Being Boycie, page 3
In order, presumably, to maximise the experience I was to make the journey unaccompanied. My parents put me on a train at Victoria, but after that I was on my own. I found the ferry in Portsmouth easily enough, and didn’t even have to think about the sea-sickness pills my mother had slipped into the small canvas rucksack which was all the luggage I carried (toothbrush, toothpaste, one spare pair of trousers, gym shoes, two shirts and a change of underwear) plus my tennis racquet – as if I was going to play tennis in France! I thought.
It all went fairly smoothly until the ferry reached St Malo. Once ashore, I looked around for a Frenchman to aim me in the right direction.
‘Ou est la gare?’ I asked, proud of sounding really quite French, and embellishing the few words with suitable Gallic gestures that I’d observed watching Jacques Tati films with my father – a lopsided shrug of the shoulder and a quizzical pout.
‘I dunno, mate,’ the man answered in distinctly London English. ‘I’m a stranger round here. I’d have thought you’d have known, being French.’
Flattering of course, but not helpful. As I was casting around for a Frenchman to ask – someone wearing a striped matelot shirt and a beret with a string of onions round his neck, smoking a yellow Gauloise and reeking of garlic – I spotted a sign in the form of an arrow with the words, ‘La Gare.’
The train journey from St Malo to Nantes introduced me to a lot more raw Frenchness – a man pulling a cigarette from a blue packet of Gitanes and sucking in the pungent smoke with extravagant vigour; a tall, shingle-haired woman who could have walked off a 1940s film poster, and a dumpier, more matronly sort with her two ridiculously obedient children.
I sat there drinking in these exotic creatures and longed to try out some French, ready even to resort to discussing my aunt’s pen on the bridge at Avignon. I was quite keen, too, to have a go at ‘Ouvrez la fenetre,’ or ‘Fermez la porte,’ but after my difficulties in St Malo, I chose instead to grin foolishly and watch the French landscape fly by.
At Nantes, I had to seek further directions. ‘Ou est l’autobus gare, s’il vous plait?
The man I’d asked looked at me as if I were simple. ‘Ici!’ he said.
I was standing in it – bang outside the train ‘gare’.
I was about to ask for the bus to St Brevin, when there it was, with my destination clearly signed on the front, being entered by hordes of French peasantry, slinging luggage and chickens on the roof, and dragging kids onto the bus behind them. I did the same (minus chickens and kids), found myself a seat and happily settled in.
A jovial, rotund little chap looked at my ticket and was transformed instantly into an arm-waving maniac, from whose torrent of French and gesticulations at another crowded charabanc I quickly gathered that this bus was not going to my destination, St Brevin-les-Pins (no relation, I discovered later in life, to the more exotic Juan-les-Pins – where Peter Sarstedt’s Lovely was to spend her summer vacations.)
Having retrieved my bag from the roof, I migrated to the other bus and, now sure that I was on the right route, settled down again to enjoy the journey.
It was, for me, a wonderful, almost fantastical voyage as I revelled in everything that was so different to what I was used to – the sounds, the smells, the people, the fields and crops, the houses and farm buildings that all made me feel I was in an alien world, and not quite in control.
After an hour or so we arrived at St Brevin-les-Pins, where I clambered down with the rest of the passengers and joined in the scramble to retrieve my bag from the roof. After quite a bit of shouting and remonstration, when everything was out, the bus rattled off in a cloud of dust to go back the way it had come. In the eerie silence of the warm late afternoon sun, I stood there like Cary Grant, waiting for the unknown in the middle of nowhere in North by Northwest.
Consulting my father’s old Bravington Wetrista military watch, which he’d lent me for the trip, I found I had arrived just four minutes before the scheduled time in the detailed itinerary my father had drawn up for me. The rest of the passengers seemed already to have been absorbed into the fabric of the small, sleepy town, while a mad-eyed mongrel dog appeared, running in circles around the leaf-shaded square. The silence was shattered when it started barking hysterically at nothing, stopping only to pee on the base of a tree or scratch its neck with manic vigour; I thought about rabies and took a step back.
On the far side of the square, untroubled by this potential danger, an old man was sweeping leaves away from the front of his house, which the breeze instantly deposited back into his small garden. Beyond him, two women fluted at one another in French that was incomprehensible to me, the mad dog loped off, silence fell once more and I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if M. Hulot himself had cycled lazily into view from around the corner.
I heard a car approaching and picked up my bag in anticipation; it appeared and drove slowly past without stopping. The silence resettled until another car, a grey-blue Citroen with great sweeping mudguards and old-fashioned chrome carriage lamps had crept up behind me. The door swung open – the wrong way, I thought – and a large chap with a jolly visage and colossal moustache stepped out.
‘Bonjour… Monsieur John Challis?’
‘Oui,’ I replied succinctly. ‘Bonjour.’
‘Ca va?’ he enquired, which left me floundering a moment.
‘Oui, merci beaucoup,’ I managed.
He opened his boot, took my bag and dropped it in before ushering me into the passenger seat. Back then in 1957, it didn’t seem at all odd for a boy of my age to get into a car with a total stranger, even a foreign one.
He drove me without incident to the place where I was to spend the next three weeks. It looked more Concentration Camp than Holiday Camp, surrounded by high, chain link fences topped with barbed wire. I wondered, as I was greeted by a pugnacious little sergeant major type, if the wire was to keep intruders out, or us in. I was quite surprised not to see guard towers with search lamps protruding from each corner. The camp reminded me of the sort of place I’d seen on innumerable war films where gung-ho, moustachioed Johnnies with implausibly plummy accents would tunnel their way to freedom (usually to be caught a few hours later by saying, “I say, I’m so sorry,” in their best English, when they bumped into a member of the Gestapo at the nearest railway station).
The only buildings were a series of low, two-storey blocks of sandy-grey concrete panels, with incongruous floral curtains in the window, perhaps to make the grim barracks more homely for us boys. It occurred to me that not much over a dozen years before, the place must have been some kind of military installation. From the second floor, I discovered, looking north across the broad mouth of the Loire, one could easily see the opposite shore and the site of the wartime German U-boat base at St Nazaire.
There, in 1942, HMS Campbeltown had brazenly steamed up the Loire estuary under intense German fire and struck the floating dry dock in the middle of the night. A raiding force of commandos leaped from the bows and set about destroying the dock in a daring and brilliantly successful operation that produced five Victoria Crosses, four DSOs, seventeen DSCs and eleven MCs. It made me tingle just to think of it.
The sense of a former military presence at our camp was reinforced by the sleeping arrangements – four large dormitories to house an assorted gang of spotty youths from a variety of countries, all of whom, more or less, spoke English. There were a few other English boys, whom I rather resented; I wanted to be the sole representative of my country to have been incarcerated in this floral-curtained barracks. I gravitated from the start towards a gang of French Canadians with their almost American accents.
I went to bed that first night a little uncertain of what to expect but excited at the thought of getting down to the beaches we could see from our window.
This hope was quickly dashed next morning at 6.30, when we were bellowed out of bed and marched down to the St Brevin Lido. The sergeant major type, whom I came to think of as Camp Kommandant, put us through a punishing series of physical jerks and made us plunge into the unheated pool.
If this was supposed to turn us into strapping, healthy young fellows bursting with well-disciplined energy and spiritual fortitude, it wasn’t going to work – not with me anyway. If there was one thing that made me want to rebel and do the opposite, it was discipline. Besides, we all agreed, the whole process smacked of Hitler Youth activity, and we knew what had happened to them.
On the march back, I looked across at the rebuilt industrial landscape of St. Nazaire, and at the not much more attractive view offered by St Brevin, and wondered what on earth had possessed my parents to send me to a hellhole run by angry little tyrants.
Back at the camp, I studied the view inland, towards tempting signs announcing Boulangerie, Patisserie, Charcuterie, and most excitingly, Bar.
Within a few a days, with a group of French Canadian boys about my own age, I’d found a way to scramble under the fence and into the open, which led to the new and exciting experience of ordering drinks in the nearest bar.
Apart from a glass of my Uncle Lew’s scrumpy, which I hadn’t enjoyed, I’d never had alcohol before, and a beer at St Brevin-les-Pins was my first ever proper drink, though, it must be said, by no means my last. We managed to escape several more times, until we were caught red-handed wriggling under the wire, which provoked an hysterical tirade from the sergeant major.
This wasn’t the only thing that excited his wrath. One of the FCs, as I called them, had brought a guitar and one evening performed his version of the Muddy Waters classic, Hoochie-Coochie Man. Of course, we had no idea what a Hoochie-Coochie man was supposed to do, but it sounded fun. I borrowed the guitar and responded with a Vipers version of Cumberland Gap – vastly superior, in my view, to the more successful Lonnie Donegan recording – but halfway through, the Camp Kommandant came storming in and yelled at me to stop. It seemed that he did know what a Hoochie-Coochie man was supposed to do, and he wasn’t having it sung about on his camp. Determined to impose cultural as well as physical discipline, he announced that only ‘folk songs’ were now permissible.
Luckily, he wasn’t privy to our interminable, and frankly illinformed discussions about girls – mainly focussing on the local French girls whom we ogled from a distance on our trips into town or to the lido. Graphic as our talk became, it was never translated into action. But the heat generated by this forbidden, or at least, unreachable fruit was none the less intense.
In the course of other, official jaunts around la Bouche du Loire, my Canadian friends and I slipped the main group for our own slightly more dangerous excursions, on one occasion nearly drowning as we teetered along a sea wall with the tide rushing in at St Nazaire, across the estuary from Stalag St Brevin. I was loving my first taste of being abroad, and despite the discipline issues, would happily have stayed on for the rest of the summer.
Although I had questioned my father’s insistence that I take my tennis racquet, it did get a surprising amount of use in France. I had played with some of the other ‘inmates’ a few times and was spotted by a local worthy who had come to visit. It seemed that he rated his own son – about my age – quite highly as a tennis player.
While I don’t want to sound immodest, I was a pretty good player myself at the time. I’d played in the English Southern Area Junior Championships, where I lost in the quarter finals to one Mark Cox, and just missed out on the All England tournament.
I accepted a challenge to play the French boy, and in what was clearly a well-advertised encounter, he turned out looking pretty confident. When it came to it, he played a bit too deep and was therefore vulnerable to the drop shot, which, at the time, was one of my best. I won in two sets, 6-4, 6-3, to much cheering from my fellow inmates and the whole local community who’d come out in a spirit of entente cordiale. I was walking away from the scene of my triumph when the French boy’s tubby little father blustered over and challenged me to play him, too. Although this match was a little tougher, I won again, in three sets, 6-4, 4-6, 6-2.
I didn’t really gather what this challenge was about – whether it was a matter of family honour, national pride, or sheer pique at seeing his son beaten by an Englishman; but I had the impression he wasn’t too happy with the result.
Shortly after that, my French sojourn was over, and I was seriously disappointed. I don’t remember anything of the journey back, but the wanderlust it instilled in me remained – a first manifestation of a gypsy feeling that I didn’t really belong anywhere – a feeling that stayed with me for a long time to come.
Luckily, at Ottershaw I played a lot of sport besides tennis – mainly rugby, cricket and football, which I still love, despite the frustrations of supporting Arsenal for the last fifty odd years. I was in most of the school teams and tolerably handy on the footer pitch. Unfortunately the coach was also the physics master and therefore treated me as a dozy thicko. I was particularly mortified when I played in an Ottershaw junior team against Eton, and he kept yelling ‘Get stuck in, Challis!’ But I was more of a creative, play maker, which didn’t involve ‘getting stuck in’. As it happened we won the match and went back in the coach happily singing, ‘We’ve beaten Eton.’
I generally fared better at tennis and cricket (although seeing me perform against Andrew Flintoff’s XI in Shropshire last summer, you could have been forgiven for doubting that).
Now I look back on my four years at Ottershaw with affection, and, surprisingly, I still feel that by boarding, I learned a lot about how to live with my fellow men – and I mean ‘men’, because one of the obvious downsides of a single-sex boarding school, especially for an only child like me, was the lack of regular contact with girls. I’m sure it took me longer than those who went through mixed day schools to learn how to act naturally and easily with young women, which possibly affected my relationships and caused my inability to commit properly for the next thirty years.
I did have contact with one girl while I was at Ottershaw, who lived thousands of miles away in Vancouver. She was my penfriend, Leni Hindmarch, acquired for me through a sympathetic friend of my mother’s. Leni was an attractive and well-developed teen, judging from the small black and white photo she sent and we did seem to have some kind of empathy, as the communications between us became, albeit very subtly, more and more saucy. These missives, evidently doused in scent by their sender, described all sorts of arousing activities, as yet unknown to me, like pyjama parties and, with imaginative extrapolation, heavy petting. The school’s censorship process (Six-Inches) began to interfere when Leni took to putting SWALK on the back of the envelope – a pretty harmless sentiment, you might think, and a lot less worrying, than, say, NORWICH (translation: Nickers Off Ready When I Come Home), but too steamy for our moral guardians to ignore. Inevitably, I was called up to explain why a fourteen-year-old boy should be communicating like this with a young member of the opposite sex. It seems a very long time ago, when you consider how teenagers these days swap snapshots of their genitals on their mobile phones the whole time – if the Sun newspaper is to be believed.
But I was a slow developer in these things, even when opportunities were handed to me on a plate. During the school holidays, when I was fifteen, my mother suggested I should join the Junior Drama League, an organisation which used to gather for tuition and workshops in Fitzroy Square, London. I went along willingly, only to be a little alarmed to find that there were more girls than boys there, and I was almost overwhelmed by this rich source of sexual arousal. One keen girl, with the perfect prettiness of teenage innocence, had me sweating up with a galloping pulse every time I saw her. Penny Ede was the daughter of well-known stage director, Christopher Ede. They lived in Barnes, where I visited Penny a few times. We’d wander together around the quieter fringes of Barnes Common, when it became clear that she was a lot more advanced than me; I really didn’t know how to respond to her adult suggestions and would depart from each encounter throbbing with excitement, confusion and frustration.
Following my trip to France and my adventures with the FCs, I certainly learned at Ottershaw how the ‘pack instinct’ can manifest itself among a group of male adolescents. It wasn’t always admirable and often went against my own instincts. I felt deeply sorry for one boy, whose name I won’t divulge, who excelled at all the academic subjects but was useless at games. He wasn’t in my house, and I didn’t know him well, but I knew he was despised by some of the other boys for being a ‘swot’ and ‘sucking up’ to the masters by being conscientious in his work. He was also horribly teased for being Jewish. It hadn’t occurred to me that he differed in any way from the rest of us; he certainly didn’t look different, but some of the boys had made the connection, and old-fashioned anti-Semitism was still common then.
In inter-house rugby matches in which he was forced to play – without regard for his complete lack of aptitude or his own wishes – he was put in the scrum, where he would deliberately be given the ball, then kicked and trodden on by the opposing scrum and most of his own side. I saw it, and didn’t take part… nor did I say anything about it to anyone.
I’m sorry to say that the torment went on until one day it became too much for him and he came running out of his house, up towards the main building, clutching a knife and screaming that he was going to throw himself off the roof.
A group of us walking down to the games fields tried to stop him, but he had completely flipped. The alarm was raised, he was prevented from getting up to the roof, and restrained until an ambulance came to take him away, and we never saw him again. Although I’d not played any part in what happened, I still feel remorseful about not intervening to help him.
