Growing Up In a War (19 page)

In the streets of central London I had occasionally seen a boy wearing a dark blue coat from his throat to his ankles that was open at the front from the hips down, so that, visible beneath it, was a pair of grey knee breeches with silver buttons at the knee, and below those a pair of bright yellow stockings disappearing into the shoes. It was an amazing sight, I thought. The first time I saw it I asked what it was, and was told it was a boy from a school called Christ’s Hospital, where they wore this uniform, because of which the school was known as the Bluecoat School, and boys like this as bluecoat boys. Years later my family swore that when I was told this I said: ‘I’m going to go there.’ I find it not at all difficult to believe this, but I do not remember it. Anyway, I went there.

In 1941 Christ’s Hospital was no longer in London, but it had
been
a conspicuous feature of the City of London’s life for three and a half centuries, and still retained extensive property there. It also preserved a special relationship with the City fathers, which is why it was part of the London County Council’s assisted places scheme. Its beginnings were unique. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in the 1530s the question arose of what to do with the buildings. Some of these were enormous, for instance Greyfriars monastery in the City of London. At that time, when most adults died at quite a young age, a number of children without families lived like animals on the streets of London (as they do today in some other parts of the world). This became a social scandal, if only because of the child crime and prostitution to which it gave rise. The Mayor and the Bishop of London persuaded the King to approve a plan to sweep these children off the streets and into the now empty Greyfriars monastery, there to house, feed, clothe and educate them. The scheme went ahead, and the new school began in 1552 in vast, already old buildings, financed by City money. By this time Henry VIII had died, so it was his son, Edward VI, who signed the royal charter that officially founded the school in 1553. Although it was always thought of, rightly, as a school, it was launched with a full complement not only of teachers but also of beadles, caterers, nurses, a surgeon, and so on and so forth – a total institution, grand and imposing. It took in girls as well as boys, and gave them the best education by the lights of the day. When the children left they went out into widely differing social circumstances, depending on their sex and abilities. Among the boys the scholars went on to Oxford and Cambridge, still helped by the school, while many of the otherwise clever ones, being well educated, and already living in the City, got jobs there, again helped by the school and its benefactors. Quite a number became rich, and helped the school in their turn. The less able were apprenticed to skilled trades. With the girls the future depended more on marriage, but on this side of
marriage
the abler ones became teachers of some kind, usually governesses, and the others companions or housekeepers.

Many of the more ancient public schools began as charities, but only Christ’s Hospital remained true to the spirit of its original purpose. Because the others were such good schools the socially privileged wanted to send their children to them, and this had the paradoxical effect of turning charity schools into bastions of privilege. But with Christ’s Hospital ‘need’ remained the talisman word: unlike the others, it never took in the children of the well-to-do. Clearing the streets of a London teeming with abandoned children was a job that could be carried out only once, but the school continued to take in children in need of care and education, and became a godsend to families in the middle and even upper classes who had become impoverished. It gave their children first-rate schooling which they could not have afforded to pay for. Once established, it took in such children from all over the country, and from English families abroad. At each stage of its development it attracted the involvement of remarkable people. When most of the buildings were burnt down in the Great Fire of London in 1666, the reconstruction was supervised by Wren and Hawksmoor. At one point Wren, Pepys and Newton were governors together. Pepys persuaded King Charles II to found a new school-within-the-school, the Royal Mathematical School, to train navigators for his navy; and Newton wrote a textbook for it. More than a hundred years after this, Coleridge and Charles Lamb were boys at the school together (and were lifelong friends as a result). Soon after them came Leigh Hunt, who joined their circle. All three of these wrote about the school, and all spoke of its remarkable classlessness. As Leigh Hunt said: ‘More boys are to be found in it, who issue from a greater variety of ranks, than in any other school in the kingdom … the boys themselves (at least it was so in my time) had no sort of feeling of the difference of one another’s ranks out of doors.’

Until the late nineteenth century it was standard practice for masters, including the headmaster, to take in private pupils, so there were boys who were taught in the school’s buildings by its masters but were not members of the school. One of these was Warren Hastings, who became a governor. Others included Camden and Pugin – and one who possesses my favourite name in the English language, Sir Cloudesley Shovell.

In 1784 the girls were separated from the boys and given their own school in Hertford, thus becoming the first girls’ public school in England. At the end of the nineteenth century the boys’ school, in search of space for playing fields, bought a vast twelve-hundred-acre site in the Sussex countryside, built a new school there on the largest scale for eight hundred and fifty boys, and moved into it in 1902. However, it remained a ‘London school’ in its conception of itself and, since universal education had now come in, it tried to recruit the more promising boys from the London state schools – hence its involvement in the LCC scheme for assisted places. When I went there the great majority of boys had come from private schools, but the state-school minority was big enough, and sufficiently long-entrenched in the school’s history, to be taken for granted, so there was as little class awareness among us as there had been in Leigh Hunt’s day.

One did not need to be poor to go to Christ’s Hospital, merely not well-off enough to belong to the five per cent or less of the population who went to the other public schools. In fact, most of the families were of above-average prosperity. I have since discovered things about this that I did not know at the time. The bulk of the boys were children of professional people who were not well paid – doctors, teachers, army officers, clergymen and the rest – or were from families like this in which the father had fallen ill, or had died. Some came from poor branches of grand families, or from families that had once been well-off and had now fallen on hard times. Others were from working-class
backgrounds.
In the England of that day it was almost ostentatiously true that we came from all social classes.

People often suppose, because Christ’s Hospital is a charity school, that it must be a poor one, but the opposite is the case. Because it provides free, or at minimal cost, what at other boarding schools has to be fully paid for by parents, the school needs to be rich, and is very rich. At the time I write these words it is by a long way the richest school in Britain, in the size of its endowment – more than twice that of Eton, for example. Its money comes chiefly from land, large amounts of it in the City, but also elsewhere – a great deal in Sussex, for instance. Some of its possessions are surprising: when I was there it was the ground landlord of two of Shaftesbury Avenue’s theatres, the Queen’s and what is now called the Gielgud.

The school assessed my parents’ means and decided that they should pay £6 a term – £18 a year – towards the total cost of keeping me in every way, including all my clothing, sport and entertainment, for the nine months of every year that I would be living there. It also suggested that they send ten shillings a term to my housemaster to be doled out to me in instalments as pocket money. Among the information it sent was the fact that piano lessons could be provided as an optional extra, for a small fee. I asked if I could have them. My father said yes, my mother said no. My father pointed out that if I had gone to any other school I would have been a day boy and continued to live at home, and this would have cost a great deal more than sending me to Christ’s Hospital, so they were saving money by sending me there, and could afford the lessons. My mother said they were having to kit me out with all sorts of things for my new school (I asked her what things, and she was unable to say – Christ’s Hospital provided everything, and these ‘things’ were imaginary: she thought kitting a child out for school was something you did) and they could not afford more expense. The argument became heated. It began in
the
living room, but when the two of them started to get angry my father ordered me to go to my room and stay there until they decided.

I went off to my room and perched on the edge of the bed, my face in my hands. Usually in a dispute between my parents I could put money on my father to win, but not always, and something made me unsure this time. There was something deeply rooted about my mother’s opposition to my learning music. It was beginning to create in me a kind of depression. I could hear their clamant voices through two closed doors, but not what they said. Then the anger seemed to subside, and all I could hear were mumbles. But I still went on having to wait a long time. At last my father came into my room, with a sympathetic look on his face, and put one hand on my shoulder as I looked up at him. ‘We’ve reached a compromise,’ he said. ‘You won’t have lessons straight away, but you can start a year from now.’

A year was an endless time. To me this answer sounded like no. If it had come from my mother it would have been no. But at least I knew my father would keep his word.

The school asked him to bring me on a particular train from Victoria station, and to have with him an empty suitcase to take my clothes away in. We found an unoccupied compartment and took possession of it, he almost as nervous as I was, though showing it less. When the train got under way I stuck my head out of the window, as I always did in trains, and saw the face of a boy of my own age at almost every other window. When the train went into a curve I could see a row of little white faces along its whole length, each one poking out separately, like horses’ heads from stable doors. I asked my father to have a look, and it made him laugh. The phrase we used ever after to evoke that journey was ‘little white faces’.

We disembarked at a station called, I could scarcely believe it, Christ’s Hospital. In those pre-Beeching days it was a substantial
building
in red brick, with three covered platforms and a comfortable waiting room – all of it since demolished, so that it is now just a halt, though still with frequent trains. Most of the other passengers got off too, the grown-ups carrying suitcases. In the station’s large concourse we were gathered together by those waiting to receive us, and led away in a long winding line up a slope that passed successively alongside the school’s gymnasium, swimming pool, armoury and post office to one of its gates, at which point playing fields opened up beside us and we could see large buildings filling the view ahead. There was a row of turrets against the sky, and beside them a square tower that overtopped them. We were led round a free-standing shop to the other side of the tower, where we found ourselves in what I was later to be told was the biggest quadrangle in England except for the Great Court of Trinity College, Cambridge. Enclosing the lawn were the dining hall, the chapel, the main assembly hall (called Big School) and the Old Science School – all in bright red brick, and all looking to my eye gigantic. Embedded in the sides of the buildings were life-sized statues of people, some of whom seemed to be kings; and in the centre of the quadrangle was a statue of another king. Cloisters ran along two of the quadrangle’s sides. The quadrangle itself opened off an avenue that ran away into the distance under grey stone arches in the cloisters, through which we could see school houses one beyond another. From the expression on my father’s face I could see that he, like me, was too impressed to say anything. Neither of us had realised that a school could be like this.

We were ushered into the dining hall – big enough, my father was to be told later while waiting for me to change, to contain Nelson’s flagship HMS
Victory
, its ceiling the largest unsupported wooden ceiling in England. Along one wall was what remains the biggest oil painting I have ever seen, a canvas, not a mural, representing the ceremony at which King Charles II founded the Royal
Mathematical
School, painted at the time by Antonio Verrio. It was eighty-seven feet long and sixteen feet high. On other walls were life-size equestrian portraits of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. By this time the impression I had above all others was of size, sheer size, a scale that had been inconceivable to me in relation to a school. And first impressions are notoriously important. Although this school was to be my world for several years to come, and to become as familiar to me as the skin on my hands, there was a small part of me that never ceased to be impressed by it, to see it as magnificent. And the detail that always impressed me most remained the very first one I had encountered, the fact that a school in the middle of the countryside should have its own railway station with frequent trains to and from Victoria.

Boys wearing the famous uniform came to lead us new arrivals to go and get ours. Our parents gave them the empty suitcases, and we were taken away. We were led to one of the school houses and up some stairs into a dormitory. There, against rows of beds, stood several queues of boys in front of people carrying out fittings on them. Next to me in my queue was one of the few boys taller than me, the first new boy I talked to. An affable fellow, he told me his name was Morrison. Smiling cheerfully, he said: ‘D’you suppose either of us’ll become head boy?’ Then, surveying the others without looking impressed: ‘One of us’ll have to.’ Seven years later he did.