The Lonely Sea and the Sky (4 page)

Marlborough College was a fearsome shock after the Old Ride; it seemed like entering a prison. 'A' House, which was stuffed with small boys newly arrived, was grim; the iron discipline was prison-like; and the food, no doubt made worse by the war, was terrible. The diet was 150 years out of date. We used to say that the roast meat was horseflesh; no doubt all boys say that sort of thing, but the reek of it turned one's stomach. However, we felt half-starved, and would have eaten anything. This feeling of starvation was certainly due to vitamin deficiency. From one term to the next we never had any fresh fruit or uncooked salad, or vegetables. There was no excuse for this – we could easily have grown these things ourselves in the college meadows – it was just sheer ignorance (or lack of enterprise) on the part of the management. It was no wonder that we had a general outbreak of boils at one time.

  Marlborough Downs are exceptionally cold (I have read somewhere that this is the coldest place in England). There was some heating in the form rooms, but none in the dormitories. The huge upper schoolroom, where 200 senior boys lived during the day when they weren't in actual classes, had only two open fires. Only the biggest boys were allowed to warm themselves at these fires. I decided that the occasional periods of warm-up available during the day only made one suffer more, so I wore nothing but a cotton shirt under my coat, discarded my waistcoat, and slept under only a single sheet at night. I aimed to get used to the conditions like the Tierra del Fuegan natives of a century ago, except that I didn't sleep inside a dead whale I was eating.

  The usual punishment was a beating; for instance, if late for early­morning school or if one failed to turn up at the fixed target for an afternoon's run. Most of the discipline was in the hands of the senior boys. Their sole form of punishment was beating, and this was so copiously applied for any infringement of an extensive and complicated social code that it amounted to licensed bullying. At certain stages of their career, boys could fasten one button of their coats, put one hand in a trouser pocket, and things of that sort. Upper School was ruled by four prefects, who sat in state at a table in front of the fire. One of them would carry notes round to the boys he was going to beat; this was during prep when we were all at our desks, and as soon as prep finished, all the 200 boys made a wild rush to encircle the prefect's desk. The chairs were pushed away, the victim bent over the desk, and he was beaten as hard as the prefect could possibly manage by taking a running jump and using a very long cane.

  We were allowed to buy milk and cereals, etc., to eat in Upper School during the afternoon, if we had the spare pocket money. The sour milk and other refuse were dumped in an evil-smelling, huge iron bin on wheels. I remember one boy who was unpopular being dumped headfirst in this bin by a number of bigger boys.

  My dormitory prefect was Edmonds and once, after he had beaten me (unfairly as I thought), his bed and bedding were completely missing the following night. Naturally, I knew that he would suspect me, so I had taken elaborate precautions to have nothing whatever to do with it, and had merely suggested the different steps to be taken for the project to be carried out successfully. It had to be carefully organised so that everybody had an equal share in it (except me, of course) so that no one person could be victimised. Edmonds did not beat me again after this.

  Marlborough was a better place in the summer term. Cricket was not compulsory and one was allowed to go off on one's own in the afternoon play period. I usually bicycled somewhere by myself: we were allowed to go within 10 miles of Marlborough. This enabled me to reach Upavon, where I used to lie in the grass on the edge of the airfield watching aircraft doing their 'circuits and bumps'; they would take off with their wheels a few feet over my head. On a fine sunny day bicycling along the hot, dusty road, army lorries would be passing in a steady procession. Sometimes I would find a nice patch in a wood, and lie there for an hour or two under the trees, reading, or watching the birds. Sometimes I would lie on the banks of a river watching the fish. These periods of comparative freedom were a great joy.

  I was crazy about rugby football, and had a burning ambition to get into the First XV. I used to wait with impatient, anxious hope for the team to be pinned on the games board. I had read with great interest about the tour of the New Zealand 'All Blacks' who won every match except the one against Cardiff during a tour of Britain. They had a new idea of playing only seven forwards instead of eight, thereby gaining an extra back, which tends to make the game much faster, provided that the forwards can hold the opposition. This seemed to me good tactics, and I suggested to the captain of the XV that it should be tried. He, too, thought it was a good idea, and changed the disposition of the team. Unfortunately, I was the eighth forward, and was therefore sacked; my place in the team went to my friend Paterson as an extra back. I would have played for the school XV against Wellington College (before the changeover to seven forwards), but I was ill in the sanatorium at that time. So I not only missed my First XV colours, but also the privilege of wearing blue shorts, which was accorded only to those who had played in the First XV against one of the major public schools, Wellington or Rugby. I once captained the Second XV in a match, but felt that I had failed because I had not reached my objective, the First XV. Considering that I had to play without my spectacles, and once ran in the opposite direction because the football, kicked high into the air, passed out of my range of sight, I now think that that particular ambition was a stupid one.

  When I first went to Marlborough I was a dedicated cadet of the Officers Training Corps, and when I went to the summer camp at Tidworth Pennings my first year there, I was the youngest boy of 2,000 from various public schools. The NCO of my tent was the same chap Edmonds whom I thought rather an ass. Evidently other people did too, because the Eton men raided our tent one day, took it to bits and distributed every item of bedding and kit all round the camp. In one way I sympathised with them, but on the other hand, as the youngest boy, it fell to me to go and collect all this stuff and put it together again.

  I used to take the field days very seriously, and even wore two pairs of spectacles so that I could shoot off my blank cartridges more accurately at the 'enemy'. One of the attractions of the first camp was a mock dogfight between two aircraft. The wings were doped with stuff that made them semi-transparent. The other demonstration that excited me was shooting off mortar shells at an 'enemy' trench (unmanned).

  The masters were a mixed lot, but there was one man called Adams, the housemaster in the junior 'A' House, whom I admired enormously. He was severe, because it was the code, but he took a humane interest in his boys. Later he joined up in the army, and was killed in Flanders. He had sent back word that his books should be distributed among a few boys whom he named, of whom I was one. I have never been sadder over the death of anyone than I was about this man; he was a fine man, and in the absolute prime of life.

  There was something mean and niggardly about our existence at Marlborough; we seemed to be mentally, morally and physically constipated. The whole emphasis was on what you must not do, and I consider that I am only now beginning to shake off the deeply-rooted inhibition which had gripped me by the time I left. One instance of the effect of this is that until recently I would shake with fear if I had to get up and speak to more than half a dozen people, because the terror of doing or saying anything which would not be approved of by a mob code was so rooted in me.

  On the credit side, I did make some good friends at Marlborough. By the time I was a sixth former, and entitled to a study, three of us became almost inseparable. One was John Paterson, the son of a clergyman at East Bergholt in Essex. He was good-looking, dressed well and was good at games. The second of our triumvirate was M. E. Rowe, whom I christened 'The Mole', because of his sharp twitchy nose, shaggy eyebrows from under which he peered hard at you, and his untidy forelock (although perhaps that is unusual in a mole). Paterson joined the army, and was killed in Malaya in the Second World War; Rowe became a QC. Both these friends became prefects, but not me. I was regarded as too much of a rebel, I think.

  Another friend I made was Fred Smyth, who came not far from my home in North Devon. Fred also was good at games. I was very fond of his mother, and used to walk over every Sunday afternoon to their place at Stoke Rivers to have tea with them. Fred's mother made some wonderful rock cakes. The walk was 6 miles each way, but I used to look forward to it all the week. They were all 'horsy' people, and Fred became a first flight point-to-pointer. I used to be keen on bird-nesting. To add to my collection of birds' eggs was the nominal motive, but I think what really attracted me was the sport of climbing difficult trees after finding one with a nest in it. I used to go out for the whole day, roaming through the woods, which grew on the slopes of our Devon valleys. I could travel all day without ever emerging for more than a few yards from woodland, and it was part of the fun never to be seen by anybody. A buzzard's nest at the top of a tall tree, with no branches at all for the bottom twenty or thirty feet, was always a challenge. I don't think I ever took more than one egg from a nest; it was just a trophy that I was after.

  Towards the end of my time at Marlborough, a new idea was introduced into the school, of having the senior boys specialise in some subject. I chose mathematics. All day I worked at maths of one kind or another. I found it a great strain trying to keep interested hour after hour, day after day, week after week. I had a letter in 1962 from a Marlborough boy who said he had been following with interest my sailing voyages, 'I found your name carved on the desk I am sitting at. It looks as if you must have spent as many boring hours here as I have.' (I wrote back and said that I did not remember being a carver of desks. Could it have been a forgery?).

  There were thirty boys in this maths specialist form, and I was only eleventh in the form. I looked round one day at the ten boys above me, most of who were far cleverer than I was, or could ever hope to be. I thought to myself, 'What a knock-kneed, pigeon-breasted, anaemic, bespectacled, weedy crowd they are!' (I must have been in a liverish mood because I was bespectacled myself.) I thought, 'I can never hope to be as good as these chaps, and would I want to be, anyway? There must be something wrong with this set-up. Real life is flowing past, and leaving me behind.' I told my housemaster that I was leaving at the end of term.

  That was the last term of 1918, and the college caught the Spanish influenza epidemic. There were so many boys down with it that we were lying in rows on the floor of the sanatorium. I think most of us were pretty ill, but only a few died. I was at my worst when the Armistice was signed on 11 November, and I could hear the crowds shouting and cheering outside. I could not even lift myself on one elbow or move on my mattress.

  When I got home and told my father that I had left Marlborough, he was furious – justifiably so. I had treated him badly, and I do not know why I had not asked his permission to leave. Perhaps I wanted to be absolutely certain of leaving, and felt that he would not consent. I was due to go to the university and stay there until I was twenty-five, preparing for the Indian Civil Service. I felt that this was all wrong, and that I would not be living a proper life.

I had read some old novels of my father's about Australia by Rolf Boldrewood. Two of them were
Miner's Right
and
The
Squatter's Dream
, and there was another about bushrangers. I thought that this would be the right life for me, and I said that I wanted to emigrate to Australia. At that time our neighbours, the Royles, had a pheasant shoot on the Youlston property, and I took part as a beater. There was a sergeant of the New Zealand Army there on leave, and he asked me what I intended doing. When I told him, he said, 'Why don't you come to New Zealand? I will get you a job.' This meant that if I went to New Zealand I would know one person, whereas if I went to Australia I would know no one. That turned the scales in favour of New Zealand, and I now sought for a passage. But passages to New Zealand were very hard to get. All the ships were booked up for a long time to come.

  My father answered an advertisement for a boy on a farm in Leicestershire. The job was mine, and I took the train for Coalville, where I worked for seven months for J. G. de Ville. I was paid five shillings a week, and during that seven months de Ville gave me a pair of boots and one half day off to go to the Leicestershire Horse Show between milkings. It was a hard life, especially in winter, getting up in the dark to feed and milk the cows and working all day on jobs such as spreading manure. In the evenings came more milking, and more feeding of calves. I was lonely, and fell back on my dreams. I looked forward every night to getting to sleep, and had wonderful dreams of warm-hearted, friendly people, loveable people, and comfortable living, with nice things to touch and eat. I often dreamed of my cousin Margaret, whom I adored.