Growing Up In a War (24 page)

That wide gulf between the smallest boys and the biggest was
due
to the exceptionally wide age range of the school, with boys from eleven to eighteen living in the same house. One institution that helped to bridge the gap was fagging. Each of the house monitors was allowed a fag, a small boy who acted as his personal servant – cleaned his shoes, made his bed, ran his errands. This was a voluntary arrangement on both sides: no one had to fag, and the fag could give it up whenever he liked. There were two inducements to do it. One was pay. The going rate was ten shillings a term, the same again as the pocket money a fag would get from his parents. The other was that he was excused from what were known as ‘trades’. Every other boy apart from the monitors had two trades, a house trade and a (dining) hall trade. These were domestic chores. One boy would have to sweep the floor round one of the dayroom tables twice a day, two more would share responsibility for putting up and taking down the blackout shutters from two of the windows; and so on. In the dining hall a pair would have the task of setting out the big plates on the house’s table, another pair the small ones, another pair the tea bowls – and other sets of boys would clear them away again. It was all well organised and, with forty-something boys available, most of the domestic chores could be briskly dispatched. The trades ranked in order of status, like so many other things in our lives – like us ourselves – and were reallocated each term. The individual boy had no say in choosing his trades, they were given to him by the monitors who supervised them.

After experiencing my share of trades I decided to try fagging. I have always rebelled against compulsion, and I have always especially disliked doing housework. I told myself that if I came to the conclusion that being a fag was worse than trades, I would go back to trades. But I was lucky with my fag-master, a boy called Homfray. He had one of the two studies at the top of the dayroom. A thin but tough young man, some inches more than six feet tall, he was of an ironic, easy-going disposition, inclined to accept
whatever
I did for him provided it was passable – the right sort of person to work for. My daily duties started with waking him in the morning after the rest of us were up, and then making his bed when I made my own. (The school – on the assumption that the air raids were over, at least for the time being – had gone back to sleeping in the dormitories, which were on the first and second floors of all the houses.) I also cleaned his shoes when I cleaned my own. I tidied his study, and made up the fire; and if he and his friends had had a fry-up the previous evening I did the washing-up. Admittedly this was housework, but the fact that I was doing it of my own volition, and could give it up whenever I liked, made it acceptable to me. It also interested me to see the life of the eighteen-year-olds from close to. One of the things I learnt from Homfray without realising it was how to treat a fag. Years later, when I became a monitor with a study and had fags of my own, I treated them that much better for it.

Another of our many sub-worlds was the life of the dormitory – seniors on the first floor, juniors on the second, two dozen beds in each. Those who had studies had their own cubicles, but apart from that the beds were laid out in a great open space like an old-fashioned hospital ward, a regulation distance apart. The horsehair mattresses were unsprung, and so were the beds themselves, which had removable wooden slats. The school doctor propounded a theory that this was good for us, and perhaps it was: at first the beds felt hard, but we soon became comfortable in them, so much so that boys complained that their beds at home were too soft. Alongside each bed was an iron settle with a flat wooden top, to keep pyjamas and other things in, and to act as our bedside table: these were said to be ancient and to have come from the school in London. Each day when we got up we stripped our beds completely, folded the blankets and sheets, and piled them neatly, army-style, and half-turned the mattress, before going off to breakfast. After breakfast we had regulation bed-making,
supervised
by a monitor. The beds had to be made in a certain way, with hospital corners. Then they were poled. It was one boy’s house trade to take a long wooden pole that existed uniquely for this purpose and roll it up each bed to smooth out its surface. He poled two beds at a time, walking between each pair holding his pole like a tightrope walker. The whole dormitory could be poled in a few minutes and would then look regimentally perfect.

At both ends of each dormitory were what we called lav-ends, each with rows of washbasins and lavatories, and a bath with a shower. During the war the government exhorted the population to save fuel on hot water by not having more than one bath a week, and by not putting more than five inches of water in the bath. A black line was painted on our baths at this level, and we were forbidden to exceed it. It was just like sitting in a puddle. Each boy was allotted his weekly bath night, two boys to a night. On other nights we were expected to wash ourselves all over while standing at a washbasin. There was always a lot of wet and noisy larking around when the boys were washing, but ultimately that would be kept within bounds by the monitor supervising them.

The moment we were all in bed the lights had to go out. By this time we were usually so tired that we fell asleep quickly. For the first hour or two we were supervised by a monitor sitting at a desk in the dormitory, where he did his prep. So that we would not be disturbed by his light, his desk had a tent-like superstructure that almost enclosed him. At weekends, when he was not expected to be doing prep, he read a short story aloud to us. On pitch-dark winter evenings it would be a horror story, and on light summer evenings a funny one, or an episode from a comic novel – perhaps one of the set pieces from P. G. Wodehouse, or
Three Men in a Boat
, or
England Their England
. Over the years I got to know most of the classics in both genres. Among my sharpest memories of school are of lying in bed listening to a disembodied voice in the darkness telling a ghost story, best of all with a wind
sighing
outside, and perhaps in some distant part of the house a window whose sash cord had broken banging menacingly. We all had our favourites, and when in due course I became a monitor I read mine. These included ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’, ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ and ‘The Room in the Tower’. There are some quotations that cling to one through life, and I still occasionally find myself saying: ‘Jack will show you your room: I have given you the room in the tower.’

Another sub-world was the dining hall, a high, handsome place hung about with those immense pictures. We were there for three half-hours a day, and always more than eight hundred people would be sitting down to a meal. Each house had a long table that seated all its fifty or so boys, and on a dais was a high table for masters and visitors. Sometimes these would be joined by the house captains, but otherwise a house captain would sit at the head of his own long table, with his most senior colleagues on either side of him and the rest of us stretching down in order of precedence to the eleven-year-olds at the far-distant bottom. As the years went by we progressed up the table. All the serving, waiting and clearing away was done by boys, with the most junior doing the most menial jobs. The kitchen staff appeared only to bring and remove the Brobdingnagian metal containers in which everything came to us. All the dining-hall equipment had to be big and tough, including the cutlery and crockery. We were given our tea not in cups or mugs but in bowls. When these were full they were heavy, but they had no handles, and we became dexterous at using them with one hand. Once, standing at a table of empty bowls before a meal, I dropped one that landed on another in such a way that it exactly replaced it on the table while sending the other crashing to the floor, exploding in a fountain of glitter. It looked like a trick, the sort of thing a performer might do on a stage. I was so entranced by it that I called Batts over to tell him what had happened, and while I was trying to
explain,
with two other bowls, I let one slip, and precisely the same thing happened a second time.

Halfway along one of the long sides of the hall was an ancient wooden pulpit of unknown origin, from which grace would be said by a boy. Opposite this, against the other wall, was a raised desk for the hall warden, the master supervising the meal. To start things off, the hall warden would bang his gavel for grace, and then again for us to sit down and begin. At the end of the meal he would do more banging for grace and our dispersal. In between, there was not usually much for him to do, but he was present to cope with emergencies, and to arbitrate problems. In my day the role was played with chilly authority by Noel Sergent, the only French master who was a real Frenchman – had, indeed, played rugby for France – a fact which made it all the more impressive that he completed the
Times
crossword every day during our breakfast. In his absence his place was taken by Fred Haslehust, a classics master who was even quicker with the
Times
crossword, but had to cede points on this because he was a setter of crossword puzzles for the
Daily Telegraph
.

The food … Language quails. Words cannot describe it. The fish pie stank. The stew consisted of lumps of grey gristle floating in a fatty brown grease with skin on top. The spaghetti we called ‘worms in carbolic’. Whatever leftovers there were from these nightmare dishes were recycled into an all-purpose pie. It defies serious understanding. The official excuse was wartime rationing, but older boys swore that the food had been just as bad before the war; and in no other place during six years of war did I encounter anything like it. But we ate it, because it was what we lived on: we were hungry children, and there was nothing else; and in any case we were not allowed to leave food on our plates. We conditioned ourselves to eat it without thinking about it. Years of doing this had a lifelong effect on some of my attitudes: I enjoy good food with a special and keen-edged enjoyment that has an
element
of surprise in it, as if it is not what I expect to be given; and I will eat without fuss whatever is set in front of me, no matter how bad it is, and feel an inner impatience with anyone who complains about it. Having said that, I have to admit that I was defeated by the fish pie. As soon as I entered the hall and smelt it my gorge rose. I would go to any lengths to avoid eating it. Usually I managed to get somebody else to take my helping, but if not I would wrap it in my handkerchief and smuggle it out of hall under my clothes, to put it where it belonged, down the lavatory.

Some of my readers may suspect me of exaggerating. After all, in most institutions where food is served, the people who have to eat it complain about it. But I am not exaggerating. In the mind of everyone who was at the school in those years the memory of the food is encrusted with scar tissue. Wherever they meet, more than half a century later, it is one of the first subjects to be mentioned. I have heard one say, not wholly jokingly, that the conditioning it gave him enabled him to survive in a Chinese prisoner-of-war camp during and after the Korean War when his friends were dying all round him. The black joke among us at the time was that we had two complaints about the food: it was impossible to eat, and there was not enough of it. We never felt satisfied, and were always slightly hungry. One curious thing is that although this was so, and although the food was vile, it constituted an adequate and perfectly balanced diet, owing to the dedicated fanaticism in this regard of the school doctor, who enjoyed a national reputation as a child dietician. We were a tough and healthy lot – most of us, anyway – lean and muscular, rarely ill. I doubt if I have ever again been as fit as I was at school. This is especially remarkable given the meagreness of wartime rations – meat once a week, one egg a week, one piece of cheese a week, and all the rest of it – and speaks volumes about our peacetime eating habits.

Yet another sub-world in our daily lives was chapel. The problem with that was boredom. The daily services were bad enough, but matins and evensong on Sundays were like oceans of time that had no shores. I had never at any age believed in God, and I saw these services as mumbo-jumbo that I was compelled to take part in. Once the novelty wore off I found them offensively tedious – I was being trapped in chapel and compulsorily bored. Inside me a huge rebellion swelled up against this, which I had great difficulty in controlling. Later, it became a serious problem for me. It was to be in the school chapel that the panic attacks and claustrophobia began that have plagued me ever since.

The chapel, like the dining hall and Big School, was built to hold a thousand people. These were seated on two sides of a central aisle, six raked-up rows on each side, so that one half of the school confronted the other. Above the heads of those in the top row ran a succession of murals by Frank Brangwyn, eight on each side, big enough to dominate the interior of the chapel. In sixteen crowded tableaux they told the story of the spread of the gospel from the preaching of the Apostles to an Edwardian street mission in the East End of London. The scenes are jostling with highly individualised characters and faces, and are brightly coloured. In a book written about the school before I went there, when the pictures were new –
Christ’s Hospital
by G.A.T. Allan – there appears this passage (p.94): ‘I cannot but feel that such wonderfully imaginative drawings would look better in some building designed for less sacred use. To my mind they produce no religious atmosphere, rather the reverse; and I think it is a pity to provide boys with grotesque pictures, to be studied during divine service, amongst which may be found apparent caricatures of masters and others waiting to be spotted.’ This is, indeed, spot on. It is precisely what I did. In my epic struggles against boredom, and the feeling of being trapped, I studied those pictures with grateful intensity, seeking from them all the different kinds of
distraction
they could yield. I found likenesses of my friends, the masters, my family, people I had known in Hoxton and Market Harborough. I cannot imagine how I would have survived those services without them. They left me with a sense of personal indebtedness to Frank Brangwyn, who at that time was alive and famous – he was knighted in the year I went to the school. (Later I discovered a Brangwyn Museum in Bruges.) When Teddy Edwards asked us to write a poem about some aspect of our experience of life at the school, I penned a hymn of gratitude to him that finished, after two lines ending with the words ‘know’ and ‘sanguine’: