by William Boyd
I ended my school career as a head of house—we called them “house helpers.” I was not very officious, perhaps lethargic might be more apt, but I don’t ever expect to re-encounter that curious sensation of strolling through the house at night while everyone else was working at prep, master of my own territory, knowing that I could go anywhere, search anywhere, order people to do my bidding. It is, for those inclined to exult in it, a heady experience—perhaps not the sort of thing an eighteen-year-old should indulge in.
The occasion when one’s power, as it were, stared one in the face was over the issue of haircuts. In those days all young males had long hair, and one of the stigmata of being a public schoolboy was the fact that your hair was so short. Consequently, everyone endeavoured to grow their hair as long as possible. The longer your hair, the more “cool” you were. Haircut nights saw the head of house, clipboard in hand, patrolling the studies. His word was law—there was no higher court of appeal. Real dread was in the atmosphere. A local barber visited the house once a fortnight. He had to have heads to cut, a minimum of half a dozen. Who would be chosen? To enter a study was an eerie experience; one might have come to claim hostages or to issue a decimation order. At that moment the power one wielded was palpable.
A side-effect of power was adulation. They were not always concomitant, but one usually went with the other. By the reduced standards that operate within any enclosed or confined community it was possible to reach a level of fame or renown similar to that enjoyed by film actors or pop stars in the wider world. These folk heroes had their own fans, even their own imitators. I am glad to say that at my school prowess at games was not the sole route to celebrityhood. It was the age of student rebellion and we had our own existential heroes. I remember a couple of them vividly. There was Burns, taciturn and poetic. His influence was widespread and was responsible for an improbable Ezra Pound craze that swept the school. Against type, he decided rugby was permissible and secured a place in the First XV. But somehow he managed to play his rugby in a dissident, rebellious manner too—brooding, never shouting, socks always round his ankles—so it did not diminish his réclame. Pat-more’s hero was Oscar Wilde. He always wore his duffel coat like a cloak and parted his hair in the middle. He would saunter around, carrying a daffodil, with half a dozen acolytes at his heels. I do not know what has become of these two, but from time to time I do encounter other erstwhile superheroes and am always astonished at how bland and ordinary they are, and wonder from where they derived their early renown. The sad thing for these people is that adult life can never duplicate the fabulous triumphs of their schooldays—they peak at age seventeen or eighteen and it is all a long slide down from then on. They are the great reminiscers.
At my school promotion did not bring any great increase in privileges. Everyone wore the same uniform and rank was demarcated only by a silk flash on the left-hand side of the regulation school jersey. A house helper usually got a single study bedroom, and the prefects (“colour bearers”) enjoyed a more lax routine. Baths were a great luxury. We had two to serve sixty boys, and a house helper’s privilege was to order any boy out of a bath and take it as his own. There was always a huge waiting list, and because of the time involved the water was never changed. As a junior I would often step into a tepid bath in which the water was absolutely opaque from the grime of its seventeen or so previous occupants. As I grew more senior so my baths grew clearer. My one decadent luxury as head of house was to order the bell-ringer (the boy who woke up the rest of the house) to run me a bath in the morning. It would wait there—unused, steaming, limpid—until I came down to the shower room to claim it.
My own progress to this exalted position was straightforward. I moved up through the various ranks to colour bearer, and there I would have stayed had not the head of my house been promoted to head boy and I was pushed up to fill the vacant role. I do not think, from the official point of view, that I was a very good head of house—I was too lazy to put myself about in the accepted way. My two interests at that stage of my school career were sport and painting, and they, rather than official duties, claimed most of my energies. I was demoted to colour bearer for a term for staying out one night during a tennis tour in Edinburgh. An energetic Canadian took over for the interregnum (I was reinstated the next term) and ran the house far more efficiently than I. Fortunately, I was not obliged to move out of my study, so—apart from a certain notoriety—the punishment affected me not at all.
Our school was in Scotland, was in almost every respect a Scottish public school, and yet a strong Scottish accent was a real stigma. Indeed, any regional accent was parodied mercilessly. When people spoke with a strong Scottish accent we would make harsh retching sounds in the base of our throats or emit loose-jawed idiot burblings. Anyone with a Midlands or north of England accent heard nothing but a barrage of “Eee bah goom” and “Trooble at t’ mill.” We all found the mocking of accents endlessly amusing. This was part snobbery, part self-defence. All public schoolboys have an intensely adversarial relationship with the local population, especially with the local youths. To us the locals were “yobs,” “oiks,” “plebs,” “proles,” “peasants” and “yokels.” It now seems to me astonishing to recall the patrician venom we would express, like aristocrats faced with imminent revolution—a curious mixture of contempt, fear, guilt and jealousy. They lived, after all, in the real world beyond the school grounds, and however superior we congratulated ourselves on being, there was no escaping the fact that they were freer than we were—and that grated. I am sure that we in our turn were looked on as revolting, arrogant, nasty snobs. By no means a harsh judgement.
We longed to get out of school, but the outside world was both a lure and a taunt. It possessed everything that school denied us and at the same time was a constant reminder of the constraints and abnormalities of the society in which we were confined. Strenuous attempts were made to escape to it.
The easiest way to get there was to be selected for a school team. Because the school was situated so far north a considerable amount of travelling was involved in order to find reputable opponents. Rugby and hockey would take you to Inverness or Aberdeen two or three times a term, and often there were matches in Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Edinburgh occupied a place in our imaginations rather as Berlin did for poets in the 1930s. It seemed to our impoverished eyes unfailingly sinful and glamorous. To be selected for a rugby tour to Edinburgh meant happy hours in Thistle Street pubs rather than eager sporting challenges.
For the outside world meant alcohol rather than girls. Our stays were usually far too short and too well chaperoned to meet the opposite sex, but there always seemed to be a chance to get drunk. I remember a match in Dundee. A friend, who had left school a term earlier and had gone to Edinburgh Art School, caught the train to Dundee with two hefty overnight bags clinking with booze. After the match we had about forty minutes to drink the lot. The favourite tipple was neat gin washed down with a tot of Rose’s Lime Cordial.
Once in the outside world, we tended to band together. This was because we were conspicuous in our uniforms (the authorities had introduced blazer and flannels for exeats to spare our blushes over shorts and knee-socks) but also because we were somehow fearful and on edge. The outside world was a welcome source of contraband—pornography, drink, cigarettes—and also, in a sense, fair game. When boys went into towns the shoplifting rate rose alarmingly. In the local Woolworth’s two store detectives used to follow one particular boy around. He was the most accomplished kleptomaniac and used to take orders for his Saturday visits. We exulted in our delinquency and bandied legends of epic thefts: a souvenir shop in the Highlands left almost empty when a busload of boys cleaned it out; a boy who dug up copper wires on a nearby RAF station, at one stage blacking out the control tower when he sank his axe into a crucial cable. We would return gleefully to the safety of school, clutching our booty. And yet within the school itself theft was regarded as the most serious and antisocial of crimes—any thief c
ould expect years of excoriation. Two worlds, two sets of standards.
Because of the isolation of the school we did not participate in the life of the local community in any significant way. We were too far away from most boys’ homes to make any half-term break practicable. It was not difficult to pass an entire three-month term without ever leaving the school grounds. As one grew older this unnatural segregation became more irksome. My abiding memory of my final two or three years is of a sense of life going on elsewhere. I felt as if I were experiencing a form of internal exile. A few away matches with teams only seemed to sharpen the sensation of missing out, of being bypassed.
The school grounds were capacious, the houses scattered randomly about the estate. I had a friend in a house so far away—over two miles—that I could rarely be bothered to visit him. The scale made it logistically difficult to creep out at night. I believe this is something that happens in most public schools. Here, escape is indulged in for its own sake, not as a means to some illicit end. In our case, and to reduce the risk of discovery, the nearest safe town was eight miles away. To drop from a dormitory window, change into civilian clothes, cycle the eight miles in order to snatch a pint of beer before closing time, then cycle back, was too arduous to make it worth while.
The summer was always better. We were very near the coast, and it was not difficult to spend a fragrant afternoon hidden among the gorse on the endless sand dunes, replenished with food and drink bought from stores at nearby caravan sites. Summer meant tennis too. The school tennis team was a member of a league that operated among tennis clubs in that area of the north-east. We would play against clubs in places like Inverness, Forres and Fochabers. The great advantage was that these games were played mid-week, in the evening. There was something unreal about these matches. The six of us in the team would get into a minibus at about half-past five on a Wednesday or Thursday evening and be driven to a small county town. There we would be dropped at the local tennis club. The matches were so regular that often no master accompanied us. For some reason—perhaps it was to do with the nature of the league—we often played against mixed doubles, sometimes against women’s teams. Here, at last, was life as most people led it. I have the most idyllic recollections of these warm summer evenings: long shadows cast across the red clay courts, the sonorous “pock, pock” of the balls in the air, the punctilious courtesy of our game (“I’m not sure if that was out—play a let!”), a few idle spectators—two girls, a dog, a ruddy man with a pipe. And then, afterwards, in the small clubhouse, with the glowing, perspiring wives of dentists and solicitors, all of us still in our dusty tennis whites, drinking half-pints of ginger-beer shandy, chatting, laughing in the palpitating dusk. There was, at least to us boys, a tender, bourgeois eroticism about these encounters, which was much analysed on the bus ride back to school. We often got back late, well after ten, with the school in bed, all curtains drawn vainly against the sunny northern evenings. We felt immensely proud of our exclusivity and were the source of great envy. Although I was a very keen sportsman at school, I find it quite easy to understand why tennis is the only game I play today.
The two main vices were drinking and smoking. Drugs were taken too, mainly marijuana, but were not anything like as prevalent as they are today. Smoking was completely banned, drinking almost so. A senior boy might get a glass of sweet sherry or a half-pint of beer off his housemaster if he was very lucky. These drinking restrictions must seem positively antediluvian to today’s public schoolboy. I recently sat down to dinner with a housemaster at one of our grandest schools, and the three boys who were invited seemed to drink as much wine as they wanted.
The underworld life of the school, then, was concerned almost exclusively with trying to procure and consume alcohol and tobacco without getting caught. Smoking was the most common. I would say that 95 percent of boys smoked at some stage of their school career, regardless of rank and position. Like any law that is consistently broken by a majority, it became impossible to enforce. Most colour bearers—who probably smoked themselves—turned a blind eye. All they asked for was a degree of discretion. I remember my study overlooked a road that led to a nearby wood. Every night after prep I could see the hardened smokers, in all weathers, in all seasons, trudging off for a “drag in the woods.” From time to time I’d ask them where they were going, to get the reply, “For a walk.” There was nothing illegal about going for a walk. You could always tell the smokers because they chewed gum and reeked of Brut aftershave—a brand unanimously endorsed by schoolboys of my era for its wholly effective smoke-obliterating pungency.
Smoking was cheap, fast and easy to hide. Drinking, possessing none of these attributes, was consequently less frequently indulged in. Usually it took place outside the school grounds. Journeys to and from school at the beginning and end of term were drunken binges. Dances, school celebrations, open days and the like were also opportunities for excess. We tended to prefer neat spirits for speed of effect. I remember after one school dance a friend of mine drank half a bottle of gin. Apart from a euphoric light in his eye he seemed fine when he sneaked back to his dormitory. He was caught the next morning when he woke up in a rank and befouled bed to discover that at some time in the night, without his realizing it, he had not only pissed and shat himself but had also vomited all over his pillow.
There was a certain illicit trade in sex magazines. Scandinavian magazines that showed pubic hair were particularly prized and could be sold for high prices. One enterprising boy who ran the school film society for a term was sent blurry but lurid catalogues from blue-film makers which, as far as we were concerned, were the last word in shocking explicitness. Certain novels were censored: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Ginger Man, Last Exit to Brooklyn. But what was permitted varied from house to house. As a fifteen-year-old I once got into fearful trouble with my housemaster because he discovered me reading Harold Robbins’s The Adventurers. It was confiscated on the spot. When I boldly asked for it to be returned on the last day of term I was told it had been destroyed.
Apart from thieving, the only genuinely illegal act that occurred with any regularity was joyriding. In my house two boys used frequently to take the assistant housemaster’s car out late at night. They would disconnect the mileometer and drive through the dark countryside for an hour or two. The owner of the car never noticed. This was an act of real daring, not to say foolhardiness; the consequences of being caught or of having an accident would have reverberated beyond the school—and yet it was not a rare event. All manner of cars were parked around the school buildings overnight. People would use them. The penalty for this crime would have been instant expulsion, but the staff, I am sure, never suspected that it went on. People could be expelled for theft, sex (homo or hetero) and consistent smoking or drinking or the taking of drugs. Few boys were expelled while I was at school: two went for having sex with school maids (the maids were sacked too); a small clique of drug-takers departed and a few heavy smokers. Boys often left of their own accord. Occasionally there would be “scandals” that made the newspapers—boys vandalized a girl’s flat on a rugby tour once, I recall—and also demanded the ultimate penalty. The boy who blacked out the RAF station also made the local newspapers. He was a simple, pale, gangly soul called Clough. He had made hundreds of pounds selling copper and lead pilfered from the air base to local scrap-metal merchants. The school, although properly outraged, had, I think, a sneaking regard for his entrepreneurial drive. His father, who did not want him at home, came up to plead for leniency with the headmaster. Clough’s punishment was to dig up all the tree stumps on the estate, a task that occupied all his free time for about two terms.
Swearing was a minor crime too, naturally. It is perhaps worth emphasizing, for anyone who doubts it, that the language of a public school is as bad as that of any army barracks. We employed all the usual four-letter oaths with unreflecting abandon. There were not many nonce words or neologisms in our private language at school for some reason. Perhaps because
the school had been founded only some decades before, traditions had yet to establish themselves. At prep school it was pure Jennings and Darbishire—“Vanes,” “Quis?” “Ego!,” “Stale news,” “Cave,” etc., etc. One exchange that I have never encountered elsewhere I record here for those interested in the folkloric side of public-school life. If you farted (“buffed”), everyone was allowed to punch you. However, if you said, “Safeties,” before you were discovered, you could foul the air unpunished.
We were obsessed with sex. I know this is true of all adolescent experience, but when I think now of the energy and relentless focus of our interminable discussions about the subject a sort of retrospective lassitude descends upon me, as well as a retrospective anger. Of course we talked about sex—we lived in a freakish, monosexual society. There was a parallel world out there in which the two sexes mingled and interacted and to which entry was denied us. No wonder our curiosity was so febrile and intense—and so destructive. The sexual apartheid to which we were subjected all those years utterly warped our attitudes and precluded us from thinking about girls and women in any way but the most prurient and lubricious. The female sex was judged by one criterion—fanciable or non-fanciable, to put it rather more delicately than we did.
Endless conversation, speculation, fantasizing, poring over sex magazines, fervid masturbation … there is something soul-destroyingly monotonous about that facet of public-school life, and one looks back with genuine sadness and weariness at the thought of so much wasted time. But there it was, and at the time it was the favourite hobby. We made the best of our opportunities. Every girl and woman who set foot on the school grounds was subject to the most probing scrutiny—housemasters’ wives, innocent secretaries, fond mothers and guileless sisters visiting the school were evaluated with ruthless purpose.
