Everything I Have Always Forgotten (15 page)

The one event, upon which I could count every evening, was the arrival of the ‘Head Man' to say “goodnight” to us in our dormitories under the rafters. He was a spare, grey-haired man who had taught for many years in the British Raj in India, that behemoth of the then so recent past. Here he was back in England with his mementoes of the East: an elephant's foot made into a stool, ivory knickknacks, rugs and so forth. Every night he would come to our dormitory under the roof of the school and say: “Lights out now. No talking in bed and… Hughes, in the bathroom!” and there he would whip me with what looked like an elephant's tail. He told me to take down my pyjama trousers and then he would bend me over the side of the great claw-foot bathtub in which we all shared the water on our bath nights. I suppose he inflicted physical pain on me, but I forget. What I do know is that I never understood why I was being punished. It was just something that happened every night.

I did once mention these nightly chastisements to my Parents and I think they were slightly embarrassed. Father said nothing beyond asking what I had done – a question I was utterly unable to answer. Mother said something about “That is how schools are run.” Certainly, if corporal chastisement was what they were paying for, in me they got their money's worth! By the time I came along, physical punishment seemed to be too distasteful for them to carry out themselves. Even physical contact, such as hugs and kisses fell to taboo. How I later envied French children who kissed formally several times a day and would walk from one room to another with an arm around a Parent – or vice versa.

Our dormitory was on the top floor of the school, under the roof. Instead of tie-beams to prevent the rafters from spreading, there were huge iron rods with threaded ends that held the roof together. These horizontal rods were perhaps eight feet above the floor, but easily accessible to small boys, jumping up from the height of their beds. We could then perform all sorts of gymnastics on these bars, but the favourite was simply to swing Tarzan-style and leap onto one's neighbour's bed. No doubt producing a resounding thump in the process, which would echo in the empty classrooms below. I particularly remember a boy called Ralph, who once managed to leap beyond his neighbour's bed and almost made it to the next one over, but crashed painfully and ignominiously to the floor instead. Ralph did not try that again.

Dormitories in these schools were unheated (as were the classrooms) and the carafe of drinking water provided for us would have a skin of ice on it when we awoke in the pitch dark of winter mornings, to get up and hurry off to class.

Even at my next school (this one, in a huge Georgian mansion on a hill, far out in the countryside) where a different punishment continued relentlessly, I never understood for what I was being punished. This headmaster had decided that I needed a two-hour lecture every Saturday afternoon. I have no idea what he was talking about to me, all alone. Sometimes I just wished he would flog me like the other boys and get it over and not take up my precious time by rambling on and on. Now I wonder about his own precious time… Why was I punished? Probably just for being me – though murderers don't get away with that excuse either. To add to my bewilderment, at this, my third school, I was also the headmaster's ‘pet', often taken with him in his car on errands, then lectured into oblivion every Saturday afternoon. What a waste of a nice Saturday afternoon! I came to think of these punishments as pure bureaucracy, no doubt necessary for the system, but an awful waste of time. Both his, mine and the school's.

Yes, I do confess, that my first day at this third school, I was roundly scolded for apparently taking my time in walking up to the master's desk when summoned. I replied with something to the effect of: “… when you reach my great age and time of life, you'll see…” such facetious ‘wit' was not appreciated. I wonder where it came from? I don't believe my Parents were facetious, it was far more likely that it was school-grown and I was just emulating my bored, cynical, dissatisfied teachers. Anyway, I learned to button it up and never again try to make jokes to those in authority. I was clearly a most objectionable brat. Nowadays, it is recognized that I am dyslexic and the learning process something of a complicated mystery to me, but I muddled through, distracted and vague and thank god, no one tries to beat me any more. I wonder if it did me any good or any harm?

An instinct within me (it must have come from my Parents, though I wonder how and why) disdained my teachers. Although they were the holders of the knowledge I was supposed to absorb, I believe I felt superior to them. Once a week we had to write informative letters home and these would be read by the headmaster and given back with corrections, to be recopied, if there were too many mistakes in spelling and grammar. Mother had told me by letter that my Parents might visit me on a weekend not designated as a visiting weekend. As if to tempt the gods, I wrote back that they could probably persuade the Head to let me go out with them, although it was not the correct weekend – this, knowing full well that the Head would read my letter. My motivation is still unclear to me, but I suppose I was testing the waters of authority. Would Father's celebrity carry the day, or would it be the petty authority of the headmaster? Not surprisingly, I was denied the outing with my Parents and I am sure the Head explained to them exactly why. I had overdone it. I had pushed my luck too far. I had teased the sleeping dog too much and it had bitten me.

As for my teachers, almost all the good ones were homosexuals. While they did not practice what they perhaps desired, their leanings were obvious from the occasional, nonchalant caress, besides the fact that they were often vastly over-qualified for their jobs. They were not pederasts and I never heard of an incident of molestation. Many of them were married, though often without children. As for the mediocre teachers: they were the rule. They were bored, had little control over the boys and sometimes had every lesson (complete with appropriate jokes) in an old binder that had served them for the forty years or so of their careers. To my intense embarrassment, these bad teachers could even be reduced to tears by the nasty herd of children in their care.

My pattern of learning was dictated by an extraordinary lack of memory for anything I was told to learn by rote. As a result, when given a weekly test of twenty questions with one-word answers, I invariably scored only one or two correct answers and would be at the bottom of the class. These positions in the class hierarchy were constantly drummed into us in order to ‘encourage competition'. – I have strenuously avoided competition ever since. Yet, given the opportunity to write an essay on some subject, I invariably came in first or second, once being given a score of 110% just how can you beat ‘perfection'? In an essay, I could get around the gaping holes in my factual knowledge and write about cause and effect instead. Quite frequently, my teachers attributed this poor test performance to extreme laziness on my part and concluded that I had not even tried to do my homework or preparation. I could study a poem or a list of dates or names for hours on end, without any of it being committed to my memory… then I would read something that struck me (such as
The Old Man and the Sea
, or Lord Tennyson, Marlowe or Vachel Lindsey) and find I could quote whole pages verbatim after one reading. Of course, these accusations of laziness were often followed by more corporal punishment even though I already spent far more time on homework and preparation than anyone else. When I reached high school (or rather a private school which is called public school in England), I resorted to getting up at three or four in the morning, using a skeleton key to get out of the dormitory wing and go to my study to prepare for the day's classes. Nor did it end when I went home for holidays. My Mother constantly drummed into me how much more brilliant were my older siblings. The eldest two had won scholarships, while I was just barely accepted at every school I attended.

Years later, someone told me that the ‘Head Man' (the Indian Raj veteran who beat me every night) at my second school had been E.M. Forster's model for the young English teacher in
A Passage to India
. When I read the book, I could find no resemblance between him and the young, relatively liberal and idealistic schoolteacher of the book. Besides, Forster's character was single and this old man with silver hair, married. I wonder if he had children, and if he did, whether chastising them had satisfied him much – or if perhaps, like many other parents, he farmed them out for corporal punishment.

Of all the years of tedium that I have totally forgotten, there are motes of souvenir that float into my mind from time to time: I do remember my very first French classes, taught by a Frenchman. The first thing we learned being the alphabet in French, a sensible thing to learn that helped me enormously with pronunciation, though we all thought it infantile, we were much too big to be learning the alphabet all over again. I remember making an egg rack in carpentry class, which served my Parents well in the larder for many years thereafter. The French alphabet and an egg rack – were these to be my monument to an expensive private education?

At each of these schools, the National Religion or Church of England was taught and applied by prayers every morning and then there was always Church on Sundays. I don't think I started reflecting upon religion until I had travelled in lands where other rites were practiced: Catholicism, Greek Orthodoxy and Islam. I just went to Church and made sure I was not perceived as a rebel. I had enough trouble without being seen as a rebel too. I pretended to toe the party line even if I did have the occasional, anarchistic desire to strip naked and run up the nave of the church, leap onto the altar and mimic Christ on the cross, or perhaps sit cross-legged, Buddha-like, on the altar. The consequences would have been grave. Was it that I was looking for the limelight, anonymous student that I was? Did I truly seek to shock? I never ever thought of spraying the congregation with bullets (as has happened all too frequently of late). Quite simply, I had been raised to think of bullets as tools for getting food, besides being used in wars, with such terrible consequences that the idea never crossed my mind. That we had no television, meant I never witnessed the cheapening of human life, by seeing multiple killings on the box before noon – an average of 157 in Japan when I worked there in 1970! As I saw it, the congregation was not food, nor fair game, they were not rabbits, wild duck or even, for that matter, wild boar! Just to shock and surprise these few hundred suited and tied men, young and old, why would I risk my skin?

Of the hundreds of sermons I heard, I do remember one: the preacher told of walking down a fancy street in London and seeing some truly beautiful gardening tools in a shop window. He stepped back and saw that it was the street presence of the venerable Sword Makers – Wilkinson's of London, founded in 1772. Thus he launched into the theme of ‘beating swords into ploughshares'. I liked that sermon and have remembered it.

The food in these schools was at least made in the kitchen, there was no packaged food in those days, but in order to make a profit from private schools, a single joint of meat had to be shared by about fifty boys and six or eight staff. It was English food at its most ordinary and tasteless. Still, by then, food could be bought – when my brother was in school during the war, the boys were so hungry that they would share any food from home amongst the whole dormitory. One boy received an enormous Shepherd's Pie. The whole dormitory was treated to one spoonful a night and it was carefully hidden under the bed of the owner. They never dared look at it in daylight or by electricity, lest they be caught – after several days, the entire dormitory was violently sick and told to spend the day in bed. By daylight, they pulled out the meat pie and looked at it – not only was it very furry and green by then – but the boys had been eating spoonfuls of live maggots as well!

My particular pain, my most miserable dressing down, worse by far than any lashing or tongue-lashing inflicted by headmasters, always came when the school matron opened my large suitcase (the other boys had trunks) at the beginning of each term or semester. On the top would be the ‘Required Clothing List' of the school. The list had boxes to be crossed off as each required quantity of clothing was packed.

I always packed my own suitcase. I suppose Mother thought that was part of managing on one's own. Or perhaps it was one thing too many for her to cope with. Since I did not have the requisite quantity of each item, I just checked them off and hoped that no one would notice. Those matrons had mostly served as nurses in the armed services during the war. For them regulations were regulations. Be a Man and Die For Your Country – and if you're such a miserable wimp as to just get wounded, the nurses would patch you up and send you back in to try again.

At the beginning of every term, I would be summoned for this tongue-lashing by a huge matron, bursting out of her starched uniform with apoplectic indignation. She would tell me, in no uncertain terms, that if Mother couldn't do better than this, I should be going to a state day school and not expect the great advantages that private school would afford me in my illustrious future. I never confessed that it was I who packed my own bag and that apart from the essentials of school uniform (which had to be purchased in London), nothing much was available in Wales. That my muddy wellington boots were on top of my clean grey flannel shorts without any protective packaging, drove those ladies to despair. Nowadays, I have to understand their dismay.

I did have one pair of boy's underpants that were not made of ‘rough grit sandpaper' and I would wear them for the twelve weeks of term time, turning in the scratchy woollen ones as dirty every week. The Matron's tongue-lashing slowly subsided into the general miserable pain, confusion and sorrow of beginning a new term. I doubt I substantially changed my packing techniques, for one thing, I could never have found the requisite wrapping paper. It was kept under the hearth rug of my Father's study and he could never be disturbed while he was working. So I just reefed sail and battened down my emotional hatches for the storm I knew was bound to hit.