The Day Gone By (24 page)

But I was speaking of my initiation as a story-teller. The first night I got to the Wood I found that I was the squit in Dormitory One, which had only four beds. The captain was a certain Tony Priestley, a forceful but quite genial character with a reputation as a bit of a daredevil. The others were McCrum, a gentle, kindly, popular boy, and Geoffrey Hunter, who was later killed in the war. Sure enough, Priestley demanded from someone a story and I, seeing it was such a free-and-easy atmosphere and wishing to ingratiate myself, took the job on, squit or no squit. The story was the Breton tale of Peronnik and the Castle of Kerglas (Andrew Lang's
Lilac Fairy Book).
To my gratification it met with warm approval, and the following night Priestley required another. This time it was M. R. James's ‘Lost Hearts'. I remember, at the end, Hunter asking ‘But what
happened?
I felt enough self-confidence to give him my sister Katharine's usual reply, ‘Think it out'. ‘Oh, I
hate
having to think it out!' said Geoffrey, who was inclined to be rather self-indulgent. But he didn't cuff my head for cheek, as he well might have.

The stories were insisted upon night after night. One way and another, they were dredged up from everything I had ever read. Sometimes, when Twid came round to ‘shut us up' (it was always known as this, since there were no lights to put out: what happened was that the door was shut for the night; ‘no more talking'), Priestley and the others would beg for another minute or two so that Adams could finish, and with this the good-natured Twid would often fall in. Sometimes he knew the story, since it might be ‘The Monkey's Paw', ‘The Bottle Imp' or some such, and would stay to hear it out himself.

By about half-term I could find no more stories to tell. I said as much, but this had no effect on Priestley. ‘Adams, this is my watch, see? Slipper coming over unless you start in half a minute.' This, as Dr Johnson would say, concentrated the mind wonderfully.

In the end I was forced to make them up. There was nothing else for it. They had to have proper climaxes and conclusions, too. A thing on the lines of Frank Stockton's ‘The Lady or the Tiger' wouldn't have done at all. I would find odd moments, during the day, to think about what I would try to embark on that evening. In the event it turned out not to be too difficult, for my audience were not over-critical, and by this time I had a tolerable standing. I remained in One for about three terms and, thanks to Priestley, his watch and his slipper, I never dried up.

But I did once get beaten for talking after lights out. It was all very sudden. I was finishing a story in whispers, to Hunter only, in the adjacent bed, when the door was abruptly thrown open and Mr Liddell, torch in one hand and cane in the other, said ‘Who's talking in here?' ‘I am, sir,' I said. ‘Get out of bed: bend over: right over.' And so, with the torchlight playing on my bum, I received four. ‘Next time it will be much harder,' said Twid, and left as sharply as he had come.

By our schoolboy code Hunter ought to have owned up too. After all, you can't be talking to nobody, and Twid should have thought of this and pressed enquiry. But what I believe now is that he hated beating people so much that he wasn't really thinking judicially and just wanted to get it over as quickly as he could. Mr Stow or Mr Morris would have got to the bottom of the matter.

Mr Morris was the Second Master. He was odd and frightening: at least, he frightened me - and a number of others, though not all. He looked as strange as he was, and it is clear to me now that he was perverted. He was about fifty, tall, the top of his head bald in the middle, like a tonsure in the sparse circle of grey hair. His long face had a drawn, ascetic look - a bachelor's face - with a high, prominent nose and wrinkled cheeks. He was loose-limbed and shambling. His clothes were the oldest and untidiest I have ever seen on an adult; almost rags. His silent stare was intimidating enough, but his anger was worse.

Bungey, as he was known, had a way of playing cat-and-mouse which never failed to reduce me, for one, to trembling and stammering incoherence (known in the school as ‘Bungey dread'). Bungey dread was an involuntary, intuitive thing. Either you felt (though sexually ignorant) that there was something queer and frightening about him, or else you just didn't. (Most didn't.) He would often begin in a low key. ‘Talking: yes, talking. I rather think you were. Perhaps you'd better stand up. And what were you talking about, I wonder.'

‘Sponge cake, sir.' (Titters. It always seemed to be something that made you look absurd and ignominious; small boys have not yet learned to lie or temporize under hostile questioning.)

‘Sponge
cake.
Do you think it might enlarge your knowledge to compose two elegiac couplets on the subject and read them to us tomorrow morning?'

(Better than being beaten, anyway. But what on earth could be the nearest Latin equivalent for ‘sponge cake'? ‘Spongia' was a substantive, but it would need to be turned into an adjective, wouldn't it? And ‘cake' - er -)

A sudden roar from Bungey. ‘
Well?
Am I to wait here all day for you to give me an answer?'

‘No, sir. Yes, sir.'

‘Hoity, toity, horrible mess!' (He really did say ‘hoity toity': the only person I have ever heard do so.) Approaches and picks up ragged, ink-stained Ovid by one corner in finger and thumb. ‘This is your property?'

‘Yes, sir. But I haven't written any words in it, honestly, sir.' (One of the most heinous crimes you could commit was to write English translations of Latin words in the margins of text books.)

‘Did I say you had?'

‘No, sir.' (Class now much enjoying the spectacle of an abject demonstration of Bungey dread - the victim defending himself in anticipation of an accusation as yet unmade.)

This sort of thing could sometimes go on for quite a long time. I remember an incident which took place when I happened to be a member of a dormitory situated just outside Bungey's upstairs study. One evening, as we were undressing, three fairly senior boys came up the stairs, grinning with bravado, halted outside Bungey's domain (he hadn't arrived yet) and announced to us, through the open dormitory door, ‘We're going to get spanked.' Naturally we all felt, while waiting, a certain amount of vicarious tension. Eventually, Bungey came loping up the stairs, two at a time, strode down the passage and invited the culprits to step inside. For what seemed a long time we could hear only his low voice talking, though one couldn't distinguish any words. Then, suddenly, we heard him cry out, in a tone of impatience and excitement, ‘No, kneel, kneel, kneel, kneel!' Then followed the sound of the blows. They told us afterwards that they had each been required to crouch upon the carpet, with their bare buttocks elevated, while Bungey beat them sitting in his armchair.

‘Spanking', as we called it, had a kind of tabu aura around it. It was the subject of bated-breath jokes, little doggerel rhymes and so on, rather taking the place of sex jokes among boys too young to know about the latter. (‘My son, my son, it must be done. Down with the trousers, up with the bum.') The instruments used were personal and various. Mr Stow used to spank on the bare buttocks with a thing called a fives bat, which is rather like a table-tennis racket but bigger, and longer in the handle. Bungey used to use the ‘jack' of an old-fashioned wooden shoe-tree - the removable, handled bit that is thrust into the middle. He, too, beat on the bare buttocks. Mr Liddell, as I have said, used a cane.

For very serious offences there would be what were known to us as ‘public spankations'. Of these, there were only two during the four years I was at the school. The first took place after a weak assistant master had entirely failed to control a prep. which gradually dissolved into a general, anarchic rag. Everyone was wondering why the master was apparently doing nothing. In fact, he was taking names to report to Mr Stow. After evening prayers that night three of the principal offenders, picked at random, were told to come up to the front and take down their trousers. They were then beaten hard with the fives bat, before the eyes of the whole school. The second occasion was when three quite senior boys, members of one of the classes who were supposed to do their prep uninvigilated in their classroom, climbed out of the window and went for a night walk on the near-by common. As ill luck would have it, they ran into the Headmaster's brother, Sir Alexander Stow, who happened to be taking a walk. Naturally, he reported them. They, too, were publicly spanked - five each with the fives bat. One thing about this I have never forgotten. Mr Morris's place at prayers was at the back of the big schoolroom where we assembled. During the pause while the culprits were taking down their trousers and Mr Stow had gone out of the room to get the fives bat, the silence was broken by the sound of Mr Morris shambling up the length of the room. He drew out a bench and placed it exactly at a right angle to the desk over which the three boys would have to bend. On this he sat down, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his hands together, with the air of a connoisseur who was not going to miss anything.

The junior masters were not allowed to beat, but an open-handed\cuff across the head or even a kick up the backside were regarded by us as all in a day's work. Mr McIntyre, the veteran master of the new boys' form, refrained from cuffing, but used to grab people by the hair (‘Ow, sir! Ow, sir!') and hold them forth at arm's length for questioning and derision. Notwithstanding, he was respected and popular, for he too possessed warmth and humour, and he taught well.

Everybody nowadays talks about the ‘humiliation' of corporal punishment, cuffing and so on: but we never felt humiliated. A cuff was neither here nor there, if you knew it was merited. As for a spanking, you felt rather proud of having endured it well, and would hasten away to describe it in detail to your friends. I remember walking over to Horris Wood with ‘Paddy' Ewart, on the evening when he had been one of those publicly spanked.

‘Did it hurt, Paddy?' I asked.

‘Yes, it did,' he replied in a casual tone. ‘Quite a lot, actually.'

I knew that for him to say this it must have been agonizing. The junior masters were virtually all young men in their twenties, some of them at a loose end, not particularly able and without any real sense of vocation. In the cases of some, it was apparent even to us that they were not particularly committed. Most stayed a few terms and then moved on to things like the Colonial Service, Australia or Malayan rubber. Mr Stow's nephew, referred to as Mr Monty Stow, was a permanency, but he was expecting to take over the headmastership in due course. It's surprising, really, how much we did learn from those half-interested young men and from old Miss Jarvis. But one must bear in mind two factors. First, by modern standards, the syllabus was limited; and these were little boys, who were learning their rudiments; almost any reasonably intelligent grown-up could have taught them with the help of a good text-book. Secondly, there were rarely more than nine or ten boys in a class. I'm sure that it is to this pupil-teacher ratio that I owed my relative academic success - if it can be so called. There's nothing like a good start and the early inculcation of a serious approach. You couldn't help but attend and work seriously with only nine or ten people in the class and the master less than five yards away.

I was speaking, however, of the commonplace nature of punishment and physical coercion in those days; and here I must mention one exceptional figure, since with him alone (and one other, later, as I will tell) I have remained, as you might say, stuck - e.g., in dreams and in revenge fantasies after a few drinks. (My daughters, when they were little, used to say ‘Strobe lights for Daddy's hate spot!') Mr Peter Delmé-Radcliffe was to all outward appearances a straightforward prep. school master of the day - about twenty-six, tall, a good cricketer and intellectually perhaps a shade above normal, for he taught quite a senior form. He was completely humourless, with a cold, sneering, sarcastic manner which made him hated throughout the school. He handed out punishments right and left. He seemed to dislike everyone, including himself. I recall another, kindly master called Denzil Young, who was a personal friend of my brother, remarking to him once, during the holidays, that it was a great pity that ‘Delmé' had ever taken up teaching.

One afternoon, I and eight or nine others were enduring a history lesson in which ‘the Rad', as he was called, was expounding the feudal system. Having written ‘King William' at the top of the blackboard, he was proceeding to illustrate how estates and manors were held by barons, knights and the like from their feudal lords. ‘And Geoffrey,' he said, writing as he spoke, ‘holds two manors of his lord Stephen.'

Sitting across the room from me was my friend Stephen Whitfield. I caught his eye and smiled. The next moment, in two strides, Delmé-Radcliffe was down on me, uttering I know not what about ‘laughing in my class'. He repeatedly beat my head from side to side, first with the book he was holding and then with his open hand, until I was dazed, and fairly badly hurt. It seemed unreal, as in a dream. When he finally stopped, the class sat in a kind of stunned amazement. As I recovered, my sense of resentment and abuse actually led me as far as a kind of cryptic protest: I sat muttering ‘Phew!' and looking from one companion to another. Everyone seemed shaken.

On another occasion I was seated two or three places away from Delmé-Radcliffe at lunch. (The masters sat at the ends of the long tables.) Speaking across the table to another boy, I said, ‘I expect Monty will be there,' meaning Mr Stow's nephew.

‘Who
do you expect will be there, Adams?' interposed Delmé-Radcliffe.

‘Sir,' I answered with some embarrassment. ‘Mr Monty Stow.'

‘Yes, well, now you'd better go and stand in the corner, Adams,' said Delmé-Radcliffe. ‘I for one shall be better off without you for the time being.'