On the exterior wall of the chapel (yet another converted WWII Quonset-type hut), the Q Day readiness sign was posted. White meant that Q Day was going to happen that term. Yellow, that it was imminent. Red: it had begun!
Once the yellow disk went up, each section assigned a member to visit the sign during the night, because the final signal could be posted at any time. When the red disk went up, it was the job of the boy who first saw it to alert the rest of his section. Once assembled, the section leader would go to Mr. Parke’s study to be issued the ammunition, a precious box full of bangers, big firecrackers powerful enough to blow a hole in the bottom of a Wellington boot if you stepped on one. Hence the rule that once the banger landed in your camp, you could not touch it or try to toss it back at the enemy.
The object of the night operation was simple: Explode as many bangers in other section’s camps within their perimeter—five yards around the hut—and have as few bangers explode in your camp as possible. Thus the need to choose your camp’s location well, one hard to find, especially in the dark.
Until a boy threw a lit banger into your camp (or an unlit one into your campfire), you could do anything short of killing him, to stop him. This included building barriers across forest paths, digging pits, setting all manner of booby traps. The rule was that the master assigned to your section had to be in on these preparations and approve them. So, for instance, if one section decided to place a thirty-pound rock in a tree that would fall on an approaching attacker, the master might nix the idea.
During the night exercise, we’d blacken our faces and hands with charcoal and creep through the woods. If possible, we’d never use our torches (flashlights). However, a campfire was mandatory, so if you could get near enough to an enemy camp, you could see the fire.
When a successful attack was carried out, we would have to declare ourselves—for instance, “Schaeffer and Nichole Two, G
Section!” And the defenders would have to also identify themselves: “Weeks One and Wilmot, F Section!” Then there would be a momentary civilized lull and each side wrote down the agreed amount of bangers that had just been exploded. After that, the attackers would creep back off into the dark, sometimes quietly followed by the recently attacked in the hopes that the attackers would inadvertently lead them to their camp.
Punching was against the rules. So was hitting an opponent with a club. But wrestling was permitted, and huge fights took place involving three or four boys holding down an attacker as he tried to make his way close enough to the fire to throw his bangers. (Montague, our premiere athlete and a giant of a lad, was impossible to stop and once crawled into our camp with everyone in F Section clinging to his back and trying to stop him but to no avail!) We could strip an attacker of bangers, then add his ammunition to ours. So if it seemed all was lost, we would try to dump our ammunition before it could be taken.
There were bloody noses, sprained wrists, scratches, and minor burns. No one got killed. And remarkably, all the scores (of how many bangers each camp had exploded within the perimeter of enemy camps) tallied between the sections correctly. It would have been unheard-of to lie about the results, just “not on at all.” Honor was not a word that was met with a derisive snicker. And lying was always punished by a “whacking.”
No one but the Headmaster could whack you—in other words hit you with the size-thirteen plimsoll (sneaker) that Mr. Parke kept under the safe in his study, the punishment of last resort when we’d touch our toes and receive from one up to six strokes—“six of the best”—on our bottoms. One stroke with your trousers up was not serious; but six of the best, “trousers down,” left welts.
Six of the best, trousers down, was reserved for crimes like lying, stealing, rudeness to Mrs. Parke, and bullying. By the time you had done something requiring six strokes, you would be on the brink of expulsion.
The most I ever got was three, trousers up, for a group cheating effort in Mr. Ward’s history class, wherein we took turns learning dates and names for his weekly quiz and everyone else looked at what his neighbor was writing and then passed on the information. We were caught the third time and only saved ourselves from expulsion by instantly owning up. We got a stern lecture and three strokes each. The lining up outside Mr. Parke’s study, the trembling as we heard the swish-smack blows fall on others, the shaky handshake with the Head, the exit, the look of anticipation from the others as they asked “Was it bad?” and the satisfaction of pulling a grim face to scare them when you walked past. . . . We didn’t ever cheat again. And looking back, it seems that having corporal punishment as a threat—“Would you rowdy Visigoths care to work, or shall I send you all to Mr. Parke’s study to explain your miserable selves?”—gave every teacher, no matter how young or inexperienced, a means to keep order. Spanking, when fairly and rarely administered, worked wonders. And it seems to me that it was far less invasive than constant psychological (let alone medical) manipulation.
After two or three years at GW, I was more English than the English. The main lesson of history was that England was in the right. We stood against the Germans. We stopped them from taking over the world, just as we stopped Napoleon at Waterloo. We liberated the Indians and Africans from barbarity, gave them the rule of law, built them railways, and explained that you could not burn your widows along with
their dead husbands. We invented the steam engine, and the Spitfire was the best plane ever. We were honest, not like those dreadful “Frogs” across the Channel. Civilization ended at the cliffs of Dover. Wales, Ireland, and Scotland rebelled now and then and had to be subdued to their rightful place. Sherlock Holmes and Watson were the typical Englishmen, resourceful and driven by a desire to do right. We had the Magna Carta and enjoyed the rights of Englishmen while the rest of the world were slaves. The purpose of the Americans was to be there when we needed them. “We can take it,” we told the Nazis after they bombed London. “Solid British workmanship” was best; our suits, cut on Savile Row, were what any real gentleman wore. Gilbert and Sullivan wrote opera without “all that Italian nonsense.” Elizabeth stood against the marauding Frog and Spaniard and made England safe for a religion as jolly and “free from cant” as cricket, when played by the rules, played honestly, so honestly that the only time I heard a boy dispute the call of the referee was when he told the umpire that he was indeed
out.
He did the right thing, he did what Winston would have done, or at least Dr. Watson. Honor, truth, and openhanded transparency, these were the “attributes of Englishmen.” Jesus was a decent chap and more or less English.
It was good to be an Englishman! When we went on vacation, I had a new status. And Mom loved my accent. Now I could tell the whole truth about at least one part of my life to strangers.
Before GW, what was I supposed to say in answer to the usual questions asked a child: “What does your father do?” “Where do you go to school?” The questioner was often an Englishwoman on holiday in Portofino or Zermatt. A truthful answer would have left people staring. “Dad waits for God to
send money, and I don’t go to school because my parents are too busy serving the Lord to keep track of me.”
Boarding school liberated me. I could say, “I go to school in Sussex. I’m on my holls and will go back in two weeks.” Boarding school was something everyone understood.
Even life at GW had a dark side that I didn’t mention. I didn’t know it
was
a dark side. The “dark side” wasn’t deliberate. It was just ignorance about my particular problem. The word “dyslexic” had not been heard of yet.
Mr. Parke often called me into his study.
“Do you try, boy?”
“I do, sir.”
“But you are not making any improvement.”
“No, sir.”
“What you write in your essays is rather good, but your spelling . . .
what
spelling? Eh, Schaeffer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“When you take that list of words into prep to memorize, doesn’t
anything
stick?”
“Not much, sir.”
Mr. Parke would sigh and contemplate me for a while.
“Well, you’re a good chap, Schaeffer, but we need some real effort. I have no idea how you will ever pass the CE.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, carry on, but
do
try!”
I would. I’d sit and stare at the lists of words. I’d relive the last soccer match I’d played. I’d take imaginary journeys from Ollon up our mountain to Huémoz, wander our village, and look at our mountains one at a time, starting with Les Diablerets, moving to L’Argentine and its sheer smooth cracked-mirror face, to the boxy Grande Muveran, the spiky horn of
the Petit Muveran, and the jagged teeth of my beloved Dents du Midi. Or sometimes I’d plunge into the turquoise water off the rocks at the side of the Paraggi Bay, follow a fish to his crevice between the spines of the sea urchins, watch his gills fanning the water, the blood warm water, that dreamy clear water on a perfect late-August afternoon . . . until the list of words would appear and sunny thoughts would evaporate, leaving the deadly list staring at me as if written in invisible ink that would fade as soon as a word was transferred from the sheet of paper into my brain. Another talk with Mr. Parke. “There must be maximum effort now.”
“Yes, sir.”
“In less than a year, you will be taking the CE.”
After I was in boarding school, Dad and I kept up our hiking tradition during the holidays. Dad would use those times to ask about my failed grades. All Dad would say, when I’d bring my report card to him during the holls, was that I’d be in real trouble if I didn’t work harder. For whatever reason, Dad never seemed to connect the dots from his own bad spelling to mine. And my parents had no ideas where to send me after GW.
What stands out, though, is not that I failed to learn to spell, but that at GW I actually received an outstanding education in ways that had nothing to do with exams and everything to do with what really counts. And what started there has continued through my life. In that sense, I never left the school.
Sometimes when I read a book and remember to think about the historical context, or when I comprehend a news item because I know my geography, every time I go to a play and think about what a play
is,
what an actor
does,
that drama didn’t just
happen,
that the Greeks and Shakespeare came
first,
that cultures have a
shape,
I’ll mutter, “Thank you, Mr. Parke.”
Great Walstead opened the doors to knowing that doors need to be opened to other doors, to doors beyond those, forever, that learning is freedom, that there are no dull subjects once Mrs. Parke sets your mind on fire with a demonstration of how the rack worked, and then casts you in the role of Figaro in the
Marriage of Figaro
and teaches you to sing, even when you can’t.
“Everyone should be in an opera at least
once,
Schaeffer!”
“Yes, Mrs. Parke, but I’m no good at memorizing things.”
“How do you know that? Let’s try, and then we shall see. It’s easier when you put words to music. Mozart won’t let you down, and I shan’t either.”
32
O
f course I failed my CE exam. My parents wanted me to keep going in the “English system.” After the good experience at Great Walstead, so did I.
St. David’s, located in Llandudno, North Wales—founded just four years before I got there—was run by some pacifists. Mom and Dad sent me there without ever visiting the place. (I don’t know how they ever found it.) It was a five-hour train ride from London. My parents never visited while I was there either. I might as well have been on the moon—on the dark side, at that.
The first time I saw St. David’s was when I walked in at the start of term in the autumn of 1966. I was not nervous or homesick. Boarding school had become routine.
Mr. Ledbetter, the headmaster’s frail, cadaverous gray-skinned father-in-law, taught, as did the stocky Head and his guitar-strumming, morbidly cheerful wife. All I remember about Mr. Ledbetter’s teaching is a series of lengthy little sermons on why he had been a conscientious objector in the Second World War. I asked him if that meant he was sorry that Hitler lost, and he glared at me but didn’t have an answer, except to say “The first casualty of any war is the truth.”
Our matron was a bit like a camp guard. She had a bulldog
that she sometimes kicked in the testicles if he humped her leg. Then she would giggle and her triple chins quivered.
The Head used to cane boys quite often. Unlike Mr. Parke, the St. David’s Head used an actual cane, not a gym shoe. A beating would draw blood. This seemed to be at odds with the school’s pacifism, and the contradiction was never explained, nor was the capriciousness of the application of the cane.
At GW, discipline had been reassuringly predictable and never cruel. At St. David’s, it was weirdly disproportionate. One boy was caned for talking after lights out—he came back to our dormitory with six bloody stripes on his pajama bottoms. Yet others were not punished for bullying, stealing, and lying.
The school was new and had no reputation (and so accepted more or less anyone). The teachers were undistinguished and the discipline was a farce. But the buildings were magnificent.
St. David’s was housed in a recently defunct girls’ school on Lord Mostyn’s estate. (The school was leased from the family.) The twelfth-century Great Hall was pristine, the best preserved and most authentically furnished space in the school. The “new” Elizabethan wing was also pristine. Mostyn family portraits hung in the dining hall. There was a priest hole above the Great Hall, left over from the reign of Elizabeth I when the Roman Catholic Mostyns hid their priests from prying Protestant eyes. (The entrance was hidden behind a tapestry and secret door.)
The view of the playing fields and woods as seen from the battlements was lovely. Above the school, a rocky slope led up and over the bare moor to the Great Orm’s Head, a huge cliff several miles away against which the Irish Sea pounded; it was full of caves, a place where pirate wreckers had set fires to lure ships onto the rocks.