Lessons, page 6
What could Roland know of this? Only what his father told him, that the Arabs were angry. No time to ask why. All children and their mothers must proceed immediately to the nearest army camp for their protection. By chance, when the Suez crisis broke, Rosalind happened to be in England visiting Susan. There was trouble “at home” that Roland knew nothing of. Nor did he know who came into the white villa while he was at school to pack a bag of clothes for him. Certainly not the Captain, who was the officer in charge of the evacuation and was busy.
The bus that brought him from his primary school in Azizia barracks did not stop that day by the lane through the pomegranate orchard that led to the villa. It went on the extra mile to Gurji. There were sandbagged machine-gun nests by the guardroom, and light tanks parked by the road. Armed troops waved and saluted as their bus passed into the camp.
The big twenty-man tents were all the same but it was a given that officers’ children were accommodated separately from the children of the other ranks. The wives banded together to manage an improvised kitchen, dining room and wash house. Nothing dramatic happened in the following week. Angry Arabs armed to the teeth did not attack the base in order to slaughter British children and their mothers. The camp was small, no one was allowed to leave and Roland had never been happier. He and two friends had the run of the place. They came to know well the smell of engine oil on hot fine sand. They explored the vehicle workshops, talked to the tank commanders, played football on the full-sized grassless pitch. They climbed up scaffold towers to be with the machine-gun crews. Either discipline was slipping or the expectation of an attack had vanished. The duty officers and soldiers—all young men—were friendly. A lieutenant took Roland on a whirl round the base on his 500 cc motorbike. Sometimes Roland wandered by himself, content to be alone. The army mums who supervised meals, bathed eighteen children one after another in a big tin bath and imposed bedtimes, were jolly and capable. Roland received extra sympathy because his mother was away. But maternal attention was just what he did not want.
Complaints and needs were directed at Captain Baines and his men. Sometimes he descended among the family tents to sort out a problem, service revolver strapped to his waist. He did not have time to speak to his son. That was fine. Roland was too young to account for his euphoria in those few days. The rupture of routine, the excitement of danger mixed with an exaggerated sense of security, hours of unsupervised play with his chums; and then, a set of absences: squinting at the blackboard at the Azizia school, release from his mother’s anxious attention and sadness and from his father’s iron authority. The Captain no longer vigorously Brylcreemed Roland’s hair in the mornings before school and made a sharp parting with the tip of his comb; his mother no longer fussed over scuffs on his shoes. Above all he was free of the unspoken family problems, which had a power over him as pervasive and mysterious as gravity.
The families left the camp late at night and travelled to the RAF Idris airfield under heavy military escort, which included armoured personnel carriers. Roland was proud to see his father in charge, as ever with his gun, giving orders to the troops, delivering mothers and children safely to the steps of the twin-engine propeller plane bound for London. But there was no opportunity to say goodbye.
The episode, a taste of unreal freedom, had lasted eight days. It sustained him at boarding school, it shaped his restlessness and unfocussed ambitions in his twenties and strengthened his resistance to a regular job. It became a hindrance—whatever he was doing, he was pursued by an idea of a greater freedom elsewhere, some emancipated life just beyond reach, one that would be denied him if he made unbreakable commitments. He missed many chances that way and submitted to periods of prolonged boredom. He was waiting for existence to part like a curtain, for a hand to extend and help him step through into a paradise regained. There his purpose, his delight in friendship and community and the thrill of the unexpected would be bound and resolved. Because he failed to understand or define these expectations until after they had faded in later life, he was vulnerable to their appeal. He did not know what—in the real world—he was waiting for. In the dimensions of the unreal, it was to relive the eight days he spent in the confines of 10 Armoured Workshops, REME, at Gurji camp in the autumn of 1956.
Back in England Roland and Rosalind lodged for six months in the house of a builder in Rosalind’s home village of Ash. Roland attended the same local school as his mother had in the early twenties, and where Henry and Susan went too. By Easter of the next year Rosalind and Roland travelled back to Libya, to a new development of villas close to the coast. Perhaps the separation had served his parents well, for life was easier, his mother was less tense and the Captain began to enjoy his adventures with his son.
In July 1959 a school was chosen and a visit was arranged for September, a few days before term began. Roland learned that he would be having piano lessons. The Captain himself played the mouth organ in a clever vamping style. His taste was for songs of the First World War. “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” “Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty,” “Pack up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag.” There were some Scottish songs, old Harry Lauder numbers he sang well. “A Wee Deoch an’ Doris,” “Stop Your Tickling, Jock!” and “I Belong to Glasgow.” It was his keenest pleasure in life to be drinking beer with his army mates, to play or sing to the company and get them to join in. His greatest regret was that he never learned to play the piano, never had the opportunity. Roland must have what he had missed. The chap who could play the piano, he often told his son, would always be popular. As soon as he started on an old favourite everyone would gather round and join in.
The lessons were arranged with the housemaster, who wrote back pleasantly to say that all was in order and Miss Cornell, who had recently graduated from the Royal College of Music, would be Roland’s tutor. The school took its music seriously and he hoped that Roland would take part in next term’s opera, The Magic Flute.
A few weeks before the family left Libya for England, the Captain made another bold move. He arranged for an army three-ton truck to deliver to the house enormous wooden crates. A corporal and a private carried them round to the small garden at back of the house. Father and son nailed them together to make a “base” in the garden. Roland would crawl inside his labyrinth of boxes to conduct chemical experiments with random mixtures of household products—Worcestershire sauce, washing powder, salt, vinegar—along with hollyhock, geranium and date palm leaves. Nothing ever exploded as he hoped.
* * *
There it was. In their different ways, they understood. The Palladian country seat on the far side of the cricket pitch marked the end of their triangular family. Its daily rhythms and currents of hidden feelings and conflicts had been intensified by being set in a distant outpost, one of the forgotten spoils of war. No one had anything to say about an end, so they walked on in silence. At last Roland let go of his mother’s hand. His father pointed and they obediently looked. On the green, a tractor and trailer were bringing rugby posts. One H-shape was being raised in place by four men with ropes. The trees had obscured them before. There were no stumps on the cricket pitch and the scoreboard was blank. The end of summer. Now the driveway was taking them in a long curve past the stables and water tower. They had a glimpse beyond the main building of a balustrade, of ferns sloping away to woods, then the foreshore and the wide blue river again, drifting away from them in a broad straight road towards a far bend. Towards Harwich, the Captain said.
Roland did not know if this was his own idea or something he had once been told: nothing is ever as you imagine it. He fully grasped its startling truth. The scale, the space, the grandeur and greenness—how could he have known what lay ahead from their small house in Giorgimpopoli or from his desk before the blurred blackboard in his classroom at Azizia barracks or from the gentle sea and carefree heat of Piccolo Capri? Now he was too much in awe to feel anxious. He walked between his parents as though through a dreamscape towards the grand building. They entered by a side door. Inside it was cool, almost chilly. Within a narrow space before the entrance hall there was a telephone booth and a fire extinguisher. The staircase was steep and modest. These details were reassuring. Then they were in a larger reception space with an echoing high ceiling and three polished dark doors, all closed. The family stood uncertainly in the centre. Captain Baines was reaching again for the letter of directions when the school secretary was suddenly before them. After the introductions—her name was Mrs. Manning—the tour began. She asked some cheery questions of Roland which he answered politely and she announced that he would be the youngest in his year. After that he barely listened and she did not speak to him again—a relief. Her remarks were addressed to the Captain. He asked the questions while Roland and his mother walked behind, as if they were both prospective pupils. But they did not look at each other. What Roland did catch from their guide were the mentions she made of “the boys.” After lunch, when it wasn’t rugby, the boys put on their boilersuits. That did not sound good. She said several times how strange or peaceful or tidy it was without these boys. But she missed them really. His old anxiety returned. The boys would know things that he did not, they knew each other, they would be bigger, stronger, older. They would dislike him.
They left the building by a side door and passed under a monkey puzzle tree. Mrs. Manning pointed out a statue of Diana, the huntress, with what looked like a gazelle at her side. They did not go near, as he would have liked. Instead they stood at the top of some steps looking down at a gate which, she explained at length, was monogrammed in cast iron. Roland gazed at the immense river and drifted away in his thoughts. If they were at home now they would be getting ready for the beach. Rubber flippers and mask with their distinctive smell in the heat, trunks, towels. Sand grains from yesterday would be in the flippers and mask. His friends would be waiting. At night his mother would dab pink calamine lotion on his burnt and peeling shoulders and nose.
Now they were approaching a low modern building. Inside, upstairs, they inspected the dormitories. Here was the strongest evidence so far of the boys. Metal bunkbeds in rows, grey blankets, the smell of disinfectant, scarred cupboards Mrs. Manning called “tallboys” and in the washrooms rows of squat handbasins under small mirrors. No resemblance to the Palace of Versailles.
Later, tea and a slice of cake in the school office. Roland’s piano lessons were paid for in advance. The Captain signed some papers and, after farewells, the walk back down the drive, a short wait under the immense tree for the bus into the centre of Ipswich, then to the stuffy school outfitter, where the oak-panelled walls soaked up most of the available air. It took a long time to work through the list. Captain Baines went to a pub. Roland put on a bristling Harris tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows and leather trimming at the cuffs. His first jacket. His second was a blue blazer. The boilersuit came flat in a cardboard box. It was not necessary to try it on, the assistant said. The one item he liked was an elastic belt in blue and yellow, fastened with a hook shaped like a snake. On the Ipswich train to London, heading back to his sister’s place in Richmond, surrounded by bags of his stuff, his parents asked him in different ways if he liked the school or this or that feature. He neither liked nor disliked Berners. It was simply, overwhelmingly there and it was already his future. He said he liked it and the look of relief on their faces made him feel happy.
Five days after his eleventh birthday his parents took him to a street near Waterloo station where the coaches were waiting. One was set aside for new boys. It was an awkward goodbye. His father clapped him on the back, his mother hesitated over an embrace then gave a restrained version of one which he received clumsily, sensitive to what the other boys might think. Minutes after, he witnessed many tearful noisy hugs, but it was too late to go back. Inside the coach there were a difficult fifteen minutes, with his parents on the pavement smiling and half waving and mouthing inaudible encouragement up at him through the window while next to him was a boy who wanted to talk. When the coach began to move at last, his parents walked away. His father’s arm was round his mother’s shoulders which were shaking.
Roland’s neighbour put out his hand and said, “I’m Keith Pitman and I’m going to be a cosmetic dentist.”
Roland had politely shaken hands before with many grown-ups, mostly his father’s army colleagues, but he had never performed this ritual with someone of his own age. He took Keith’s hand and said, “Roland Baines.”
He had already noticed that this friendly boy was no bigger than he was.
In the first instance, the shock was not separation from his parents 2,000 miles away. The immediate assault was on the nature of time. It would have happened anyway. It had to happen, the transition into adult time and obligation. Before, he had flourished in a barely visible mist of events, careless of their sequence, drifting, at worst stumbling, through the hours, days and weeks. Birthdays and Christmas were the only true markers. Time was what you received. His parents supervised its flow at home, at school everything happened in one classroom and occasional shifts in routine were orchestrated by teachers who escorted you and even held your hand.
Here, the transition was brutal. The new little boys had to learn quickly to live by the clock, be its servants, anticipate its demands and pay the toll for failure: a telling-off from an irritable teacher, or a detention or, in the final resort, the threat of “the slipper.” When to be up and making your bed, when to be at breakfast, then assembly, then first lesson; to gather up everything needed five lessons ahead; how to consult your timetable, or certain noticeboards for lists that might contain your name; to walk punctually from one classroom to another every forty-five minutes and not be late for lunch straight after fifth lesson; which days were games, where to hang and retrieve your kit and when to hand it in for washing; and on the afternoons when there were no games, when to be at class in the late afternoon, and when to be at class on Saturday mornings; when prep started and how long you had to complete your set tasks of memorising or writing; when to shower, when to be in bed fifteen minutes before the lights went out; which were the laundry days and at what time you must line up to present your dirty clothes to Matron—socks and underwear on certain days, shirts, trousers and towels on others; when the top sheet on your bed became the bottom and the new sheet went on top; when to queue for nit or nail inspection or haircuts or pocket-money distribution and when the tuck shop opened.
Possessions consorted tyrannically with time. They could disappear at the ends of your fingers. There were many things you were likely to lose or forget to bring at the start of the day—the timetable itself, a textbook, last night’s prep, other exercise books, printed questionnaires and maps, a pen that didn’t leak, a bottle of ink, pencil, ruler, protractor, compass, slide rule. If you kept all these small things in a case, you could lose that too and be in bigger trouble. PE was a separate, terrifying concern. Twice a week you carried your gym kit from class to class. The games master, Mr. Evans, a Welshman, was a bully who punished lateness or physical inadequacy with viciousness, mental and physical. In that first week he dug his thumbnail deep into Roland’s ear for failing to sit cross-legged on the rugby pitch in the correct manner. As the pain increased he scrambled on the grass to find the right position. In Libya only Libyans sat on the ground, which was stony, hard and hot. In the gym, the games master’s gym, the fat, the weak and the clumsy were the likely victims. After the first encounter Roland escaped attention.
Time, which had been an unbounded sphere in which he moved freely in all directions, became overnight a narrow one-way track down which he travelled with his new friends from lesson to lesson, week to week until it became an unquestioned reality. The boys, whose presence he had dreaded, were as bewildered as he was, and friendly. He liked the warmth of the cockney accents. They huddled together, some wept at night, some wet their beds, most were relentlessly cheerful. No one was ridiculed. After lights out, they told ghost stories, or elaborated their theories about the world or boasted about their fathers, some of whom, he learned later, were non-existent. Roland heard his own voice in the dark trying and failing to evoke the Suez evacuation. But the story of the accident was a success. A man sailing through the air to his certain death, a woman blinded and bleeding, sirens, police, his father’s bloodied arm. Another night, Roland repeated it by general request. He gained status, an element that had never been part of his life. He thought he was becoming a different person, one that his parents might not recognise.
After lunch, three afternoons a week, Roland’s year group put on their boilersuits—simply done—and were sent out to play unsupervised in the woods and along the river’s foreshore. Much that he had read about in the Jennings novels and dreamed of from dry Libya was at last fulfilled. It was as if they had received instructions from Boy’s Own magazine. They built camps, climbed trees, made bows and arrows, and dug a dangerous unsupported tunnel and went through it on their stomachs for a dare. At four o’clock they were back in class. The hands that held fountain pens might be still streaked with black estuary mud or grass stains. If it was double maths or history, it was a fight to stay awake for ninety minutes. But if it was Friday, when the last lesson was English, the teacher thrilled them by reading aloud in a high nasal voice another episode of a cowboy story, “Shane.” It occupied most of the term.
