Noisy at the Wrong Times (12 page)

Astonishingly, I do not remember any of us complaining that the punishment had been disproportionate to the crime. At home few of us would tolerate such discipline, would never consider a bruised and wounded arse to be anything but an outrage. But there, then, we had bought almost completely into the regime that delivered said indignation. We did not examine or wonder what on earth would happen if he’d hit a boy or stolen some bread from the kitchen or disobeyed an instruction. The truth was that for all those things he would have received the same punishment, which was the point. Maybe a suspension would ensue if he burned the house down, but crimes both minor and major were punishable by the same thing. And we seemed to know it, even if it was subconsciously.

Despite Rob’s slippering and the resultant collective determination to avoid the same fate, it was inevitable that I would soon suffer something similar. In truth, perhaps I was hoping to earn some spurs myself, but the way in which I did so was entirely unintentional and wholly unexpected. It was barely a week before I too was ordered to the study, and it was Rob who caused it.

Our friendship had continued to grow along well-marshalled lines; conservatively offered an olive branch to each other whilst remaining aware that at any time, there might have to be a summit to decide who would become top dog. Since we had decided we liked each other, we thus spent a lot of time hanging out. It also meant certain facets of our personalities were becoming more evident and Rob’s most manifest personality trait on the fateful day was thinking it was hilarious to see how people reacted to pain. Walking across the concrete paving outside of the master’s dining room, he was waving a large, flexible branch in the way that young boys do, for no reason. We like to hit things with big sticks, but we don’t like being hit with them.

Well I don’t.

Inevitably, he waved his big stick at me. This is no euphemism; he really did have a big, wooden branch from which he had stripped all twigs and leaves. Even more inevitably – and fate intervened here, I am sure – it connected with the back of my leg. The sting brought white light and tears to my eyes, and from deep within, a boiling eruption of invective issued forth into the Suffolk countryside. In an instant, several ‘fucks’ and at least one pair of ‘c**ts’ had rung like a klaxon through the crisp autumn air. Unfortunately, at that moment, Morris happened to be breathing the same air. Indeed, so close was he, he could probably smell the foul language. Halfway through my third ‘you utter fucking bastard Smith”, I noticed him staring at me, his eyes livid with rage, and I can’t swear to it but I am sure he was trembling too.

Gulp.

“Volpe, go and stand outside my study,” he growled.

I mean it, he really did growl and I was almost sick on the spot. As Morris turned on his heels, no doubt eager to get back to his study for a quick warm-up, I wobbled, stunned and
shaken, numb with fear. I thought of how hugely offensive Morris would have found my outburst.

I knew.

I thought of Rob’s bruised, mangled buttocks and contemplated how much more angry Morris must now be, having been assaulted by my broadcast of almost the entire lexicon of Anglo-Saxon profanity. Perhaps I
would
need hospital treatment? Maybe, this time, there surely would be blood? I walked towards the inevitable agony and considered my options. Refuse to bend over? No, he’d make me. Get a book and shove it down my trousers? No, someone had once tried that and been given twice as many whacks as a result. Run away, hide and never come back! I could live off the land forever, eating bugs, squirrels and fish for my supper. Anything seemed possible as I thought of what was to come.

In truth, I had no choice, but it was not for want of considering every outlandish route of escape. As I approached the open door of Morris’s office, I did so in what felt like slow motion. I had been used to getting a good hiding from Mum, but this was entirely unlike anything I had felt before and I kept thinking – hoping – that maybe he wouldn’t slipper me, that I would get a good talking to instead, but as I passed the dining room and saw a dinner lady, I wanted to run to her and hide behind her. If there was going to be a saviour, then it had better arrive soon because I was just feet away from the threshold of Morris’s study. My legs were turning to jelly as I reached the room, and Morris was waiting for me, standing by the side of his desk, the files he had been carrying placed roughly on the otherwise neatly stacked papers. I saw this as a sign of his anger. Anger, or any form of outward emotional dynamism, was uncommon to John Morris, so when it appeared, you bloody noticed it, I can tell you.

* * *

It was a warm summer day, and Morris was taking a history lesson in the classroom that had once been a large drawing room of the old Berners House. There was an authentic Adam fireplace behind protective glass and elegant cornices framing the room. Large curved windows faced out onto Orwell side, with views across the river to the north. Suddenly, a boy motioned to the window and asked, “What’s that, sir?”

Morris strolled to the window and so strange was the sight, we all rushed to the windows for a closer look too. Over the hills across the Orwell was a large black cloud, and it was moving towards us very quickly. Morris scrunched up his face in thought as he gazed at it. We all hung from the open windows trying to work it out too.

“Close the windows please, boys,” Morris said without a shred of dramatic inflection.

As we did so, the cloud grew angrier and larger and seemed to cover the entire playing field outside. Soon it was upon us, and the windows were covered with thousands of bees. They buzzed furiously at the glass for a few moments, and then this swarm of biblical proportions moved away as one, no doubt following their Queen. Within a miraculously short space of time, they formed a huge teardrop of teeming, squirming, vibrant life hanging from the lower branch of the great Cedar of Lebanon tree that sat below the building.

“Back to your seats, please. Right, where were we? Ah yes,
The Somme
...”

* * *

“I will not tolerate the kind of language I just heard, young man. It was disgraceful,” Morris said, his voice steel-edged with
indignation. The usually laconic Morris had also become comparatively verbose.

“But Sir, Smith hit me with a stick and it hurt and I couldn’t help it...”

I trailed off pathetically. I had nothing more to say since what I had already said sounded hollow, and I could see in his face that it was worthless trying to explain what had been a torrent of adolescent, potty-mouthed petulance. I was also starting to hyperventilate, and even if words had been ready to come out, they would have perished on the arid carpet that was my tongue. To Morris’s right hand, I could see a basket of sports clothes, bits of equipment and, lying threateningly on top, the upturned sole of a Dunlop Green Flash plimsoll. I stared at it, my executioner, my nemesis and the most famous plimsoll in all of Suffolk. If inanimate objects can take on a personality, the Green Flash was the Daddy of them all. It had character, reputation and a degree in torture to its name.

Morris said something about teaching me a lesson, but by now, I wasn’t listening. He slowly picked up the Green Flash and came towards me. I remembered what Rob had said about the hand that forced him to bend. My fear had clearly not totally dispossessed me of my belligerence, and I bent, as nonchalantly as my growing terror would allow, offering Morris my behind in defiant invitation. Unfortunately, I had bent down facing the wrong way – Morris was left-handed. He told me to stand up and then took hold of the back of my neck anyway.

I will always place John Morris above Nuns, but to him swearing sat at the top table in the Hall of Beëlzebub. There was no place for it and argument to the contrary was never brooked or tolerated. It was hard to contend that earthy colloquialisms were common in religious practice, but at primary school we gloried in the rhyme “Bloody in the Bible,
Bloody in the book, if you don’t believe me, have a Bloody look!” However, fuck, shit, tosspot, wanker, cocksucker and all the other words I had shouted at Smith that day are not in there. Look for them yourself, I promise you won’t find them; neither a tit nor an arse will you encounter in the Old or New Testament. Not even Happy Clappy churches indulge in cathartic, satisfyingly mouth-filling imprecation. I find that a shame but bent double at the waist, waiting for the Dunlop hammer to fall, I just thought it was deeply inconvenient.

I got five whacks, each of them feeling harder than the one before. On the first, the shock propelled me forward, and I hit my head on the piano in the corner of the study. Such was my convulsion, Morris had lost his grip on the back of my neck and as my cranium connected with the corner of the keyboard, the guts of the piano gave a sharp note, like a sleeping dog being trodden on. Morris was quick with the strokes, and there was no sense that he was enjoying it. I was to learn later that some masters most certainly did enjoy it, but Morris displayed a rhythm and technique that managed to maintain whatever sense of propriety such an event could muster. It was formal, controlled and painful. It was shocking, too, since there was an inherent violence in the act, but I never held that against him, essentially because I was in no position to do so with my arse prone, a strong hand holding me down and half a pound of rubber giving my school trousers a polishing.

By the fifth strike, the sting had become a blunt pain that radiated into my legs and up my lower back, but the relief of being able to stand, knowing it was over, was colossal. Morris seemed calm and composed, which is somewhat different to how I felt. The sweat that had broken out on my skin was being burnt off by the energy the beating had transferred into me – I was in danger of generating cumulonimbus in the study. Morris allowed me a moment before telling me to leave, and
as I limped out of the office, doing everything in my power not to ‘crack’ (a cardinal sin) I heard the kerfuffle of laughter from the shower drying room that was next door to the study. I went in to find several of my housemates, quickly gathered together by a gleeful Rob, sniggering hard, clutching the glasses they had used to listen through the wall.

I went on to be slippered by Morris many times and for what one might consider greater crimes. None, however, came close to that first occasion for sheer intensity. Morris’s strength was never so provoked as it was by a c-word. Climbing roofs, disobeying teachers, leaving school without permission, strangling his wife, kidnapping his children, disembowelling his dog, beating up a smaller boy: none of them could ever have summoned forth fury like a ‘fucking bastard’ did.

PRESSURE COOKER

T
he pressure of life at Woolverstone continued to build with every one of those first days. There was layer upon layer of expectation, duty, responsibility and rule. It felt relentless at times and our individual personalities were being moulded and crafted, if not extinguished, by every single one of those regulations. I’d love to have heard the view of some of my primary school teachers had they been observing this remarkable transformation. It was not so much a change in me, but in what I was apparently prepared to countenance. Every event, from assembly to detention to prep and breakfast, was sacred; we had to be in the right place at the right time and be wearing the correct clothes. The rules felt trivial, pernickety – hysterical even – and we had noticed how certain individuals enforced the hierarchy with particular zeal.

The whole process of integrating into the life of the school was made more arduous by these endless regulations and some of the frightful people who revelled in enforcing them. Yet all of these pressures, palpable even in the first week, were as nothing compared to the looming reality of the sport that Woolverstone excelled at and which would expect more of us than almost anything else: rugby.

None of us had ever played rugby at primary school. All of us were football mad, and some had played cricket, but I was again at some advantage having had Serge give me two years of reports on the game and how important it was to the school, yet I had never held a rugby ball in my hands. I remember
being told repeatedly that Woolverstone was ‘one of the top three rugby schools in the country’ and woe betide the intake that broke the sequence of achievement. Our first sporting test was looming over us like a great shadow; all the talk was of the impending event, from which no first former could escape, one for which the whole school turned out and for which we would wear our new rugby kit and steel-toed boots for the first time. It was an event of magnificent conception, the most popular match in the school rugby year, and it was called
Stonehenge
.

Stonehenge was brutally simple. Sixty boys split into two teams with one team in blue and the other in white. Something in the order of five balls would be thrown onto the pitch, and each team was told to touch balls down behind the try-line at the end of the pitch they were facing. They should try to pass to a colleague in the same coloured shirt and ‘tackle’ anybody they saw with the ball, and the team that scored the most ‘tries’ would win. That was it. No structure, no rules, no referee. It was carnage, but there
was
a point. As boys flailed and charged at each other, chasing bobbling balls around as if they were pursuing chickens in a farmyard, several masters and a couple of members of the first fifteen stood on the touchlines with clipboards, noting the naturally talented and determined players. From this sixty would come two groups of 30, divided into A and B group. And A group would produce the school under 12s team. Even at that young, tender age we would be playing competitive matches with the same level of expectation as any other year group.

Knowing this fact was quite a spur to those of us with egos that had followed us to Woolverstone, and I had the added incentive of knowing that Serge would kill me were I to fail to be a half-decent rugby player. If there was a miracle at work at Woolverstone, it was its knack of finding boys of ferocious
competitiveness (or injecting it into them), and I have often wondered how it did this. I doubt many of us had glittering academic careers mapped out for us by our parents, who in most cases hoped for a trouble free adolescence, a successful arrival in the lounge marked
adulthood
and then perhaps a decent, sustainable job. Woolverstone didn’t comply with such a lowly ambition, and there was a belief that all could achieve great things. That, after all was the point of the school surely? Stonehenge was the first opportunity to show some mettle – with the entire school watching.