Owning Up: The Trilogy (24 page)

Yet, even towards me, he would sometimes, however rarely, extend a moment of favour. ‘
Mel, Mellis
,’ he would always decline on these occasions, ‘neuter – honey’. While this lasted, and it was never for long, I would feel more than relief, almost love.

Parkfield School occupied a large Victorian stone house with a red-brick extension housing the class-rooms and dining hall. At the front there was only a short curved drive and a bed of gloomy, overgrown laurels masking the building and Twyne’s piss-pot emptying from the road, but behind there was a large yard, cemented over, with an outside lavatory and a shooting gallery along one side and across the yard, through an opening in the high wall, the playing-field.

What Twyne always called ‘the carriculum’ was quite elaborate. Rugger and cricket of course, but also rifle-shooting in the long shed where we lay full length on our elbows on prickly mats, ‘squeezing not pulling the trigger’, and boxing in the basement, a hideously painful business of bleeding noses and cut lips which he always referred to as ‘the noble art of self-defence’. In the summer we went swimming once a week in a hired indoor pool the other side of Sefton Park. This wasn’t too bad as it involved a long Noah’s Ark-like walk during which you were allowed to talk to your partner, and just to get out of the building at all was a relief, similar in impact I should have thought to that experienced by a long-term convict on changing prisons and thereby catching a glimpse of the outside world going about its normal business.

At the baths Twyne’s method of teaching those who couldn’t swim was, predictably, to throw them in at the deep end, hauling them out only if they were in real difficulties, and I was extremely grateful I had already mastered, at the Cornwallis Street baths, an adequate if stilted breast-stroke. If it was raining hard on the day we went swimming Twyne, rather than write off what he had paid in advance for the pool, would order a fleet of taxis ‘with terrible trouble and at horrible expense’ as he put it. I leamt later that the school was always on the verge of financial collapse so it was indeed an inexplicable extravagance.

Parkfield’s stated object was ‘to coach boys up to the standard of the Common Entrance Examination for the Public Schools’ and to this end, apart from Latin, we were taught English, French, History, Geography, Mathematics and Scripture. In addition there was Music, Art and Carpentry once a week. For these ‘extra’ subjects teachers came in, but for the others there was a permanent and presumably hideously underpaid staff.

Two of them, Miss White (Maths) and Miss Maclean (French), are little more than names now, although I can remember that Miss White, while small and elderly, was an effortless disciplinarian and that Miss Maclean smoked a great deal and possessed a leopard-skin coat. The rest of the permanent staff remain in much sharper focus: Mr Taylor and Mr Oliver because they liked me; Miss Chesterton because I irritated her so much. Mr Taylor and Mr Oliver were both, I suppose, in their early twenties, and Mr Oliver, unlike Mr Twyne, was actually a BA, a fact heavily emphasised in ‘the carriculum’. They were both keen territorial officers and amateur rugger players, and you wouldn’t have expected them to take to me at all, but they did. Mr Oliver was rather good-looking in a clean-limbed kind of way. Mr Taylor on the other hand was prematurely bald with a ginger moustache and owlish spectacles, and I liked him even better than Mr Oliver. They both taught English and History at different levels of the school, and it was true that these two subjects were the only ones I was any good at. I don’t think, however, that this is why they were on my side. It was more to do with the fact that they were both very bored, loathed Twyne, admired my refusal to submit to his will and, above all, that I made them laugh.

When I was still in the bottom class and, except in English and History, at the bottom of it, Mr Taylor discovered to his surprise that I could recite Shakespeare and, with Mr Twyne’s reluctant permission, loaned me to Mr Oliver to take the principal role whenever the top class was stumbling its way through one of the plays. That I could read blank verse fairly convincingly didn’t mean that I could understand much of it – it was more to do with my imitative facility, Tom had taken me to see
Macbeth
when I was still at Camelot, and Maud would sometimes, as a change from ‘Naughty Little Briar Rose’ and ‘Burglar Bill’, recite me some of the famous speeches in which she had triumphed at The Green Room before the Great War. I had been thrilled by
Macbeth
and moved by Maud’s rendering of ‘Build me a willow cabin’ and ‘The quality of mercy’. As a result I had caught the rhythm of Shakespeare and, provided I understood the gist of the speech, could turn in a creditable performance for a boy of eight.

Later, however, whenever I said anything which amused either of them, or recited a new monologue by Stanley Holloway, or imitated the Western Brothers – popular comedians of the time who dressed in tails, wore monocles, and drawled their way through satirical songs of aristocratic fatuity – I would be sent to repeat it in the other’s class-room. If I were to meet Mr Twyne en route, they told me, I was to explain that I was needed to read a speech by Shylock or Othello. But as Twyne was always in his own class-room, stressing perhaps that while
nubio
meant ‘to marry’ it applied only to women, I never had to resort to this excuse. Naturally I was delighted at these expeditions, not only because I adored showing off, but also because I was in league with grown-ups in the deliberate deception of Mr Twyne himself.

Sometimes Mr Oliver became irritated at my continuous need to divert, at my untidiness or lack of concentration, but Mr Taylor never did, which was why I preferred him. The only time he spoke harshly to me was not because of anything I’d done, but because he was irritated by Gampa’s admittedly rather dubious insistence on being addressed as ‘Colonel’. ‘He has no right to the title,’ said Mr Taylor, quite red with passion. ‘He was only a Colonel in the Territorial army. He would have to have been in the regular army to earn the right to be called Colonel! I would refuse, yes refuse, to address him as “Colonel”. I would call him “Sir”, As he is an older man I would naturally call him “Sir”, but Colonel never!’ I couldn’t understand why Mr Taylor – although I’m quite sure he was technically correct – became so heated on the subject, but I somehow felt it was better not to question Gampa or even Tom. It would be betraying Mr Taylor.

One afternoon at tea (doorsteps of brown bread thinly smeared with margarine and jam which came out of huge tins and tasted of onions) Mr Taylor and Mr Twyne had a row. We were all, of course, riveted but were unable to work out from what they said to each other what the row was about. They were perfectly civil on the surface and both finished off every sentence with a ‘sir’. But their voices were quivering with suppressed rage and Twyne’s finger, always a bad sign, was constantly easing his collar. Whether as a direct result of the row, or because of a more general antipathy from which it arose, Mr Taylor left in the middle of the summer term. I cried when he said goodbye to me. I cried on the way home, and I howled and sobbed to Maud and Tom that evening.

‘He was my friend,’ I explained to them repeatedly as they tried, rather worriedly, to calm and comfort me, ‘he was my friend!’

Bill, who was in the room, suddenly realised that he did not like all the attention I was receiving, and decided to get in on the act.

‘He was my friend too!’ he wailed loudly and somehow managed to burst into tears as convincing and copious as my own.

I stopped crying at once. Bill had only arrived at Parkfield that term whereas I’d been there for three years. He hardly even knew Mr Taylor! I was absolutely furious with him. It was like
Trader Horn
all over again.

Miss Chesterton, who taught Geography and Scripture, was quite young, handsome rather than pretty, and clearly very nice. Her dislike of me rankled and was based, I’ve come to the conclusion, on my preciousness and tendency to pronounce confident value judgements. Two examples will suffice, both of which took place at tea. Sir Henry Newbolt – Twyne’s favourite poet as it happened – had just been created Poet Laureate. I pronounced magisterially that this was ridiculous. It should obviously have been Kipling. Miss Chesterton snapped that I was in no position to judge. I was very hurt.

The second confrontation was over a joke. ‘Did you know,’ I asked the boy sitting next to me shortly after the coronation of George VI, ‘that the King has been going around with Mrs Simpson’s sister-in-law?’ He looked very surprised until I explained that Mrs Simpson’s sister-in-law was (ha-ha) the Queen. Miss Chesterton overheard me, as she was intended to. I wasn’t going to waste a joke like that on one dim boy, especially as it was the kind of joke that Mr Taylor would have sent me to tell Mr Oliver. Miss Chesterton, however, was not at all amused. She said it was disgusting and an insult to the Royal Family. I told her that I had heard it from my Uncle Fred. It was my customary ploy to retreat behind a grown-up if challenged, and this time anyway it was true. ‘That doesn’t make any difference,’ said Miss Chesterton. ‘It’s unsuitable here!’

Twyne was at the head of the next table but luckily did not pick up this exchange although, unexpectedly, he wasn’t a passionate monarchist. The Empire, yes. The public schools, certainly; but his enthusiasm for the Royal Family was never more than lukewarm. Of course he never admitted to this directly but several times he repeated something which struck me later as significant. ‘When I was inspected by the Prince of Wales during the war,’ he told us, ‘I could see that he was wearing make-up. The Royal Family wear make-up!’ It was clear that he found this extremely suspect. For a man, whether Royal or not, to wear make-up was almost on the level of being a ballet dancer.

The temporary staff consisted of a carpenter, a lugubrious Liverpudlian who was passionate about dove-tailing. I was as bad at carpentry as I’d been at raffia. He used to pick up whatever I was trying to make, hold it up to the bare bulb of the basement, and squint along it with one eye. ‘Luke at dat,’ he’d say gloomily. ‘It’s all cock-eyed.’

Music took place in Twimbo’s sitting-room, a dusty and masculine apartment with leather furniture and an upright piano, on the ground floor of the older part of the house. We didn’t learn to play instruments, just to sing, either in unison or two-part harmony, a selection of sea shanties or folksongs. We were taught by a small, cheerful and somehow pathetic lady called Miss Nangle who also accompanied us on the upright. It was all perfectly agreeable and the songs: ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor?’, ‘As I was going to strawberry fair’, rather jolly. The only time there was a near disaster was when we were learning a new folksong allegedly written by Henry VIII. It was called ‘The Carrion Crow’ and one of the verses went:

Oh wife, oh wife bring out my bow

Heigh ho, the carrion crow.

Oh wife, oh wife bring out my bow,

For I mean to shoot that carrion crow.

Twiggle Twiggle Twig Dum Twee!

The trouble was the absurd last line. Every time we sang it through, I became more and more hysterical and hysteria is catching. Miss Nangle was very patient. ‘Boys! Boys! It’s not that funny! Now calm down! Let’s start again, shall we? One, two…’ It was no good. Eventually we could hardly get through the first line before the thought struck us that only four lines on we would have to deal with ‘Twiggle Twiggle Twig Dum Twee’, and we would dissolve into giggles.

It was a hot summer’s day and the sash window was wide open. We stood in a semi-circle round the piano and I was facing the window. I looked up, wiping away my tears, and saw that Mr Twyne, who could always move remarkably quietly for so large a man, was leaning on the window-sill thoughtfully smoking his pipe. How long had he been there? Did he realise I had started the whole thing off? His expression was enigmatic, but that didn’t mean anything. The fact that I had stopped laughing so suddenly had an instant effect even on those with their backs to the window. We froze like a herd of deer scenting danger. Miss Nangle, facing the piano, had no notion as to why the atmosphere had changed so rapidly. We sang through the first verse, including the refrain, as if it were a dirge. When I looked up, Mr Twyne had vanished like a ghost.

‘That’s better!’ said Miss Nangle, ‘But now it’s
too
serious. It’s meant to be fun! We’ll try it again next week. Turn to “Bobbie Shafto”.’

Miss Nangle also taught me the piano at home.

Art was my favourite subject. We were taught it on Saturday morning by a man called Captain Banks or, as Twyne pronounced it, ‘Ceptin Benks’. He was short and rather dapper and quite old. He was very bald and freckled with many grave marks on his hands. He smelt strongly of scent. His method of teaching was to demonstrate on the blackboard with coloured chalks. He taught us about perspective, shading, highlights, the ideal proportions of the face and body. He would run at the blackboard, make a mark with the chalk giving it a little twist at the end, a little flourish, and then retreat backwards equally fast to examine the effect with his head on one side and a look of total self-satisfaction.

Sometimes he gave us his own small water-colours to copy. They were poor things, very wishy-washy, usually of boats pulled up on a shore. They were framed in
passe partout.
He didn’t tell us much about the history of art, but spent a long time attacking the modernists whom he felt had robbed him of recognition. In particular he raged against ‘the Sandon Studio artists’, many of whom I knew. ‘They paint purple women with green hair,’ he shouted, working himself up into a paroxysm of rage.

One Saturday, instead of copying the boats, we went to Sudley with Captain Banks to look at Cousin Emma’s pictures. He’d asked me to arrange this expedition and I had. I was in fact rather proud that he should have considered that a relation of mine had a collection worth visiting, especially as Captain Banks had never taken us to the Walker Art Gallery. Perhaps, though, that was because Twyne wouldn’t allow it. As it was open to the public, it may have come under the same taboo as cinemas, theatres or shops.