by Rick Stein
I had problems with Brandons, anyway. The head teachers and owners, Mr and Mrs Lyons, were perfectly nice, though they seemed to me to be very old, but Mr Lyons had a terrible cough and kept spitting yellow phlegm into his handkerchief. And the food was awful. Every Monday we had cold roast lamb and mashed potato. I could only eat the lamb fat if I could swallow it with lots of water. I’m sure everyone can remember that horrible feeling when trying to eat something so noxious to you that it makes you retch. I managed to board at the school one weekend but was so distraught that my mother insisted it was too much and brought me home.
IV
I was nine when I was packed off to ‘proper’ boarding school. I spent a year at a prep school near Tewkesbury called Wells Court, and then three years at The Wells House in Malvern Wells, where all the Wells Court boys went, and finally five years at Uppingham, a public school in Rutland. I imagine everyone who has been sent away to boarding school can remember their first day. I can all too easily visualise the afternoon I turned up with my school trunk in the boot of my dad’s pale blue Jaguar Mark 7, and I got out to meet Mr and Mrs Finlay at the door of what was something between a large country house and a stately home. My son Edward later described his arrival at boarding school as like having albatrosses in his stomach. I also recall my youngest son Charles on his first day of weekly boarding panicking when he realised we were going to leave him behind.
My first term happened to be the summer term and wasn’t too bad. I felt most homesick and did most of my crying in the second term. The hardest thing was trying to eat and dry retching. One night I vomited all over my bed and the surrounding floor. I had to put up with the impatience of matron, who was woken to deal with it, and the irritation and taunts of the other members of my dormitory. That same matron – I have a feeling she was called Miss Semen Adams but maybe I’m making that up – on another occasion sent me to stand in a corner in the sick bay. Two hours later I was still there. She then blamed me for not coming to get her, as she’d forgotten me. I cried, of course. Another long-forgotten infringement had me disciplined by having to change in the corridor outside the dormitory. This punishment meant scrambling out of school clothes into sports clothes, then back again. In between the changes I was naked, which was the precise moment that one of the only three girls at the school came round the corner, saw me and laughed. I can still recall my embarrassment, the shame of having a girl see my penis. It wasn’t, in retrospect, a laugh of ridicule but at the time it was easily the worst thing that had ever happened to me.
I remember going back to school on the train in my second term from Kingham in Oxfordshire and worrying that if my mother’s dachshund, Rupert, had boarded the train by mistake I’d have to take him into school. Although I tortured myself with ridiculous imaginings, I wasn’t, I guess, any different from most of the other boys. They just got on with it and so did I. My pre-prep school and The Wells House were both run by a man called Alan Darvel. His nickname was Beak. Beak was probably in his early fifties though anyone over 30 would have seemed old to me then. He was balding and rather red-faced but otherwise quite fit, if a little overweight. I know this because he was very keen on swimming naked at the pool in our playing fields at the foot of the Malvern Hills. Not having any guidelines to go on, none of us thought there was anything odd about this, though a naked middle-aged man with large hairy testicles striding around a pool surrounded by ten- to thirteen-year-olds would not perhaps pass muster these days. Beak was unmarried and we were all a little scared of him. He was keen on beating us regularly. I managed to avoid it generally, but others were not so fortunate. He ran things autocratically and sometimes would punish the whole school with detentions, runs and changing exercises if culprits didn’t come forward and own up to some misdemeanour. On one occasion the punishments went on for weeks when no one admitted to snipping the bristles off all the nylon hairbrushes in the lavatories. Finally, it was discovered the bristles had shrivelled up in basins of hot water. On another occasion he called us all into the ‘big school’ for an assembly where he lamented our appalling behaviour. He announced that he would turn his back to us and ask all those who thought he should go to raise their hands. The deputy head would then count the show of hands. We were appalled. Poor Beak. Of course no one raised his hand.
When I got home and told my parents about it, they said he was a silly old histrionic queen, and we all should have raised our hands just to call his bluff. I was shocked but rather pleased to be included in the joke, though I didn’t quite realise what was being implied. It was one of those occasions when a child begins to realise that his parents know things he doesn’t know. I didn’t particularly like Beak – I was a bit nervous of him – but he lived for his boys. He used to spend several weekends each term visiting us in all the schools we had gone on to, so we would see him once every couple of years. He would arrive, blue-blazered and grey-flannelled, in his dark green Jaguar and take us out to lunch. This was a bit weird. I was at Uppingham by then and did not really know any of the other boys there who had been at The Wells House. They were certainly not the sort I wanted to be associated with in the teenager world of public school. I have to confess that the last time Beak came I was enjoying a liaison with a girl who worked in the kitchen at my school house. I made an excuse, and stood him up for lunch, but felt guilty about it and still do to this day.
Interestingly, Beak never touched or spoke to any of us inappropriately and was a thoroughly good headmaster. He was very keen on all outdoor activities, not just swimming but hiking too and, perhaps more importantly, set great store in boys spending as much time as possible outside – so much so that we were very much left to our own devices to explore the Worcestershire countryside. The degree of independence we had then seems staggering today. There’s no chance of going back to those freedoms – it would be too frightening and risky for today’s teachers and parents. We spent lots of time building camps in the grounds of The Wells Court and, when we got older, roaming the hills, building huts and swinging from trees. The huts were mostly made from branches and walled with hay, though in the Malvern Hills acquiring sheets of corrugated iron or the odd bed-base or rusty car suspension was a bonus. Some of the more ambitious huts had two storeys. One in particular, the Alamo, had a palisade round it. I took part in a raid of the Alamo. The physical skirmishes were fought with ferocity and involved a couple of the more daring of my band defecating into pages torn out of exercise books, which they then threw over the walls. It’s all there in Lord of the Flies.
When I finally got to build my own hut, I borrowed a pickaxe, a shovel and a wheelbarrow and dug a significant pit in the rough granite soil of the Malverns. I found some rusty corrugated iron and sheep netting, made beams from some old bedrails, tied everything together with bailer twine, then shovelled earth on to the roof, and hung a grain sack over the entrance. I built a fireplace from some house bricks I found behind Cuff’s lemonade factory – which is now Schweppes Malvern Water – and made a chimney from an old earthenware pipe. I would slump down into my stony covered pit, lie on the damp ground and light a twig fire (drawing up the chimney, though with plenty of smoke coming my way) and ‘smoke’ an old man’s beard. I felt like king of my damp humpy. Old man’s beard, a wild clematis, hanging down in grey fluffy swathes over the leaves of autumn in Worcestershire, is to me the background in every image in Keats’s ‘Ode to Autumn’. On darkening foggy winter afternoons when I walked back to school with my friend Hector Blackhurst along the narrow sheep paths through the trees, the old man’s beard would be a shroud of grey all around us. I felt very close to Hector, and we were so serious when we were walking along the paths, pulling up the occasional bracken frond and talking earnestly about life and love. We both read a great deal, lying on the floor in the school library. He was very keen on Henry Rider Haggard. I had read King Solomon’s Mines and thought it was good, but I liked novels about people and their emotions much more than stories of discovery of lost worlds. Hector w
as obsessed with Ayesha, ‘She-who-must-be-obeyed’. I read She and its sequel Ayesha, became equally absorbed, and so our deep conversations involved much talk of a sorceress whose beauty was so intense that she had to remain veiled and keep behind a partition away from ordinary men because otherwise she’d send them mad with desire. This was a theme of enormous power to someone on the cusp of puberty, and was all we needed to discuss matters of the heart. We were filled with a sense of entering a world of physical love, of deep and meaningful wonder.
Hector was a huge fan of Lonnie Donegan and his skiffle band and ‘Rock Island Line’, ‘The Battle of New Orleans’, ‘The Grand Coulee Dam’, ‘Sweet Sixteen’ and, above all, ‘Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour On the Bed Post Overnight?’ Ah! And to think that we were listening to Lonnie Donegan while Elvis was waiting just around the corner. I built a crystal radio set from parts I bought in a component shop in Soho. All my friends were making their own and were into popular music. We got the plans from Practical Wireless magazine: a crystal diode, a tuning coil, a resistor, a variable coil and a set of Second World War headphones. We made the sets in tobacco tins or cigar boxes or just on a piece of wood, and had to keep them hidden because we weren’t allowed radios. You needed an aerial and an earth, so you could only set it up if your bed was by the central-heating pipes. The aerial was no problem – we just used the bed springs. The joy of slipping on your headphones in bed at night! In would come Radio Luxembourg: Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ ‘Not Fade Away’, ‘Yakety Yak’ by The Coasters and, the most fabulous memory for me, The Everly Brothers’ ‘All I Have to Do is Dream’. There’s a song by Van Morrison which recalls those far-off days for us prep school boys. It’s called ‘In the Days Before Rock ’n’ Roll’ and remembers the excitement of tuning in Radio Live. It was a delicate task as there were loads of other stations in the medium wave band at night around 208 metres.
By the time I was tuning into Radio Luxembourg, sex was still distant, though fast-approaching. I wonder what it’s like for a child these days to become aware of sex? I only say this because my growing realisation of the realities of sex occurred to me in such a natural manner, if not necessarily comfortably, that I wouldn’t, in the words of William Holden in The Wild Bunch, have had it any other way. Will the constant stream of information from television and the Internet change the utter bafflement of it, I wonder? I struggled in semi-ignorance. This was when I still kept my teddy bear, Blue Ears, hidden under the sheets in the dormitory. We boys spent some time trying to figure it out and then we heard that if you went and asked Beak for what was known as a sex lecture he’d tell you all about it. The idea of doing this was shameful, but we egged each other on and finally a group of about ten of us knocked on his study door and asked him. He seemed perfectly at ease and agreed to talk to us all. The information that he imparted was completely astounding to me. The idea that I had little seeds in my penis, which would fertilise eggs in girls’ wombs; it was frightful. Beak’s little lecture went on for about an hour and I was late for gym which was being taken by the assistant headmaster, Mr Hall, whom we all knew as Stubbs. I revered Stubbs. He was our games master and was almost as wide as he was tall, but it was all solid muscle. He epitomised health, vigour and clean living. I had begun to show some promise as a rugger player. Stubbs coached the first XV and I really wanted to be in the team.
‘You’re late. Where have you been?’
‘With Beak. Sir.’
‘Oh yes? What have you been up to?’
‘Lecture, sir.’
‘A lecture? What sort of lecture?’
‘Sex lecture, sir.’
I used the letters S-E-X in a Scrabble game at home with John, my dad and an artist friend, Enslin Du Plessis.
‘Ah,’ said my dad.
‘Sex rears its ugly head,’ said Enslin.
Enslin used to chain-smoke. I can still hear the intake of breath through the corner of his mouth with the smoking cigarette firmly clasped in his lips as he painted. It was as if he was slapping the smell of cigarette smoke and turpentine on to his canvases. He painted Henrietta and me sitting on the lawn in front of our farmhouse. Another work by him is hanging above the kitchen table in my house in Padstow. It’s a painting of the mantelpiece in the flat which my parents shared with him in Mecklenburgh Square. There’s a mirror at the back, a bottle of sherry, a bottle of VAT 69 and a tall green bottle of Gewürztraminer. Whenever I look at it I remember Enslin’s bald head and the gas boiler in the flat and the interminable time between turning on the water, the smell of gas and then the explosion as it fired up. That, and the comforting smell of his cigarettes.
V
I went to Uppingham because my father and Uncle Rolf had been there before me. My father hoped I would go to Winchester like John, my brother, but I went for a tour of both schools and discovered that when the Winchester boys got up in the morning they had to wash using a jug of water and a bowl whereas Uppingham had baths and showers. I was – more importantly – also nervous because Winchester had a much higher academic standard than Uppingham, and I didn’t think I had any chance of passing the entrance exam. My work at prep school had improved over the years, but I was a bit B division.
Public schools in the early 1960s were not the friendly places they are now with lots of girls around and a pastoral emphasis on the care of young minds and bodies. Years later, travelling through California with a couple of Englishmen on what would nowadays be called my gap year, I had them spellbound with tales of the fagging system, permitted beatings by other boys and the use of whips along the touchlines during rugby games.
There were 12 houses at Uppingham and the house prefects could beat younger boys with permission from the housemasters. The housemasters also did a bit of beating; the school prefects, called pollies, also carried out beatings, as did the headmaster. At house level it started with a walloping with a gym shoe, then progressed to flogging by the entire complement of house prefects, with the head of house having the privilege of two strokes. In this case they used what was known as a corps beam, a leather-covered stick carried by the teacher officers in the Combined Cadet Force. The same instrument was used for school floggings by all the school prefects. These, mercifully, were rare. The headmaster used a thick cane; again these beatings were rare but they were accompanied by the sort of collective atmosphere of slightly enjoyable jittery tension that I imagine would attend an execution. I can only recall one multiple flogging by the headmaster when all 600 of the school had to walk to a halt station on the main London to York railway line. Easter was early that year and we had been made to stay on at school. There was a collective anger at this which led to a lot of equipment at the station being vandalised. A box of detonators used to halt trains in an emergency was stolen and exploded on a return walk, while a track-maintenance trolley, propelled by a push-and-pull handle, was left on the main track (fortunately it was discovered before another train came down the line). It was like the aftermath of the recent riots in London. The atmosphere at the railway had been similarly anarchic.
Afterwards, everyone was questioned by the headmaster. At the time I felt that the fact that I didn’t vandalise anything was pretty lame. I have, I now realise, a vein of cautiousness running through me which I have come to dislike because it prevents me from being the hero I would like to be.
Even at 17, I was completely opposed to older boys being encouraged to beat younger boys. Tim Dale, one of my closest friends in our house, West Deyne, shared my view. He also shared my view of rock and roll, blues music, Elvis Presley, Tamla Motown and Fats Domino. Both Tim and I were house prefects, but neither of us was actually prefect material, or so we thought at the time. By then, we were counting the days until we could leave the school, and it was with intense distaste that we witnessed the occasional beatings carried out by the other prefects. Two of the first-year boys were constantly in trouble for various misdemeanours as fags. Fagging was the system by which the junior boys were made to clean w
ashrooms, changing rooms, dining rooms and corridors, but were also expected to fetch and carry for the prefects. For a while you were the personal fag of a prefect, which meant you had to tidy his study and run errands for him, including going to the buttery for snacks. I was Godfrey’s fag. Not only can I not remember his Christian name but I probably never knew it, as we called everyone by their surnames. Godfrey was a short, dark-haired person of serious demeanour who was impeccably dressed. My daily routine included brushing his jacket and hanging it on the back of his chair and shining his shoes. I remember he used a pocket watch slipped into his top pocket with a black leather strap attached to his buttonhole. His desk had to be exact and he had a large number of ornaments, lacquer boxes and family photos, all of which had to be at 90- and 180-degree orientation with each other. He was not ever of an inclination to praise me for keeping his glass poodles, Mount Fuji boxes and fountain-pen holders in alignment, but I lived in fear of getting more than the occasional black dot for sloppy work.
