John Bull's Schooldays

City Ways

By KINGSLEY AMIS ST. HILDA'S was a place where they had big girls and little girls, but little boys only. All categories appeared to be heavily represented. My bewilderment on the first day, sharpened by the severe bite a boy called John Skelton gave me, went on for a long time. I was a solitary in school hours, coming to life only at tea-time, an occasion often delayed by voluntary/compulsory service in the cloakroom, where I was retained in order to tie the laces of those unable or unwilling to secure their own outdoor shoes. Thereafter I Would play with the children of my parents' friends, including a Roman Catholic lad who traumatised me by telling me that God was always about and by showing me his set of images. Of my pastoresses and mistresses I remember best Miss Crampton, who taught French among many other things and kept saying, 'Le shat: the cat'— one of those pictures from the past that seem never to lose their freshness. I fell in love with Miss Barr, whom I see now as a tall, Eton-cropped figure of improbable elegance. She took English, and it is here, perhaps, that we can date my first devotion to the glories of our literature.

It was at Norbury College that I became aware of the vast free entertainment that school life usually represents. Handwork was my only Worry : my cardboard bus and plywood cigarette box never got off the drawing-board and this humiliated me. In everything else I was fine. From Babington I learnt the chief basic rhymes and enough rude words to hold my end up in conversation. I made Hall ary in a playground fight. Taylor and I discussed the works of Percy F. Westerman and Ian Hay. With Dominy I \would go as far as Streatham Astoria to see Richard Barthelmess or Gary Cooper on the screen, the Paramount Tiller Girls or Troise and his Mandoliers (vocalist : Don Carlos) in the stage show. I took forty minutes to make four not out in a pick-up game, played left-back for the 3rd XI against St. Joseph's and was last but one in the 440 Under-Twelve. I fell. in love— alas, to no more purpose than before—with the headmaster's daughter, a gay girl who had a fringe and liked Gracie Fields and Henry Hall.

Mr. Waller used to read books out when he should have been teaching us English. They were about the war ('I've copped it in the back, sir') or lethal espionage in Eastern Europe ('for God's sake shoot me and have done with it'). He left after a time and Mr. Ashley came, bringing with him Alfred Noyes, The Merchant of Venice and essays to do with Beauty. Once we all had to write a poem in blank verse about the miracle of St. Sophia. Mine was ninety-nine lines long and Mr. Ashley said it was the best. I began liking English for its own sake. About that time my first published work of fiction, a 300-word story called 'The Sacred Rhino of Uganda,' came out in the school magazine. In it a certain Captain Hartly, evidently less well up in Ugandan ma,urs than a 'veteran hunter' had any right to be, shot the rhino and was instantly set upon by some 'native worshippers' it had. He got away with his life, I forget how. These events were recounted in taut impressionistic prose : 'He clutches at his side . . . pitches forward . . . unconscious. . . With this the initial, experimental period of my writing came to an end.

In 1934 I appeared at the City of London School, a large, rather oppressively dignified building on the Victoria Embankment. It had lots of identical passages and a vast agoraphobic playground filled with self-possessed boys in black coats and striped trousers. At this time I was an undersized, law-abiding, timid person. Fear made me vomit on the first few mornings but 1 quickly found that this was excessive. Nobody ever used me unkindly, except perhaps King (Science Ill) who at tuck-shop time every morning would greet me with 'Hallo, Curly' and ruffle my hair, which I currently wore in two brilliantined flaps. His bearing, the tone of his voice and the redness of his own hair made me afraid to punch him. I was soon reconciled, however, and began to be fascinated by the social possibilities of this immense new environment. My 'fellows, 1 saw dimly, were drawn from a wide variety of social strata : accents varied from those that discomforted me to those that made me feel superior. But example at once taught me to put such attitudes aside. To be accepted you had only to be amiable; to be liked you needed pre-eminently to be able to raise %a laugh occa- sionally—but here the most vapid clowning served as well as wit.

Efficient mimics of the staff were especially highly regarded. I developed an imitation of the headmaster : 'Get it right, not wrong. Black, not white. Cat, not dog.' This measure had the double advantage of securing esteem and pro- viding a counterpoise to the terrified veneration I felt for my original. As at every school one ever hears about, the masters were imitable eccentrics almost to a man. This can only partly be put down to the stylising effects teaching has on demeanour. What is also at work in this situation is the nature of the observer. To the pre- pubertial eye all grown-up behaviour is so fan- tastic as to defeat 'discrimination; the youth in his last year or two at school is already taking out naturalisation papers for the adult world. It is the boy in his early teens who sees, that world with the delighted, faintly hostile astonishment of the tourist, who is entertained to the limits of endurance by its quaint tribal customs, its grotesque ritual dances, its catering, scowling, gesticulating witch-doctors. And if he later be- comes a novelist he must strive to recapture, not indeed the undifferentiating vision of childhood, but the adolescent's coldly wondering stare.

However that may be, I shall never forget Mr. Marsh sucking the earpiece of his glasses, or Mr. Penn accusing us all of having eaten his biscuits, or Mr. Carruthers's imperturbability when Rum- sey and I dropped the suitcase of broken glass —a long-treasured riot-mechanism--at the back of the room. I remember these things not as facts, but as little mental films with a complete set of sound-effects. The most noteworthy figure of all, I realise now, was Mr. Copping, who played (one at a time) the flute and the double-bass, who spoke with an Attic Greek accent of the fifth century, who once captivated us all by replying with incomparable, table-turning deftness to a disingenuous question from Rigden about castra- tion : 'I don't know whether any of you have ever been to a horse-fair,' the answer led off- 1 can hear those Periclean tones now. As I do so I marvel at the way the 1938 version of Mr. Copping still seems older than the 1958 version of me, a trick of time which will no doubt remain as effective in 1978.

My education, pursued with some obduracy by the masters, was filled out and humanised by the other boys. From Moses I learnt about Fats Waller and Charles Morgan; from Bateman, air- pistols and the dating of girls; from Lightfoot, Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov; from Williams- Ashman, upper-middle-class life, comprising the possession of actual pictures (not reproductions) by living artists, the voluntary reading of The Oxford Book of French Verse, and the notion of foreign travel. But at this distance it is people like Wybrow that I recall with most reverence; Wybrow, that great rampager and heresiarch, loping through the cloisters with one hand ready to dart out in assault, the other clutched inward for defence, his whole being permanently gathered for thz delivery of a jeering guffaw, his ravaged face and elbowing, shoving demeanour an advertisement of instinctive revolt. He treated me tolerantly enough and got into the habit of yelling 'Hiya, Sergeant Delius' when I appeared, in allusion to my OTC rank and my imitation of the composer 'three months before the end'— a popular request item at that time. Whenever I rememlnr Wybrow I am saddened at the thought of all that pulsating violence going to waste in commerce or trade, instead of enlivening the culture pages of a Sunday newspaper.

I moved into the sixth form, which meant that I could use the front entrance, go out to lunch at the Lyons' near Blackfriars Bridge, and be harangued slightly by Mr. Copping, in his in- carnation as my junior housemaster, for hardly ever turning up at the sports ground. I pointed out that this amenity was situated in the far side of London from my home and that attendance there of any but minimal frequency would inter- fere with my studies. (Inwardly 1 congratulated myself on the fact that athletic, equally with in- tellectual,. deficiency had no effect on one's schoolfellows' attitude.) In fact I liked having my studies interfered with, but by disruptives of my own choosing : trying, to paint in water- colour, reading up on Dadaism, finding out about architectiire—three branches of endeavour I pur- sued not far,. but far enough to last me for the rest of my life. I also wrote some poetry; along thing called Prelude' was foisted on the magazine editor..lt was a kind of suburbanite's Waste Land tizzied up with bits of Wilde. In the same issue or thereapouts there was a story about the war in Spain by the secretary of the school branch. of the. League of Nations Union. I joined this or- ganisation. Meetings were held in concert with the City of London School for Girls.

It was a great, surprise when, in the summer of 1939, one or two people suggested to me that there might be going to be a war with Germany. I had not had time to think this over when we were abruptly evacuated to Marlborough. The haversack rations 'in the train were delicious, far better than those we had got used to on OTC field days. Out of the window everything began to look very countrified and was still, looking it as we drew into Marlborough, which turned out to be in Wiltshire. Accommodation was hastily or- ganised: billets in the town for the majority, barns with army-type beds in Ahem for a select band that included me. During the next few days ate about twenty tins of sweetened condensed milk, the discarded residue of my companions' train rations. My appetite sharpened by the country air, I also ate a good deal in the dining- hall of Marlborough College, an institution few of us had previously had cause to know about. After one such meal, at which the sixth-formers had acted as waiters (in anticipation of Christmas Day in the army), I was standing talking to my friend Richenberg near the front gate of the college. A fifth-former called Horwood, whom we both knew slightly, came over to us.

`You've heard, have you'?' Horwood asked. 'He's taken Danzig and bombed Warsaw.'

'Are you sure?'

'Just came over the wireless. I got it off one of the cooks.'

After a moment, Richcnberg said : 'Well, any- way, I should say. we've got a fair chance of beating him.'

'A fair chance?' I echoed. 'We'll wipe him up.'

They both looked at me. 'They reckon his air force is pretty hot,' Horwood said. 'And his tanks.'

'Well, we've got an air force and tanks, haven't we?'

'Not like he's got, according to what I read.'

`The Polish army isn't mechanised,' Richen- berg said.

'But we've been sending them stuff for months now.'

'We haven't got enough stuff for ourselves.'

'Oh, nonsense,' 1 said.

One of them said 'We'll see' or something of the kind and the conversation shifted, probably to what school life would henceforward be like. This question, with its attachments. of home- sickness and selfish anxiety, interested me more than British military supplies to Poland, though I was to recall Richenberg's line on this when, years later, I happened to see a list of the 'stuff' Chamberlain's Government had actually sent : the largest item was four gun-turrets and mount- ings for a Polish light cruiser. At the time, the colloquy I have tried to re-create did not have on me the effect it should have had. I did not reflect that Horwood, a boy with no pretensions to being `well-informed,' might be considered to' have shown me up as -naive and complacent. Nor did I then take occasion to execrate those of my parents' friends who knew people at the office who had got chatting in the train to chaps who had been told confidentially by someone in the know that Germany's economy would not stand a six months' war, or who had been drinking at the golf club with a. fellow whose brother-in-law had driven his car into—guess what?---a card- board tank on a road near Vienna. But after all, the Poles, not to mention the French, were at the moment still in the field.

With commendable speed, the City of London School tackled the dual task of turning itself into a boarding school and using the same class- rooms, sports facilities, chapel, sanatorium and goodness knows what else as another boarding school. None of the masters showed signs of the appalling extra burden of work, replete with boredom and irritation, they must have had to shdulder. The boys at any rate were happy as the result of novel surroundings, kind and indul- gent treatment from their billet-landladies and a whole new world of illegality to explore. They received little comfort or friendliness from the Marlborough College boys, who remained, apart from some contact between squash champions and the like, entirely aloof. The unlooked-for descent of 600 or 700 London day-boys, many of them noisy and tatterdemalion, was no gift from the gods, but after a time some host-like gestures, in the form of joint debates or even invitations to tea, might reasonably have been expected. None were made to my knowledge in the five terms I was at school in Marlborough. During that period I spent two minutes in con- versation with Marlborough boys; they were acquaintances of Richenberg's, now captain of the school. When I look back on that whole situation, it appears to me very surprising, and I would give much to be able to see, in retrospect, the figure of Wybrow ranging contumeliously across the front court of the college, kicking a Marlborough prefect's rolled umbrella out of his hand or jostling an important parent at the gate. But he had left us at the end of that summer.

These reflections, like so many others, did not occur to me ut the time. I was busy finding out that organised games, even if approached late in life, were enjoyable and could be fitted plausibly enough into a mode of existence that also in- cluded Mozart and Louis Armstrong. I joined the chapel choir, and singing in four-part har- mony revealed itself as the apex, still unrivalled in my experience, of non-sensual pleasures. The rural attractions were tremendous, imparting a kind of zest to adolescent melancholy, and to this day my every attempt to visualise a generic country scene calls up some image of Marl- borough. The barn where I ate all the condensed milk was soon evacuated; half a dozen of us established ourselves in a cottage on the Bath road. Here there were conversations with Richen- berg and Rose that afforded an optimistic pre- view• of the university. It was in this direction that our lives were now bending themselves, and there, in due course, we eventually departed, my two companions going into residence in October, 1940, myself in the following April. 1 was de- layed, I used to plead, by having switched from classics to English, and also by being forced to take Higher Certificate three years running. 1 passed all three times, naturally, but by a steadily decreasing margin. By 1945 or so I should prob- ably have been failing altogether.

Life at a large day school in a large city em- bodies a freedom which I should guess to be unique, a freedom based on heterogeneity. Where there is no orthodoxy there can be no conformity and no intolerance. This was certainly true of the City of London School. I have never in my life known a community where factions of any kind were less in evidence, where differences of class: upbringing, income group and religion counted for so little. In particular, although perhaps 15 per cent. of the boys were Jewish, not a single instance of even the mildest anti-semitism came to my attention in the seven years I was a pupil there. The academic teaching was of a standard not easily to be surpassed, but more important still was that lesson about how to regard one's fellows, a lesson not delivered but enacted. Thanks indeed for that.