by John Hicks
>. To schoolboys with anti-establishment leanings this was an open invitation. My friend, John Watson, has a mechanical bent (and has subsequently enjoyed a distinguished career in aeronautical engineering) and his curiosity was aroused. While I acted as decoy and lookout, and the harried masters checked their registers for the slow and indolent, John investigated. Cunningly, he spurned the opportunity to turn the tap completely off; innate empiricism drove him to see what would happen if the tap was turned to a three-quarters position. That bus was the one carrying the School House boys.
Soon after the Selwyn’s bus started along the twisting lane for home, John’s question was answered. Boys in the back of our bus, who had no knowledge of John’s tap tampering, reported that the bus behind was having trouble keeping up. Sometimes it seemed to surge forwards and nearly catch us up, but increasingly it fell behind and eventually it was a mere dot in the distance as we proceeded merrily on our way. As John and I glowed with the inner glee that must enthuse all successful saboteurs, it did dawn on us that the ramifications—should we be rumbled—would be severe. We had the discipline (courtesy of CCF training) to keep our lips sealed, as they have been till this day. It was a good bonding exercise and I am pleased to record that John and I remain good friends and have enjoyed many, far more worthy, adventures together since then.
Meanwhile, on the School House bus, tired and hungry boys were starting to realise they would be late for tea. Army discipline can fold under provocation and on that bus it was breached. There was mutiny. As a result, School House had their Gallipoli Shield points reduced for poor behaviour. Anyone looking in the school record books will now know the true story behind Selwyn’s wresting of the Gallipoli Shield from School House in 1965. John and I had, unwittingly, served our house well. That is how antiheroes operate.
Life is so unfair.
~
There was another uniform that I had to wear under sufferance, this time on Saturday afternoons. That was when the woggle and neckerchief came out and we repaired to the Scout den. I tolerated all the badge work because at the end of the school year our troop indulged in some seriously good—and, occasionally, some seriously bad—adventures. With them I had canoed down the Ribble in full spate, been spat on by a drunken Irish nationalist in Dublin (it was not a good idea to wear a Scout uniform in Eire in those days and our leaders shouldn’t have been so indiscreet as to fly the Union Jack at our campsite) and enjoyed a delightful camping and backpacking trip in the Austrian Alps.
The next trip to Austria was to be a seriously bad one. Under the immature leadership of a prefect I shall call Snake, our band of teenage boys disintegrated into factions. This was to be a fascinating reconstruction of Lord of the Flies, set in an alpine wonderland. The fact that there were no fatalities was more a matter of luck than good management.
Our line of sixteen boys laden with packs and tents struggled up towards the pass. It was hot, and hard to credit the advice given to us by a descending climbing party. They seemed amazed that we intended to cross the large snowfield on the other side. It was steep and very icy. No rope! No ice axes! We should take heed of their warnings. We did. Snake spotted an interesting-looking side-track we could follow. The map and decision-making were solely entrusted to him, by him, and to his prefect chums. Their experience was meagre, more meagre than many others in the party, but they owed their positions of power to parents willing to sacrifice evenings to their advancement: bridge nights with the headmaster. That is how the system works. The seeds of many disasters before and since Gallipoli were sown on the back of corrupt privilege.
And so we trudged haplessly down an ever narrowing track. There was a sign in German, set below a skull-and-crossbones. The sinister symbolism is international, but unfortunately only one of our party had studied German. Haltingly, at Snake’s request, he translated, ‘On pain of death, keep to the left side of the valley’. It sounded convincing, we didn’t want to detect any bullshit. It would have been such a fag climbing back up the valley, and ignobly slinking past the hotel we had theatrically trooped by that morning. Then we were all-conquering heroes, but our very inexperience would have been flagged to any true men of the mountains by the Hollywood of bright new billies and bedrolls barnacled to the outside of our packs.
On we went, over increasingly difficult ground, keeping left. Keen types scented victory. They needed to lead at all costs. As long as they are first to camp, they consider they have won the day. Tough that their victory expends all their energy and they have to loll around recovering whilst lesser boys cook and clean.
They were well ahead of the main bunch by now and had arrived at the edge of a rather large cliff down which two of them proceeded to dislodge the heavy packs they had, too carelessly, hefted from their screaming shoulders. Down they bounced, spewing contents as they went, including all our money and traveller’s cheques. Suddenly these front-runners lost the will to press on and decided to wait for us. But we never reached them. Stopping was their first sensible decision, for down that very cliff three members of the Austrian army had recently plummeted to their deaths, leading to the erection of the sign on the track which, in fact, translated as, ‘On pain of death, do not go beyond this point’. Sometimes getting it half right is not good enough.
Meanwhile, further back, on what we assumed was the left hand side of the valley, I thought I had found a way down a rather awkward section. I was spread-eagled in an exposed position. Beneath my feet a twelve-foot drop onto a steep scree slope melted in my panicked vision. The trouble was my confounded rucksack. Forty pounds is a considerable handicap. It had dawned on me that I was in a position from which I could neither advance nor retreat. I was going to have to let go. My legs shook, my hand-holds slackened.
Why linger? Consciously I consigned myself to my fate and peeled backwards off the face. I was prepared for the worst. In a blurring second or two an overpoweringly malign, regretful flashback of my short life surged through my mind.
My pack cushioned the first impact on the scree. I somersaulted and lay winded on the slope, mercifully intact, apart from a gashed forehead. Apparently it looked spectacular, but I was too drained to acknowledge the salutations of my peers. The horror of those few seconds would play back in my mind for a while yet.
Shocked but relieved, our group spent a wet and uncomfortable night on a steep slope. Unable to pitch our tents we tied them to trees to prevent us sliding into a rushing gorge. Sheepishly the leading group trudged back up to us and appeared out of the damp gloom to relay their tale of woe.
In the morning I glimpsed the dainty elegance of a chamois across the stream, then she was gone; a bright jewel in a tarnished ordeal.
We had been very stupid and, later on, Snake and his lieutenants were suitably upbraided by local officials. They did not appreciate helping to search the area at the base of the precipice for the equipment these silly boys had lost: ground that naturally held more poignant significance for them. I almost felt sorry for Snake, but his ego was more than a match for this challenge and he appeared unchastened by the ordeal. The makings of his political career were already in train.
A bedraggled party of wet, bruised and, in my case, bloody boys were offered hospitality in the hotel we had triumphantly clattered past the previous morning. I rather hoped the pretty waitress would attend to my war wounds, but she obviously hadn’t read any romantic Edwardian literature about wounded heroes and showed no interest in my plight. All in all, I rated it a capital learning experience, far more valuable than dressing up as soldiers on the parade ground.
~
In my later school years I was fortunate enough to become interested in my school subjects and my academic performance lifted to a level where it was conceivable that I might, with application, achieve my objective of being a vet. Perhaps it was the introduction of biology to the syllabus that fired me. Mr Swift had my attention within minutes of explaining the glories of photosynthesis: how life on this planet, as we know it, depends ultimately on chl
orophyll. This tiny molecule, present in all green plants, fixes the energy of the sun and manufactures the chemicals that sustain plant growth. ‘Our ancestors worshipped the sun, boys, and on that point it strikes me that they had a lot more sense than us!’
Yet Mr Swift, not an hour earlier, had been singing hymns with the other masters at our daily chapel service. What had happened to his ‘faith’? The attraction of the sciences, for me, was that they were not based upon faith. Rote learning was secondary to fostering a questioning and investigative attitude.
Since Junior school days, when we had compulsorily to learn a hymn for our weekend homework, I had had great difficulty assimilating unexplained—perhaps inexplicable—mumbo-jumbo. The Headmistress of the Junior School was deviously cunning. One weekend we were granted a special privilege. On Monday morning all we had to do was write out any two consecutive verses that we had memorised from the Bible. Oh! the frustration of discovering that the verses fore and aft of ‘Jesus wept’ are disproportionately verbose. It was a long slog trying to find two verses with a shorter combined length.
Mr Swift’s surprising utterance lifted a great weight from my shoulders. So … some adults other than my parents (parental opinion being of little moment at this stage of life) shared my growing doubts! Perhaps it didn’t matter that I had declined to be confirmed into the Anglican Church after all. I had known all along that I couldn’t live up to the expected standards. I had also seen that many of those taking their vows were, also, demonstrably unable to adhere to them; yea, though it troubled them not. Henceforth I would just have to go hungry and thirsty at Holy Communion while the exalted ones ate Christ’s body and drank His blood.
Our homework assignments were becoming more interesting. One holiday the biology class were each allocated a pair of locusts and briefly instructed about feeding and housing them. (The housing was to be manufactured at the boy’s initiative, with parental supervision if they were canny—mine, to their detriment, were not). Finding the lawn clippings on which to feed the burgeoning hordes would be no problem over the summer holidays.
It is fortunate that the vagaries of English weather are inimical to locust physiology, which was why we had been instructed to keep them indoors, but when they’ve outgrown their welcome in the parental home, what then? Mr Swift cannot have been aware of the family ructions his little projects caused and that maternal sensibilities had been well and truly primed by the previous year’s experiment with stick insects.
It was soon obvious that locusts did not believe in parthenogenesis like the sedately grotesque stick insects. Within a few weeks every corner of my cabinet was chock full of copulating locusts; and their teeming, ever-hungry offspring rustled restlessly round the floor, looking for anything to eat. Eyes focused on the grotesque, fizzing adults tended to neglect the athletic offspring of a multitude of incestuous couplings. They leapt about the confines of their makeshift home as I struggled to slide increasingly vast bundles of grass through the glass door. If the feeding frenzy of sharks alarms you, I can assure you that they have absolutely nothing on locusts. I struggled to keep up with them.
Inevitably, the door jammed on the odd occasion, and some of the more adventurous locusts would seize their chance and embark on hazardous journeys of discovery. It was quite surprising where they or their crunchy carcases could end up. Not wishing to alarm my mother, I never owned up to these escapees, hoping against hope that they would vanish into thin air. Some hope. She finally flipped when she found the dog gnawing on a locust rusk under the dining room table. But by then other mothers must have been in equally desperate straits—you know how the grapevine works—and they had agreed on a solution:
‘Mrs Callaghan seems very nice, John. You know her boy Peter, don’t you?’
Yes, I knew Peter all right. He was probably the biggest larrikin in our class. And, I have to confess, I remember him with great fondness.
‘Well, she is going to bring Peter round to collect up all the locusts and he will dispose of them humanely for all of us.’
Many of the parents were probably, like my mother, at their wits’ end. They may not even have cared that the motives behind this apparent act of generosity leant more to mischief than altruism, but it was divinely inspired mischief. Peter’s vision anticipated a link between modern biological science and the scriptures. Here was an opportunity to create a veritable plague of locusts.
Peter seemed unusually perky when he arrived. Something was up. He gave me a secretive smile as he carelessly emptied the contents of my cabinet into a large multi-walled paper sack; ‘They’re going to a warm home, John, with heaps of space, a varied diet and plenty to eat. Just you wait and see!’ And in due course we did.
At this stage it is perhaps appropriate to digress and ponder the Victorians’ great love affair with large greenhouses. It all started with the Great exhibition of 1851 when Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort, commissioned the building of Crystal Palace—the grandaddy of all greenhouses until it burnt down. But it started a trend and soon every municipal authority, the length of Britain, felt compelled to follow suit. Liverpool was no exception. They built their large greenhouse in the centre of Sefton Park and called it the Palm House. Conveniently, it was just down the road from our school.
The Palm House was where Peter Callaghan chose to liberate our locusts.
By the time we returned from our holiday break the word was out. So we were not particularly surprised to discover the Palm House was closed for ‘routine maintenance’. Wild rumours circulated. Boys peering through the steamed up windows claimed there were massive drifts of locusts piling up against the panes … They spoke of demented gardeners charging about with ginormous knapsack sprayers flapping on their backs, and of prized specimen plants stripped to mere skeletal remnants … those locusts had fired our juvenile imaginations in a way Mr Swift could never have envisaged.
The truth is more prosaic. Perhaps the humidity was not congenial to locusts. Perhaps the place was saturated with organochlorides to suppress other pests. Perhaps the gardeners were alert and sprayed the strange invaders at first encounter. Our over-imaginative budding journalists proved unreliable. When I visited there wasn’t one locust to be seen, just the odd scowling staff member. We were never privy to what transpired in the corridors of power, but it would have been interesting to have been a locust on the wall.
‘Due to a regrettable incident’ the Palm House was promptly declared out of bounds to boys in our school uniform.
~
Work makes heat. To demonstrate the Laws of Thermodynamics we repeatedly upended long cardboard tubes filled with small glass beads. After a while their temperature had risen measurably. Q.E.D. Later those same beads, spirited from the lab, were on the dining room floor, demonstrating the Laws of Motion. This experiment promised to be more diverting. A combination of parameters contributed to the entertainment: a hard parquet floor, leather soled shoes (compulsory for all boarders), transparent invisibility and a sharp left turn into the dining area immediately through the doors. Add to this the desperate rush of those late boys keen to gain their seats before grace was said. Faces, full of intent and anxiety, were instantly transformed to surprise and alarm as centrifugal forces propelled them at a tangent to their intended destinations—a perplexing observation to all save a few mischief-makers. Perhaps the cleaners found a few small glass beads at the end of the day and wondered. For the rest of the diners it remained an unsolved mystery. For the miscreants it was good luck that no one was hurt. I admit to being irresponsible on occasion.
Mostly our pranks were innocuous enough. But if we could strike at the head of the system we would. Poor headmaster—at times we turned the tables on your power! If there was an ‘s’ at the end of the line of a hymn, I can promise you that due accord was given to its sibilance: we pounced on it sonorously, slowly or almost silently—whisperingly—but always out of synchrony with our neighbours. These were the annoyances that all your threats of beatings
and physical detentions were powerless to stop. Hold us back for extra hymn singing Headmaster, if you must. The lessons we will miss are of more concern to you than us. See! You had to give up in defeat. The next day with sibilances redoubled, victory was ours. And when your dog pulled restlessly on his lead at the school sports did you realise that you were entertaining a group of sixth-formers with a high pitched dog whistle? They work beyond the auditory range of most middle-aged men. What entertainment we had watching you in country squire pose, being towed around by your disobedient Golden Retriever … bewildered country squire with flailing shooting stick! What a lesson in applied physics and biology! How interesting that dogs’ hearing is far more sensitive than ours to sounds of shorter wavelengths.
As figurehead of the whole rotten system, I felt little sympathy for you even when some of your more irresponsible pupils phoned every taxi firm in Liverpool on your behalf the day before the end-of-year break-up. They were asked to call round to your house at strategic intervals through the night, warned to knock at the door repeatedly because you were a little hard of hearing, and to please persist because you had a plane to catch. Was it my imagination that you looked tired as you shook my hand and wished me well on my journey through life? Nice sentiment, a shame you never knew my name.
Amid this curate’s egg of a public school, the good parts succeeded in laying an education which would indeed propel me on life’s journey. Over the decades I have retrospectively come to terms with the rest. Greater talents than mine have overcome far more serious hurdles. I may have had a privileged upbringing in the eyes of my erstwhile Taranaki colleague, David, and others who denounce English public schoolboys, but nothing is as it appears.
