A Young Man's Passage (6 page)

Barry Jones had also been deemed acceptable and during that summer holiday we played with our guinea pigs, cycled round Bushey Park and wondered what life would be like at our new school.

There was quite a lot of correspondence over those weeks, letters typed on quality notepaper, always headed with the school crest and Latin motto:
A Minimis Incipe
. One Saturday my mother took me to Peter Jones in Sloane Square to kit me out with what was required: not just a school uniform but a summer blazer, house tie, cap, cricket whites, cricket jumper, two rugby shirts, socks, shorts, boots, satchel, fountain pens – on it went. A lot of this was a waste of money, of course. I played rugby twice a week but it was a matter of personal pride to me that I never once touched the ball. I didn’t understand the rules, for one thing. Shirt, shorts and socks were pristine from one week to the next, laundry not required. With one exception. Shivering on the sidelines, the ball landed in my arms as I hugged myself against the cold. Jolted out of my quiet contemplations by people screaming my name, I ran towards the goal and put it down at the spot I’d noticed over the months was of great importance. I turned expectantly, expecting congratulations, but none were forthcoming. Apparently I’d run to the wrong end, scoring for the opposition.

Some summer reading was also recommended, hair length specified and a copy of the school rules supplied so I could learn them and adhere. It was all a bit daunting.

As was getting there. I’d been used to simply crossing the road to get to the Sacred Heart, but now I had to get to Ealing by 8.50 a.m. and not be late. That was one of the rules. From Teddington this involved walking to the station, catching a train to Richmond, getting on the 65 bus to Ealing Broadway, then the E2 to Eaton Rise. For my new life I’d have to leave home at 7.20 a.m. My mother would lay the table the night before, partially segmenting my half grapefruit with a sharp knife and turning it upside down in a cereal bowl so it wouldn’t dry out. In the winter she would make me porridge, standing at the stove in her dressing gown.

At the time this was deemed worth it because St Benedict’s was considered to be such a special school and I was lucky to be going there. I did this for seven years, was rarely ill or late, and it never occurred to me to play truant.

Unlike my sister Beverley, who left for school every morning for a whole term but then went around to her friend’s house and hid in their loft all day. She was only rumbled when the parents’ evening rolled round and her form teacher said, ‘Beverley who? I’ve never heard of her.’

Her rebellious nature manifested itself in another curious way; when told to go and have a bath she would lock the bathroom door and sit on the windowsill smoking, swishing the water round occasionally in case anyone was listening. She’d then wet her hair in the sink and come downstairs supposedly bathed. Unfortunately she had no slippers on and my mother noticed the tell-tale dirt between her toes.

So, one September morning in 1970, I arrived at the big, red Victorian mansion in Eaton Rise, London W5, that was St Benedict’s middle school. Here I would stay for two years until graduating to the upper school, a rather forbidding mix of old and new buildings just down the road, teeming with big boys with deep voices.

The middle school was a kinder, gentler place, lots of lino and polished banisters leading to the very top of the house where lino gave way to carpet, where the headmaster’s office was. The classrooms, three for each year, were on the lower two floors, and to the side of the playground was a 1960s prefab building where school assemblies and PE classes were held.

Each year was streamed, which meant clever boys were assigned to 3(a), average boys to 3(1) and the least bright to 3(2). I was in 3(2). After the initial shock of being named and shamed as the bottom of the pile, I decided we were the boys who had the most fun: at least, if you’re counting laughs per minute.

Not all of us were stupid; some were just naughty, asking inane questions just to annoy the teacher, humming quietly to make others laugh or even, if you sat next to the right boy during French (when the lights were dimmed and the blinds drawn to facilitate the instructive slide show), given to undoing their flies and guiding your hand inside. I’m sure that kind of fun didn’t go on in 3(a), where they were all far too busy being bright and brilliant.

All boys were known by their second names only, which took a bit of getting used to. Especially if they had names like Noonan, Lavarini, Girenas or Pecko, which sadly some of them did. At that age I couldn’t get my mouth round Pecko even if I tried.

At the end of the first term, Smith, Spragg and Nutt were promoted to 3(1). This was a bit like entering a new social stratum and peer pressure demanded friendship be replaced with disdain.

I quickly made new friends with my own kind. One boy invited me to sleep over at his house and plied me with cider. We then embarked on a curious game of strip poker that meant I had to remove an item of clothing whatever the cards said. When I continued to lose despite having nothing left to shed, he said, ‘Ah, that means I get to do whatever I want to you.’

And so he did. I didn’t really know what was going on, but it would have been churlish to stop him. A few weeks later I was invited to go one Saturday to the Science Museum by another boy. As we travelled home on the tube he whispered in my ear, ‘I’ve heard about you. I can’t wait to get you home . . .’

So I was a kind of boy-scout version of a gangster’s moll, passed around like a bowl of cheesy balls.

Our headmaster, Father G, was kind and paternal. Late forties, tall with a ruddy complexion and big yellow teeth. His eyes twinkled with wit and warmth. He taught us Latin and geography twice a week, and I looked forward to his lessons. He had a dry sense of humour and would send up his own authority by making mock-angry-headmaster announcements. If he asked a question my hand always shot up, even if I didn’t know the answer, because we always had a bit of banter between us whatever the outcome.

The ordeal of the long bus journey home was eased somewhat when I discovered the benefits of sitting downstairs. The top deck was always the preserve of schoolboys and smokers. When the bus got nearer Kingston, the workers from the Hawker Siddeley factory got on and came upstairs, smelling of oil and carrying tartan zippy bags containing their now empty Tupperware lunch boxes.

One day it was full upstairs and that’s when I discovered the joys of sitting downstairs betwixt and between the women, who of course talk more intimately to each other than the men, who are too busy coughing and rolling their own.

Once I heard a woman say to the stranger beside her: ‘I’ve got three children you know, and a husband on a machine . . .’

I told the story at the dinner table that night and so enjoyed the laugh I received that thereafter I used to travel downstairs deliberately, the better deck for eavesdropping on elderly ladies going to or from the shops.

Other tantalising snippets I recall overhearing were:

‘Don’t mind me, I’ve got skin cancer.’

‘The morning isn’t the same without a sausage.’

‘Shut up, Julie, you’re nothing but a fucking foulmouthed cow.’

‘Stop dribbling, Doreen!’

And my all-time favourite:

‘But there ARE no motorbikes in Harlesden . . .’

BEING A ST BENEDICT’S
boy, I would obviously stand if the seating was limited. It was a school rule: ‘All boys shall offer their seat to people on the bus.’ How times have changed.

About half our lessons were taught by monks; the remainder were taught by real people. My favourite lesson was English language and my best teacher was Mr Moore. He was dramatic and a bit fey, but a brilliant and inspirational teacher. Once a week we did Exciting Writing, where we could make up our own stories, usually on a topic we’d discussed beforehand. Once, as soon as he entered the classroom, a volatile boy called Heinz flew at him, shouting and screaming incomprehensibly for a couple of minutes. This boy was always in trouble and had been beaten by Father G several times in his carpeted office. We all froze. When Heinz stopped as suddenly as he’d begun, Mr Moore calmly told us to open our exercise books and write down our reaction to the staged drama we had just witnessed.

When our second year started, we were treated as the ‘big boys’ of the middle school. In a year’s time we would enter the upper school and we needed to be toughened up. Father G’s smile was flashed with less frequency and a harsher tone was used all round.

A selected few boys of our year were named as prefects, but none of us plebs from what was now Lower 4(2). Surprisingly, I was awarded the role of ‘apple boy’, a lesser honour but an honour nonetheless. It brought with it a tiny amount of status and meant I spent morning break distributing Cox’s apples for a penny a time through a kind of stable door opposite the toilets.

Sport was a big part of the curriculum. We had PE lessons twice a week, rugby or cricket twice a week depending on the season, and last thing on Wednesday afternoon was swimming – compulsory unless you had a note from a parent to excuse you. A coach would arrive and take us to the public baths in Ealing. Each night before bedtime I used to pack the necessary ‘kit’ in my school ‘shoe bag’.

One Wednesday I forgot my swimming things. I was as sorry as anyone. Particularly so as the Strip Poker Boy often required me to share a changing cubicle with him. He once said to me as we got changed, ‘Hear that noise? That’s them next door having a wank.’

And there was really no other explanation.

When the time came for everyone to go off in the coach for swimming, I and three other boys, similarly trunk-less and note-less, remained in the classroom, knowing we were in trouble.

‘We’ll get the whack,’ said Mercieca, unconcerned, a friend and fellow rebel of Heinz’s and no stranger to corporal punishment. No one had ever laid a finger on me, punishment-wise, and I couldn’t have been more scared if you’d told me I was about to mount the electric chair. A dinner lady at the Sacred Heart had once slapped me on the back of the legs for talking in the queue and I was in a state of complete outrage for weeks, even though it didn’t hurt much.

We heard Father G approaching and the door opened. He looked furious and his face was beetroot-red.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked us coldly.

We whimpered our various excuses.

‘Get upstairs to my office,’ he spat.

When we arrived in the carpeted office, all bookshelves and easy chairs with a stately desk by the window, we stood and waited in silence for a minute until he followed us in.

He marched to his desk, opened a drawer and, with something of a flourish, pulled out a leather strap. It was about a foot long, half an inch thick, studded with brass round the perimeter. It wasn’t adapted – it was clearly manufactured with the express purpose of inflicting pain. As each year master had a different variation on this weapon, must we suppose that, at some point in the academic year, various disciples of Christ sat around a catalogue and hummed and hahed about the various merits of the cane or the strap?

‘Three whacks each. You first, Mercieca,’ said Father G.

Mercieca stepped forward with the nonchalance of a veteran, leant across the seat of a worn armchair and placed each hand on the wings attached to the back. Father G approached, lifted the flap caused by the two vents at the back of Mercieca’s jacket and swiftly, in one movement, lifted the front panel of his cassock and tossed it over his right shoulder. With the strap in his right hand, his face distorted, eyes bulging and lips thrust forward, primate-like, he grunted as each swipe of the strap hit its target.

There was no pause between the three strikes, it was a brief, frenzied attack, then he stood back, inhaling noisily.

The other two boys followed and I was saved until last. None of the others had made any noise, or reacted much at all. I did. I cried out in pain and was told to shut up. When we got back to the classroom and gingerly sat down, Mercieca said, ‘Blimey! He hit you much harder than us!’

It wasn’t just the stinging pain or the humiliation of having my backside flogged for a mere matter of forgetfulness, it was the terrifying transformation of Father G from paternal, holy priest who fed me the Body of Christ at mass to furious strap-wielding monster. It was a lesson in life that I would never forget.

The next day in geography he tried to resume the jolly banter that had always been a hallmark of our relationship. I was having none of it. If he asked me a question I gave a monosyllabic answer and gazed wistfully out of the window: also, presumably, a beatable offence, but he got the message.

I never willingly spoke to him again.

Beatings were an everyday occurrence, though, and I’m sure that part of me felt I had somehow graduated. I was ‘one of the boys’, or so I liked to think. Usually boys were beaten in the carpeted office over the armchair, but if your crime was a particularly heinous one then a ‘public execution’ was in order.

Later Robert Heinz had one of these, although I can’t remember what for. He was called onto the stage during morning assembly (after prayers), his misdemeanour announced and then he was told to bend over. We all held our breath as he was given six very hefty stripes with all the energy Father G could muster. It was terribly shocking to witness, a bit like seeing news footage of someone being beheaded in Rwanda.

Afterwards in the cloakroom he dropped his trousers and showed us the thick, blood-red welts that criss-crossed his buttocks, one or two on the back of his thighs where the headmaster had missed, or maybe Heinz had been involuntarily propelled forward with the velocity of the previous hit. Heinz wasn’t tearful about it like I had been – he was furious, calling Father G all the names under the sun.

A week later he got his revenge.

We were all in on it. Heinz had sneaked into the office during lunchbreak and stolen the strap. Everyone had a close look at it, this evil weapon that had caused so much pain to so many of us. I held it upright and it flopped from side to side like one of those extra-extra large penises you occasionally encounter (or I do), which take forever to become fully tumescent.