Basil Street Blues (24 page)

The Head Master when I arrived was Claude Elliott. ‘Elliott did not neglect education matters,’ writes the most recent historian of Eton, Tim Card. This was fortunate in a schoolmaster. He was later knighted for ‘services to education’, though ‘few headmasters have been more determinedly not educationalists’. He was perceived by us to be a kindly and cautious man, rather deaf, somewhat dull, and known by some of the masters as ‘Muttonhead’. His influence on the school was far less marked than that of the most outstanding housemaster Oliver Van Oss, an energetic man with some interest in the arts, who bustled about the streets catching our attention, but who failed to catch the attention of the Fellows in his bid to become Head Master himself.

At the beginning of my second year, Claude Elliott was appointed Provost of Eton and a new Head Master arrived. This was the historian and social scientist Robert Birley who was reputed to be a blazing socialist and nicknamed ‘Red Robert’. Some of the masters felt apprehensive over this new Head Master. When ripples of their fear reached us, we began whispering among ourselves how he would make early school half-an-hour earlier. The fact that he was coming from Germany (the Labour government having appointed him educational adviser to the military governor in the British Zone) seemed to make him a hostile figure. In fact, he turned out to be a liberal-minded Conservative voter whose red politics were later attributed to a portrait of Johannes Brahms in his office having been mistaken for Karl Marx.

With his white hair and stooping gait, I thought of Robert Birley as an elderly man and am shocked now to discover that he was only forty-six when he came to Eton. I occasionally heard him lecture and realised he was an inspired teacher. But the general quality of teaching at the school, in so far as I experienced it, was fairly lamentable. Worst of all was ‘Bloody Bill’ (H.K. Marsden), a tall, bent, grim-visaged, churlish, prying mathematics master with a relish for power and a devotion to the theory and practice of corporal punishment. He terrorised generations of boys and was disliked by everyone except a few favourites. But some Old Etonians, having survived the tyranny, later found themselves congratulating him on that fact.

More amiable, though hopeless as a teacher, was ‘Hojo’ (William Hope-Jones), another mathematics master who had spent almost all his life at Eton. In 1902 he had appeared with Maynard Keynes in a school performance of
Much Ado About Nothing
. After three or four years at university, he then came back to Eton as a master. By the time I arrived in his class he had been teaching there for over forty years and grown into one of those gnarled ‘characters’ around whom cluster stories that vastly amuse people without much sense of humour. In Tim Card’s chapter ‘Eton between the Wars’, he appears as a celebrated oddity who won boys’ hearts by his eccentricity and goodness. ‘Was there a more imaginative teacher of Mathematics in his day?’ the author asks, ‘...many boys who were not natural mathematicians were glad to be up to Hojo.’ But I am not one of them. He was in his mid-sixties by the time he taught me and seemed almost out of control – of his subject and of us. Perhaps, poor man, he was ill. In any event, Eton was no longer between the wars and, though he hung on, Hojo’s day was past.

Among the other masters was Tom Brocklebank whose ‘difficulties’ we attributed to his once having become stuck near the summit of Everest; ‘Leggy’ Lambert, the Lower Master (later Vice Provost), who used his desk as a kennel during thunderstorms; and Babington Smith who marked our papers out of ten thousand instead of ten.

But there was one teacher I admired. Sydney Watson, our precentor and musical director, was afflicted with such an insistent stutter that some people who heard him utter his full name in public believed he had a knighthood. But his passion and zest, his sheer skill as a choral conductor, turned this terrible hesitation into eloquence. He was known to us as ‘Daddy Watson’ and, as he led us through the complexities of Haydn’s
Creation
, Bach’s
St John Passion
and Handel’s
Messiah
, through songs by Brahms and Vaughan Williams, Stanford and Parry, making the rough places plain, it seemed indeed as if he were our father and we, of the Eton College Musical Society, his family. The ECMS was the only society I joined, the one ‘team’ I played for. We sang in the evenings at a schoolroom in the Eton Wick Road. It had steeply-banked rows of desks up which Daddy Watson would leap and round which he strode, encouraging us, correcting us, explaining, expounding, exemplifying, sometimes tapping his baton to prevent us going off the rails, then urging us on again. I did not read music but, holding the sheets in front of me, I could see roughly where the notes went, could pick up a tune, follow a narrative; and so for some four years as treble, alto, tenor, bass, I belted it out, giving my best, feeling my best.

On Sunday afternoons, I used to sneak off to the Music Schools with Michael MacLeod. We weren’t really allowed into this building, not being proper music students, but no one minded us occupying a room with a piano if no one else needed it. Over some weeks, we ‘composed’ a piano duet that, beginning with a pastiche of chopsticks, went on for almost eight minutes. We were proud of this marathon, but having nothing more in our musical vocabulary to add, wisely forgot about it when we returned from our holidays. But my recollection of it now, when so much else is forgotten, marks it as an emergence from my musical beginnings in the garage at Norhurst. Certainly Daddy Watson gave me a wider liking for music, and after fifty years or so I can still summon up a few of the songs we sang, and startle friends with an odd line or two.

I had been at Eton for two or three years when one night, sometime after midnight, Purple Parr opened the door of my room as I lay sleeping and told me to come to his drawing-room. As I put on my slippers and dressing-gown I remember wondering whether one of my parents had died. But when, a few minutes later, I stood before him, Parr began asking me in a solemn voice a series of innocuous, almost meaningless questions. Who were my friends? Did I have friends in other houses? When did they come and see me? Or did I go to their houses? And so on. After half-an-hour of this surreal interrogation, he told me I might return to my room. When I woke next morning, I thought perhaps it had been a dream. But I soon found that a number of other boys had been taken from their beds and similarly questioned. What was happening, we concluded, was a homosexual inquisition or purge.

Was there homosexuality at Eton? Well, of course there was. Romantic passion and amorous speculation hung in the valley atmosphere of the place, and seeped into our imaginations. With almost 1,400 teenage boys closeted together in some twenty-five houses, how could there not have been infatuations and intrigues, spiced with exciting rumours over who was ‘gone on’ whom? Boys exchanged signed photographs of one another as marks of favour, and would send each other complex paper knots containing confidential messages which were delivered from house to house by fags scampering through the streets. These running figures seemed to match the palpitating hearts, the breathless tension and suspense, of the correspondents. Our hours were steeped in vague delicious daydreams and pleasurable scuffles on the floor in the evenings that might turn at night into masturbatory fantasies. To all our emotions there was a rhythm that seemed to change with the changing seasons. In the schoolrooms we read poetry that, though filtered through sanctioned translations from dead languages, told of exquisite friendships and carried erotic signals from the past. But we were very much alive and curious as to how we might translate these sentimental stories into present-day adventures. Surely this, in addition to the taking down of Latin Unseen and the recital of gender rhymes, was part of our education? We wanted to live our literature for, as Cyril Connolly wrote in
Enemies of Promise
, ‘a schoolboy is a novelist too busy to write’.

In the scandalous twentieth-century novels of public school life, from Alec Waugh’s
The Loom of Youth
(1917) to Simon Raven’s
Fielding Gray
(1967), there is a potent homosexual ingredient, sometimes disguised, often unenacted, that is nevertheless sensationalised by athletic brilliance, or exploited by the system of fagging and the habit of boys legitimately beating younger boys (the very rare beatings by housemasters were interestingly called ‘screwings’ at Eton). There were, of course, tides of fashion in homosexuality (we never used the words gay and lesbian then), and to the general reader one period may seem saturated with it, another quite arid. But we rely on accounts which have been written either by some of nature’s celibates or by those who were very sexually aware. In earlier days, when some unmarried housemasters would bestow long kisses on tolerant boys in their rooms after lock-up, a general unawareness of sex may have made emotional life simpler. ‘Women did not play a large part on the Eton scene,’ concedes Tim Card in his survey of Eton from 1860 to 1990.

…It would seem that sex may have caused increased problems between the Wars… Most Housemasters were constantly on guard against any physical sexual activity… Boys were left in little doubt that they would be sacked… The adult world was still officially very hostile to homosexuality, but among the boys it was recognised that romantic friendships were natural.

Purple Parr sent my father a letter warning him that I should be careful of the company I kept. He must have written to a number of parents about this lurking peril of ‘keeping company’. Evidently something dramatic had happened and a hunt was on – I think one boy may have been sacked. This was something that must have taken place every few years. But my father was astonished. He braced himself to do his duty and informed me that homosexuality was ‘worse than...’ Here he paused, trying to be fair, yet still dramatic. ‘…Worse than burglary.’ I would like to think that he coined the phrase ‘buggery is worse than burglary’, but I cannot honestly say he did. It was all made more difficult for him by having to voice his dismay down the telephone while I was staying with my mother in London. I remember him whispering that during his time there had been ‘only one queer at Eton’ and he was pretty odd – no one had liked him. My father was whispering because he did not want my stepfather to hear of this scandal, and his whisper made everything sound additionally dark and dreadful. In Norhurst style, he continued lowering his voice on the telephone until it grew hard to pick up his plunging syllables. What he had to say, as it became more buried, also became more infernal. He had instructed my mother not to breathe a word of this affair to her husband, but in order to bring home to me the gravity of it all, he also instructed her not to take me to the cinema while I was in London. My mother, however, was unable to take Parr’s letter quite so seriously. For about thirty seconds or so she attempted to show concern, then we went off to see a film together (with me swearing never to breathe a word of this to my father).

We were all in a muddle because no one had decided how much sex-life should be allowed between boys of fourteen to eighteen (many of whom without sisters knew no girls at all). In fact nothing had really changed at Eton in the thirty years since Cyril Connolly was there. In 1920 he had found himself among those boys who were floundering through on ‘surreptitious experiments’ that were suspected by the masters and would have led to his expulsion if they had been actually discovered. Eton, he came to believe, encouraged ‘continence officially and homosexuality by implication’. This tantalising suspension of the emotions, with all its intensity and irresolution, fixed many public schoolboys in perpetual adolescence.

Nothing had changed: but much was about to change. Things simply could not go on like this. Those of us who left Eton in or around 1953 were impatient for the better life that was to begin ten years later ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first L.P.’. Though this change came a bit late for us, our impatience was, I like to think, a necessary preparation for this change, a hammering at the door.

Though midnight interrogations and solemn letters were high points of anxiety, my main anxiety over the first three years at Eton was figuring out how the place worked. The streets were busy with boys hurrying from one place to another as if they instinctively understood the choreography of the system. Perhaps I too looked like this as I walked along. But I had great difficulty finding out, keeping up, arriving at; and for years afterwards I was afflicted with exhausting nightmares of following people and losing them, of failing to reach some destination and never discovering what it had been. When Purple Parr, making his amphibious progress through the damp corridors, glided into my room one evening to describe his shame at having a Captain of Games who apparently played no games, I was sympathetic but could not bring myself to explain that I did not quite know how these games were arranged, or even sometimes where they were played. No wonder, as Griffy Philipps observed, I looked haggard.

But in my last year I found there were some blissful advantages to this ignorance. For if I was not quite all there, as it were, perhaps I would not be noticed; and if no one noticed me, then I was free to do as I liked; and if I did what I liked surely my anxieties would evaporate. And they did. There were penalties to be paid for this style. If you affected a forgetful air, you soon found yourself forgetting things you would have preferred to remember. But as a way of avoiding trouble it seemed to suit me well enough, though it meant I avoided other things too.

At the beginning of one half in my last year a boy I had known at Scaitcliffe, Nicky Winter, came to see me. He told me that he had suggested my name for ‘Pop’, the élite Eton society to which my Uncle Kenneth had belonged. No one, he was able to report, had a word to say against me. In fact, no one had anything to say at all. Between legendary appearances on the squash court, I seemed to disappear and was unknown. However, if I would put myself about a bit, Nicky Winter said, and make some effort, he might perhaps get me in at the next election. It was a kind gesture and I was tempted to do something about it. But I found that I was unable to do anything. It was as if I were already programmed for invisibility and could not reverse the process.