A Very Private School, page 8
Jack also expected the boy to take down his pyjama bottoms. William obeyed, and knelt on Jack’s pouf – the soft, tan, circular cushion in the centre of the study – with his naked buttocks in the air. ‘What have you done wrong this week?’ Jack would ask, in a low voice. This put William in a quandary. He was somebody who made sure to stay out of trouble. He would offer up to Jack his few, minor indiscretions, but would also feel compelled to add some invented ones that were more serious, knowing that having nothing much to confess would anger his self-appointed surrogate father.
After each ‘confession’, Jack would say, ‘Well, that’s very disappointing …’, and spank William’s bare bottom hard. The headmaster’s hand often lingered on the stinging buttocks, William recalls, in what he now terms ‘a romantic fondle’.
James Temple, another of my blond, pretty Maidwell contemporaries, struggled academically, and that presented Jack with an Achilles heel. He insisted that James come to his study, late at night, for ‘extra lessons’. While James knelt on the pouf with his pyjama bottoms removed, Jack presented him with a series of classroom questions that he’d written out on cards. These were placed on the floor, in front of James’s nose, so he could read them out before attempting to answer them.
Jack would spank James slowly and softly at first, before striking harder and harder, till James got the answer right. Then the headmaster would caress James’s buttocks and genitals, while the stinging pain subsided, before presenting the next question. And the crescendo of smacks on bare flesh would start again.
Any chink of educational weakness was open to exploitation by Maidwell’s predatory headmaster. Perry Pelham, a gentle, quiet boy two years my junior, was good at all subjects except maths. Once, before sitting a maths exam, Jack told Perry, ‘To encourage you to do your best today, you should know that you will receive a stroke of my cane for every percentage point that you drop in this paper.’ Perry froze. He only got 44 per cent – worse than he would have expected to have achieved normally.
After the disappointing result came in, Jack took Perry to a place where privacy was guaranteed – an area of the school’s attics that was out of bounds to boys.
‘What is forty-four from one hundred?’ he asked.
‘Fifty-six, sir?’
‘Yes, quite right – fifty-six … But do you really expect my poor old arm to be able to cope with beating you fifty-six times?’
‘No, sir,’ Perry said, daring to hope.
‘So, what is seven into fifty-six?’
A pause.
‘Eight, sir?’
‘Yes. Correct. So I will give you eight strokes of the cane each night of the coming week.’ And he did – up in the attics, for his own private pleasure.
William, James and Perry suffered appallingly in these secret sessions, but there was also a thriving public side to Jack’s beatings. Indeed, looking back, it’s clear to me now that the purpose of Maidwell’s strict structure was to provide Jack with a steady stream of boys’ buttocks to contemplate and strike. The staff knew that, if they wanted the formidable headmaster’s favour, they needed to present him with miscreants.
Robert Lilburne, at Maidwell in Jack’s earliest years as headmaster, recalls the austere Oliver Wyatt with some fondness. ‘Porch, on the other hand,’ he says, ‘was an evil sadist with paedo tendencies. He didn’t like boys, but he did enjoy hurting them.’
Soon after I arrived at Maidwell, I learned that the school never had a victimless day. After tea, at ten minutes to six, it would be the turn of at least half a dozen of us boys to disappear into the dimly lit corridor that led from the side of the school kitchen to the private wing, where the Porches had their set of rooms.
As soon as you took your first steps down the corridor, your nostrils would recoil at the smell of the place – of pungent wax, oozing out of the dark wall-panelling, and up from the polished wooden floor. Eyes also struggled to adapt, for the few lights were spread apart and dim. You’d shuffle down this gloomiest of passageways, too apprehensive to talk, and stop just short of the Porches’ entrance hall. Once here, only whispers were allowed, to add to the drama of the ritual.
Maidwell’s deputy head boy would be on hand to hear why you were present, and he placed you in a line, on the left side of the corridor, to await your turn with Jack. While you stood outside the study, you could just make out the outline of words being exchanged within, but the sound of Jack’s blows punched through the closed door, echoing round the hall in a terrible warning of what you were about to suffer. Stomachs gurgled, throats dried and buttocks tightened, as terror intensified along the line of small children awaiting the headmaster’s cruel attention.
One of my friends was so distressed by the wait outside Jack’s study, and by the sounds he heard coming from within it, that he lost control of both bladder and stomach. On hearing of this, Jack burst out of the door.
‘What’s going on?’ he demanded.
‘I’ve spilt something, sir,’ the ten-year-old replied.
‘Wet yourself, rather! You grubby little boy!’ Jack fumed, before furiously sending him back up the corridor to get himself clean.
But someone still had to suffer: a friend of mine who’d only been present as a witness to a transgression was beaten in place of the one who had fouled his clothes. This innocent told me recently: ‘That was my “Eureka moment” – I realised, This is all wrong. This shouldn’t be happening.’
When your time finally came, you were ushered forward by the deputy head boy. As you shuffled into the gloomy study, your eyes acclimatised to find Jack seated, devoid of compassion, ready to dispense physical pain, the quiet blaze in his eyes betraying his inner gratification.
Jack stared intently, his right knee held tight in interlocking hands, as you stood before him, maintaining the stiff upper lip expected of you. He listened with evident disappointment as your misdemeanour was read out, then issued a short denunciation of your conduct, before flicking a slipper from foot to hand and beckoning you towards him.
He was expert at the next part. He pulled you down so your stomach pivoted on his scrawny knees, before flicking up the vent of your jacket so he could take unobstructed aim at your bottom. The strikes were delivered swiftly and sharply, with the full force of his sinewy arm, before he pushed you away disgustedly. You made for the study door while your head swam with shock and pain, biting your lip and blinking hard.
The head boy witnessed these nightly beatings while standing in the shadows behind the headmaster, his job to record on the school list who had been beaten, for what, on which day, and how many times. One of these head boys, Isaac Ewer, recently told me this list acted as a reminder of where to look for fresh victims: ‘I’m sure Jack could look down the list and see, for instance, that Spencer hadn’t been beaten for a while – so it was time to change that.’
If the schoolboy offence reached beyond the bounds of the headmaster’s slipper, and demanded the Flick or the Swish, the head boy would be told to leave the room. Jack would command the pupil to drop his trousers and underpants, and kneel on his pouf, before administering the strokes in private.
A Maidwell friend of mine, who died a few years ago, spoke of how, during such a caning in the study, Jack reached down with his hand to cup the boy’s scrotum. He used his grip on this sensitive part to move my friend round on the pouf. This gave him an angle from which to cane his buttocks with greater force.
Another former pupil told me how he turned his head while being caned and caught sight of a large bulge in the front of Jack’s cavalry twills. The headmaster slapped this boy’s face hard and shouted, ‘How dare you turn round? Look to the front!’ before completing the thrashing with added gusto.
One of my Maidwell classmates was summoned to the study alongside a pupil who had cut a sapling in the school grounds. The other boy dared to answer back, and my friend remembers thinking, ‘Oh my God …’, as Jack exploded: ‘He caned [the other boy] in front of me. It was so hard.’
He then turned to my friend and whipped his buttocks so severely that, when the blood dried, the cotton of his underpants became enmeshed in his torn flesh. My friend was unable to separate his clothing from his cuts that night, till the matron soaked him in the bath and the underwear came free from his wounds.
The Flick received regular airings. At the end of each week every boy in the school received grades for his work. There were seven subjects, which the school listed in order of importance: Latin first, then maths, French, English, history, geography and Scripture. Your form teacher would give you a grade for each.
‘Weekly Marks’ was supposed to reflect how much a pupil had tried, rather than indicate his academic prowess: 3 was for excellent effort, 2 for hard work, 1 was satisfactory, 0 was not, while a minus reflected ‘little or no effort’. Anyone who got an aggregate of less than 7 could expect a rendezvous with the Flick.
It became obvious that, for their supposed lack of classroom effort, Jack was caning the same seven or eight boys every week – some of them were genuinely struggling with their studies, while the others were pretty, athletic and able. We knew this posse as the Saturday Morning Club. No matter how hard these pupils tried, they received Jack’s cane weekly. One of them still remembers the pattern of these encounters: ‘Jack shouted and then beat me.’ Sometimes he’d position the last blow so it crossed the preceding, parallel ones, for added pain.
‘I remember one boy suffering this fate,’ my contemporary Thomas Scot says. ‘And several of us asked, fascinated and appalled, to see the welts. There was a horrified silence when we saw the bloody result of Jack Porch’s work; I can picture the scene even now.’
My ability to avoid livid stripes on my buttocks was noted by Jack: ‘Charles has had the sense to remain out of trouble this term,’ he once reported to my parents. It had been a particular effort because my dormitory prefect had been Edmund Ludlow. He enjoyed special favour with Jack because of his ability to sniff out boys who’d broken the rules and then serve them up to the headmaster for beatings.
My heart had sunk when I found out I was in Ludlow’s dormitory. I knew from those who’d been under him the previous term that they’d been beaten on ‘every day but two’, as one of them remembers still. This wasn’t because they’d been caught in the act of talking after lights out, but because Ludlow had quizzed them each morning: had they transgressed the no-speaking rule? The guilty boys, brought up on a code of total honesty, admitted that they had.
Before lights out on the first evening of that term, I shared with my roommates what I’d discovered about Ludlow’s methods. I reckoned that the only way to avoid getting into trouble for talking after lights out was not to talk. Everyone agreed. We lay there silently, every night that term, till sleep claimed us.
This wasn’t at all what Ludlow wanted, as he needed culprits to hand over to remain so high in Jack’s good books. Each morning he would interrogate us: ‘Right – which of you spoke after lights out last night? Come on – I want all the names.’ But every time we looked squarely back at his darting, suspicious eyes and gave our solemn word that we had stayed silent in the dark. Ludlow tipped from fury to anguished disbelief as the term progressed. He once screamed in frustration: ‘You’re either the biggest load of liars there’s ever been or the biggest load of goody-goodies!’
But we persisted. Breaking the link between this enabling prefect and the headmaster’s painful slipper made the monotony of our nightly silence worthwhile. In a place where we had next to no power, Ludlow’s utter consternation was rich reward.
The headmaster’s wife was another purveyor of boys to beat. This proved Mrs Porch’s only engagement with Maidwell’s pupils: she didn’t teach at the school and never joined us in the dining room, but chose to live a quiet, separate life. The most common adjective my contemporaries have for her is ‘ghostlike’. We’d heard a rumour that her father had been gassed in the First World War, and we took this to somehow explain her detachment. (More recently, I heard from one of Maidwell’s teachers that Mrs Porch had been dependent on Valium in the years I attended the school.)
Mrs Porch enjoyed working in her rose garden, a small square near her family’s quarters that was enclosed by a finely clipped yew hedge. She wore short rubber boots that peeped out from under long skirts in the winter, while secateurs and a basket were constantly to hand in the summer. The flowers that she cut were reserved for the Porches’ private wing, where they stood out in the general gloom.
When three boys joined in a game that involved jumping across one of her precious rose beds, some of their leaps accidentally fell short. A rigorous investigation was held into the tell-tale heel marks left behind in the perfectly tilled soil, with pupils’ shoes examined for clues. The culprits were summoned to Jack’s study for individual canings of a particular severity.
It was not, I think, the nature of the crime that caused such a punishment. Rather, it was the headmaster’s way of showing that any transgression that affected his wife would be dealt with especially harshly: however eerie her presence, she was still the queen consort of Maidwell, by dint of being married to its undisputed king.
Jack didn’t just rely on others sending him boys to beat. He also hunted for prey himself.
Maidwell’s dormitory occupants were divided into early beds, semi-beds, semi-demi-beds and late beds, according to when exactly, between 7.30 and 9 p.m., they had lights out. He’d come around the most senior dormitories in friendly guise every evening, spending a few minutes in each. We played cards with him – vingt-et-un (or pontoon) usually, or a hand of bridge occasionally. He took part to win, but he was at his most relaxed with us at these times. One of my friends once said that during these evening visits, ‘We were like the sons he never had.’
But on these dormitory tours, his worst tendencies surfaced. ‘He slyly encouraged us to cheat [at cards],’ Robert Lilburne remembers, ‘and when he caught us would pull us over his knee and spank us using just two fingers of his right hand. I remember only too well deciding not to cheat after twice experiencing his cock digging into my tummy.’
Jack invented a game called ‘toe beetles’, and his fingers were those ‘beetles’, probing and tickling our toes, before moving up our legs to our torsos as we screeched with laughter. He would go ‘Ha-ha-ha – toe beetles! Toe beetles! Coming to get you! Toe beetles!’ in a maniacal voice that, then, we found funny.
We were thrilled to have a playful moment with someone we were, for the most part, terrified of. Even when his bony fingers dug in quite deep, we would whoop with enjoyment and beg him to carry on. We craved the attention of this most powerful of men, however it came.
After lights out, Jack engaged in nocturnal patrols, when he reverted to his most overtly threatening form. Nobody could hear him pad along the corridors in his soft, evening slippers. He cruised like a submarine, his jutting-out ears scanning for illicit whispers. If on the way to or from the bathroom a boy spotted Jack wandering the corridors, he’d speed back to his dormitory and hiss, ‘Cave!’ – Latin for ‘Beware!’ – and nobody dared speak again till the morning. But it was impossible to escape such a committed predator for long.
One night, boys in my dormitory were whispering about nothing much when Daniel Blagrave suddenly chimed in with ‘Do you know what peasants are called in South America?’ None of us had a clue. ‘Peons!’ he said, with an emphasis on the first syllable that sparked loud laughter: any phrase with ‘pee’ or ‘wee’ in it would have set us off for, however rarefied our family backgrounds might have been, we were, in the end, just ten-year-old boys.
The handle on the dormitory door slowly turned. Terror. It was Jack.
We lay still, hoping to pass for sleeping innocents. Jack put the light on. ‘Who was talking?’ he asked, his low voice choking with excitement, as he sat down on the nearest bed. Four hands went up, including mine. He beckoned us towards him as he flicked a slipper into his right hand.
One by one, we were upended on his knee and given swingeing blows to the buttocks before being pushed away. I’d been beaten with a slipper several times by him already by now, during his post-tea rituals, but that had been through my trousers and pants. Pyjama bottoms presented no protection, and the pain was shocking in its intensity. One who was beaten with me that night recalls, ‘I simply could not believe how much his slipper hurt on this occasion. No mercy whatsoever – for the crime of talking.’
We each sped back to our beds, trying to put on a brave face while our buttocks burned and our eyes smarted. We lay there in silence, piecing together the path that had taken us so quickly from schoolboy laughter to alarm to dizzying pain. Jack left us in the dormitory in shock and resumed his patrol of the corridors, looking for more victims.
Rather than be embarrassed at the amount of physical punishment he meted out, Jack seemed to revel in it. He called his beatings ‘whacking’, and thought it was something that could be joked about. When teaching us the different cases of Latin nouns such as nominative, vocative and genitive, he renamed the accusative the ‘whackusative’. He illustrated each of these words with the pin figure of a boy. The pin boy illustrating the whackusative was bent over, arms down, bottom pointing upwards. His head was thrown back with sketched lines emanating from his mouth, showing that he was wailing in pain. It was one of the ways in which Jack normalised his way of doing things – his sadism.
I like to think Jack had some scruples about such abuse, and I suspect it lay behind one of his classroom eccentricities. The school sold us fountain pens, which we chewed on hard, so they were often reduced to gnawed stumps. Jack viewed our pens suspiciously, insisting that we leave them on our desks before approaching him in class. If anyone forgot and approached him with pen in hand – perhaps when having a piece of work marked – he’d call out ‘No – no – remember St Cassian!’ and send them back to their desk with a violent wave of his arm.
