Noisy at the Wrong Times (11 page)

The anticipation of being at the school was mixed with the inevitable homesickness many were feeling, but soon, chatter replaced sobbing in the dorm after lights out, despite our knowing it was
verboten
. Conversations were laced with ninety percent untruths as boys sought to establish their credentials. Brothers would become gangsters, sisters would be beauty queens and, for those of us who had them, Dads would be businessmen or spies. Many of us had been champion-something-or-others at primary school, and
all
of us knew what it felt like to touch a girl’s bits. Slowly but surely, a pecking order was forming among the first formers, based on who was the loudest, had the best stories or who claimed to have won all the fights he’d ever had. It wasn’t entirely surprising that we
saw our physicality as the passport to status, and it is something Woolverstone would come to harness and channel very effectively, but it was also a measure of where our priorities lay.

Later, we would discover many boys in the school had commendably glamorous parents who, strangely, we all took some sort of credit for in our growing camaraderie and solidarity. There was the boy whose father led the Red Arrows and the boy with a Dad who was props master on the James Bond movies. We had a friend whose mother was a model, known to all for her part in a famous Levi advert and her best friend was married to Eric Clapton, which meant the boy spent Christmases playing snooker with superstars of the rock world. The boy himself went on to fame and stardom for a time as a pop star. Another had a famous disc jockey for a dad, and several boys had about them the demeanour of laid-back hippies, a mood absorbed from liberal parents who smoked lots of weed. We were a diverse bunch for sure and I was quite often struck by the ordinariness of my own family when compared to this alluringly bohemian, Arts and Crafts menagerie. My plain background didn’t stop me basking in the reflected glow of these colourful lives, but the truth was that there were many who knew the caustic dangers of inner city London as well as I did. In time, we would come to know more of the lives of our school friends, and all too frequently it was easy to discern crushing difficulties. In my memory, most of us had fractured families and those who didn’t were usually among the small intake from military families. Conversely, of course, there were boys who had stories they never wanted to tell, or felt unable to, for fear that they could not measure up to the elevated bloodline of the heroes and hard-nuts who now surrounded them. We must have appeared absurd, terrifying or both, but these boys would nevertheless remain quiet and probably frightened.

I haven’t until now thought much about my own homesickness in those first few weeks. I don’t recall it, although I must have felt it somewhere along the line. I was quite an independent child; my mother always recalled the time she took me into hospital at five years’ old to have my tonsils out, but getting me settled in was cut short by my excited invitation for her to leave and let me get on with the adventure. But whilst I don’t recall ever crying down the phone to Mum (no doubt helped by having an older brother there), I did miss bits of my life at home, and I also believe I was already feeling the weight of expectation. The fear of failing was getting to all of us because we were surrounded by those who were just so bloody good at stuff. You couldn’t escape them: the rugby players, the musicians, the real eggheads who were talked about in hushed tones. We had a lot to live up to, and it took some time to work out which behaviour was appropriate in order to step onto the track whose destination was ‘success’. It would normally begin as silliness and bravado, but the crucible for building self-image was at first the dormitory or the house, not the classroom, and the first seam that male adolescence usually mines is machismo.

Small boys, when they first encounter other small boys act in a way that is the human equivalent of a peacock showing his feathers. In a normal day school, there are often mums and dads to add character and status to an individual, along with the size of car or house. There are the reassuring comforts of home, and an evening in the bosom of family can revive the flagging spirit of a child who has had a bad day among his peers. In a boarding school – or, more specifically, in a closed, darkened dormitory – it is, even in a benign form, a case of kill or be killed. There is no comforting hug from mother to soothe a furrowed brow, nor is there is any escape from a bully or a tormentor in a hall of residence. There is just the daily
grind of the effort to get up the pecking order and to achieve, at the very least, a position no less than halfway up it. I fought my way through force of personality to what I believed was somewhere near the top, and in truth I was more force than personality, but I felt as though I was making progress.

Many did not relish the post-lights out humdrum, but it was certainly a time when we could get to know each other and for friendships, such as they were, to emerge (Rob and I formed an alliance that lasts to this day.) It was also a time for the second form to have their fun, forcing juniors to run ‘dares’ or ordering one of us to ‘run the gauntlet’, when everybody waited at the foot of their bed with a pillow as the chosen one ran between them, taking blow after blow. Dares were often exciting, but none of us wanted to have to do them, and we dreaded the nights when the second formers decided it was to be such an evening.

Our dorm looked out across Berners’ field towards the old pavilion, so when a nervous first former was ordered to run to there, we could see the events unfold in front of our eyes. The boy had to get out of the house first, usually at a time when the house was in full functional flow, so his furtive escape into the night was laced with danger. He could be caught by anyone walking through the house, or by a senior watching TV in the dining room. Worse was to get caught by a master on duty. A frisson of excitement would ripple through the dorm as we saw the boy appear on the lawn in front of the house, creeping, hiding behind pillars, crouching below windows. Once convinced that the coast was clear, the boy would set off sprinting across the open ground with his striped pyjamas flapping in the breeze. Pyjamas were almost universally striped and too large for the boy. If they did not flap, it was because it was pouring with rain and the fabric was clamped against his skin: meteorological considerations were thin on the ground
between empowered second formers. Other dares were more epic and involved bringing back evidence such as a sign or piece of wood. When they got really elaborate, boys doing the dare could be out for half of the night, returning to a silent, sleeping dormitory.

Sex, or the prospect of it, was never far from our minds, and usually the general discussion in the dorm would turn to it. Opinion polls would be held on the various wives of masters, pop singers or newsreaders, and we rued the fact that matrons were never attractive (probably a deliberate decision on the part of the school). After long talks about the virtues of various girls of our acquaintance, many of them inventions, the unmistakable sound of twenty boys wanking (impossible to describe) would fill the air.

So the dormitory became the centre of our worlds in the first few weeks at Woolverstone. It is where you would retire to if weary, to lie on your bed and read or wonder about home; and I suppose, despite occasional dangers, it was a place of safety. The small, two square metres of bed was your sanctuary, and nobody was permitted to cross its threshold; nothing provoked ire as fiercely as seeing somebody lying on your bed. But your bed didn’t protect you from everything, as Rob Smith soon discovered.

The dorm was in three sections, with panelled walls dividing each of them. The middle section had the toilets, and at each end were the doors onto the landing outside. I was in an end section on a bottom bunk, and Rob was in the middle section. We were all busy telling various lies about ourselves, excitedly talking about the rugby careers we were soon to embark upon, when John Morris, the housemaster, quietly opened the dormitory door and stood listening.

John “Musher” Morris, as he was known, was a calm, religious man. He had a young family and, in fact, looked a
little like Bobby Charlton with glasses. He was a man who commanded respect by virtue of his quiet moderation, reason and was a fully paid up member of the hierarchy and played us well in this respect. In order to stop someone like me from bullying, he knew immediately to send me on an errand to stop somebody else doing it. Morris epitomised confidence of a more modest and self-contained kind, and although I never thought to emulate him in this respect, I was sufficiently aware of it to moderate my more strident side whenever he was around. He taught history and was a very fine rugby player and coach, so I spent lots of time outside of the house in his company, but I wish more of his manner had rubbed off on me. I thought him a brilliant man. And I quickly came to know where his line in the sand was; as it was described to us, he hated many things, but he hated swearing and rule breaking more than anything else. Rules were there for a reason, they brought order and discipline, and it was no surprise that he held such a view. Nor was it a shock to learn that profanity offended him more gravely than if you had run him through with a scaffold pole. Swearing was a crime beyond almost anything else we could commit; to swear was an offence to oneself, to others around you, to God too, I suspect. It was not something we ever philosophised with him about, we just did not do it when he was around. Oddly, I suspect my memory of Morris as a trenchant, God-fearing man is probably as a result of school embellishment, but when we arrived, this was the caricature painted by our contemporaries, and it took hold.

Rob Smith, being in the middle section of the dorm did not see him come into the room and as we all fell silent, Smith continued his pursuit of an answer to a question he had asked me.

“Volpe? Volpe? Answer me Volpe!”

The silhouetted housemaster stood still, listening. And then he spoke evenly and in a menacing monotone.

“Smith. Go and stand outside my study”.

There was a collective lurching of stomachs. Even at that early stage, we knew what that meant. As Smith climbed out of bed and trudged out of the dormitory clad in nothing but his pyjamas, we suddenly all realised that henceforth, life was going to be different. As Morris left the dorm, he reminded us sternly of the no-talking directive and closed the door. The second formers were beside themselves with mirth and excitement at Smith’s imminent beating. We novices weren’t sure what to make of it, but it was certainly dramatic. I should think all of us had received a good hiding from a parent before, but formalised punishment has gravitas precisely because it is controlled and by design. We did not know what to expect from it all. Would we hear Smith’s screams echo through the house? Would he come back howling and crying? Would he need hospital treatment? Would he ever be the same again? How the world outside drifted further away at that moment, how our cockiness evaporated and melted into the thick, tense air of the dormitory.

Pound to a penny, Rob would piss his pyjamas, I thought.

* * *

The first time I had received a whack from a teacher was when five years old at Addison Gardens. The headmaster had been called to the classroom because some boys were getting unruly. He came in, asked the main culprit – who was unmistakeable on account of his being half-buried in the beads and counters he had been chucking everywhere – for the names of his accomplices, and the bugger had named innocent, uninvolved and oblivious
me
. Almost before I could raise even a yelp in
protest, I was pitched across the headmaster’s knee, right there in front of the whole class, and given a hand smacking. And I pissed in my pants. Some weeks later, the teacher called me to the front of the class and scolded me for something that, again, I hadn’t even done. She ordered me to put my hand out, which I did, not knowing why, and from behind her back she produced a thick wooden ruler and attempted to bring it down across my knuckles. I moved my hand. She grabbed my hand and rapped me across the knuckles anyway. I kicked her in the leg and ran out of the classroom. My Mum visited the school to speak to the headmaster about that one and told the teacher, “Iffa you touch mya son again, I fucky killa you.”

* * *

Ten minutes after leaving the dorm, Smith shuffled back in quietly. Nobody spoke to him and none of us asked what had happened. We all just went to sleep and if he had pissed his pants, he wasn’t telling.

In the morning, we were eager to talk about the previous night’s drama. I don’t know what we expected, but Smith looked pretty normal; there were no bruises on his face, no tear-streaked cheeks, no plaster of Paris or blood or crutches. In fact, I think we were disappointed to see no signs of injury
at all
. Had he not just been slippered by the legendary Musher Morris? Why was he still breathing? Walking? Alive? But injury he did, indeed, suffer. Smith told us how Morris had wordlessly ushered him into the study, took him by the back of the neck with his right hand, encouraging him to bend at the waist and with the left delivered four thwacks with a rubber soled plimsoll. These being pre-Nike days, plimsolls were not the light athletic constructions of today, but canvas and rubber bludgeons. The shoe in question was a Dunlop Green Flash. The sole was at least one-inch thick
rubber and into it were moulded hundreds of small lightning flashes. Smith reported that it was at least a size ten. It hurt, apparently. A great deal. Rob, as we had now taken to calling him out of sympathy, showed us his arse and in the middle of a sickeningly large contusion that covered his entire posterior, we could clearly discern the word “Dunlop” in reverse, and scores of small lightning flashes bruised into the skin. Right there and then, we all vowed to avoid a ‘kippering’ from Morris. And there was no doubt that we admired Rob for taking the beating and not to be crying his eyes out twelve hours later. It was a badge of honour of sorts, he had broken his cherry and the knowledge of how it felt to receive a slippering was his to impart. It would never surprise him again.