John Bull's Schooldays

The Best That Money Could Buy

By QUENTIN CREWE MY parents gave me the most expensive education England offers. They could do that for me, they said, and no more. Once it was over, I would be on my own. Their reward for this prodigious outlay was simply that I should do well at school. It followed inevitably that I should do well in the world.

Aged just seven and with these precepts ring- ing in my head, I set out for the Kent coast and ten years of total bewilderment.

I suppose there was nothing about this par- ticular 'preparatory school for boys to distin- guish it from a hundred other such establish- ments. The buildings were bare and plain. A tunnel led under the road to two sizeable playing fields and a swimming pool. We slept in dormi- tories for about a dozen boys and worked in a vast classroom, which could be divided by slid- ing doors into three rooms.

Ordinary though it may have been by scholas- tic standards, it seemed to me a place of wild improbability.

The headmaster I remember primarily as a man who wore two different kinds' of slippers— one red pair, one black. The red pair had heels and were used to correct more serious breeches of discipline; the heel-less black pair were for lesser crimes. It puzzled me that the quality of any given offence varied with whichever pair he happened to have on.

'I don't much like your eating in bed,' he would say when sporting his black ones.

'Eating in bed is the most disgusting thing a boy can do,' was his judgment in red slippers.

I had valued justice as being invariable at home. I learned rapidly that it had quite a differ- ent flavour in my new surroundings.

There was the schoolboys' code of honour, which provided that one should submit to name- less indignities and sufferings with no complaint. This enabled the older boys to feather their nests in the manner of Chicago gangsters.

One day a camera arrived for me by post.

'I see you got a parcel this morning,' said one of Al Capone's lieutenants. He himself never carried out any operation. He merely directed affairs with the same skill which later made him a successful producer. '

'Oh, nothing much really.'

'Let's see.'

don't think you would be very interested.'

My arm was twisted and my desk wrenched open. They took the camera to Al Capone, promising to return it when I had learned to speak the truth. I never saw it again. The code dictated that I should bear this in silence. To report it was unthinkable.

Each master had his own code. One of them used to judge a boy by his reactions to what he called his trade mark. He would roll up your shorts and strike you an open-handed blow high on the inside of the thigh. If you cried out it was hard ever to get good marks in his class. Another, a great armadillo of a man, had a different criterion—athletics. A good boxer was assured of success in algebra.

The education meted out in this place was of an uncertain nature, which I soon came to sus- pect. Miss Carey, the language mistress, told us that French should be spoken in such a way as to sound like 'wind whistling through a keyhole.' As I lived in France I had other ideas.

History had an Alice in Wonderland charac- ter, without its charm. Battles were the thing. The English kings didn't like the French kings so they had a war. The battles were Crecy, Poitiers, Agincourt. Draw maps.

The respect for Monarchy which was instilled into us would have made Metternich look like a republican. The only rebel who merited any approval was Simon de Montfort, but after all he had married Henry's sister.

Imagine then my surprise at the arrival of Mr. Hall, a tall, nervous, balding man who was considering taking orders. In the first class he took, he explained the system of electing Popes. The Cardinals were sealed up at the time of choosing Pius XII. He reviewed the history of the Papacy simply and honestly. My astonish- ment was unending. Here was history, first related to the present day, secondly made absorbing.

Mr. Hall was the first master to suggest that Africans and Indians were human beings with rights of their own, the first man to explain that battles were not necessarily the best solution to every problem, the first person to make us won- der whether it might not be right to dispense with kings on occasions.

He was, of course, too good to last. He had not the least idea of keeping order, for he treated us like human beings, which we had long since ceased to be. And he had a temper which would flare up once in a while, under the provocation of paper darts and ink bombs. One morning he hit a particularly odious boy. In this there was nothing surprising. But, in the afternoon Mr. Hall's good nature had returned. He publicly apologised to the boy. Such sanity was too much. He left soon after, universally derided by boys and masters.

I too left, for the time had come for the second, even more expensive, part of my costly educa- tion. I was to go to Eton.

Once again I set off full of advice, this time reinforced with a curitms document with a large blob of sealing wax at the foot, which my father had made me sign in duplicate. It read as follows: 1, Quentin Hugh Crewe, do hereby undertake to work to the very best of my ability for so long as I remain at Eton. If I slack, as I have done in the past, I fully understand that my parents reserve the right to remove me from Eton and send me to some local school. Given under my hand. . . . It seemed to me that, although my father was by nature eccentric, there must be something about school which made everyone lose his senses. Eton, I was given to understand, was a microcosm of the world. If I could learn to live there, I could learn to live anywhere. I was soon to appreciate the truth of this, though not in the way my father meant.

I did not, at that age, question the merits or otherwise of public schools. My object was merely to adjust myself and escape notice. The most normal behaviour, I imagined, from what my father said, would best achieve this purpose. It was not so.

It would be tedious to enumerate all the sen- sible things we were forbidden to do. A few Will suffice to show the futility of my hopes. We were allowed to walk only on one side of the High Street. There were many useful shops on the other side. To get from one to another we had to cross the road, walk, say, thirty yards on the permitted side and cross back again. Our overcoat collars must always be turned up, whatever the weather. We were forbidden to roll our umbrellas up neatly, but must carry them flapping hopelessly like wounded rooks.

The schoolboy code reigned in an adapted form. Here discipline was maintained in the houses by an autonomous clique of senior boys, with the right of corporal punishment. There was no appeal from their decisions. Once they beat my brother for making too much noise falling downstairs.

The Eton Society, 'Pop' (was there ever a more sickening name?), was a self-elected group, wielding totalitarian powers over the whole school. They arrogated to themselves certain rights and enforced them with a specially designed cane. When I say that the trivial absur- dities, mentioned above, forbidden to the rest of the school were, with a few extravagances of dress and the privilege of sitting on a certain wall, almost the sum of their rights, the paucity of this Society's imagination is revealed.

It was not the tedium of running messages, lighting fires and cooking tea for my seniors which depressed me, nor the beatings if I did it inefficiently (incompetent was their favourite word), but that they could want me to do these things. It was strange to me that people so little older than myself could enjoy creating barriers to friendship and could wish for me to do things badly so that they could punish me.

And the masters. What place did they hold in the promised microcosm?

1 was the only new boy in a house which was being taken over that term or 'half' by a new housemaster. Our common strangeness drew us together and he asked me to do something for him.

'Eton masters have a way of becoming peculiar after a time,' he said. Will you tell me if eve!: you think I am getting odd?'

said 1 would.

It was not hard to see what he meant. What was the reason for that other monstrous shamb- ling housemaster? He had a hobo's slouch and grime. He had a reputation for beating the boys in his house with an oar, contrary to all regula- tions (beating was the prerogative of youths at their most sadistic age).

Who could explain Mr. Sanderson-Smith Who held up his hands in the middle of the geometry class and pronounced, 'Chaps, chaps, God is in this room'?

Mr. Philips had a vendetta with Mr. Holland- Stevens, who held his classes in the -next-door rooin. 'Scuffle your feet and stamp,' he would order us. 'Louder. Ruin his class. He shan't teach them.'

Mr. Firth-Kent strode wildly about barefoot and made one construct ikosahedrons in paper. His teaching, however, lasted. I can still recite Pi to its thirty-sixth decimal place, as engraved on the tomb of Ludolf Van Ceulen.

Apropos of nothing, Mr. Corbett would cover his mouth with .a vast expensive handkerchief and announce thickly, 'I am a passionate man.' He would then sit silent and shivering all over With rage for half an hour, while we sat trembling too, with nothing to do.

How many more there were, the venerable, the shabby, the lewd and the stupid and a few, a very few, real teachers.

The day was bound to come. It happened on a morning when my housemaster was delivering us one of the most embarrassing lectures on self-control. He stood in front of the fire in his Corps uniform, with thick leather leggings. Eventually the heat from the fire seeped through the leather to his calves. It must have been extremely painful, yet the sight of his furious, wild and unavailing struggles to get the things off made us laugh.

He was still enraged when he came on his rounds to our rooms that evening.

'But can't you see it is funny if a man lectures you at great length on self-control and then can't get his leggings off for lack of it? You asked me to tell you. I think you are losing your sense of humour and that's what makes all the others so peculiar.'

I was beaten once for impertinence and again for saying that that proved my point.

I suppose we learnt something from the very few, but my father was inevitably disappointed. I was not a success. I was too busy trying to understand.