Mrs. Parke was small and athletic and had birdlike sharp pretty features, bright dark eyes, and a natural authority, but with the added threat of Mr. Parke’s wrath if anyone showed his beloved wife the least disrespect. Together they ran the best and happiest school I was ever in or have ever seen or heard about. The boys did not ask about my bad leg. And even though I was an outsider, most of the boys either left me alone or were kind.
At Great Walstead, no one knew anything about me. I never talked about the Bible studies or endless prayer meetings or the fact that the other boys had fathers with real jobs while we Schaeffers were living off God. My dad was a teacher, I said, which was almost true.
I also ignored my polio leg, never wore my brace again, and, by my second year at GW, even made it onto the First Eleven football (soccer) team as right back, a position that I played so fiercely that I helped take our team to an undefeated season one year. Mr. Marsh, our sports master, told me I was the “most dogged” defender he’d ever coached.
When I made the team, I felt as if I had just won a gold medal at the Olympics, joined the human race, been vindicated in some cosmic way, was declared normal for the first time in my life, and now was “just like other boys,” as I thought of it. The joy was right up there with getting my first novel published, actually better.
When I was fifty years old and Mr. Parke had just read one of my novels, he wrote to me out of the blue and said he
remembered me as being “a very courageous boy.” I hadn’t heard from him for many years. His compliment meant more to me than anything anyone else has ever said, as if God decided to show up unexpectedly and say something nice.
When an attacker would break through and leave the rest of our team scrambling, and there was no one left between the goalie and the attacker but me, and the whole school was on the sidelines yelling while Mr. Parke called out “It’s up to you, Schaeffer! Stop him!” and I did, took the ball away, then managed to land on my left leg, so my wickedly strong good leg powered the foot I used to clear the ball, and I cleared it the length of the field while the masters and boys cheered and Mr. Parke called out “Well done!”—every problem, sorrow, or set-back evaporated.
29
G
reat Walstead School sat at the end of a long, oak-lined driveway. The grounds covered 294 acres of fields, woods, ponds, a small river, playing fields, and lawns set in gently hilly landscape, midway between London and Brighton, about an hour train ride from each. You passed the school’s small farm while on your way up the drive. Next to the farm—it consisted of two tumbledown cow barns—sat Walstead House, the cottage the older boys lived in, which I moved to after my first year at school.
Walstead House was an Elizabethan farmhouse built of brick and crooked oak ship’s timbers. The boys said it was haunted. And we thought that several stains on the ancient oak floors looked like blood. The low oak doors, string-pull latches, and steep creaking stairs had not changed since Elizabeth was waiting for news of the Spanish Armada. The place smelled of shoe polish.
After passing Walstead House and a massive half-acre cluster of rhododendrons, the main school building appeared on the edge of a close-cropped lawn. It was made of brick, with ornate white trim around the roofline. It was four stories high, topped by many tall chimneys and a steeply gabled slate roof. It had been built as a manor sometime in the 1800s and turned
into a school in 1925. Wings had been added, jutting in several directions behind the original building.
The main house had fifteen- to twenty-foot ceilings, a wide and stately staircase descending to a marble-floored front entrance hall, large common rooms, a library, an oak-paneled headmaster’s study, and many dormitories on the upper floors. Behind the main house was a series of decaying huts linked by rickety half-covered passages. The huts had been bought from a nearby Royal Air Force base at the end of World War II. These served as our classrooms, as cold in winter as they were hot in summer. In winter, the huts were heated by portable kerosene stoves. The windows had to be opened when the eye-watering fumes got too intense.
The huts were always dusty and almost impossible to sweep clean, no matter how hard the boys assigned to sweeping duty worked. The good news was that most of the hut classrooms, propped on cinderblocks a few feet off the ground, had loose floorboards. We would pry one up and just sweep everything through the hole.
There was a large dining room that had been added just a couple of years before, in 1960. It smelled powerfully of some sort of tar-based disinfectant, a smell that sometimes overpowered the taste of the food. The dining hall provided an object lesson in the postwar decline of the Empire. Its doors were made of hollow plywood, its walls of flimsy sheetrock, and the floors were covered with thin linoleum. The shabby new wing included the tuck room. That was where we kept our all-important tuck boxes, miniature trunks about the size of a case of wine. Our tuck boxes were filled with “tuck”—jams, potted meats, squash (bottles of concentrated fruit syrup), and any other little treats from home that we’d bring out at tea time.
GW was a prep school—in other words, a private boarding school for boys aged five to thirteen. “Prep” stood for preparatory. What we were being prepared for was entrance into a select public school. And everything came down to the Common Entrance (CE) exam.
A public school was a private (usually all boys or all girls) boarding high school. Most of the boys in public schools would have attended prep schools since they were five. Home for them was where you visited during the “holls.” By age eighteen, they had spent less time with their parents and siblings than most American children spend with their families before they’re eight.
The aim of the staff at GW was to make sure that we passed the CE exam with marks high enough to be admitted to the public school of our parents’ choice. In the case of most of the boys, this meant they would go where their fathers had gone. The well-connected, rich, and lucky few would attend schools like Eton, Rugby, or Harrow; the rest of us would head to lesser schools. The public school you went to determined what university you got into. That would decide your fate.
The “brainy boys” would some day get “firsts” from Cambridge or Oxford; the lesser mortals would get lesser degrees from lesser colleges, and some might even be relegated to trade schools. A lack of seriousness about one’s studies could always be cured by the oft-repeated phrase “You won’t be so pleased with yourself when you get those CE results!” The twice-yearly mock CE exams, taken by all the boys in fourth, fifth, and sixth forms, loomed large.
While looking at other boys’ confident faces as they bent over their mock CE exam papers, I felt the vastness of my ignorance spread out in front of me like a dark toxic pool. I
had just turned eleven and was just starting real school for the first time in my life. I could read and write—haltingly—but not much else. The only subjects I was any good at were history and geography. Mom’s reading out loud, the discussions I heard, and the living tableau of human geography that came and went through L’Abri paid off when it came to general knowledge.
I could not spell anything in English correctly, let alone in French, let alone comprehend anything Mr. Rouse was trying to impart in Latin class. And math was a closed book. I
was
good at French, or at least the Swiss Canton of Vaud-accented French spoken in our village, but, of course, not the grammar.
“It’s a verb!” Mr. Marsh, the French master (and soccer coach) said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, get on with it, lad.”
“Yes, sir,” I answered, while staring into the distance and waiting for inspiration.
“Well, Schaeffer, what’s the problem?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“But you haven’t written anything. As I said, it is just an
ordinary verb!
”
“But, sir?”
“Yes, boy?”
“What
is
a verb?”
In 1962, there were many thousands of prep schools like GW feeding many hundreds of public schools. There were rumblings that the Labor government would someday shut down “elitist” private schools in favor of government schools; but, other than that, the whole system seemed secure and as much a part of the English landscape as the local pub. Some
prep schools were miniature hells reminiscent of something out of Dickens, where bullying and brutal caning were facts of life. Sometimes when we visited another school to play them at soccer, the place would seem grim and the boys looked a “sorry lot.” We always stayed for tea after the match and sometimes heard whispered stories about what had happened to this or that boy or cousin at this or that prep school where bullying was allowed, perhaps even encouraged as a rite of passage by sadistic masters. But there were also many places like Great Walstead, solidly middle-class, with a distinctive religious character of one sort or another ranging from Anglican to Roman Catholic, Baptist, and all points in between. Most of them seemed like happy places, at least the dozen or so I visited from time to time as a member of the First Eleven.
At GW, our religion was Mr. Parke’s religion, a sensible low-church Anglicanism. A jolly local Church of England priest, Father Sheldon—the father of Paul Sheldon, a tall, gangling bespectacled boy who was our best cricket bowler and one of my best friends—came to the school to conduct chapel on some Sundays. The rest of the time, Mr. Parke and the teachers led our short and lighthearted Sunday and daily chapel services. They tended to reflect the theology of the master taking them, or, in the case of “Bubble,” his cantankerous atheism.
The only remnants from the school’s founding were Mr. Alban and Mr. Brabey, both of whom had fought in World War I. We called Mr. Alban “Bubble,” because of his snuff habit that resulted in congested breathing that sounded disgustingly like a kettle bubbling. His snuff-taking gave us opportunities to watch in delighted disgust as noxious brown juice trickled out of his bulbous red nose and stained his upper lip, before Bubble would wipe his nose with the brown-stained handkerchief he
kept shoved up the sleeve of his ubiquitous, shapeless, and patched navy-blue cardigan.
Everything about Bubble reeked of nicotine, and everything on or near him was stained yellowy-brown. His thinning hair was always greasy and his sallow skin the color of putty. He was short and had bad teeth.
Bubble taught us to make Molotov cocktails, which we threw on the old tennis court, sending fireballs up into the air like miniature nuclear mushroom clouds. He showed us how to bayonet an attacker. He told us stories about the Home Guard of WWII, “not my war, mind you, but they had me organizing the local chaps.”
Bubble would gleefully try to turn us against God. He raved about the wonders of evolution, more as a personal manifesto than as science. He also made a big point of advertising his far right political sympathies.
Once Bubble put some boys in detention, including me, who argued with his assertion that anyone who believed in God was “thick as mud.” When he put us in detention for believing in God, we appealed to Mr. Parke, who upheld Bubble’s right to punish us unreasonably, but who also told us he thought it was “jolly unfair,” but that we, like the “martyrs during Bloody Mary’s reign, should suffer gladly for your faith.” Mr. Parke laughed when he said this, and detention was not so terrible. All we did was sit at our desks doing a bit of extra studying.
Bubble was one of our favorite teachers, and the ruder he was, the more we liked him. Mr. Parke knew that we knew that his allowing Bubble to be unreasonable was some huge game, and we were all in on the joke.
Both Bubble and Mr. Brabey were past retirement age and had become as much part of the school as the massive oaks
and cedars towering over the lawn. They puttered around “teaching” and generally being the sorts of characters that only the English have a way of nonchalantly putting up with, the sorts of eccentrics who send a boy to half an hour of detention for saying God exists.
Mr. Brabey was assigned to tutor me in extra math when, about halfway through my first term, it became apparent to Mr. Parke that I was so woefully behind in every subject that I’d have to undergo extra tutoring in just about everything. “It’s as if you’ve had no education at all. What
have
you been doing?” asked Mr. Parke during one of our many “My dear chap, this just
won’t do!
” meetings.
Old Brabey was living in a damp, closet-sized room next to the school kitchen that smelled of mildew and the glue from the lifelike models of animals he made out of plastic wood, then carved with files. Brabey was bald, short, and fat with a kindly face, a pudgy triple chin, and a fringe of yellowing white hair around his shiny pate. He was easy to distract, and we did very little extra math.
Brabey had been a stretcher-bearer in World War I. His face and hands were the color of boiled lobster, a bright reddish-pink that only the perpetually chilly English seem to be afflicted with, along with cold- and damp-related ailments like “chilblains.” “Old Brabey” (as we boys called him) dressed in baggy heather-colored tweeds and sometimes smelled of undergarments past their prime.
I spent many a gray afternoon listening to harrowing tales of life in the muddy, rat-infested trenches. Each lesson in trench warfare ended when Old Brabey would shout furiously that I was distracting him from teaching me math—or “sums,” as he called it.
“But, sir, I have not tried to distract you, sir.”
“Wipe that grin off your silly face! Do you think this is
amusing?
I weep for you, boy! I
weep!
”
“Yes, sir.”
I’d sit staring out the high window at the lawn and distant sodden cricket pitch soaking up yet more drizzle, the view made wobbly by the wavy Victorian glass panes while visions of men on stretchers, brains blown out, mingled with the view of the English countryside.