Growing Up In a War (20 page)

Eventually it was my turn to be transformed. First the knee breeches, the silver buttons surprisingly loose and clunky. Then an open-fronted white shirt with no buttons and wide three-quarter-length sleeves. Then came the tricky bit: how to tie the separate white bands round the neck and safety-pin them to the shirt so that they did not drift askew. I had to have it done for me, and was told it would take a few days to learn. Then I rolled on the mustard-coloured stockings, and finally elbowed my way in to the big, billowing coat – more silver buttons on the sleeves and down
the
front, ending with an extra big one at the bottom. And there I stood, just like the boys I had seen in the London streets. I was given a leather girdle to hang round my waist, and for a moment I just stood there with my thumbs stuck in it, trying to take myself in. Then my minder, who had packed my former clothes into the suitcase, led me back to my father, who by this time was standing outside the dining hall gazing at the view. When I emerged from under the cloister a look of astonishment crossed his face, followed by a repressed radiation of pride. I knew what his emotions were, and basked in them. As I walked towards him I was overcome with shyness because of my clothes. I could feel them on me in a way I never did again, and my stride was self-consciously long.

The next thing we did was go to my house and meet the housemaster. The sixteen houses were in eight blocks, each named after an Old Blue – worthies such as Middleton, first Bishop of India, and Peele, a poet and playwright contemporary with Shakespeare (he was Shakespeare’s collaborator on
Titus Andronicus
) – so each house had that name plus the suffix A or B. Mine was Barnes A. This, I was told – erroneously, it happens, but I believed it throughout the time I was at the school – was after Thomas Barnes, the outstanding journalist of the nineteenth century, the editor of
The Times
who earned it the nickname ‘The Thunderer’. So we went past Lamb to Barnes (the two had been friends) and were shown into the senior housemaster’s study.

There sat Douglas Burleigh, known to his boys as either Dougs or Snugs. He and my father got on famously, with an ease and warmth that I found unexpected. I suppose I thought my father would be a little overawed, for no better reason than that I was. But now I began to feel left out of the conversation – they were not even talking about me. I remember my father using the phrase ‘in this democratic age’ in a sentence the rest of which eluded me. They seemed not to want to end their conversation; but another parent was waiting at the door, so I was taken away.

My minder was waiting outside for us, and showed us the rest of the house, which was home to fifty-something boys: dayroom, with separate studies at the far end for the nobs; tuck cupboard outside it, where he said any food of my own would have to be put away, to be unlocked for only a couple of hours each afternoon; changing rooms, a forest of clothes on hooks and pegs, ankle deep in rugby boots; washrooms, including a row of showers over a trough big enough for a whole rugger team to sit and bath in at the same time; shoe room, pairs of slippers in pigeonholes all round the walls; lavatories at the back on the other side of an air passage. Doing a turn round the back of the house we saw a swarthy eighteen-year-old, the skirts of his coat tucked up into his girdle, pumping a bicycle tyre. ‘That’s Neighbour,’ murmured the minder with admiration. ‘He’s the house captain.’ All the way down the front of his coat, so close as to be almost touching, were big silver buttons of the sort that I had only one of; he had a stand-up black velvet collar, which I did not have, and at the end of his sleeves were half-drooping black velvet cuffs, again with silver buttons – very elegant. I asked why his coat was so different from mine, and was told: ‘He’s a Grecian. Grecians all have coats like that. They’re the top boys of the school.’ Taking a leaf out of Morrison’s book I said: ‘I’m going to be a Grecian,’ at which the minder said: ‘I expect you will be one day.’

There came a seemingly natural point when my father left us, as he was meant to, and went to the station to catch the next train back. I was so full of my new surroundings that I did not mind him going.

That night I was taken down to ‘the tube’ to sleep. German bombers had been flying over Christ’s Hospital on their way to and from London, and a few had been shot down nearby, so the whole school had taken to sleeping underground. This was made possible by an ingenious feature of the school’s construction. The houses, thickly laid along a central avenue for half a mile,
contained
the usual tangle of wiring and piping; and so that their underground supply connections could be got at without digging up the surface outside, these ran along a tunnel that could be accessed from inside any of the buildings, a tunnel big enough for several men to walk along abreast. This was known as the tube. In downpours of rain, or when the school was snowed up, it was a walkway for everyone’s use. And during the Blitz it became a mass dormitory with beds along the whole of its length.

The houses kept their separate identities in the tube, and slept in that part of it that was under their own house. In the Barnes A section we junior boys were supervised by a house monitor called Morgans, a six-footer from South Africa. There were six house monitors, all of whom looked to me like giants. I had never been in a school where the oldest boys were eighteen, and fully grown. For me there was conceptual dissonance in the fact that these adults were ‘boys’ in my house. I looked up at them with awe. They seemed to me even bigger than ordinary people; and their differentness was emphasised by the Christ’s Hospital clothes, which made them seem like creatures from elsewhere.

In those days the monitorial system was exceedingly powerful. Almost every aspect of life in the school outside the classroom was organised by the older boys. They had what felt like total power over us, including the power of punishment. We saw it as them, not the masters, who ran our day-to-day lives. When they left the school they went straight into the army, where they arrived ready-trained in exercising authority over their fellows – with the result that in wartime conditions they sprinted up the ladder of promotion. We became used to the sight of uniformed captains and majors around the place who were young Old Blues revisiting the school.

Next morning the first thing to do was to find my class. A noticeboard in the dayroom told me which one it was. All new boys were in two forms, it said, the third form and the lower fourth –
LF
for short. This LF was divided into five streams, from A to E, and I was in LFA. All clear up to this point. The notice announced what time this class was supposed to meet, but did not say where. I turned from the board to a biggish boy who was passing, and said: ‘Excuse me, can you tell me where the LFA are supposed to meet?’

‘No such form,’ he said, not slowing down.

‘Yes there is. It says so here.’

‘There isn’t,’ he said, sweeping on. I looked at the notice again.

There it was: LFA.

Across the room was one of the monitors, so I went over and put the question to him.

His manner was kindly. ‘You must have made a mistake,’ he said. ‘There isn’t such a form.’

‘But it says so on the notice.’

‘It can’t do.’

‘It does.’

‘Show me.’

He came across to the noticeboard with me and I pointed it out. Understanding spread across his face.

‘Oh, you mean LFA,’ he said. ‘You were saying LFI.’ And he told me where to go.

I was foxed for a while. But that day, as it went on, I made the discovery that I had a cockney accent, a realisation that had never entered my head. As a new boy I was constantly being asked what form I was on (everyone said on, not in), and when I answered, everyone thought I was saying LFI. I came to realise, though with extreme difficulty, that I must be. It was a milestone discovery. All my life I had assumed that the way I talked was normal. The only people who had ever had any problem understanding me were country people, and that was because
they
were different. They had an accent, not me. Country people had remarked on what they called my London accent, but that was because they spoke
country,
and weren’t used to hearing London people talk. In this, as in everything else, I took it for granted that London was the touchstone. London set the standard that others followed, unless they did not know any better. But now it was unquestionably I who was different. Yet I could not
hear
the difference. I was being made aware of it only from outside. I suppose, looking back, I must have been familiar with the way the other boys were talking because I had been hearing it all my life on the radio – indeed it was often referred to, until well after the Second World War, as BBC English. As a broadcaster myself, many years later, I became used to the fact that when people with regional accents hear themselves on the air for the first time they are astonished and taken aback by their own accents, which they were previously unaware of. But at school, of course, I had no such way of hearing myself.

I started trying to speak clearly, to avoid misunderstanding, so that when I said ‘A’ people would actually hear it as ‘A’ and not as ‘I’. Beyond that, I did not try to change my accent – I would not have known how to, not being able to hear it. Nevertheless, over the next couple of years, and without being conscious it was happening, I came to talk like the other boys. My musical ear probably had something to do with this. I did not know that the change had occurred until people elsewhere began to remark on it – and then again I was surprised, because at every point during the transition I had been talking spontaneously. The nearest thing to this situation that I have encountered in adult life is with the children of friends who emigrate to the United States: after a couple of years they are talking like American children, yet they have not made a conscious effort to change. Before the age of puberty such a change involves no act of will on the child’s part: on the contrary, it would require a strong effort of will
not
to change.

In my house there were seven other new boys, six of whom came from prep schools and already talked like the older boys.
This
was when I first heard of prep schools. I had not known such schools existed, and looked with wonderment on boys of my own age who had already, for years, been learning Latin and French, not to mention algebra. The only other state-school boy was from Berkshire, and he had a rich country burr. Like me, he was talking like the others within a couple of years.

After my first two days, my recollection of my own newness no longer contains many individual memories. There was so much that was new, so much to learn and come to terms with all at once, that it blurs into one. It was like starting life all over again in a new world. This was what the schools I had read about in school stories had been like, and at first I saw it as glamorous, though really of course it was no such thing, not glamorous at all. Among the boys, the prevailing atmosphere was one of rough good humour and a basic decency. This made things easy for a newcomer. In any case, my most immediate fellows were new too; and I had been used all my life to being in a motley gang of boys, and also to joining new gangs. Having grown up on the streets of Hoxton I felt myself to be streetwise in a way that the others were not; and as an inner-city child, still very much a London chauvinist, I thought of myself as metropolitan in a way they were not. As a typical cockney kid I was cocky, I know. But for all my follies and foibles the others accepted me as I was, and took the rough with the smooth. The school in general prided itself on its attitude towards the individual: it liked to claim that whereas other public schools tried to mould you into a standardised product, at Christ’s Hospital they tried to find out what your potential was and help you develop it. And there was some truth in that.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PEOPLE IN A
war take it for granted that the war will bring upheaval into their personal lives, and children can usually adapt to this more easily than adults. As a nine-year-old on the outbreak of war I had accepted without question the need to leave my parents and my home in the East End of London to live in a village in Sussex; and then again, after a while, to go and live in a town in the Midlands. Even within that town I had lived first with one family of strangers and then another. Meanwhile my parents had been bombed out of our old home in London and gone to live in a suburb I had never heard of. I was repeatedly being plucked out of my existing environment and plunged into a strange one. I got used to this as the pattern of my life. As far as I was concerned, when I went to Christ’s Hospital it was another such change, my third or fourth in two years.

Actually, though, unrealised by me, it was a turning point of a different order from the others. From then on, my life was to be lived in a world of well-educated people, and it never had been before. I was now on an escalator that, without any further effort or movement on my part, was going to take me to one of the best
lycées
in France and then the University of Oxford. And that was not all. I had entered a moral universe quite different from any I had known before. Up to then I had lived, in my little-boy way, by the laws of the jungle. All small boys are wild animals, and I do not want to exaggerate the difference between me and others,
but
I had grown up in circumstances more primitive than most. If I wanted something that I could get by theft or violence, I took it. If I felt that telling a lie would help, I lied. I thought nothing of cheating at games, or breaking a promise. I had no feelings of loyalty to anyone except those closest to me, and with them I behaved myself only because I needed them. I had no guilt about any of this. I thought that anyone who behaved otherwise was a fool, and so was anyone who got himself into trouble by telling the truth. I was like an animal intent on satisfying its needs.

The most basic thing Christ’s Hospital did for me (and perhaps against me too) was to socialise me. It imbued me with a different value system: telling the truth, keeping my word, being loyal to friends and also, amazingly, behaving decently to everyone else, never cheating or taking what did not belong to me. The surprising thing is that I took to it and liked it. If anything, I carried the change to excess, as converts tend to do. Looking back, I think I embraced it with such intensity because, unconsciously, I saw it as the only way of being secure and at home in this new environment, which gave me such an exciting way of life – for, from the time I arrived at Christ’s Hospital, I loved being there, and would not have wished to be anywhere else. Being an all-boarding school, it was a closed world, more structured and ordered than anything I had known before; and it could be that I needed something like that. Even when I rebelled against it, as I was later to do, I liked having it there to rebel against. Underneath everything, I was happy with it until I left six and a half years later to join the army.