A Very Private School, page 6
An older boy who’d seen me squirm under Mrs Ford’s unkind attention that morning told me, ‘We call her “Granny” Ford rather than “Mrs” Ford – not because she’s nice, like a grandmother should be, because she isn’t like that at all – but because she’s so old.’ It was a comfort to know that others found her just as awful.
There were further new boy hoops to jump through that first day. For the simpler administration of the school, we were each allotted a unique number, inherited from a boy who’d left Maidwell the previous term.
‘Your number is sixty-four, Spencer,’ Granny Ford told me. ‘It was Shepherd’s number before becoming yours. A nice boy, Shepherd …’ she said, wistful at the departure of a boy she liked, and coming to terms with the regrettable fact that he’d been replaced by one she had already decided she would not. During my five years at Maidwell, ‘64’ was on all my clothes, on the changing room peg where I hung my sports things, on the hook for my towel in the washroom, and also in indelible ink on the plastic mug where I kept my toothbrush and toothpaste.
That first afternoon we were led, in our sports gear, to the school’s pool. The master in charge of swimming pointed at the concrete cavity over his shoulder and boasted: ‘Seventy thousand gallons of water go into this pool – all piped out of our own natural spring – and we’re not so soft at Maidwell as to bother with heating.’
He bent to scoop out the pool’s floating thermometer: ‘Today the water is – let’s see – sixty degrees … And for those of you who think that’s cold – the pool remains open for swimming till it gets down to forty-eight.’
He explained that the school viewed us all, on arrival, as ‘learners’. ‘You’ll want to rid yourselves of that miserable status and become “swimmers”, if you want to be allowed into the pool’s deep end,’ he said. ‘That means you’ll have to complete a length, unaided, under my supervision. Now, change, and let’s see if any of you can swim that far.’
To my mortification my swimming trunks hadn’t been packed. Mary, my nanny, had reasonably assumed that there would be no swimming during the Christmas term, so they remained at Park House. When I nervously shared my predicament with the tall, hard-faced master, he looked at me with cold disdain.
‘Well, you’ll still have to take the swimming test!’
‘But how, sir?’
‘I suppose you’ll just have to do it in what you’re wearing – your rugby shorts,’ the master said, crossly, with a snort of disgust bursting from the hairy nostrils of his Roman nose.
The coldness of the water was a shock, but that afternoon I gained my first, lowly toehold in Maidwell’s hierarchy by becoming a ‘swimmer’, along with most of the other new boys.
During that first week, I wrote to my mother, thanking her for a letter. I put a brave face on things, assuming she must know how terrible my new life was, but not wanting her to worry about me: ‘I have settled down alright and William Purefoy is in the same form. This is only a short note. I have made three other friends not counting William.’ These were my new dormitory comrades, Scot, Fleetwood and Hewson.
To counter our homesickness, my new Maidwell acquaintances and I tried to keep each other’s spirits up. My party piece was imitating Bert and Harold, absurd characters from The Adventures of Sir Prancelot, a children’s TV series. But it proved impossible to distract ourselves for long from the yearning for home.
Homesickness is a horror that great writers have described with brilliance. George Orwell remembered it as ‘The horrible sensation of tears – a swelling in the breast, a tickling behind the nose.’ Roald Dahl reckoned that ‘Homesickness is a bit like seasickness. You don’t know how awful it is till you get it, and when you do, it hits you right in the top of the stomach and you want to die.’
To me, homesickness was as inexplicable as it was inescapable. I found it simply overwhelming – a secret shame that had to be denied, because the first lesson we absorbed at Maidwell came not from the teachers, but from the older boys. They explained that ‘blubbing’ was unacceptable. ‘If you blub, you’re “wet”,’ we were told – and nobody wanted to attract that level of ridicule, whether new boy or older. At the same time, we were all told that we would ‘get used to’ homesickness. Like so many others, I never did. So I learned to hide my despair, knowing I would never conquer it.
My homesickness combined the agony of a twisting blade with the slow, constant suffocation of hope and reason. It came in waves and – just when I hoped I had it under control – it would crash in on me once more, with colossal force. It could be particularly dangerous at night, when the sound of another child’s choked anguish easily set me off.
Pink’s light was switched off at the end of each day by Granny Ford, with the sing-song farewell, ‘Good night – don’t let the bed bugs bite.’ Once she closed the door, sobs could break the silence from any corner of the dormitory. Generations of boys had suffered homesickness lying on these same, lumpy beds. I recently spoke to a man who arrived at Maidwell as a seven-year-old, a decade before me. He recalled how bereft he had been at night as a new boy: ‘I had a very good cry. I knew nobody there – absolutely nobody.’
Many in my generation experienced the same trauma, after being abandoned so young in such a strange place. Two of my year recall their first day: ‘I’d had this beautiful childhood,’ the first says. ‘Then I was dumped [at Maidwell]. My parents dropped me. I sat on my trunk and cried, asking myself, “What am I doing here?” It was brutal from that point on.’ The second remembers: ‘I had a sense of abandonment and a fear in the pit of my stomach the like of which I had never experienced – and which I don’t think I have ever experienced since.’
At the start of each term, looking at those other faces, white with shock and their eyes red-rimmed with suppressed tears, the trauma was never far away. To survive it, a small but important part of us had to die.
The relentless timetable could distract you from homesickness during the daytime. But the hours of darkness remained silent and empty. No talking whatsoever was allowed in a dormitory between Granny Ford’s turning off its lights and her marching into your room again in the morning. Alone with my thoughts, in the dark, I felt the full pain of separation from my family. I wondered what was going on at home in my absence. Sleep provided the sole escape from such difficult thoughts, and it was best reached with a teddy bear held tight – a soft shield against a hard world.
But such mementos of home could carry their own dangers.
Robert Tichborne, four years my senior at Maidwell, recently told me how he chose to leave his teddy bear at home, his first term, because he ‘didn’t want to look babyish’. At the start of his second term, having seen that younger boys weren’t looked down on for having teddys, he opted to bring his to school. But rather than acting as a comfort, it exacerbated his suffering. ‘The teddy bear was the thing that did it,’ Robert recalled. ‘It triggered my homesickness, being such a direct connection with home. It set me off completely. I was in puddles of tears. I had to put it to one side and take it home as soon as I could.’
Each of us had to find his own way of coping with the feeling of abandonment at night-time. One of my fellow new boys in Pink could only get to sleep through rocking his entire body back and forth, rhythmically. He did this for twenty minutes or so each night, hugging himself tight in a self-soothing routine to counter the turmoil tearing at him as he lay in the dark. His rocking would finally slow, then stop, as he was enveloped in the comfort of sleep.
When I’d been at Maidwell for five days, the headmaster sent a handwritten note to my mother: ‘The slightly anxious look is leaving Charles’ face, and I am now usually greeted with a broad grin. He is moving happily & confidently from one companion to another when they play in the garden, and this shows greater confidence. School porridge finds little favour, but he is coping. I will write again.’
This he did two weeks later, in correspondence of a more formal kind, typed on Maidwell Hall writing paper and addressed to my father. He sent a copy to my mother too, his handwritten scrawl revealing his thoughts about the relative status of the sexes: ‘My normal practice is to write to fathers about a boy’s work but thought you might like a copy,’ he sniffed.
This more considered letter began: ‘The time has come for me to write to give you some account of the impression which Charles has made in the classroom.’ This was to be a work report, without a nod to my emotional reaction to being removed so abruptly from home.
‘I can do this very briefly because it takes very little time to say that all is well. He is a quiet member of the form who has shown himself to be a reliable and a rapid worker. His reading is excellent, and he clearly enjoys it … But when he writes stories, he reveals that he is not as relatively mature as he appears on the surface. However, he shows a lively imagination, and he uses words to convey his meaning very well.’
The headmaster then paid tribute to the quality and range of Miss Lowe’s teaching at Silfield: ‘This is something which is becoming increasingly rare – and it is very welcome … If the opportunity arises, I hope it will be possible to pass on to his previous school our thanks for grounding him so well.’
The teacher who had taken on the baton of my education from Miss Lowe was Miss Best-Shaw, who taught seventh form, Maidwell’s junior class, where all new boys began. Miss Best-Shaw seemed immensely old to me, but I see now that she was thirty-eight when I came under her charge. She was plump, of modest height, with thin, short, wavy brown hair, and glasses of a type that had been fashionable in her teens. She was without vanity and her wardrobe never changed: a navy-blue cardigan, a white ruffled shirt and a grey pleated skirt that she flattened out with open palms when nervous. Another sign of her being flustered was a surprisingly loud sniff.
The Best-Shaws were Kent aristocrats, and her mentor was her childhood nanny, who would live with the family for sixty years. There was something childishly kind about Miss Best-Shaw, which made her well-suited to overseeing seven- and eight-year-olds. She seemed much less assured with adults: I don’t recall ever seeing her interact with her Maidwell teaching colleagues.
Miss Best-Shaw’s classroom was in an isolated, ugly, modern block, removed from the bustle and beauty of the main school, but she seemed happy in her backwater. It was here that she greeted us, my first morning at the school, with an astonishing announcement: ‘Although my name is, indeed, Miss Best-Shaw, you will at all times call me “Please”.’ Seeing how baffled we looked, she continued: ‘All female members of staff here at Maidwell – teachers, as well as the matron and assistant matrons – are called “Please”. It is one of the school’s traditions. It’s seen as a way of instilling good manners into all of you boys while you’re here – addressing a lady as “Please”, regularly, will hopefully make politeness a habit that will stay with you forever.’
I remember thinking – even then, as an eight-year-old – that this was deeply odd. There was also the clumsiness of it all: when asking for something from a female member of staff, you had to start ‘Please, Please …’ It neither seemed nor sounded right then, but it’s even more baffling to me now. This strange custom was a sublimation of the individuality of Maidwell’s women. Allegedly designed to underpin good manners, the practice instead reinforced a view that each female working at the school was undeserving of specific respect. She was simply to be bundled under the nonsensical classification of ‘Please’. There was no similarly idiosyncratic term for the male teachers.
Miss Best-Shaw’s seventh form offered a gentle introduction to Maidwell. We had all our lessons in her simple classroom. Alongside undemanding forays into English and maths, we did plenty of ‘handwork’ – papier-mâché, basket weaving, painting and making model planes. We received an introduction to the Greek and Roman myths, while being the only class spared French and Latin lessons. When it was sunny, Miss Best-Shaw occasionally dared to take us outside and read to us, with evident enjoyment, in the shade of one of Maidwell’s mighty trees.
While being cared for by a kind teacher, new boys were also granted a period of grace that shielded them from the physical punishments that, I was horrified to learn, seemed to lie in wait all around us. Nobody had warned me that Maidwell would be a place where corporal punishment was not only allowed but rampant.
An older boy in Miss Best-Shaw’s class explained to me, during my first week or so, that you were ‘whacked’ by the headmaster with the slipper for talking after ‘lights out’ in your dorm, for spilling things, for treading on the flowerbeds, for letting water tip over into your boots, for leaving your clothes on the changing room floor, for barging past masters, for being rude, for flicking ink from your pen, for being late for meals – for all sorts of things. But, being a new boy, you’d have to spill your milk or water at meals thirty-two times in your first term to get whacked, while a senior boy would be beaten for doing that sort of thing just three times.
More serious breaches of the school’s discipline – such as stealing or lying, or using sticks or stones when fighting – would, I gathered, lead to caning. There were two canes, so renowned that they had been given their own names – ‘the Flick’ and ‘the Swish’ – and they were deployed on boys’ bare buttocks.
The Flick, the headmaster’s regular choice, was, I heard, a thin, malicious instrument that whipped round the buttocks to nick the top of the recipient’s right thigh. This flogging was administered with such force that each lash had the sound of a pistol crack and cut the skin open, leaving blood oozing from tight, agonising lines. These vicious wounds changed from red to bluish-purple in their first week, before billowing into cloudy brown bruising thereafter.
Particularly serious misdeeds saw the headmaster reaching for the Swish – a sturdier, knotted piece that packed a heavier punch. In fencing parlance, the Flick could be seen as the épée, with the Swish the sabre.
When in the mood for something a little more exotic than this pair of old faithfuls, the headmaster would stroll into the school’s grounds and use his pocketknife to cut down a stalk of bamboo for use as a ‘one-off’ on a specific victim.
From the start of my Maidwell career, I was determined to avoid the pain and humiliation of slipper or cane. At the end of my first term, the headmaster wrote of me: ‘Being a good natured and amenable boy, he has no difficulty in keeping our fairly modest quota of rules …’ But in truth the rules were innumerable and complex and weren’t written down or recorded anywhere. I feared that they’d be impossible to negotiate safely once I was shorn of the leniency afforded a new boy.
The only true safety at Maidwell seemed to lie in being far away from the place, at home. And this was a sanctuary we rarely reached.
There were three terms at Maidwell each academic year – ‘Michaelmas’ (also known as ‘Christmas’) was the longest, running for three months from mid-September to December; ‘Lent’ from mid-January to late March; and ‘Summer’, which began in late April and closed the academic year when it ended in mid-July.
During each term every boy was allowed out for two weekends, called ‘leave-out’, which lasted from the end of morning lessons on a Saturday till late afternoon the following day. During the Christmas and Summer terms there was also a week’s ‘long leave’, halfway through the term. I had one leave-out per term with each parent and alternated my long leaves. So, as I worked out carefully at the time, when trying to bring some logic and order to a life so out of control, I spent 67 nights per year with either parent and 230 nights – almost eight months in the year – at Maidwell. It was a calculation that weighed on me, as I tried so hard to fit inconspicuously into a setting that, as the newest of new boys, proved particularly alien and intimidating. It was exhausting, those first weeks, having so many new customs to learn, and people to look up to, when the only kindness stemmed from my fellow inmates of Pink, the self-conscious Miss Best-Shaw, and Francis Allen – a boy three years older than me who, being number 65 in the school list, had his changing room peg next to my number 64. Kind smiles from such a senior boy were a rare comfort in a setting where older pupils seemed determined to inflict on us the same frigid disdain that they had suffered in their own time as new boys.
My initial leave-out that first term arrived on Saturday 14 October, 1972 – a day I had held in focus since before starting at the school. My opening letter to my mother as a new boy had flagged it up, as a longed-for moment of liberation. Giddy excitement built up among the pupils as the day approached. Granny Ford always resented these obvious boosts in morale, and she loudly scolded boys for being ‘bumptious’, as she peevishly called it – as if we were somehow rude for bursting with excitement at the delicious prospect of a weekend back at home with our families.
Never have I known time go slower than on that Saturday morning, as I watched the classroom clock tick slowly towards the lesson’s conclusion. On bursting out into the front courtyard, I ran to my father and hugged him round the thighs.
As we made for his car he gave me the disappointing news that it was too far to make it home, to Park House, when only allowed out for a single night. Instead, we’d be heading to Althorp for lunch with my grandparents, before going on to my father’s London mews house. But when we arrived at Althorp, Mr Pendrey, the genial butler, informed us in a sombre voice that my grandmother sent her regrets, but she felt too unwell to join us or to even receive me. My father briefly visited her in her bedroom, while I for the first time experienced Althorp without my grandmother’s palpable love.
I’d last seen her during the summer between the new boys’ tea party and my first day at Maidwell. Her head had been swathed in bandages, after surgeons had failed to remove a brain tumour that had taken root where she’d been struck hard, long before, in a train crash.
