Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  Letters we wrote to our families were censored. Those we received were opened and read before they were passed on. Tolerating no interference from parents, Mr Pope ruled the school fiercely in a tradition of muscular Christianity, Mens sano in corpore sano. Though he possessed neither himself, he believed in a healthy mind and a healthy body for others. And a healthy body meant cold showers, outdoor exercise and sport.

  It rains less in Stirling than it rains in Arisaig; yet it rains a lot, as it does throughout Scotland. Daily, after we’d wolfed the pitiful snack called lunch, we were marched across Stirling Park to the playing fields which lay beneath the baleful edifice of Stirling Castle, its black granite silhouette backed by a leaden sky either threatening or delivering rain. There I played rugby in the wet, running across a muddy field after an odd-shaped ball, barging into people and trying not to catch up with it. At the end of the game, bruised and cold, soaked, filthy and bored, I marched back with the rest across the park, its slopes and trees already fading in the damp twilight of a winter dusk.

  Reaching the school we stripped off our mud-soaked clothes in the changing rooms, then raced naked and freezing to the white-tiled area and sunken bath that was the communal shower. There was no question of the water being hot, there wasn’t even a tap for hot.

  Mr Pope ‘took’ the showers, he always took showers. Until my last days there, I don’t recall this duty ever trusted to another master. As we scampered naked from the changing room he was waiting for us, standing above the sunken bath his one hand resting on the single lever that controlled it. In a shivering bunch we massed beside the bath. On command, the first eight jumped down to occupy it. Mr Pope’s fingers would tighten convulsively on the lever and he’d shove it to full spurt. Twice a day Mr Pope discharged this duty. Twice a day he watched groups of pre-pubescent and pubescent boys dance and shriek and quiver in frozen anguish beneath him.

  Hurst Grange didn’t simmer with unlawful lust, the weather in Stirling was too cold for anything to simmer, but repressed sexuality oozed in a dank tide through the school’s narrow corridors and chill high-ceilinged rooms. In the fiery blaze of his ardent religious conviction Mr Pope knew the flesh was evil. From the pulpit every morning, and twice on Sunday, he inveighed against carnality. Miss Green the matron shared the same horror of the flesh, though it was a trial she faced only once a week, rather than twice daily as he did. On Friday we were allowed our weekly bath in hot water; it was her job to ‘take’ bath night.

  The communal bathroom was an unheated lino-floored room fitted out with hand basins and two freestanding tubs. Each had a line drawn around the inside four inches above the bottom, to mark the level to which it could be filled. One ration of warm water served four boys in turn.

  ‘Taking’ bath night involved Miss Green in not just impatient supervision but active participation in the event. A tall, bossy girl with long legs and a good figure but mean mouth and face pinched in constant irritation, she stood over each pair of boys as they sat in the puddle of soiled water in the bottom of the tubs, snapping out instructions and brandishing a large rough-bristled scrubbing brush of the kind used to scour floors. If they didn’t move fast enough she’d use it on them hard to scrub their dirty necks.

  In the same bath rota as myself was a boy named Forsyth who was in his last term and captain of the rugby team. Popular, he had a swagger and air of self-assurance we envied; we admired him particularly for the wispy but undeniable beard of pubic hair that grew above his genitals. One night as Forsyth sat in the tub while Miss Green stood over him in her customary threatening fashion, he got an erection. And Forsyth’s erection was no mere twitch or sluggish thickening of the member; in the space of seconds it rose erect in rampant adolescent glory, aimed directly for Miss Green.

  For an incredulous moment she stared at it hypnotised, frozen into shock. Then her sallow face went bright red, her mouth flew open. ‘You filthy, filthy, disgusting little boy!’ she shrieked. Pouncing on him she attacked it with the brush, scrubbing at his cock with the coarse bristles in a frenzy of disgust, reviling him while he yelled in pain, floundering in the bath and struggling to escape.

  There is a time and a place for everything, I learned, and observed all that was happening around me with fascinated attention. I believed that I was the first person to have invented masturbation and that one day I would become rich and famous when I chose to reveal my secret to the world.

  I bought a watch. I’d spotted an ad for it in a newspaper claiming it would function fifty feet underwater, which I thought would be useful in the explosives work I was planning for the holidays. I saved for eight months to get it; it was the first thing I’d ever bought and I was immensely proud of it. That watch meant a great deal to me and when it broke I cried.

  I hadn’t dropped it, I hadn’t overwound it, it had just stopped. Mr Faulkner said he’d get it fixed for me in town and I gave it him.

  Mr Faulkner taught maths. I was seeing him twice a week for coaching. These tutorials took place in his room among the warren of narrow, dark-varnished passages and winding stairs on the far side of the school. In his late twenties, he had sandy receding hair and a walrus moustache. Narrow chested, he wore an old tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, one of them coming detached. The Players Weights he smoked, thinner and smaller than normal cigarettes, had marked his finger and thumb with a sepia stain. He taught standing in the classroom, seedy and dejected with shoulders stooped and on his bad days gave off an air of such furtive desperation you felt sorry for him.

  It was hard to concentrate during his tutorials; the room was heated only by a single-bar electric fire and the windows kept tight closed. The damp fog was pungent with old tobacco, a smell of stale beer from the empty bottles stashed beneath his bed and an odour of something else that was Mr Faulkner’s own. At times I felt a little sick.

  Spotting my discomfort he was always ready to take a break and talk about something else. ‘If you ever put a foot wrong and come up against the law, I’ll tell you one thing,’ he said to me one evening. His offer connected with nothing we’d been discussing before, but I listened carefully to what he had to say. ‘I mean it can happen,’ he continued, ‘You make some slight mistake anyone else would get away with but they go after you and you find yourself in front of the beak.’ He paused and gnawed on the ragged fringe of his moustache, groping in his pocket for a packet of ten. ‘Well, just say it happens and just because of rotten beastly luck you’re found guilty and sentenced to a fine of £200 with the option of thirty days in prison …’ He jabbed at me fiercely with the Weights packet, ‘Always choose to pay the fine. If you have to beg, borrow or steal, pay it. Never choose prison – the stigma stays with you always.’

  My watch, which he’d given to a shop in Stirling, took ages to repair. ‘Foreign – a question of the spare part,’ Mr Faulkner explained. Two weeks later it still had not been fixed. We were nearing the end of term and I asked him to recover it, I’d get it done in Fort William during the holidays. Just before breaking up I asked again. Mr Faulkner seemed flustered. ‘Turned out to require a specialist, had to send it to Glasgow. Be ready waiting for you when you get back next term,’ he promised.

  It wasn’t, and when I did return to school a month later Mr Faulkner was no longer on the Hurst Grange staff. The town was permanently off limits, but I got permission to ask after my property at its three jeweller/watchmakers. None had record of it. I don’t believe Mr Faulkner had intended to steal it, but his solitary pleasure – drink – had proved hard to support on the pathetic wage the school paid him. I think he’d pawned the watch, then found himself too pushed for money to redeem it before he and his stigma had to move on.

  Winston Churchill claimed that he found private school an invaluable experience: nothing one goes through afterwards can ever be as unpleasant again.

  Quite early in my time at Hurst Grange I worked out my own technique to survive the place: hypochondria. My supposedly delicate health got me
off games, allowing me to indulge my one true pleasure – reading. The skill I’d developed at turning sheet white and dropping in a dead faint to the floor won me spells in the sick room, and these gave me as much pleasure as I found later in weekends of luxury in five-star hotels. There was privacy and peace – even a primitive form of room service. Lying in its narrow bed with the coverlet pulled up to my chin I read compulsively, and the books I read transported me to another place. At first it was Henty and John Buchan – many of whose stories were set in the Highlands I missed so painfully – then Saki, Osbert Sitwell and Ronald Firbank. School was a dank prison to be endured, but I knew somewhere out there existed a world of capital cities and sparkling lights, a world of dazzling possibility.

  Some afternoons, alone in the school while everyone else was at games, I’d go down to the cramped passage off the changing rooms where our tuck boxes were stored. These were kept padlocked. We had the keys, though the boxes were subject to arbitrary searches for contraband by Mr Pope. However, I’d constructed an ingenious false bottom to my own which remained undetected. In it I kept the fudge Nanny had made for me, a medicine bottle filled with gin decanted from my parents’ drink cupboard and my .22 revolver together with a box of fifty rounds of high-velocity ammunition.

  I’d sit in the dark-varnished, dimly lit changing room, nibble a square of fudge, nip on gin flavoured by toothpaste, and think about God, Arisaig, and that world of wit, glamour and romance which one day would be mine. Regularly I broke down the revolver to its separate components, cleaned and reassembled it. I’d punched a hole in the lining to the inside pocket of my school blazer to fit the barrel, and if I felt low I’d wear the gun to class.

  Twenty years later in New York City when a man described to me how carrying a concealed pistol had changed his life, I understood exactly what he meant. He faced the world from a place of power; he gave off different vibes which others sensed and reacted to with respect. I never showed the revolver to anyone at school, never drew it and never fired it. Yet the feeling it was there, heavy in my breast pocket, cheered me enormously. In over three years at that school I learned little, but I did discover that carrying a gun is an excellent way for a boy to gain self-confidence.

  Every morning for ten minutes, and at much greater length on Sundays, Mr Pope preached to us from the raised pulpit in the assembly hall. Twenty-five small boys stood below listening to him rant, their hair still wet from the morning shower.

  He preached of damnation and hell fire, of the flaming pit and eternal torment that awaited us … unless! It was the same severe Calvinist faith as I’d heard in the Presbyterian kirk in Arisaig, but afterwards could run home to the manse where Nanny was cooking Sunday lunch. There I’d been able to discount its uncompromising message, here I could not. Mr Pope’s impassioned delivery made his words impossible to ignore; he became so excitable he frothed, spittle flew from his mouth. Choose Christ or burn in hell.

  I resisted for a year – and then I cracked. I remember vividly the sermon that did it for me. Coming towards its climax Mr Pope declaimed, ‘Suppose I were to step down from this pulpit and go amongst you with a rope … winding that rope in and out between you where you stand, so some of you are on one side and some upon the other … And all of you who are on this side of the rope will go to Heaven, and all on that side will burn for ever in everlasting punishment … All you have to do is choose. All you have to do to be saved is step over the rope.’

  Well … some choice, I thought. And stepped.

  Soon after came my last term at Hurst Grange – and also, rather more surprisingly, Mr Pope’s. One evening, final assembly was taken by Mr Green – something that had never occurred before. Next day Mr Pope was still missing from the school; the evasive but exhilarated behaviour of the staff and lack of normal supervision told us something was amiss. A thrill ran along the frigid corridors of the school. First through wild rumour, then confirmed, we learned the reason for the headmaster’s absence. He had been arrested for an act of gross indecency in Stirling Park.

  In the letter sent later to all parents, encouraging them to keep their children there under a new headmaster, the school’s principles were spelled out: academic excellence, respect for discipline and, above all, dedication to the moral and physical health and well being of the boys put into its care. The letter reiterated this code of honour, it had always been and always would remain in place. Mr Pope’s little lapse was regrettable, of course, but – the letter pointed out – to the very last and even in the heat of passion the headmaster had himself remained faithful to these self-same high ideals. His ‘indiscretion’ had been with only an idle working-class lad from the neighbouring estate, not, it was stressed, absolutely not a pupil at the school.

  Mother seemed flustered when I turned up at the manse. ‘Darling, you’re supposed to break up tomorrow!’ she said.

  ‘I told Mrs Scott she was wrong but she just won’t listen,’ Nanny said crossly as I hugged her.

  I felt a huge relief that Hurst Grange was over and that I was home. It was already dark outside, rain was rattling against the windows but it was wonderful to be back.

  ‘Well, darling, how did you do last term? Did anything super happen?’ Mother asked.

  ‘The headmaster buggered a boy in Stirling Park,’ I told her.

  ‘I’m sure he deserved it, darling,’ she answered vaguely, her mind on what she had to announce. ‘Your father wants you to learn to ski before you go to public school.’

  It was thrilling news. ‘Where?’ I asked.

  ‘Davos, we’re joining him there after Christmas. He’s got his hands on some money from a novel he’s written but he’s not owning up to how much, the swine!’

  4

  Davos

  Mother and I travelled out to Davos by second class wagon-lit, taking a large Thermos of tea and food for the journey. Both of us wore skiing clothes. Mine had belonged to her brother Tony and been stored away by Nanny when he outgrew them.

  Father was waiting at the station when we arrived and we drove to the hotel in a horse-drawn sleigh. He was in very cheerful spirits, which was not how I remembered him, but then neither Mother nor I had seen him for many months.

  He loved winter sports. While training Special Forces in the war he’d never missed a season’s skiing; he’d ended it in Italy commanding a school of mountain warfare. Following the Allies’ victory he’d returned to England annoyed that hostilities had ended without his leading his specially trained killers across the Alps and schussing into Austria. Already in bad humour, he’d taken one glance at post-war Britain and detested it. Though rationing remained in force, signs of returning affluence were already evident in London. Big cars, restaurants which got round the restrictions to serve elaborate meals, a thriving black market, fur-collared coats, and a few expensive-looking people. He didn’t care for the look of them at all. ‘Spivs and profiteers,’ he pronounced. Or ‘bolshies’. Bolshies were the worst. He returned to Italy to run the British Council in Milan and write books, encouraged by the success of his first, a biography of Gino, which had been a best seller when it came out in 1935.

  The place where we were staying in Davos turned out to be a large luxurious hotel, and this was a wonderful surprise. On the rare occasions I’d spent a night in a hotel in the past Mother had been paying, and the places we’d put up at hadn’t resembled this in the least. Here, Father was standing treat. His finances fluctuated; usually broke, when he got money he’d settle the school bills and the liquor account, and for a few months rejoice in affluence with no thought for later. Besides, this was a special occasion, our first family holiday ever and an opportunity to teach me the final skill he felt I required for adult life: to ski.

  He took me out on the nursery slopes next day. These were crowded with colourfully dressed people whizzing effortlessly down the piste but, unlike them, I was not allowed to use the tow lift. Edging my skis across the ascent, I had to climb. ‘Strengthens the thighs,’ Father said.
‘Skiing is all about thigh muscles, the rest is just style.’

  He was an excellent skier himself, but wholly self-taught and contemptuous of what he saw as current faddish technique. Skis wide apart, he’d come down the mountain steady as a table. He was used to skiing with a Bren gun strapped across his back.

  Davos was a fashionable resort. Just turned thirteen, I was uncomfortably aware that we were dressed differently from everyone else. They wore well-cut tunics slashed with vivid colour, the trousers tapering to fit inside their boots. ‘Frightful pansies,’ said Father scornfully, throwing them a dismissive glance as they flashed by.

  Mother’s and my ski clothes dated from the thirties. Unearthed by Nanny from a cobwebbed trunk in the manse’s loft, they smelled strongly of mothballs and had shapeless baggy trousers which fell loosely to overlap the ankles. Father, who never fell while skiing, had on a fishing sweater and old tweed jacket. And a large rucksack.

  At his insistence, and very much against my will, I wore a rucksack myself. On his orders I’d filled it with my spare clothes and a blanket from the hotel bed. He inspected me critically when I came out onto the slopes on our first morning, weighing the rucksack in his hand. ‘Won’t do,’ he pronounced. ‘You can’t go into the mountains without the right equipment. Weather may close in on you … may have to hole up. You need a Primus, soup, groundsheet, sleeping bag.’

  The nursery slopes stretched only 200 yards from their crest to the lively restaurant at the bottom, it seemed unlikely we’d be forced to bivouac half way down to pass the night. I tried to dissuade him. ‘Well, we’ll have to get those from a shop then,’ I said.