. She kicked off her lessons with quickfire rounds of mental arithmetic, the benefit of which remains with me still. She also inspired us in ways that the more traditional staff must have scorned.
Pupils were forbidden to use the school’s front door, except on the first and last days of term when our trunks were being shepherded in or out. But Miss Vecqueray would lead us through them, into the front courtyard, before sending us in various directions to work out mathematical angles in a living, open setting, rather than merely on paper, at our desks. Meanwhile in the science lab, she had us scrambling round on our knees, counting square floor tiles to help our calculations, making her subject into an enjoyable game instead of a dull discipline.
Occasionally, she would take some of us in her car, which one of my contemporaries describes as ‘an hour of kindness in a very brutal existence’. She was used to helping others locked up against their will, spending some of her spare time educating inmates in a nearby prison.
Miss Vecqueray cared about our living conditions at the school and would complain to the headmaster about how unnecessarily chilly the place was in winter. During his visits to the masters’ common room, she’d ask him to turn on the heating, while rubbing her hands on a teapot to emphasise how cold it was.
One term in 1974, Miss Vecqueray failed to reappear in the classroom. Nobody explained why. We had last seen her looking frailer than normal and using a cane. Eventually we heard rumours that she had contracted cancer. After her diagnosis, she took a cruise that was paid for by grateful Maidwell parents. She returned, was admitted to hospital and soon died. When she did, we pupils lost a rare ally in the common room – one who challenged the norms.
At the start of my third year, Michael Barker arrived as her replacement. He was six foot four, square-shouldered, with dark, wavy auburn hair and a turned-up nose. He’d been something of a sporting hero when a pupil at Wellingborough, a senior boarding school near Maidwell, and we boys thought it glamorous that he spent his Saturdays as a linesman in professional football matches around England.
To me Mr Barker was, by a huge distance, the nicest master in the school. He seemed to like us boys and got to know our personalities. In an institution that was paring away at our individuality and self-worth, this was immensely appealing. He made us value ourselves and, bored by the humdrum, he added humour to his classroom, livening up his questions by using names ridiculous enough to make children chortle: once, when we had to work out a ship’s velocity, he called the vessel ‘the Saucy Sal’. Such gentle silliness livened up maths considerably: we giggled, before settling down to our set questions with purpose, eager to impress this teacher who was, happily, so different from the others.
Mr Barker didn’t just change my outlook to maths, he also changed my name. He said I didn’t suit the formality of being called ‘Charles’ and declared he would instead call me ‘Matt’. The quirkiness of this appealed to me, and I went along with it.
In conversations after lessons, I confided in Mr Barker how much I hated being away from home. ‘I’d rather go to a state school than continue as a boarder here,’ I said. ‘At state schools they go home at the end of each day …’
Mr Barker smiled: he had taught in a deprived area of England and told of the incest some of his pupils had suffered there, as well as other hard to imagine terrors. ‘No, Matt,’ he said, ‘you’re too precious a flower to ever be allowed to go to state school.’ He saw how crushing I found his conclusion: ‘We’re just going to get you through this, and you’ll be fine,’ he added, and I believed him. I don’t recall a similar moment of thoughtful encouragement from any of the rest of the staff during my entire time at Maidwell.
It’d be wrong to paint Mr Barker as a saint. This extremely powerfully built man’s temper could be terrifying. His face turned puce, while his voice boomed. But he was never physically threatening, and the flashes of wrath soon burned themselves out.
I feel that Mr Barker had a clear view of how cruel several of his colleagues were. I would catch him looking at the worst of them out of the corner of his eye with evident disgust. But given his junior status in the staff, he knew he was not in a position to do much about it.
David Johnson – in his late fifties and early sixties when we overlapped at Maidwell – was the oldest master there. He had been a lawyer, but found the grind of that profession unfulfilling, and so turned to teaching. While proud of one of his brothers-in-law for winning the Nobel Prize for Physiology, Mr Johnson had limited academic ambitions.
He seemed content to remain a mid-ranking all-rounder in Maidwell’s teaching hierarchy, despite his age and intelligence. ‘The higher the monkey climbs the tree,’ he’d tell his colleagues in the common room, ‘the harder he falls on his arse!’ So he busied himself at the school, while averting his eyes from the crimes around him.
Mr Johnson had a striking physical presence. He was of medium height, but his plumpness made him appear shorter. Livid rosacea cast across his face in a flush that extended down into the creases of his jowls, lending him the hue of an angry turkey cock. His fine head of thick silver hair – slicked back in a scentless sheen – was of a generous length that never seemed to vary. He would comb this mane with slow, exaggerated strokes while staring intently into one of the many mirrors dotted around the school. His comb was always to hand, in his jacket’s top outer pocket, behind a white handkerchief whose triangular top pointed rigidly skyward.
