The Day Gone By (26 page)

‘Me that have sailed leagues across

Foam haunted by the albatross …').

I put a friend, whom I judged to be likely, on to the book, and for weeks we conversed in references, proper names and quotations. We came within half a plank of worshipping Tishnar, but that would have been dangerous (and too revealing: we had no wish to hear her traduced).

Since those days I have read the book many, many times. Often I have set out to read it aloud to various people. My mother loved it, but I could never get my feeling for the book across either to my father or to my sister. Indeed, they teased me. This surprised and somewhat upset me. It was the first time that I had had the experience which I reckon that as we grow up we all undergo in one way or another. We find that even our intimates, and those we love very much, do not always understand or empathize with things which we ourselves feel deeply: either they don't feel them at all or else they see them differently. In the deepest recesses of the imagination we must expect to find ourselves often alone, separated even from our closest friends. (I was once in love with someone who hated Jane Austen.)

That wasn't, however, by any means all there was to Walter de la Mare during this time. One of the masters, Denis Fussell — may his name be blest for ever — had acquired the newly published
Poems for Children
(1930), comprising ‘Songs of Childhood', ‘Peacock Pie' and about forty other poems; and somehow the book came my way. By gum, some ‘poems for children' those are! They flung open the door upon a numinous, night-blue world of incessant danger, wild beauty, loss, fear and death; no pretence or dressing-up (like M. R. James), but deeply felt and sincere, and all cast in words of storm, rainbow and wave. They struck into my heart the full realization of humanity's ultimate ignorance and insecurity in this world; and this has never left me, having since been endorsed again and again by just about everyone from Beethoven to William Golding.

‘Who said, “Peacock Pie”?

The old King to the sparrow:

Who said, “Crops are ripe”?

Rust to the harrow:

Who said, “Where sleeps she now?

Where rests she now her head,

Bathed in eve's loveliness”? —

That's what I said.

Who said, “Ay, mum's the word”;

Sexton to willow:

Who said, “Green dusk for dreams,

Moss for a pillow”?

Who said, “All Time's delight

Hath she for narrow bed;

Life's troubled bubble broken”?

That's what I said.'

My father's character was in certain respects oddly paradoxical. As I have told, with his time he was more than generous to his children. I spent long, happy hours in his company, being read to, walking in the country or simply accompanying him on his morning rounds. We never seemed to have too much of each other. In minor ways he, like my mother, spoiled me. Once, for example, I remember how I had been rather ‘going on' for a day or two about how much I wanted a certain boxed game (I was very fond of indoor games) in which one ‘caught' cardboard fish with small magnets on the end of miniature rods and lines. That afternoon I raised the matter again.

‘All right,' said my father. ‘Let's go down to the town now, and buy it.'

I was delighted, and was about to precede him out of the garden door that we normally used, when he said ‘Let's go this way' and unexpectedly went down the hall towards the front door.

The game, wrapped in brown paper, was already stuck in the letter-box. We spent the evening playing it.

Yet this open-handed generosity did not extend to our education or our careers. My sister has since told me that when she got her entrance to Girton, my father wasn't at all keen for her to go up. He said he couldn't afford it, and it was only the formidable Miss Luker (‘Nonsense, Dr Adams!') who coerced him otherwise. He used to say that he could never see the advantage of going to a university, since you were no better qualified when you came down. (He himself, of course, had gone from school to Bart's.) ‘Much better get on and get a job.'

The funny thing was that if you asked him ‘What job?' he had no particular ideas: he seemed to have no ambitions for the children he loved so much. I believe he would have been quite content for my brother and myself to take jobs, say, in a bank in Newbury (though, to do him justice, he paid for my brother to become a solicitor).

The real trouble was that he was not making a great deal of money; that much even a child could perceive, for during the early ‘thirties our- establishment began to dwindle, and went on doing so. Once, when I was little, we had had a gardener (Thorn), a cook and two housemaids. I can't remember the details, but gradually we came down to Thorn and one maid. (‘Your mater does the cooking, doesn't she, Adams?') Yes, she did, and she did it loyally and well.

I had vaguely supposed that I would go from Horris Hill to Winchester, but as my last term approached it was clear that my father had other ideas. He reckoned he could get something reasonable in the way of a public school for less money, but he also wanted it to be not too far away from home. He meant to keep an eye on it. Casting around, he hit on the very place to suit him: Bradfield. He went over there, taking me with him, to meet and talk to the Headmaster. He liked the Headmaster and more than liked the look of the school; their business was soon done. I was put down for the Michaelmas term of 1933.

Bradfield lies on the Pang, about a dozen miles north-east of Newbury, in the heart of the Berkshire countryside and not far from Pangbourne. Like a pretty girl, the school has for a start a great asset in its favour. Both it and its surroundings are very beautiful. The school buildings are anything but compact, extending in a rambling way, from the south bank of the Pang up the hill known as Hogger, and covering more than a quarter of a square mile altogether. Open country lies all around, and out beyond the Pang, about a mile away, lies the extensive woodland known as Greathouse Woods. There can hardly be a more attractive school site in the whole country. The first-eleven cricket ground, known as Pit from the high banks which surround it on three sides, is outstandingly beautiful.

The place began in 1850 as a sort of choir school for the village - a kind of serious hobby, one might say, of the founder, a local gentleman called Thomas Stevens. By 1881 Stevens had in effect gone broke. He couldn't pay the staff, so he handed the place over to the then headmaster, Herbert Gray. Gray was to Bradfield what Arnold was to Rugby. During the thirty or more years (too long) that he was headmaster, he not only made the place solvent but built it up into a reasonable minor public school. Whitworth was the third headmaster to follow Gray and, although a limited man and in some respects even a little ridiculous, succeeded, largely by being a man of conscience and complete integrity, in keeping his staff loyal and even attached to him, favourably impressing parents and in general maintaining the standing of the place.

As is well known, Bradfield's unique feature is its Greek amphitheatre, constructed by Gray, during the late eighteen-eighties, from a disused chalk-pit, using the labour only of boys and locals. As far as I know, it is the only amphitheatre of its kind north of the Mediterranean. Here, triennially for the past century (except during the wars), an ancient Greek play has been acted in the original Greek. Gray himself, in his time, used to play the Choriphaios. The benefit and value of the Greek theatre and, simply, its power to influence for good and to confer happiness upon thousands of people - upon which I will expand later - have been another important feature of my life and had a great effect upon me. As I grew older it became - and remains - the best thing Bradfield gave me. To go there still brings its own singular delight. I am a Bradfieldian: this is my theatre - has been for more than fifty years - where I can honestly say that I have been more consistently happy than anywhere else. This blessing, however, was still to come.

I was the first boy ever to go from Horris Hill to Bradfield. (Now they go in numbers.) Many years later I heard (from John Moulsdale, a kind of Bradfieldian Mr Chips) that Whitworth, meeting Mr Stow at some sort of academic get-together, said ‘Well, Stow, so you're sending me a boy at last.' ‘A very peculiar one,' replied Stow.

For a boy in the top form at Horris Hill to take nothing more than the Common Entrance exam, to a school like Bradfield was felt to be almost - if not quite - a discredit. Neither Mr Stow nor Mr Morris, of course, said anything to imply this, but my form-mates did - plenty. I had no recourse but to bear this as best I could. The way things turned out - and in the light of Nicholas Monsarrat's account of Winchester at that time in his autobiography,
Life is a Four Letter Word
- I can only feel very thankful that I went to Bradfield.

However, it would have been a strange new boy of thirteen who could have arrived at any idea of this. In those days life at Bradfield was - by modern standards, anyhow - harsh. At least, it was harsh at the bottom, though I was to find out later that it was not so harsh at the top. The academic work was all right – I came top of my class during my first term, and was told by the form master (that same John Moulsdale) that I ought really to have been placed in a higher form - and so were the games. But over and above these was the fagging, which was severe. This fell into four categories, of which the worst was house-room fagging. House-room fags were organized in gangs of four - a head fag and three others – who were ‘on' twice a week. (The Sunday gang had only Sundays.) Their job was to sweep and dust the house-room (where all but the most senior boys lived when not in class or at games) in the evening, before prep. They had twenty minutes in which to do it. This doesn't sound bad, but in practice it was murder. To start with, the brooms were worn and wobbly-headed from hard use, and the damp rags for dusting smelt sickly-foul. Twenty minutes wasn't time enough for the job. The fags (not allowed to take their coats off) worked like demons, all of a sweat. The brooms raised a choking dust which hung thick in the air like fog and fouled your hair, your neck and your clothes. Afterwards, you could cough or blow your nose and the mucus would actually be black. The raised dust settled on the tops of the lockers and on the windowsills and undid the work of the fag doing the dusting. Bigger boys cursed you for the trouble you were causing. At last it was time to stop, though it could never be time to be done. Then came the crunch. The head of the house-room - not a prefect, but next in line - inspected the work. If he decided it was inefficient - and, like most jacks in office, he was usually hard to please - he could punish you – either the head fag or the whole gang. The punishment might be learning verse, or it might be doing an extra fag - that of someone else who had given better satisfaction. For consistently bad fagging — say, three times in a row - you were beaten by the junior prefect.

Then there was bell fagging. You were bell fag for the day about three times a term. This meant listening out of the window for the school bell and, on hearing it, running, fast, to ring the house bell (in our house, a war-time relic, the bell of a submarine,
B.
10). This wasn't too bad, except that you were stuck with it all day and couldn't settle to much else. You had to be ‘there', listening out. Study fagging was much more of a bore. There were two fags to each prefect's study, and they had to sweep and dust it, wash up the tea-things, clean the prefect's shoes and so on, in addition to their other fagging duties. It left little free time for the junior boys.

Finally, there was the practice known as a fag call. A prefect could enter the house-room and shout ‘Fag!', whereupon everyone with less than two years' seniority had to run and stand in front of him. The last one to arrive was landed with the job — going to buy Mars bars, etc., from Grubs, or carrying a note to a prefect in another house. It wasn't a fair system, because the boys with lockers at the far end of the house-room stood the least chance.

Punishment by prefects for breaches of rules was common. A few years ago I met a contemporary at the Old Boys' annual dinner, and we began swapping memories. ‘It was fascism, really, wasn't it?' he said. I could only agree. If a prefect at Bradfield told you to climb up the wall, you not only climbed up the wall damned quick, but you thanked him kindly for not kicking your bottom while you did so. The house was forever full of people learning verse, writing essays so many pages long, picking up rubbish from the gutters of the road leading down the hill, or getting up early to call prefects in their beds at some ghastly hour. A beating in the dormitory was a not uncommon event. The house prefects were allowed to beat only with the heel of a shoe. For a serious offence, the head of the house could beat you with a stick. Later, as a young officer in 1941, with Hitler at the gates and all on the hazard, I had to learn that British Other Ranks were not going to stand for the sort of discipline which had been the order of the day at Bradfield.

The school regime worked on the privilege system. As a new boy you had no privileges at all: as you gained in seniority you acquired some, and then more. It was a privilege to brew up on a Primus, to put your hands in your pockets, to whistle or sing, to wear a pullover, to call another boy by his Christian name. There was a whole host of sartorial privileges - brown shoes, coloured colours, tassels on mortarboard hats - for we all had to wear mortarboard hats and gowns - and heaven knows what else.

But the worst one was the prohibition on ‘bitching'. Bitching was school slang for horseplay, but the term extended to any unbridled behaviour whatsoever. To push another boy was bitching; to take a hop, skip and jump or to swing from the branch of a tree was bitching. I remember a boy who was judged to be bitching by kicking a tin can. The rule against bitching was rigorously enforced, and the punishment was always beating. This meant that until you were in your third year, you couldn't let off steam anywhere at all (apart from games), and even in your third year only in the house-room: and these were healthy boys of thirteen, fourteen and fifteen.