Unwillingly to school
Matt Jacomb
STAND BEFORE YOUR GOD by Paul Watkins Faber, £14.99, pp.203 hen I was asked to write a review of a book about the experiences of a boy who went to the Dragon School then Eton, on the strength of the fact that I had been to both schools, I feared a dull dose of nostal- gia. At least it was written by Paul Watkins author of several acclaimed novels . . . my hopes were raised. They quickly proved
The place where my father's rented car had been parked was empty too. It was so dark, I couldn't see the tops of the trees. I didn't know how to get back to the Randolph Hotel and imagined that my parents had already left there. They were on their way back to America.
After his one aborted attempt to chal- lenge his fate, he never made another (don't be a quitter his father had taught him). He escaped instead by fantasising about returning home against impossible est and sometimes moving account of an ordinary boy travelling through the very private world of English private schools, and provides a genuine insight into the system. Watkins, maintaining a terse style throughout, writes through the increasingly sophisticated perceptions of a boy growing up.
At the age of seven he is flown across the Atlantic, shaken by the hand of his serious- faced father and placed in the charge of his housemaster, his journey begun. Ten min- utes later, he realised he had been tricked; he ran out into the driveway to find the road empty: odds and then by writing stories — a fanta- sy that may well keep him busy for the rest of his life. So he sets about trying to have fun and to control the constant teasing of his American accent. He learns to hide his American accent in England and his English accent in America — something I remember doing when public school accents were unusual in Islington.
Missing the shared experiences of his friends at home and unable or unwilling to embrace fully a self-image of a public schoolboy, he became a perpetual outsider. His holidays are spent waiting for his friends to start theirs and then finding that his English jokes hadn't travelled. The moments of fun are precious but they are temporary and are increasingly overshad- owed by images of despair and impending and inevitable parting.
Without any bitterness or any attempt to judge, through the eyes of a child and the words of a writer he witnesses many of the absurdities and tragedies of the system. The persistent (if subtle) sexual atmo- sphere at the Dragon is perhaps the most shocking: Watkins recounts that a boy ends up working as a child prostitute in the uni- versity parks. I myself wondered if a master just wanted to show me the photographs he had taken of me playing tennis when he invited me up to his room.
He describes the fantasy isolationism of Eton, corduroyed and [weeded 14-year- olds proudly mimicking fathers or uncles, boys falling in love with each other, porn mag barons, the corps. The school itself is a fantasy with its absurd uniform and bewil- dering rules — umbrellas unfastened (or is it fastened?), certain walls for certain boys to sit on, having to raise an index finger to an imaginary top hat as you pass a master.
For children to have to spend most of their time in this fantasy world seems to be a terrible waste. Terrible waste, too, the suicides which he describes — one of whom was my tennis partner. The one rule that he has found it hard to throw away (as have many others) was the unspoken social rule that you don't talk to people below your status because their status might well rub off on you . . . pragmatic, but a touch cold.
It is not an angry book and you do not feel sorry for the author, but you do feel sorry for some of his colleagues and for his father who sent his two sons across the Atlantic, died half way through their adventure and missed nearly half the years that they shared on the planet. Stand Before Your God is an excellent description of a childhood; it is also essential reading for any parent with the budget to consider boarding school for their children. The nat- ural conclusion is that it is a massive gam- ble; for those who think twice about putting a tenner on the National should think very carefully about boarding school. I predict that this book will still be being read long after the last 'lights out' has been called for the institutions it describes.
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