Growing Up In a War (29 page)

In case what I have written has activated the curiosity of readers, perhaps I ought to pre-empt mistaken guesses by saying that I never got involved in sex with anyone in my own year or older. My preference was for boys younger than myself, who I was able to fantasise about being girls. And none of them is named in this book.

In adult life I have found that a great deal of misunderstanding exists regarding the nature of sexual activity in boys’ boarding schools. Wherever heterosexual males are segregated from females and forced together for long periods there will be sexual activity among them. It happens in the armed services, in camps and on ships, and in prisons, prisoner-of-war camps, and so on. These men are not homosexuals, nor are they being turned into homosexuals: they are normal heterosexual males. Their sex drive is so urgent, especially when they are young, that it compels an outlet, and if they are denied the outlet that they want they will seize on whatever is available until the real thing comes along. The vast majority of males who take part in homosexual acts in these circumstances have no desire to do so in other conditions, and do not do so during the remainder of their lives. The minority who do are those who are homosexual anyway, or at least bisexual. It is not, I believe, possible for a normal boy to be turned into a homosexual by being sent to a boarding school.

At about the same time as all this started to happen, I was made to specialise as regards my academic work. I was really too young to be doing this, but it was normal in all of Britain’s best schools at that time – they were notorious for it in other countries. The advantage was that by the time a boy went to university he was well advanced in his special subject, and the university could begin with him at a high level. The disadvantage was that his general education was not as broad-based as it should be: for instance, at
the
age of fourteen I gave up the sciences altogether, after only one year each of biology, chemistry and physics.

Near the end of our second year we were asked what we wanted to specialise in, but were warned that we might not get our choice – there had to be a limit to class sizes, so we might need to be spread. I said I wanted to specialise in modern languages, which for me would have meant taking up German in addition to my French. But when, on the first day of my third year, I looked at the noticeboard, I saw my name down for classics – and that meant taking up Greek as well as the Latin I was already doing.

I was appalled. For the second time I was being denied German, when I so passionately wanted to learn it. Apart from that I was dismayed at the prospect of having to study Greek, by which I was, if I can so express it, bored in advance. The natural step was for me to talk to my housemaster, which I did. He said that this was something that only the headmaster could alter, so he made an appointment for me to see God.

H.L.O. (Henry Lael Oswald) Flecker was a fearsome figure even to the masters. Looking down from a height of several inches over six feet, he was domineering in manner, and given to volcanic eruptions in which his speech would turn into a scream, and he would rant on and on, and stamp not only his foot but the whole of a giant leg. Everyone found him alarming. His nickname was Oily, or The Oil. At first I assumed this was because of his appearance – his skin was quite a dark brown, and shone – but in fact the name came from something he had said when he was new to the school, introducing himself via a sermon in chapel. He was describing how he saw his role, and having characterised the school as an already well-running machine he added: ‘I am the oil.’ From that moment he was known as The Oil, and then, by a natural extension, Oily. Although he was now at the top of his profession, the first thing anyone said about him was that he was the brother of James Elroy Flecker, who was then a famous poet – he
had
died in 1915 – and who possessed what was already, in my eyes, the distinction of having written a play for which Delius had composed the incidental music:
Hassan
, or
The Golden Journey to Samarkand
. It enraged The Oil that he should go through life being known to everybody as his brother’s brother, even all these years after his brother’s death; but there was nothing he could do about it.

As I crept into his study it seemed to me shadowed and congested, and full of dark wood; and he standing in the middle of it taller than any human being I had ever seen. He told me to speak up, and I said how much I wanted to learn German. He said I could not, because there was a unique problem with it: most of the German speakers among the staff had been called up for war work, so the school had a special shortage of teachers in that subject. In which case, I said, could I specialise in something other than Greek? He gave an exaggerated look of surprise. Classics was absolutely the right thing for me, he said. I was a bright boy, and the brightest boys in the school always specialised in classics, as a matter of course. Latin was already one of my best subjects. It was obvious I ought to do classics, anyway, which was really why they had put me down for it. I resisted. I started to say that I was better at maths than at Latin, so could I please specialise in maths; but before I was halfway through my second sentence a scream rent the air, bouncing back off the walls and drowning everything in the room. It was so loud, so violent, so sudden, and so totally unexpected that it had happened before I realised that anything at all had happened. By the time I took in that he was yelling an unbroken stream of imprecations down into my upturned face, it had been going on for several seconds. I stood there bewildered, utterly overwhelmed. His words poured over me like molten lava. There were no pauses between them, and I was too dazed to take most of them in – all I heard was that I was a something little something who something somethinged and needed
to
something something. One of his legs, which by itself seemed taller than I was, stamped again and again as he screamed. The only complete sentence I registered, because it was shouted louder than the rest, and in tones of cosmic incredulity, was: ‘Do you think you know better than I do?’ At last the screaming rose to its highest peak on the words ‘Get out! Get out! Get out!’ and I found myself physically bundled into the corridor. His study door slammed behind me with an almighty
thunk
.

I reeled back to my house, a cauldron of inner upheaval. The only recourse I had beyond the headmaster was my parents, so as soon as I got back to the dayroom I sat down and wrote them a letter, asking them to write to him. It was several days before a reply came, and then, to my surprise, it was from my mother. Neither she nor my father had written to the headmaster. Her letter admonished me to accept my fate, and gave inane reasons for doing so – for instance, that Greek was worth doing ‘if only to be able to say that you have learnt it’. My disgust went beyond words.

There was nothing more I could do, yet something inside me would not accept the situation. I had no choice but to attend Greek classes, but I did not take anything in. It was not that I made a conscious decision to go on strike – the blockage was there of its own accord, insuperable. By the end of the school year I knew almost as little Greek as I had known at the beginning; and whereas in every other subject I was near the top of the class, in Greek I was bottom.

The headmaster sent for me again. I went to his study in terror, expecting another explosion. When I arrived he was sitting at his desk, and he turned towards me with a disconcerting smile.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘You win. You can do German if you’re still determined to. But I warn you: if you do, you’ll have to take it in School Certificate next year. And if you get a bad result it’ll be on your own head.’

That was that. My year of Greek left me with nothing more than an ability to read the Greek alphabet. I suppose I could, just, add to that the fact that my Greek teacher – A.H. Buck, known to us all as Buckie – was to become a friend when I was in my early forties. He had been a boy at the school, which meant that his whole life had been Christ’s Hospital. I was sitting in his class one day, in the depths of a depression brought on by a bad cold, when he appeared at my elbow.

‘Got a cold?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Feeling lousy?’ (I can still hear his articulation of ‘lousy’.)

I was astounded by the question. It went against the whole way we lived. You never talked about how you felt, or asked anyone how they felt. If you had troubles, you dealt with them by yourself without discussing them with anyone else; and no one else would refer to them either, however well they knew you had them. A surge of astonished gratitude welled up inside me.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, you’d better go back to your house, then. You can make yourself a bit more comfortable there. No point in staying here if you feel like that.’

This tiny bit of sympathetic concern, not only expressed but acted upon, was unique in my experience of the school – until my last couple of years, when I began to deal with masters on more equal terms.

Decades later, Buckie made sexual overtures to a boy, who told his parents, who told the headmaster, and Buckie was out, his whole world in ruins about his ears. He was looked on as disgraced beyond redemption, and felt himself to be so. In obscurity he got a low-paid (and also, I think, part-time)job with Oxford University Press as a proofreader of Ancient Greek, and went to live in a bedsit in the poorest part of Oxford. When I found myself in Oxford too, as a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, we met several
times.
I was touched to find that Christ’s Hospital was still central to his inner life. Among other things, he marinaded in the books of writers who had been there, and seemed to know the essays of Charles Lamb almost by heart.

When my voice broke I joined the choir, and found a similar problem to the one I had had at Worth. Although my speaking voice was high, my singing voice lay awkwardly between tenor and bass, so that I was not able to sing either part properly – neither the higher notes of the tenors, which is where the best bits usually were, nor the lower ones of the basses, their juiciest bits to sing. I joined the tenors to get the tunes, and simply left out the notes I could not reach.

Rehearsals with Corks were among my most enjoyable experiences. He had a fine ear for the balance of voices within a choir, and his love of romantic harmony led him to put a slight touch of emphasis on whichever note within a chord was the least expected, so there was a trademark warmth and richness to the sound he produced. He shaped phrases beautifully. Repeated rehearsals of a work under him would make that work a special possession for me, and this happened with Handel’s
Messiah
and
Acis and Galatea
, Brahms’s
Requiem
, and Christmas carols by surprising composers such as Tchaikovsky. From this choral singing I learnt more about music, and about how to read music, than I did from my piano lessons with him.

For a couple of years in my early teens my best friend was Jennings, who had been my nursemaid when I was new. Perhaps partly for that reason he usually had the edge on me when it came to taking a lead. I first heard about a great many things through him, and learnt a lot from him. His nickname was Spint, our slang word for anyone of slight build. He showed me a photograph of his father, who looked Asian, but Spint said he was Eurasian and his
mother
English. Spint had spent his pre-school life in Malaya, where he had been born. His father, he told me, had edited a newspaper in Singapore before the war, and had published a book under the nom de plume Southern Cross. It was Spint more than I who had the sort of personality that was supposed to go with being cockney: cheeky and chirpy, amusing in repartee, independent-minded, pleasure-loving, irreverent of authority. His approach to life was like that of a man tucking in to a gourmet meal, all smile and elbows. One of the things that pleased him most was language. He would latch on to particular words and phrases and repeat them as if they were music, his eyes lighting up as he said them. For a term he found himself rehearsing the role of Laertes in a school production of
Hamlet
, and during those rehearsals he absorbed not only his own part but most of the play. In the same way as a boy might suddenly start whistling, he would, apropos of nothing at all, come out with one of the ordinary, unfamous lines, like ‘It is a nipping and an eager air,’ with a look of wonderment on his face, as if this was something truly marvellous, which of course it was. I helped him learn his lines, and absorbed a lot of
Hamlet
myself. My father had taken me to see John Gielgud in it, so the whole play was already alive for me, and I came to think of it as the best play I knew.

Jennings and I were schoolboy socialists. For him, I think, this was part of a general bolshiness whose chief target was the school, but my attitude was quite independent of the school. The chief influence on me in this, as in so many things, was my father. I had grown up absorbing a lot of his ideas, and now that I was old enough to understand some of them I was getting enthusiastic about them. The prevailing ethos of the school was conservative, among boys as well as masters. There were the odd few socialists here and there, especially among the older boys, but they were either smiled at indulgently or disapproved of. In a distant house there was a communist who was none other than Bernard Levin.
Since
we were all known by our surnames, I gave him the nickname ‘Lenin’ at our end of the Avenue. He and I got to know each other quite well in later life, and he told me he had never realised that this soubriquet was coined by me.

Jennings and I read some of the notorious Yellow Books of that time, hard-covered pamphlets written by Labour politicians and published by Victor Gollancz in lurid yellow jackets. They expressed not so much support for socialism as hatred of the Conservatives. Because there was a wartime truce between the political parties their authors hid behind Latin pseudonyms, but the publishers made no secret of who they were. The most famous and influential of the pamphlets,
Guilty Men
, was by Michael Foot. Another, ineptly titled
Why Not Trust the Tories
, was by Aneurin Bevan. Basically, they blamed the Conservatives for the war, and argued that the Conservative Party ought never again to govern Britain. These books broke the party truce, of course, but that did not bother me, and I was a great enthusiast for them. From them I imbibed what was the standard left-wing view of inter-war history, and it informed my outlook until I found myself studying something closer to the real thing at Oxford. The left-wing view glossed over the fact that the Labour Party had persistently voted against any attempt to prepare for a fight against Hitler, and the fact that the only significant voice calling for such preparation had been that of a Conservative, Winston Churchill. It also overlooked the more general connivance of the left – communists more than socialists – with fascist power. It demonised Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour Party leader who left the party and led a national coalition government after the debacle of the Labour-led government of 1929–31. Partly on that basis, it encouraged the myth that in any large left-wing organisation the leaders usually betrayed the rank-and-file when they reached the top.