“He died the worst death there was, lad:
gas!
”
“Yes, sir.”
“Choked his life away before me, me a
helpless
stretcher-bearer and not one thing I could do for my
own brother!
”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“Have
you
ever seen someone die in a gas attack, lad?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, I did! My own brother! Clarence, poor Cla—”
Brabey dabbed at his puffy eyes with his inky handkerchief. A tear would roll down his cheek and hang trembling from his yellowing nose whiskers, then splash on my notebook and make the pale cheap ink run.
Boys with parents close by went home for one or two weekends per term. I went with friends or to my sister Susan, who had just moved from Huémoz to live in London. Once per term, I took the train from Hayward’s Heath to Victoria Station and then the tube to Ealing for a long weekend. Susan and Ranald provided a home away from home. Margaret, their daughter, was born before they left Switzerland, and soon they had another daughter, Kirsty.
Ranald made it clear that at the English L’Abri, he was going to do things
his
way. “We will not be as disorganized as The
Work in Huémoz,” he would say, and “We will put more emphasis on study.” Ranald was going to be a L’Abri missionary, but not like “your loud father who shouts when he preaches.”
I learned that the British, including Ranald, felt rather superior to everyone else, especially to Americans. There was a right way to do things, the British way. I learned that when a woman walked into a room, you stood, and that you did not talk to an adult with your hands in your pockets. I called my school masters “sir.” I addressed women by their last name, as in “Yes, Mrs. Parke.” I did not “sneak” (tell on people). I did not lie, or when I did I made sure never to be caught; and, when confronted, I learned to admit what I had done in an “honorable English way,” by raising my hand quickly and “owning up” to having been the boy to have done whatever it was I had done.
I was doing my best to rise above my embarrassing shouts-when-he-preaches father. I had cricket whites and a fine bright pink blazer and school cap. When they sang “God Save the Queen,” I stood. I not only knew who Gilbert and Sullivan were, I sang in
HMS Pinafore
. (I also played the Count in the
Marriage of Figaro
.) I could even quote a little Shakespeare and was studying Macbeth. I had wealthy English friends whose fathers would pick me up in their Jags and Bentleys for a weekend. I would hang around on the David Spinks’ farm with Spink One and shoot starlings with his air gun, or at the posh Robin Spink house with their heated pool and little dog that would hump your leg.
There was only one problem. My passport to this pleasant club could and would be revoked unless I passed the Common Entrance exam. And I knew that if you peeled back the top
layer of my polite English schoolboy veneer, you would find a horribly ignorant young man, one who could talk without putting his hands in his pockets—Mrs. Parke only had to remind me once—but who also did not understand the first thing about geometry, spelling, and Latin and never would. I knew I was doomed.
30
I
had grown up with the idea that God wanted me to be strange, perpetually weird, perpetually different. For the first time in my life, I encountered people like Mr. Parke who seemed to share my parents’ evangelical faith but didn’t set themselves apart from the world. The thought that you could be a normal person and still believe was new to me.
At GW, it was good enough to just show up in chapel, be polite, and let God do the worrying about how sincere other people were. There were several teachers besides Bubble who were unbelievers, and they were all in good standing.
When Bubble took chapel, he once had us sing some odd ditty he’d written, set to Wagner as the “hymn” and smirked while he read the scripture passage of the day. Mr. Parke bore this with a good humor that only served to make his faith seem unassailable. Mr. Parke believed what he believed, and Bubble believed what he believed, and there was room for all of us.
GW was actually a rather humble little place, with minimal facilities beyond a wonderful natural setting. The fees were low, the classrooms bare, cold, and ugly. But Mr. Parke’s philosophy of education—it was about finding something each boy could be good at, opening doors beyond mere exams, about learning basic rules of politeness that would serve you all your
life—was wonderful. And most of the teachers were highly eccentric, and therefore interesting. That was all that mattered.
Mrs. Parke was a particularly magnificent teacher. She understood
exactly
how to make history come alive for little boys by describing torture, mayhem, battles, murders, plots, heroic deeds, imprisonments, voyages, the Black Death, all in glowing Shakespearean detail. Sometimes she would demonstrate how the rack had been used and lay on the teacher’s table, arms stretched above her head, her gray wool knee-length skirt tucked neatly under her trim body, and she would describe in detail just
how
Guy Fawkes or other traitors felt as bones were pulled from sockets, and then how they would be hanged, “just for a bit,” then taken down, revived, and quartered.
Dates, names, and places, the whole shape of history, stuck, glued into our little brains.
“And then the ax fell!”
“
Please,
Mrs. Parke, where did the king’s head go?”
“Into a basket, or onto the straw put there to soak up the gouts of blood!”
“Do you think he
knew?
”
“Certainly. I expect the brain stayed alive for several horrifying seconds. And, of course, the body would twitch a good bit.”
My world got bigger. Instead of saving men’s souls, my days consisted of learning history from Mrs. Parke, learning to play cricket (badly), being surprisingly competitive at high jump (my right leg was three times as strong as any other right leg at GW), and joining the rifle club and discovering that I was a good shot. I also discovered that other boys shared my interest in women.
It didn’t take much in those days. The “naughty postcards” were hardly explicit. They were drawn somewhat in the style of
the early Vargas pinups, usually of a young woman in some suggestive pose with a witty caption. There was a girl on a swing, with the breeze lifting her skirt to reveal stocking tops and tight panties molded to her figure. A farmer was walking past with his rake over his shoulder, the inference being that the handle was going to penetrate where all we boys—passing the card around—longed to go. The expression on the girl’s face was shocked but pleased, her mouth frozen in a startled “O!”
When we “wanked,” we didn’t think of it as sex—at least the other boys didn’t, to the extent they talked about it. (I did not advertise the amateur gynecological training that Mom had given me!) “Sex” was that far-off thing they dreamed about doing to girls. And our dreams were not terribly specific: just addled, and usually somewhat romantic, thoughts about “girls,” or “a girl.” Real girls and actual sex seemed farther off than Mars. (Matron and the other females in the school seemed to be living behind a thick sheet of glass.)
When we wanked in a group from time to time—usually in the forest while taking a break from building a camp, raft, or fort—it was a game, something like armwrestling but where everyone could win. We sometimes compared the distances we could shoot sperm. It was matter-of-fact and jovial, a community undertaking.
Mr. Parke advised us against all forms of “abuse.” However, he only mentioned this once in the context of the Sixth Form (eighth grade) facts-of-life talk. The rest of the time, no one said anything about wanking, pro or con. Since everyone teaching at the school knew everything there is to know about boys, I’m sure it was no mystery to them that there was some “bashing the bishop” going on. No one seemed upset. We were never lied to and told any of the mythology that I’ve read other
boys were told, stories about masturbation driving you mad. It just wasn’t that important. Privacy was respected.
Every other week, Mr. Parke rented a movie and showed it on Sunday evening on a rickety old 16-mm projector that clicked along so loudly that if you were sitting next to it, you couldn’t hear the dialogue. We watched patriotic war epics made in the 1940s, or comedies, mostly from the 1940s and ’50s, the Ealing comedies that introduced me to actors like Alec Guinness and Terry-Thomas. There were the Shakespeare plays,
Othello, Macbeth,
and the rest. Sometimes there would be a documentary, say about a trip up the Congo River, with the colonial baggage-bearers glistening under the hot sun and an imperturbable English guide trekking into darkest Africa, a sort of Livingston who would dress for dinner, even when no other “civilized Englishmen” were near.
There was also TV, about one hour per week for the older boys. Our favorite was
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
We were also allowed to sometimes watch
Top of the Pops,
a weekly program with the latest pop and rock hits being lip-synched live. The Kinks, Beatles, Petula Clark, Roy Orbison, and the Rolling Stones became part of my inner vocabulary.
I was overjoyed by the movies and TV. I had been longing to see movies, any movies, not to mention listening to rock music and jazz. I had barely seen a TV set since my memorable polio-operation-summer in America.
Mrs. Parke encouraged everyone to play music. I took lessons and played the piano badly, but that didn’t hinder me from joining in our many music evenings where I’d thump out a few minutes of boogie-woogie. We were allowed to carry hatchets into the woods to cut down trees—only birches, though, and brush, never the oaks—to build our camps and
rafts. There were three ponds as well as the River Ouse. Sometimes the semiwild pigs from our farm were allowed to root in the forest for acorns and we would make a game out of running past them. And we were allowed to do anything we wanted in the way of climbing the enormous trees, making huts, rafts, and treehouses, digging caves, fishing in the river, bicycling, anything at all as long as we were always back for tea, prep, classes, chapel, and sports.
After sports, we took a muddy, disease-ridden communal “plunge bath” wherein we sat in a big shallow cinderblockand-stucco wading pool-like tub in the basement of the main house. We got in twenty or so at a time, squatted in three inches of muddy tepid-to-icy water, and scrubbed off the filth and sweat—and caught each other’s infections.
At breakfast each day, there was a list of who would be “off sports” or “off plunge bath” read out by Matron. If a boy had particularly contagious boils or verrucae, he might be off plunge bath for the whole term. We got illnesses I’d never heard of, like verrucae—a kind of ingrown boil—and other skin conditions perhaps related to cold, eating our weight in “fried bread” and other saturated fats, and only bathing twice a week.
Of course, no one sued anyone when their child had an accident or sliced open his hand with a penknife. We all carried one. It would have been considered bad form to sue. How could a boy build a fort if he wasn’t allowed to climb trees? How could he cut saplings to make bows and arrows if he had no knife? Someone was always getting stitches. We were
boys!
Freedom from litigiousness meant that we were in young male heaven. Who could have ever learned to
love
life as we did if we had been stuck indoors playing “safely” on video
games, plugged in, wired up, and growing obese? Thank God there were no computers! We didn’t play games
about
reality, we
were
reality! We built things. We climbed things. We were never indoors if we could help it. There was no tree off limits, no pond too deep, no river too dangerous. Everyone had to learn to swim. And who didn’t know how to climb? And everything we did was dangerous, difficult, and challenging; otherwise, what was the point?
It was virtually impossible to be overweight, or restless, let alone suffer from attention deficit disorder in GW. We were just too busy being happy, physically exhausted little boys in a secure and predictable environment.
At night we were asleep in about ten seconds from the time we lay down at eight PM (nine for the older boys). And in class, no matter how grim it seemed during some Latin grammar test, we knew that soon we were all going to spend a great afternoon doing sports, or trekking in the woods. It was all about mud, water, sky, and learning free from psychological or “behavioral” manipulation.
Rules were basic and few, related to how you treated others, not what you did or didn’t do with your body. Order was built on respect for authority, which, far from being constraining, allowed us near-total freedom. We were polite, did not bully, and told the truth
or else!
So we were free to pretty much do anything, once we understood the rules about how we were to interact with others. And there were no frightened parents in sight. Who could ever have had Q Day if there had been?
31
Q
Day, our version of D-Day, was invented by Bubble in 1946 or thereabouts. Q Day was part military exercise, part rite of passage. The Fifth and Sixth Form boys were divided into sections, F Section, G Section, and so on. Each section had a captain and officers. There were about eight boys in each. There was a cook, first aid officer, Morse code officer, the boy in charge of the building of the hut, a map-reader good with coordinates, a record-keeper/scribe, a boy in charge of defenses, another of intelligence and planning attacks. (I was always the First Aid officer, given that Susan had taught me a certified Red Cross course. I even got the chance to stop a severe hemorrhage after Weeks stepped on a broken bottle while fording the river.)
Each section met through the year for exercises in map-reading, first aid, and various sorts of military-style drill. But the main activity during the summer term was camp-building. We could only use natural materials: logs we cut, ferns, branches leaves, grass, mud, rocks . . . no plastic sheeting.