Coasting (18 page)

No secrets were permitted. In stern Protestant tradition, everything was above board and exposed to public view. On the dormitory windows there were bars but no curtains; the long uncarpeted room held twenty-four narrow iron bedsteads spaced, by order, at eighteen-inch intervals. This was just sufficiently close for your neighbor on either side to grab your genitals without polite preliminaries.

You wank me, I’ll wank you
. There was no more homosexual affection in the exchange than there was in fives or boxing: it was a compulsory game designed to teach the new boy that his private parts were private no longer. From now on, nothing was private. What else would you expect of a
public
school?

The doors had been removed from the toilet cubicles. Boys squatted in the row of open stalls, their trousers collapsed around their ankles, showing bald knees and moon faces as they emptied their bowels. At 7:15 each morning they queued in naked lines for the cold showers, while the
duty house monitor—another, older boy of seventeen or eighteen—stood by in a dressing gown, on guard.

“Get
under
it, Pearson! … Reynolds, soap your shitty arse, will you?”

The younger boys were “fags”; fags by name rather than fags by nature, since in England in the 1950s the word had not yet taken on its American meaning. A fag was simply a monitor’s personal servant. He swept the monitor’s study, cleaned his shoes, pressed his trousers, laid out his books, woke him with morning tea, and was permanently on call for chores and errands.

“Fa—a—ag!”

In the Lower Common Room, the fags sprinted for the stairs. The last to arrive in line at the shadowy corridor of monitors’ studies, with their superior scent of Woodbine cigarettes, coffee and old leather, got the job. I had asthma and was a hopeless runner, so the last in line was usually me.

I was no Jeeves. I fetched the wrong cricket pads from the pavilion, the wrong brand of gramophone needles from the music shop in town. I left smears on most of the things I did. When I ironed trousers, their creases turned, despite my best efforts, to a maze of intersecting lines like a railway junction. When I made cocoa for the monitors, the milk foamed in the pan and congealed on the stove in a mess of black gunk. Three or four times every term I was ritually beaten for being “slack.”

“You are a very
low
person, Raban.”

“Yes, Owen.”

Owen was Head of House, a far more impressive figure, with a far wider range of punishments at his disposal, than any master.

“What are you, Raban?”

“A low person, Owen.”

“You’re so low that I can hardly see you, Raban. You’re a wet squit.”

“Yes, Owen.”

“So take your horrible low wet squit presence out of my sight.”

To begin with, there was an internal blaze of hurt and
disbelief, like a bursting appendix. But after a few months the day-to-day terrorism of boarding school settled into an acceptable, at least survivable, normality. I knew well enough that beatings, crushings and physical humiliations were all in the curriculum if you were going to be properly educated as an Englishman. They were an essential part of the privilege for which our parents were making their well-trumpeted financial sacrifices. My own father had been at the school, in the same house, twenty-three years before me. I found his initials, J. P. C. P. R., scratched into the stone window frame of the Lower Common Room. He had regaled me with a memory, curiously cheerful, of being tossed in a laundry basket until his leg had been broken. King’s had made a Man of him, and it was going to make a Man of me.

The school, in the cathedral grounds at Worcester, had started life in the Dark Ages and claimed the Venerable Bede as its founder. But its character was wholly nineteenth-century, a shoestring model of Thomas Arnold’s Rugby. Since the middle of the nineteenth century it had been preparing the sons of clergymen, solicitors and the better sort of tradesman for the tough business of Empire. Wherever the map was still colored red, there were Old Vigornians. They were not grandees but functionaries: adjutants, A.D.Cs, civil servants, schoolteachers, tea planters, shipping agents … the gruff, uncomplaining men in the middle of things who sported an Old School tie that no one who had been to Winchester or Harrow would recognize.

Bulletins of their doings, apparently borne in cleft sticks, reached the school magazine, their tone breezy and facetious. There was the instantly identifiable style of the lonely O. V. keeping his pecker up in foreign parts:

The O. V. s were all around us. Their names were engraved on the pawnbroker’s hoard of silver cups, which it was the duty of the fags to polish up on Sunday mornings in the interval between cathedral Matins and lunch. The walls of the house refectory were stacked solid with their photographs. They stood, sat and squatted cross-legged in teams, holding rugger balls, cricket bats, oars and hockey sticks. The older O.V. s were in sepia—boys already looking as grim as middle-aged men, wearing linen shorts that came down below their knees. Their stares were blank, their faces masks. They were our future. Their tradition of duty, service, knuckling- to and playing the game was being passed intact to us, a millstone inheritance. At evening prayers we sang:

Owen, a cathedral organ scholar, was at the piano, keeping up a weepy, throbbing, juicy rhythm in the bass. Major MacTurk, our housemaster, late of the Scots Guards, led the singing. His black walrus mustache was going to salt-and-pepper at the tips, and his ears and nostrils sprouted fierce little curlicues of hair.

Our brethren ’neath the western sky were O. V. s every one. Sunset over Worcester was sunrise in Fiji and the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. On isolated hill stations, in mission
schools and trading posts, our brethren were emptying their tin bowls of shaving water and knotting their O.V. ties, assisted on every hand by native fags. The hymn, together with my heroic and somewhat simplified view of the realities of the British Empire, always made my eyes prickle unmanfully, thus disqualifying me from a Vigornian vocation at the very moment when the vocation itself tugged at its strongest.

Like most of the masters, Major MacTurk conspicuously retained his wartime military rank. For the school was staffed by men who were officers by inclination and teachers only by necessity. From Monday to Friday they strode about the school like fugitive crows in their threadbare university gowns. In class, they slogged through Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
, the Tudor kings and queens and French irregular verbs. No one could accuse them of unseemly enthusiasm. But on Saturday mornings, when the school Corps assembled in uniform, they came out in their true colors. In full battledress, their campaign ribbons glowing on their breasts, they twirled their swagger sticks and
grew
. Colonel Shepherd added three inches to his height; Captain Thomas turned from a tenor to a baritone in his Saturday Black Watch outfit; Major MacTurk, already frighteningly large in my world, swelled up like some mythical avatar of War, his mustache points freshly waxed, his eyebrows as black and spiky as a hedge of thorns.

The moment the bell sounded at eleven, the school became an Army company. Blancoed and bereted, equipped with rifles salvaged from the Boer War, we drilled on the parade ground in deadly earnest. The Corps was not a game: it was, more effectively than Greek or Latin, an educational foundation stone, a serious preparation for the life that was supposed to lie ahead of boys who went to King’s. The school kept Sandhurst supplied with a steady stream of officer cadets, and to do National Service without winning a commission was regarded as mildly disgraceful.

At thirteen-going-on-fourteen I was a daydreaming academic washout, but I could strip a Bren in sixteen seconds, calculate the trajectory of a bullet, with all due allowance
for dead ground, charge a stuffed sack with a bayonet, and interpret an Ordnance Survey map in terms of its possibilities for gunnery and tactical surprise. In the Corps, the slovenly and inattentive child came within a whisker of making the grade. There was a good deal of derision in the Lower Common Room when I was, to my own astonishment, promoted to lance corporal.

Major MacTurk said: “If you didn’t have asthma, Raban, and generally pulled your socks up, one might even begin to think in terms of Sandhurst, but alas—”

He might as well have pinned the Military Cross to my chest. Once a term, on Field Day, I got a taste of what it might feel to be a true Vigornian. We were bused out to Bromyard Down, an undulating land, with a desolate and wretched aspect. Wheezing only a little, I led my section in V-formation through the spiny gorse and made them wriggle on their bellies in single file. The foggy silence was broken every so often by the petulant small bangs of blank .303 cartridges and the loud voices of officers proclaiming the injured and the dead.

The officers had commandeered every bump and knuckle of high ground, from where they ran the war with whistles and enlivened it with thunderclaps. It was an old-fashioned, low-tech war. Fighting was at close quarters, some of it hand-to-hand. From sandy foxholes, covering fire was provided for acts of suicidal heroism. It belonged somewhere between Spion Kop and Mademoiselle from Armentières.

The casualties were carried away on stretchers by the conchies in the Red Cross—day boys whose (mostly Quaker) parents had objected to their compulsory service in the Corps, and who were reckoned to be beneath contempt. The living fought on into the dusk, mounting pincer movements, recce patrols and snatch raids for prisoners, who were frequently tortured during their interrogations.

This enforced military apprenticeship at least produced a fund of metaphor with which to explain and ratify the experience of boarding school. For most of the five years that I spent at King’s, I saw myself as a prisoner of war, detained by Germans in a comfortless Stalag for the duration. The
ferocious bullying, the removal of the most basic privacies, the treatment of physical weakness as an offense worth punishing, were simply what one expected to endure at the hands of the gooks.

I knew all about gooks. I escaped into the literature of escape—the paperback memoirs of the British prisoners who had dug tunnels, built wooden horses, gone over the wire in laundry trucks during the War. In the early 1950s, scads of these stories were published every year, and I read every one of them, greedily, lost in the romantic fiction of running away. Many of the most commercially successful of these books were unsatisfactory for my purposes, since they dealt with escape on a mass scale—twenty or thirty men at a time scrabbling their way through the earth to freedom. My interest was in the one-man tunnel, the solitary break planned without reference to the Escapes Officer, and these were so rare that I had to invent most of them for myself.

In the moonlit dormitory I lay half-awake, with bells from the cathedral ringing the quarter-hours. The gooks slept. Working effortlessly, I carried away paper-bagfuls of soft soil, which would later be surreptitiously scattered over the rose beds in the school gardens. I shored up the night’s work with slats of wood torn from a tea chest that I’d spotted earlier that day outside Matron’s door. My nails were broken and I had earth in my hair, but I was already under the first line of wire. Ten yards more, and I’d be under the perimeter fence. Twenty yards beyond that, the pinewood began. The gooks, with their searchlight mounted on the eastern watchtower, would never spot me as I sprinted (asthma miraculously cured) through the trees.
Auf Wiedersehen!

Ten years later I came across what I took to be the key to this compulsive fictionizing, these sweet dreams of heroic warfare and flight, when I read Vladimir Nabokov’s afterword to a reissue of
Lolita
. The germ of the novel, Nabokov said, lay in a newspaper clipping about a captive ape in a Californian research institute. Given paints, brushes and paper, the ape spent a year producing indecipherable blobs of color. Electrodes were attached to its brain. Its tormentors
tried to encourage it by subjecting the animal to a perpetual exhibition of simple pictures of female apes, bananas, tall trees and other likely objects of fantasy. At last it came up with the goods. Sheet after sheet of paper was painted with shaky black parallel lines. The chimpanzee was drawing the bars of its own cage.

I wasted the greater part of my time at this school in drawing the bars of my cage. I went there at eleven, on a state scholarship, and was mercifully withdrawn from it when I was sixteen.

Now the whole country was out on a field day.

The saloon, lit by the flickering gray moonshine of the TV, rocked comfortably at anchor. Crouched forward, cupping my jawbone in my hands, I was engrossed in the shuffle of bizarre pictures on the screen.

Vertical-takeoff fighters dithered grotesquely aloft, making the air below them boil. Marines with bodybuilders’ muscles and elaborate tattoos were doing physical jerks in an improvised gym. They were naked except for their uniform undershorts, which consisted of two Union Jacks, one fore, one aft. The crux of the frontward flags bulged with impressive genital equipment. More soldiers, their faces menacingly camouflaged with boot polish, or perhaps woad, were at bayonet practice, making horrible noises as they charged the sack. The show came to a climax with a wide-angle shot of another saloon, now an Other Ranks mess, packed with several hundred singing men.