Noisy at the Wrong Times (10 page)

Getting up was difficult enough at the normal time, and the master on duty would do it in the style of his choice. Suffolk mornings in the autumn or winter were unforgiving things; frost and mist, and above all else, cold would greet you when you opened your bleary eyes and cast a look across Berner’s field. If you had games that day, you would know what suffering lay ahead from that first glance. John Morris, the formal housemaster of Halls, would walk quietly through the house, pulling open curtains and rhythmically intoning “Wakey, Wakey, rise and shine, time to get up” as he went. He would give the bell to an individual whose duty it then was to go through the house ringing it every five minutes to ensure all were finally awake and at breakfast by the given time. Bell ringers, without a choice in the matter, were deeply unpopular. We ring a bell at Opera Holland Park when we need the
patrons to get to their seats, and we send a steward around the theatre to clang and cajole the people out of the public spaces. It has the same irritating effect on them as it did on the boys in Halls house; the familiar sneers and gruff voices following every bell ringer have probably been the same through all history.

Mike Coulter, John Morris’s deputy, took a different tack. He would sneak up to the door, silently release the catch of the handle, stand back and then launch himself feet first through the door bellowing, “Get up! Get up! Come on, come on! GET UP!” Sometimes you would hear him coming if you were already awake, and I would never fail to be shocked by the deviousness of his technique. I once suffered a serious crick in my neck having lifted my head suddenly from the pillow as Coulter traumatised us into life. At weekends, when rising time was a bit later, Morris would occasionally bring his young son with him, and the child would ring the bell gleefully through the house, which is the worst possible way to be awoken. One Sunday morning, the child took the bell to within an inch of the face of second former we shall call Big Dez, and began to ring it loudly in the sleeping behemoth’s ear. Like an ogre beneath his bridge rather than the big teddy bear the child obviously saw him as, Dez opened one eye, checked that Morris had gone ahead to the next dorm and then delivered a sharp smack to the mini bell-ringer’s head, his huge hand shooting out like a chameleon’s tongue. As the child ran off screaming, Dez went back to sleep.

Some of us had begun an uneasy acquaintance. Of the ten first formers in Halls House, there were at least three of us who obviously fancied ourselves as year leaders, but we had sense enough to just accommodate the competing egos. I had instantly warmed towards Rob Smith, who was seemingly prepared to indulge in rule breaking. Then there was Seaton,
who by coincidence lived near to me in Fulham and whose estate used to regularly get into fights with ours. The second formers, who shared a dorm with us, were keen to assert their newfound authority, having been the recipients of the standard bullying the year before. I was soon to learn that Serge’s year had given them quite a hard time and they were looking for revenge. Big Dez, who had an afro the size of a small bay tree, was worrying me a great deal, and we first formers quickly learned the art of quiet submission. Even my instinct to retaliate for the most minor affront had to be curbed – there were ten of them in a largely unsupervised dorm, and even I didn’t think I could take them all on at once. So cuffs, shoves and name-calling were the order of the day for all of us. I was being singled out for an extra bit of verbal attention because Serge had obviously been a bit of a bastard to them in the previous year. But it remained verbal precisely because Serge had been a bit of a bastard in the previous year.

Those early days were characterised by the uncomfortable feeling of being out of our normal element. It was
discombobulating
.

A wonderful word, that.

Discombobulate.

The comforts and certainties of home and familiar surroundings were torn from under our feet, and the exigencies of our new world of rules, which smothered us like cling film – with beady eyes on our every move and no end of people ready to correct our behaviour – pulled many of us up short. Every day a new protocol would present itself: don’t use that door, use the one ten feet away; don’t stack your shoes like that, stack them with the heels showing outwards; only hang towels in the drying room, not in the dormitory; fold the corners of the bed sheet thus. I list but a few of the orders we were obliged to obey on a daily basis.

“It’s like a prison in this shithole,” I would mutter under
my breath almost every time I received a command. It got to the point where I would want to dig a hole whenever I saw a sixth former or a master approaching, to hide in dirt and muck, if only to avoid the next piffling irrelevance or needless errand.

I simply found it difficult to obey orders without a bit of a fight. I’m still like that. I knew these boys were bigger and older than me and had the ‘right’ to tell me what to do, but I found most of them unworthy of the role. Some were moderately cool, sixth formers with long hair who played guitar or were top rugby players, but too many were obviously relishing their power over us; and almost without exception, they would be the nerdy ones, those who from time to time you would hear being mocked by their peers. It was an early lesson in insecurity. So, when an order came, I wouldn’t disobey, but there would be a momentary pause, a glance, a look away and then a quizzical look back, a question perhaps. I would then comply with a wry smile. Sixth formers would rarely beat up the smaller boys, so I had worked out that I was in little physical danger. They must have hated me.

“Volpe! What the fucking hell are you doing using that door?”

“I’m going into the house.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s cold.”

“What fucking door is it?”

“The door to the house, where it’s warm.”

“Is that the junior’s door? Is it?”

“Errm, I’m not sure to be honest.”

“No, it isn’t, you little shit!”

“Oh, OK.”

“The one
next
to it painted blue, use it. You are in prefect’s detention for two weeks, one for using the wrong door and one for being a cheeky little fucker”.

“Oh fucking hell!”

“Make that three weeks for swearing.”

The power always resided with the sixth former despite my notions of rebellion, but if I could exasperate them, delay them or just simply annoy them to a point south of a punch in the head, I was satisfied.

It wasn’t just the outlandish idea of rules and regulations, or order and command, duty, responsibility and deferment that challenged us – or, more specifically, me. Our environment was unspeakably taxing too. Even the good stuff like rolling hills, trees and grass carried a threat of a kind. The sky was enormous, the night was as black as ink and the air could be so cold it would burn your nose. Where was the light and roar of traffic I was so used to? Noise accompanied my every waking and sleeping moment in Fulham; with a fire station to our left, a police station opposite and a railway line to our right, we were surrounded by sirens, clatter and din. At Woolverstone, if you sat on the grass and listened, you could just about hear the pulse of your own blood over the squeaks, tweets and squawks coming from the shrubs and bushes. If Fulham was the dissonant croak of a punk band, Woolverstone was Sibelius as played by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Furtwängler. And I hated it. I couldn’t cope with the silence at night. Or the darkness that might conceal a prank or devious bully who could, unseen, pelt you with spiked horse chestnut husks as you ran corrective perimeters of the school road for using, yet again, that wrong bloody door. On a clear night, the purity of the darkness meant I could see so much more of the cosmic ceiling; I had only to go seventy five miles to render twice as beautiful, things that were millions of miles away.

I had never imagined a life in the countryside, and here I was, about to face at least five years slap bang in the middle of
it. I couldn’t see myself ever adapting to the mud, the cold, the wetness, the wildlife or the distance between everything. There were fields all around us, cattle in the paddock next to the cricket pitch and there were warnings about the foreshore, the irrigation ponds and about keeping off farmland. I had no idea what an irrigation pond was but was assured it was deep and exceptionally deadly if you fell into one, and we had three at the bottom of an adjacent field. Wherever you were, there was
always
an adjacent field. There was a field to cross before you could do anything. Usually there were several fields, and you were never sure if you were permitted to cross them, in which case you might have to walk around them and that doubled or trebled the distance. If you risked it, you invited the possibility that a gravel-voiced farmer with a dog that doubled at Pinewood as the Hound of the Baskervilles would chase you away. The farmers hated Woolverstone boys because we always damaged crops, as far as they were concerned; we all belonged back in the city with the rest of the scum. Their dogs, which were frequently more intelligent and erudite than their masters, hated us even more than their primped, subsidised owners did. They could happily walk past a hundred people, waddling and snuffling cutely at small children and rolling onto their backs for a tickle, but the slightest sniff or sighting of a Woolverstone boy and they would turn rabid.

But there was no escaping the truth that Woolverstone was a fine-looking place, even if it did at first feel as though I had landed on Mars. When gazing from the back of the main house down to the Orwell river, you saw a patchwork of early autumn colour and mile after mile of trees cladding the rolling hills of the river valley. The foreshore of the wide Orwell was fringed by a substantial open marsh dotted with boggy pools, and it gave off a smell that drifted up on the crisp air. Before that was another seam of thick verdant ferns in summer, golden bracken
in autumn and flat frosty saw grass in winter. Large cargo ships would chug up the river to Ipswich through the forest of small bobbing yachts and fishing boats that cowered in the enormous wake. Seagulls and their distinctive cry filled the air, crows cawed endlessly in the morning mists, and when it shone, the sun was bright and sharp on the eyes. And there was quaintness aplenty: in the chocolate box prettiness of St Michael’s church up beside the First XV playing field; in the tiny picture postcard villages of Woolverstone itself, Chelmondiston, Shotley and Pin Mill. We even had archetypal groundsmen whose local brogue meant I couldn’t understand a word any of them said. I don’t think they truly qualified as ‘quaint’ per se, especially not with their grizzled syllables and big, gnarly hands. There were four of them, led by Dickey Mayes, a former Kent cricketer and creator of a wonderful first class wicket on Berners’ field. Digging beds, driving tractors, pulling small carts of plants, mowing lawns or the playing fields, the groundsmen were wizened, weather-beaten and Suffolk residents through and through. One always had a pipe in his mouth and carried with him a happy demeanour. That is to say, that once you realised he wasn’t growling at you, it was easier to see his happy demeanour.

“Yaargh roit, g’daaay boy. Naarh be waaarg’n on thart there graaas wool yaarh?”

He didn’t as much speak as
vocalise
. After a while, you could determine when he wasn’t telling you off and could make out a few words from the inflection he used or the look in his eye. The groundsmen never moved very fast. If you passed one on the way to a lesson, he might be replanting a flowerbed at a speed where movement was barely perceptible. However, when you came back, the previously empty wasteland of the bedding plot would look like a Gold Medal display at Chelsea.

Paradoxically, despite considering myself to be in a surreal
place, I do remember feeling smug when I thought how jealous my friends would be if they could see me, although I agree this sounds peculiar since boarding school filled them with dread. At primary school, we had twice gone to a farm in Beaconsfield (a mere hop, skip and jump from west London) and the journey out to the farm was always suffused with glee on account of our passing fields full of cattle and sheep. The farm itself was little more than a shed with a pair of Friesians in it, but the ground was muddy and the aroma was that of dung – fruity, herbivore dung as opposed to the effluent on London’s streets. I think we associated the countryside with wealth and posh people, and believed everyone had a car in the country. And a house. Usually a large house. I’m not entirely sure what was so exotic and exciting about the green spaces around London, but we would be beside ourselves with the exhilaration of it all. Now, my entire playground was a hundred times better than that, I would awaken to the mooing of cattle, and their smell would hang in the air permanently. Only to an urban child could the type and smell of shit be a status symbol.

It seems to me that my education – in a more global sense – began in those first few days of life at Woolverstone. If the environment was part of the plan when the brave and brilliant individuals who created Woolverstone first drew up their ideas then they chose well the crucible for our instruction. A child’s environment has a huge part to play in his development, and it’s not just the
social
influences. If heightened aspiration was the driving engine powering the school, both the sculpted lawns and uncontrolled wildness of the land upon which it sat was the exquisite bodywork. Our school offered us space and wide horizons; I am not so trite as to make the obvious correlation here, but education needed to provide us with more than the vocational or merely prosaic. It was not immediately obvious to me that the Suffolk countryside was more than a
geographical location, but it is certainly clear to me now that I had a great deal to adapt to when I arrived at that place, and coming to terms with this beautiful but nevertheless shockingly new and unfamiliar world was all part of the learning. This forced emergence from our personal little castles extended to everything, including the ability to share our worlds with those around us.

I had been used to sharing sleeping space at home, but it was a very novel experience having to do so with nineteen others. They all had their habits or did annoying things; I would roar internally at the variety of irritating bedtime rituals. Some of them farted a lot, had rancid feet, talked in their sleep or just plain got on your nerves. One boy even slept with his eyes wide open, which is unsettling if you happen to glance at him as you returned from the toilet in the middle of the night. If you were in a bottom bunk and the person on top fidgeted a lot, the creaking and squeaking of the metal netting above would drive you to despair. We shared everything; sleeping space, toilets and showers, mealtimes and duties, so our new world was certainly going to test us all.