The Day Gone By (22 page)

‘I sometimes think about the cross,

And shut my eyes and try to see

The cruel nails and crown of thorns

And Jesus crucified for me.'

‘Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended,

That Man to judge thee hath in scorn pretended?

I, blessed Saviour, I it was denied thee.

I
crucified thee.'

I don't know how much effect this sort of stuff had on other boys, for we never talked much about religion among ourselves, but it shook me all right, and has left me all my life with a sickened horror of Christ's passion. Some years later, when I tried to talk to my mother about this, she dismissed it as ‘morbid'. I could talk about it to my father, though. He understood and to a large extent shared my feelings; but he didn't tell me what to do about it.

I wish — and I dare say I am not the only person to have wished — that Christ had not died as He did. (Neither Mohammed, Buddha nor Confucius were put to death.) Nor can I see what good it did for us as Christians. I can see that Christ was the first martyr for Christianity. After all, He could have said to Pilate ‘I won't do it any more: I'll go home and keep quiet.' That would have got him off all right, I think. (John, Chapter XIX, 12.) However, He preferred His integrity, and no doubt He was right in reckoning that His teaching would not be likely to endure if He showed that He valued His own life above it. ‘But if you ask them' (the clergy) ‘in what way the death of the Landlord's Son should benefit us, they are driven to monstrous explanations' (C. S. Lewis). The benefit must, I think, be accepted as purely transcendental in its nature. ‘Almighty God, grant that the death of Thy dear Son may be effectual to my redemption' (Dr Johnson). However, my own greatest enlightenment and help in these difficult matters were to come many years later, first from Frazer's
Golden Bough,
but more positively and inspiringly from Joseph Campbell's
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
and
The Masks of God.

However, I anticipate. Looking back now, I think the greatest benefit which I derived from Horris Hill was not doctrine (they didn't indoctrinate us with ideas: ideas are no good to little boys) and still less a religious atmosphere. (There was very little invoking of Christian values to support discipline: Mr Stow's reference to Matthew, Chapter XVIII, 6, was quite exceptional.) The benefit was a sound knowledge of quite a lot of the Bible. Thanks to Horris Hill, I have a pretty good grip of the synoptic Gospels (John came later), Acts, Genesis, Exodus, Joshua, I and II Samuel and I and II Kings. We didn't do the prophets or St Paul; too much for small boys. I think that these (expurgated, of course, after the manner of those days), comprised an excellent syllabus for nine- to thirteen-year-olds, and I have always been glad of it.

However, Bible Study was not pushed particularly hard at Horris Hill. There was divinity prep. on Sunday evenings and a divinity period on Monday mornings. Apart from that, revision and preparation for the end-of-term exam, were left to the discretion of the form master.

My introduction to the Bible itself (in contradistinction to the excellent
Baby's Life of Jesus Christ,
by Helen Rolt, which my mother had read to me, and the Bible stories told by Miss Langdon) was somewhat unusual. Horris Hill's syllabus for the academic year 1928—29 was the synoptic Gospels and the Acts; but I had arrived in the summer term, and consequently was plunged straight into Acts for starters. However, I already knew enough about Jesus's life, death and resurrection to have a reasonable idea of where we were and, as with
The Pilgrim's Progress,
I found it stimulating and exciting to think that I was reading, in the authentic, grown-up text, one of the great books of the world. I enjoyed the way of teaching, which, as well as explanation, was largely based on training you to identify, comment upon and remember memorable contexts. ‘Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.' ‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? … It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.' (Explain about donkeys.) ‘And Gallio cared for none of these things.' ‘Hast thou appealed unto Caesar? Unto Caesar shalt thou go.' As Rudyard Kipling said of
Uncle Remus,
‘The book was amazing, and full of quotations that one could hurl like javelins.' It's an admirable training in the appreciation of beautiful prose.

At the end of my first term, there was what was known as a ‘massed divvers exam'. That is to say, the whole school took the same examination paper. The littler boys, of course, were not expected to do as well as the senior boys: they just did the best they could. I remember that the exam, began with fifty one-word answers, the questions being given out orally - of which the first was ‘Where were the apostles first called Christians?'

This divinity paper, to my own enormous surprise, turned out to be my first academic success. When the list went up, I was thirtieth out of the ninety-odd participators. The name of the top member of each form was underlined, and mine was above that of the top boy of the form above my own. Of course, my father was delighted, having been no inconsiderable biblical scholar himself; and remained one, too.

I should have explained earlier that Horris Hill and my home at Wash Common lay about a mile and a quarter apart as the crow flies and only about two miles apart by road. My father was the school doctor and of course I came in for a certain amount of ragging on this account — some of it rather spiteful. No doubt he got special financial terms for me, but I rather think there may have been other reasons behind his decision to send me to Horris Hill. We have always to remember the never-mentioned influence of poor Robert. If I was at Horris Hill, my father could keep an eye on me and if necessary even be there in a few minutes. Also, I know that he was not satisfied with the way in which the education of my brother (now sixteen) was turning out at Sherborne. John had gone to Sherborne prep. school at the age of nine. My father had chosen Sherborne because it lay close to his own old home at Martock and he knew the district, the public school and its reputation. However, John had been unhappy there and had not done particularly well: nor was he getting on any better at Sherborne itself He never seemed to act like a normal, happy boy. He was abstracted, self-conscious and preoccupied; worse, he did not get on well with my father, with whom his relations were always distant and cool. The two of them seemed to have little or no rapport. I think my father reckoned that, taking all things into account, there was much to be said in my case for a different boarding-school, nearer home.

Why not a day school in Newbury? the reader may ask. Don't be silly! Only lower middle-class boys went to day schools. If you didn't go to a boarding-school you weren't a gentleman, and on top of that you would grow up to be a wet and a weed. Worse still, you wouldn't be able to wear an old school tie and begin your career by being able to say ‘I was at Wrykin' (or wherever). It would be an unthinkable social disadvantage, and reflect badly upon your parents. Such values were in those days unquestioned.

Horris Hill, whatever its merits - and they are considerable - was not and is not a beautiful place. The buildings are downright ugly — tall, gaunt, asymmetrical and horribly institutional in appearance. Although it is in open country, there is precious little pleasure in nature (or none such as I was used to) to be found in the grounds. A gravel playground adjoining what is called ‘the lower field'; and an upper field which in my day was used only for nets, cricket, football and golf; a sloping pinewood on one side of the lower field and a thin belt of half-starved trees along the other; these were our confines. The whole place formed a bare upland, inhospitable alike to wild-flowers, birds and animals. Years later, when as an adult I visited the prep. school called Elstree, near Woolhampton, to watch Horris Hill play them at football, I was struck by the charm and beauty of the place (it is basically a sixteenth-century manor, with delightful grounds) and could not help wondering how much influence the ugliness of Horris Hill and the beauty of Elstree respectively had upon those who unconsciously soaked up their environs during four impressionable years of boyhood.

Horris Hill's domestic facilities would strike any parent today with amazement. There were adequate water-closets, certainly, and wash-hand basins a little way off; but that was about all. On one side of the changing-rooms were some stone troughs, which you could fill with cold water to wash the mud off your arms and legs after football. However, this activity was neither supervised nor compulsory and few bothered with it. Everybody got one hot bath a week.

In the dormitories there were no taps; only carafes of cold water. Everyone cleaned their teeth into the same wash-bowl, to facilitate the task of the maid who came round to empty it and rinse it out. Under each bed was a chamber pot, and these must have been emptied and cleaned by the maids as part of morning bed-making drill. In one corner of each dormitory was a lidded, wooden commode, for use by anyone who might be taken short in the night. I never knew one to be used; though during my time I knew three or four people to have involuntary ‘accidents' in their sleep and beds.

In the mornings, winter and summer alike, there were cold baths. In those days cold baths were a common institution of all boarding-schools. We'd have despised any school that didn't have them. (I believe Bryanston and Dartington Hall didn't: they were ‘progressive' and
ipso facto
‘weedy'.) Two or three baths in the bathroom were filled with cold water and thither we proceeded in our dressing-gowns. You had to get in and out carefully, not to spill any water — a degree of deliberation which lengthened the nasty process. Cold baths, as well as evening hot baths, were supervised by the under-matron, Miss Archer, a spare, leathery, middle-aged, unsmiling woman who was universally liked and respected because she never raised her voice and was the same to everyone; firm, consistent and fair, and impossible to bamboozle. We never thought it in the least disconcerting to be naked in front of Miss Archer; and she herself was equally equable in the matter.

In those days there was much less fuss about nakedness. If some occasion, such as bathing, cold baths or the doctor, required you to be naked, you simply undressed without a second thought. Only ill-bred people were self-conscious about nakedness. As is well-known, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) used to photograph the little daughters of his Oxford friends naked, and they were delighted for him to do so, as he did it very well. Any innuendo about it would have been met with silence, raised eyebrows and an immediate change of subject: the offender wouldn't have been invited again.

Like most other people, I hated the cold baths. But from the school's point of view they had their advantages. To start with, Mr Stow didn't have to pay for hot water in the mornings. Secondly, they saved labour and were a quick, convenient way of getting ninety-odd boys up, washed and wide-awake. Thirdly, we never seemed to get colds and our general resistance to cold was good.

There was no electricity anywhere in the school. Downstairs there were gas brackets with incandescent mantles. Some had low pilot jets which burned all day, but these were only in relatively dark places such as storerooms, where they might need to be turned up at any time. At dusk, the pantry boy would go round the entire ground floor with a taper on a stick, turning on and lighting the gas. I still like to see a mantle, for instance on a Tilley lamp, take on its brilliant, dazzling glow: it tells of cosy snugness (not that we had any curtains), falling twilight and attention to books. I like the smell, too.

At Horris Wood, a house providing extra dormitory accommodation about three hundred yards away and situated just beyond the pine-wood I have already mentioned, there wasn't even any gas. As evening fell Vera, the buxom, pleasant, gentle-voiced maid, would light a whole battery of paraffin lamps and range them together on a tray. This she carried from room to room downstairs - hall and corridors too. Each had its place and each burned on until lights out. Sometimes one or another would suddenly flare and smoke, requiring quick adjustment from the nearest passer-by. These lamps had a smell all their own. It is one of pleasant associations for me, since I was - when the time came - happy at Horris Wood, as I will relate. Paraffin lamps at evening - that soft light, illuminating print, knitting or mending, but leaving friendly gloom in the room's corners - well, I'm sorry, reader, that you should have been denied the blessing of this gentle, homely change from the rhythm of the sun to the rhythm of nightfall. This is something vanished for ever, as surely as the dust on the hedges.