A Very Private School, page 15
Mr Johnson’s clothes were hardy perennials. His sports jacket had dark panels with rust-coloured checks, while his shirts (cotton in summer, woollen in the cooler months) were white, etched with the thinnest of coloured lines. He favoured sweaters in warm tones – burgundy or butterscotch – and they had an exaggerated V-neck that plunged to the point where his belly started to billow out. His ties were navy blue or darker, and his trousers had turn-ups, under which flopped the laces of his sand-coloured hush puppies. He trod softly in these, his toes pointing outwards more than most, but his bulk meant you could always hear him coming – rubber soles kissing the wooden floorboards with a bouncy, swishing squelch.
We called this man with dark-brown eyes, sprouting eyebrows and thick-framed spectacles ‘Johnno’, and we did so with some affection. He engaged with us in light conversation and used our nicknames when doing so. He had a sense of humour that he shared as generously with us boys as he did the sweets that always rustled in a paper bag in his pocket. We couldn’t help but feel his warmth.
For those of us desperately missing our pets at home – my letters to my mother often led with ‘How are all the animals?’ – we loved hearing Johnno talk about his cat, Mugwump. We never met Mugwump, since the Johnsons lived in a cottage in the village that was out of bounds, but we warmed to tales of this cat’s boundless gluttony and laziness – delicious snippets of domestic life that briefly transported us far from our regimented existence. From the few interactions we had with Mrs Johnson, when she popped by to drop off something for her husband, we knew she was quietly kind. I liked to imagine that Mugwump had a pretty fun life, his food bowl chock-full of treats.
I see now that Johnno had the wisdom and the wherewithal that might have enabled him to blow the whistle on those corrupting forces who ruled Maidwell. To his credit, he subverted Jack’s ability to cane boys when they fell short in their weekly marks by making sure that he was the last of the masters to write down his grades. Two of those in the Saturday Morning Club have told me, separately, that a 2 for good effort from Johnno saved them from dipping below the minimum allowed aggregate of 7, thus sparing their buttocks from the viciousness of the Flick – for that week, at least.
But Johnno was in awe of Jack – an awe that I believe was shot through with fear and sycophancy. When composing the lyrics for one of the school’s annual in-house musicals, Johnno concluded the main song with a climactic salute to the man he hailed as ‘Jack – that great master of Maidwell’. And while in the principal’s presence, Johnno would wear a weak, obsequious grin, from which his eyes remained disconnected, while he pulsed mild panic.
Johnno knew about the cruelty, and he had a trained legal mind that surely could have framed a coherent report of the grave transgressions he had witnessed. But for all his charm, Johnno was unable to rise to the challenge. Worse, he even aped some of the abuses; for, disappointingly, he had a nasty side. Once this flowered, there could be no possibility of his doing the right thing for us boys.
At his worst, Johnno could change from cheery friendliness to shouty fury in a second. Oblivious to his own hefty girth – or perhaps because of it – he liked to address any overweight pupil as ‘little fat boy’. One of his regular victims was the Honourable Thomas Grey, a lord’s son who (despite his larger size) was one of the school’s leading athletes. One day in class, Johnno called Grey ‘little fat boy’, and Grey had had enough. To our incredulous delight, he replied ‘Yes, little fat man?’
Johnno went berserk, spewing molten rage, his face transforming from its customary red into a rich crimson. As he began to calm down a little, he formulated a sentence suitable to the slight: ‘You will go right now and report yourself to the headmaster on the spot!’ Grey stood up, shocked and crestfallen, exited the classroom door and took himself down the ominous corridor at the end of which stood the headmaster’s study door. After knocking, he was summoned in, and found Jack at his desk. Grey had to explain to him why Mr Johnson had sent him there.
It would have been pointless trying to put things into context by explaining Johnson’s taunts. Such a defence would have been deemed impertinent and deserving of an even harsher reckoning.
There could be no forgiveness for a boy who not only had answered back, but had insulted the elder of the common room. Jack told Grey to pull down his trousers and underpants, and to assume a kneeling position on the pouf, where he was caned six times with the Flick. If Grey learned any sort of lesson from this episode, Johnno failed to. He continued to deploy his ‘little fat boy’ gibe liberally.
Like Jack, Johnno presented as a pious Christian. He spent his afternoon off each week mowing the grass in Maidwell’s churchyard, next to the school. His religious beliefs strayed into the classroom. In the school’s gym one day, Cornelius Holland spread his arms out and laced them through the climbing bars behind him, before jokingly proclaiming, ‘Look! I’m Jesus on the Cross!’
‘Blasphemy!’ screamed Johnno, in a tone that touched falsetto, and sent Holland to Jack for an immediate thrashing.
These spectaculars aside, Johnno’s day-to-day unpleasantness involved pelting boys with blackboard chalk. If he spotted a pupil failing to pay full attention to his lesson, he would strike him as hard as he could with these multi-coloured missiles – his right arm going back slowly to full slingshot position, then whipping forward at maximum velocity. When Johnno hit a boy, he congratulated himself loudly on his marksmanship – ‘Good shot, sir!’ While he once hit one of my friends on his eye socket, it’s amazing that, to the best of my knowledge, he never caught anyone flush on the eyeball.
Meanwhile Johnno was the martinet who led the school’s daily drill, where he maintained parade ground discipline. What an odd sight we must have made – seventy-five boys bobbing and weaving, in all weather, while being shouted at by an overweight man, well beyond his prime.
PE was another of Johnno’s incongruous offerings. Tucked away near the back gate, the school gym was little more than a tall, unheated barn, with stark lighting and basic equipment: climbing bars running up the main wall; a vaulting horse, draped in battered brown suede; while worn, brushed leather medicine balls lay largely unused in a corner. Four thick ropes, the colour of tobacco-stained fingers, flopped down from the gym’s ceiling.
Perhaps one reason for Johnno’s move from practising law to teaching boys at this prestigious boarding school could be found in his marked snobbery. He must have studied the boys’ backgrounds in some depth for, at the end of our weekly gym sessions, he would order us all to stand at ease in front of him, waiting to be individually dismissed by his cryptic utterances.
When he said, ‘My family owns half of Yorkshire’, Richard Ingoldsby would run off to shower and change. Likewise, ‘We live in a castle in Cornwall’ would see Cornelius Holland start to head back to the main school.
Yet Johnno’s own background remained a mystery to us. He liked to drop hints about a somewhat puzzling military past – one that, given his age, must have encompassed the Second World War.
One of his thumbnails was crushed and corrugated: it had turned the colour of dried mustard. Someone was brave enough in class one day to ask him what had happened to it.
‘I caught it in the breech of a cannon.’
‘In the Artillery, sir? What rank were you?’ the boy pressed.
‘I just couldn’t say,’ he replied, with a modest smile. ‘It was all so long ago.’
We shouted out our guesses, and his hints left us with the strong impression that he had ranked somewhere between a captain and a colonel.
‘A major, then, sir?’
He smiled enigmatically, without clarification. It was all rather odd. The suspicion has always remained with me that, if he ever had served as an officer, it was probably as a junior one.
It was easy to set Johnno off on a red herring, where he would talk at length about a topic that we had slipped into the class conversation. As he warmed to his theme, we could put our pens down, relax and silently congratulate ourselves on having got him off track. Once he spent an entire class talking about appendicitis and what he believed caused it – ‘If you swallow twenty-nine pips from a tomato, one of these could end up in your appendix.’ This deeply unscientific analysis was welcome, when we should have been discussing, say, the monks of Anglo-Saxon England.
During one lesson he set the scenario of us pupils being soldiers in Northern Ireland, conducting a house-to-house search for terrorists. ‘You walk into someone’s kitchen, and there’s a bottle of whisky on the table …’ John Okey butted in mischievously, ‘Oh goody – I’d help myself to that!’ We laughed, but Johnno paused. He smiled victoriously and said in a still voice, ‘And then, Okey, you’d be dead. The whisky bottle has been boobytrapped by the IRA. Boom!’ He threw his arms out wide, a massive grin on his face.
Johnno led musical appreciation, a Wednesday evening fixture when we read at our desks while he played us records from his collection. He favoured old-fashioned humour, particularly the nineteenth-century comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as the ditties of Flanders and Swann, a pair of Oxford graduates popular in the 1950s and 1960s. The material harked back to Britain’s imperial era, when humour and racism were allowed to overlap. Johnno’s favourite song of theirs was about the ghastliness of foreigners, with the refrain: ‘The English, the English, the English are best, I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest …’
His love of music saw him write the school concerts, composing fresh lyrics for established tunes. In one I played a fourteenth-century English king, Edward III, while my stage queen was my first Maidwell friend. ‘The boy who stole the show,’ recorded the school’s review, ‘was undoubtedly William Purefoy, portraying Queen Philippa with considerable verve and nerve.’
In another of Johnno’s productions, I was an investigative journalist. On Radio Luxembourg in the mid-twentieth century, there was a regular musical interlude promoting Ovaltine, a malty, bedtime brew. It started:
We are the Ovaltineys, little girls and boys
Make your requests, we’ll not refuse you
We are here to amuse you …
Johnno borrowed the lilting, playful music from the commercial, while changing the words to:
We are the boys of Maidwell, happy little boys
Now our concert is before you
We do hope it will not bore you …
These words are revealing of the culture that Johnno, for all his laughter, knew to prevail in the school. To claim that we were ‘happy little boys’ misrepresented the truth. Many of us were miserable.
We had the adaptability of youth, though, and the instinct to make the best out of a bad thing, which often involved the forging of good friendships. We were not ‘happy’, but coping.
And why should we worry that our best efforts to entertain would somehow ‘bore’ our audience? It reminds me of that ugly Victorian line that ‘children should be seen and not heard’: a dictum that anticipates children being incapable of saying anything of interest to an adult.
But the lyrics that Johnson composed that have remained uppermost in my memory, more than four decades on, are these:
At ten to six, it doesn’t take two ticks to get covered in perspiration;
I like a rag, a good old Maidwell rag –
Give me some blood on the floor.
In an unguarded moment, Johnno – good old, jolly old Johnno – unwittingly delivered up the key that unlocks a door to some of Maidwell’s more telling peculiarities.
9
Blood on the Floor
Macho does not prove mucho.
– Zsa Zsa Gabor
The ‘ragging’ referred to in Johnno’s song comprised a daily ten-minute period of physical aggression when Maidwell’s pupils were made to burn off energy and settle scores in a lightly supervised free-for-all. Each evening the school’s handsome central hallway became a wrestling ring, with no pupil excused the melee.
The tradition of ragging had been established during Oliver Wyatt’s headmastership. One evening during the Second World War, Wyatt’s boys ragged so fiercely that they tore down blackout blinds – required on windows to deny German bombers tell-tale flickers of light from the ground. This prompted an angry visit from the police. But ragging survived this interest from the law, and flourished. By the time I arrived at Maidwell, it had long been the fulcrum of the school’s evening schedule.
Tea ended at ten to six. While those due to be beaten by Jack exited left out of the dining room – faces tense and pale, stomachs churning – the rest of the boys turned right, bellies full, ready to do battle with one another. They peeled off their jackets and draped them over the main staircase’s banister, creating a lumpy mound of green and brown tweed. Adversaries were selected, and ragging began.
It was fighting at its clumsiest, involving one-on-one grappling, with opponents pushed, tripped or hurled to the floor, where violent tussles continued. A junior master would be notionally on duty, occasionally casting an unconcerned eye over the jumble of thrashing bodies.
Ragging’s few rules had been passed down by previous generations of pupils, with basic fair play in mind: scratching, biting, kicking and half Nelsons were forbidden, while judo throws and punching an opponent’s torso were allowed. The greatest no-no was hitting someone below the belt – in the ‘grollies’, as we called testicles. Equally, any call for air had to be honoured instantly.
Ragging was rough enough to make tears inevitable. Some boys wouldn’t know their own strength, and the disparity in weight between the slightest and the largest could be considerable. At the same time, the school’s bullies found their worst instincts validated and encouraged by this daily brawl.
Heads would bump together, or they might be shoved hard into the unforgiving wooden floor that contained an endless stock of splinters. I recorded in my diary how, one evening, a boy’s lip struck the floor so hard that it erupted in a bloody explosion. The first time that one of my friends ever saw stars was during ragging, after hitting his head against the iron, Victorian radiator that stood against one of the hall’s walls. His temple missed its sturdy, barrel-shaped tap by a couple of inches.
We ragged, and ragged hard, until the master on duty jangled the school handbell at six o’clock, signalling an immediate end to hostilities. We put our jackets back on, straightened our ties and made for our classrooms. As we rubbed fresh bruises and allowed our panting to subside, our minds moved quickly on to the evening prep that was our last academic work of the day.
Ragging was also allowed any time we were outdoors, in the grounds. In an old-fashioned school like Maidwell, in the mid-1970s, such fighting was seen as a healthy activity for small boys: it wasn’t so much permitted as encouraged – an outlet for aggression that was the core strand in the surprisingly hardy regime that thrived beneath the school’s veneer of gentlemanly civility.
Maidwell even fostered a form of knife culture, with every boy expected to have his own sheath knife, and often a penknife as well. The sheath knife dangled from your hip throughout the day – being taken off only when playing sports, when ragging or when entering your dormitory.
The way in which we all carried these weapons remains, to me, one of the more puzzling aspects of my Maidwell years. At the time, boys might have taken small penknives as useful tools on camping trips. But how could anyone have thought that seven- to thirteen-year-olds having six-inch blades to hand was a good idea? Such knives have been illegal in Britain since the 1980s, even for an adult. Yet ours were such an accepted part of the school that Jack bought us a sharpening stone, with oil, so we could keep our blades keen at all times.
Our knives were cherished and admired. My first sheath knife was given to me by my father after a trip to Norway: it had naive engravings on its antler handle. By the time I was twelve, I possessed half a dozen. The one I prized most was a commando dagger with a blade nearly seven inches long. Jack once borrowed it during a classroom science experiment, to stir some crystals in a giant test tube. But even that weapon, with a wartime provenance, couldn’t compare to Nicholas Love’s favourite blade.
Love, three years above me, was famed for two things. First, he was the ‘School Molecatcher’, charged with despatching moles before they threw up mounds of earth on Maidwell’s precious lawns: his spring traps were often successful, and he skinned his many victims, before pinning their pelts to blood-flecked wooden boards for tanning.
Love was also known throughout the school for his enviable collection of knives, of which his perfectly weighted Bowie knife was king.
There was a soft-skinned redwood tree in the grounds, within sight of the headmaster’s wing, into which we were allowed to hurl our knives. This was where Love perfected his throwing technique and accuracy. We would watch as his Bowie knife seemed always to go into the bark tip first, and he could nominate precisely where it was going to pierce. At Maidwell, such a talent inspired awe.
Sometimes we would run at this redwood and see how far up it we could scramble before reaching as high as we could and plunging our blade in. We’d also play games of ‘dare’ with our knives, standing with our legs wide apart, taking it in turns to pitch our blades into the ground between each other’s feet. I find it astonishing that nobody received a serious puncture wound during my five years at Maidwell. While enraged, some boys would threaten others with their weapons, but none ever saw this through.
