by David Niven
Brian said he had begun to feel better from that moment.
I have noticed again and again that when things are really black and one feels that they can’t possibly get any worse—they often do. This time, however, things improved.
The crammer at Penn Street was the Vicar—the Reverend Arthur Browning, a magnificent looking grandson of Robert Browning—clear, blue eyes and white, wavy hair.
Chorus:
It’s the roast beef of old England
That makes us what we are today!
Verse:
What makes the Vicar’s hair so nice and wavy?
It’s simply becos he was brought up on the gravy,
Of the Roast Beef of old Engerlund
That makes us wot we are today.’
Etc. etc.
So we dutifully and sycophantically warbled at the village fete, a week after I arrived.
Sycophantically because, beneath his benign and exotic exterior, he was an evil-tempered, vain old tyrant. The parents uniformly adored him: the boys without exception loathed him.
The Victorian vicarage nestled next to the Victorian church in a damp dell, enfolded by dripping beechwoods, part of the well-known pheasant shoot of Lord Howe’s Penn House estate, three miles away.
Mrs. Browning was a plump partridge of a woman who wore pince-nez which were attached to a little chain. These in turn were controlled by a spring concealed inside a round enamel receptacle pinned to her generous left bosom.
There was a nice sporting master called Mr. Keeble who took us for long walks to Amersham and bicycle rides to Beaconsfield, and a nice scholarly old gentleman called Mr. Woodcock whose ill-fitting false teeth had a distressing habit of flying out on to the carpet or into the soup. At the village fete they became embedded in a macaroon.
Ma Browning was immensely greedy and the high fees paid by our parents enabled her to provide a very good ‘board’ indeed. She had a brace of pretty daughters aged eighteen and twenty whose woollen bloomers hung in steaming festoons in the bathroom and an elder son who enlivened Sunday luncheons by arriving flushed and late with garrulous business friends from London.
All in all, with the exception of ‘Pa’ Browning’s rages, which were the twittering of little birds compared to the exhibitions of Mr. Croome and Commander Bollard, Penn Street vicarage was a very pleasant interlude. I worked hard but many of Pa Browning’s tantrums were certainly brought on when it became apparent to him that mathematics of all sorts would for ever be beyond me.
It began to look probable that the Royal Navy would not entrust the navigation of several million pounds’ worth of battleship and several hundred lives to an officer who could not work out his position; but there was still some hope as the most important part of the naval entrance exam was said to be the interview by the Board of Admirals, and many encouraging stories were in circulation to prove that he who impressed the Admirals personally was well on his way to conquering the written papers. There were about a dozen boys at the vicarage, some of my age trying to pass the common entrance exam to public schools and an older group who had finished with school and were trying to pass examinations for universities. Some of these had been removed under a cloud from public schools. Having been expelled myself from Heatherdown, I had a certain amount in common with these, but not nearly so much as one large ex-Etonian thought. At first I was flattered by his attentions and was naive enough to think he liked me for myself. He took me for bicycle rides and stood me ice-cream cornets by the gross. Then one day he took me for a walk in the beechwoods. It was a very dreary experience and the laws on homosexuality being what they still are, I am certainly not going into it in any great detail here. Suffice to say that I came out of the wood with a ten and sixpenny second-hand accordion which I had admired in a junk shop in Loudwater.
I think I had visions of owning a whole orchestra. In any event, I could not wait to tell everyone how easy it was to obtain musical instruments. I was interrogated by Pa Browning and a large, black taxi came and took the large ex-Etonian away.
The day of the naval entrance exam finally dawned. I was scrubbed from head to toe and, shining like a new sixpence, was dumped with several hundred other applicants in a forbidding morgue of a building, next to Burlington Arcade.
My French, English, history and geography were all pretty reliable and I had been primed with a few questions in arithmetic, algebra and geometry that Pa Browning was sure would come up. I had those answers down pat, but above all I was rehearsed in how to behave in front of the Admirals. ‘Be quick and intelligent without being smug or cheeky,’ said Pa Browning. ‘If you don’t know the answer to a question—make one up quickly—don’t just dither. Remember above all the boy who was asked to give the names of the three most famous Admirals in British naval history—‘Admiral Nelson, sir; Admiral Drake, sir; and I didn’t quite catch your name sir’.’ The first exam was the medical one.
Half a dozen at a time, we were stripped naked and to test our hearts, made to climb ropes without using our legs; then the usual tapping of knees and peering into ears, mouths and eyes took place.
Finally, ‘get on your marks as though you were going to run a hundred yards’. Once in position, a large hand grabbed our testicles from the rear. ‘Cough!’ came the order. One poor little brute thought the man said ‘Off!’ and leaped eagerly forward. He was still being rubbed with ice when I was fully dressed and waiting to be summoned by the Admirals.
A bemedalled Master-at-Arms approached me in the anteroom.
‘All right you, you’re next, now go and sit at that desk. You’ll find a pencil and paper there. You have five minutes to write a funny story—got it?’
I repressed my urge to indulge in lavatory humour and I don’t remember what I wrote but it was certainly plagiarism in its finest form as I had read it the day before in an old Punch.
Clasping my funny story, I followed the Master-at-Arms into a long panelled room. Seated round a table was a drift of Admirals. One or two wore beards; all were bound to the elbows with gold braid and clanking with medals. They seemed rather bored. One took my funny story and read it then passed it to his neighbour. Out of the corner of my eye I watched it progress as questions were fired at me.
‘Have you had any relations in the Navy?’
I dug up a distant cousin who fought at Jutland.
‘How does a petrol engine work?’
I knew.
‘What was the number of the taxi you came in, this morning?’
‘I walked, sir.’
‘There is a blank map on the wall over there, go and point out Singapore.’ I jabbed a desperate finger in the region of Bangkok.
‘Why do you want to go into the Navy?’
‘I want to be an Admiral, sir.’
(I think I overdid it a bit there.)
After a few more fairly inane questions to which I gave answers of equal non-distinction, the most heavily bearded of the Admirals spoke up. ‘One last question—why were you expelled from Heatherdown?’
That really rocked me but I should have realised they would have done their homework.
There was no point in trying to work round that one so I put on what I hoped was ‘the boy stood on the burning deck’ expression—‘I put some dog’s mess in a box, sir, and sent it to a sick friend.’ It sounded quite awful the way I said it and a long silence followed my announcement.
‘You thought that was funny?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘But your headmaster did not—correct?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I see. Well, fortunately, we don’t have dogs aboard ship.’
Hearty laughter greeted this sally, and I was so grateful to the old man. I quite oddly said, ‘Thank you, sir.’
I believe I passed the interview and I was bullish after most of the written papers. The last one to confront me was mathematics.
Not one of the carefully learned problems so confidently predicted by Pa Browning came up and my total s
core in the subject was 28 out of a possible 300.
Not unnaturally, the Royal Navy decided that it could rub along without me. So, aged twelve and a half, it was ‘back to the old drawing board’.
∨ The Moon’s a Balloon ∧
THREE
THE English public schools have been operating for a long time: some for a very long time indeed. Eton was founded in 1440, and Winchester even earlier, in 1378. Rugby, where that horrible little boy picked up a soccer ball and charged off with it, started in 1567 and Oundle, ten years before that. Cheltenham and Marlborough, having opened their doors for the first time in the early eighteen-forties, were probably the youngest additions to the well-known list, until in 1923, Stowe came along.
Stowe School was established not, as were the others, by Kings, Archbishops or Lord Mayors but by a consortium of educators and hard-headed businessmen who saw the possibilities for a new public school and hoped to make a good thing out of it.
Stowe House, the vast Georgian home of the extinct Dukes of Buckingham, had become the debt-ridden property of a kinsman—the Master of Kinloss. He, like my father, was slaughtered during the war to end all wars, and his mother, like mine, was forced to liquidate.
The consortium obtained this magnificent house and several hundred acres of grounds. Clough Williams-Ellis, the architect of Portmeirion in North Wales, was enlisted to transform it. A prospectus was issued and Stowe was on its way heralded as ‘the New Great Public School’.
In these early post-war years, a whole stratum of suddenly well-to-do industrialists found the established public schools, to which they longed to send their sons, already bulging at the seams, so the consortium had no problem whatever in finding clients. Discovering a young aggressive headmaster with new ideas was far more difficult. They made a most fortunate choice—a young housemaster from Lancing College—J. F. Roxburgh.
In May of 1923, the school opened with less than a hundred boys. Somewhere in the depths of the Carlton Club, ‘Tommy’ heard rumblings; they could have been fulminations because a leading article in The Times and the Headmaster of Eton, Edward Lyttelton, in that year both opined that instead of starting a new public school it would be far more sensible to enlarge the facilities of the old ones. Whatever they were; the rumblings sank in. Pa Browning was instructed to investigate this last resort and in July, I was sent over to Stowe, 30 miles in the dilapidated village taxi, to be interviewed by ‘J. F.’ Roxburgh.
Stowe must be the most beautiful school in England. Golden stone colonnades, porticos by Vanbrugh, sweeping lawns, huge lakes, long green valleys, glorious avenues, a Corinthian arch, a Palladian bridge and scores of assorted grottoes and ‘temples d’amour’ from each of which, through spectacular beech woods, rides open up to show other more fascinating ‘follies’. Robert Adam, Grinling Gibbons, Kent, Valdre and Borra combined to produce glowing, beautifully proportioned interiors. Roxburgh, in his first public speech as Headmaster, said, ‘Every boy who goes out from Stowe will know beauty when he sees it for the rest of his life.’
How true, but the apprehensive, small boy who waited in the Headmaster’s flower-filled garden on that warm summer evening, saw nothing of the architectural and landscaped beauties around him. All he knew was that he had never in all his life wanted anything so much as to be accepted for that school—it just felt right and he longed passionately to be part of it.
Roxburgh finally appeared. Very elegant, he seemed, with a spotted bow tie, very tall, curly hair parted in the middle.
He came out through the french windows of his study and crooked his finger at me. Then he smiled, put an arm round my shoulders and led me to a stone bench.
‘Now, my dear man,’ he said, ‘you seem to have had a lot of ups and downs—tell me about it.’
I don’t pretend to have total recall but I do remember those words—I will never forget them.
He listened sympathetically as I told him my version of my life so far. When I had finished, he remained silent for what seemed like an eternity. Then he stood up and said, ‘I’ll walk with you to the car.’ On the way through the school, he showed me the Assembly Hall and the Library and pointed out the fabulous view from the top of the South Front steps across sloping, green pastures to a lake, then up to the towering Corinthian arch. Several times he spoke to boys who passed us, each time addressing them by their Christian names.
When he reached the ancient taxi, he looked down at me and smiled again, then he said, ‘There will be two hundred new boys coming next term and you will be in Chandos House. Your housemaster will be Major Haworth.’ I mumbled something then climbed into the taxi and wept.
In September I arrived at Stowe along with the other new boys. As we outnumbered the old boys by two to one, everybody, masters included, for the first couple of weeks, sported pieces of white cardboard pinned to their coats showing their name in bold print, rather like a dentists’ convention in Chicago.
One of Roxburgh’s better new ideas was to break with the traditional prison garb of the older establishments; no top hats, stiff collars or straw boaters for us…the boys wore grey flannel suits on weekdays and blue suits on’Sunday.
Rules were sensible and good manners were encouraged: for instance hands had to be removed from pockets when passing masters or visiting parents. There were no ‘bounds’ and boys were allowed to have bicycles. As, however, one had to pedal three miles to get out of the school grounds, this was a little more strenuous than it sounded.
I could not believe my good fortune. The boys seemed nice and friendly albeit as bemused for the first few days as I was and Major Haworth, lately a company commander at Sandhurst, was one of the kindest and gentlest of men.
People are sharply divided about their schooldays and contrary to what one tells one’s children about their being the best days of one’s life, most people remember them with distaste.
Stowe, in those early days, was different from any other school. At the start, we were all the same age—around thirteen. Within four years, as the number of boys swelled from three hundred to five hundred, there was an annual intake of younger ones but somehow it seemed as though we all grew up together and I for one enjoyed the whole thing immensely. Inevitably, my inherent weakness of not being able to stand prosperity got me into trouble, but for the first couple of years, I was a fairly reliable citizen.
Roxburgh dominated the scene and I worshipped the man.
The first to notice some special interest being shown by a boy, Roxburgh nurtured it, fostered it and made the boy feel a little bit special because of it. How he did this, I shall never know, but he made every single boy at that school feel that they, and what they did, were of real importance to the Headmaster. Boys were always addressed by their first names and encouraged to build radio sets, to fence and play golf and tennis besides the usual school games, to paint, play the piano or the bagpipes and to keep pets, though this last got a little out of control as the boys grew older and instead of rabbits and ferrets being the status symbols, monkeys, bears, hyenas and skunks filled the cages. Finally, the school zoo was shut down for reasons of noise and smell.
I played the trombone and the drum in the school band and started a house magazine, to which ‘J. F.’ subscribed, called The Ghandosian. I also by the age of fourteen fell in love once more with milk chocolate and became almost entirely conical in shape. My nickname was Podger or Binge and. I went bright pink after Rugger. Another boy, named Smallman, was even fatter than I was; his nickname was unoriginal—‘Tiny’. ‘Tiny’ Smallman was very large indeed and we both became self-conscious about our physical defects. Tiny found an ad in a boys’ paper and we spent our pocket money on strange tubes containing a foul-smelling green paste which, when rubbed on to the stomach or bottom, was guaranteed to reduce it in size. After football, we waited till the others had left the changing room rather than take a shower in public.
Because of my shape, I was enlisted in the school plays, usually playing a mushroom or something fairl
y unobtrusive . I got the call of the greasepaint, however, and before I left, I was running the school concerts and giving myself all the best parts.
I studied fairly hard, though permanently stymied by mathematics, and my immediate goal was the, School Certificate; a public exam for which one sat between 15 and 16 and which, provided one obtained enough ‘credits’, was comparable with ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels today. One of the ‘credits’ which one had to obtain in order to get the School Certificate was mathematics, so from a very early date ‘J. F.’ saw to it that I took special tuition to try and defeat the monster.
My long-term goal, thanks to some pretty nifty salesmanship by Major Haworth, became the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, followed by a commission in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.
School, between thirteen and fifteen, therefore, presented no great problems and the holidays, too, went along very nicely during this period of formation. Tommy being persona non grata at Rose Cottage, the summers were bliss: for Christmas Grizel and I were packed off to spend the holiday at Nanpanton, in Leicestershire, with the Paget family—where the children, Peter and Joan, were of identical vintage.
Their father, Edmund, was, with a splendid figure named Algy Burnaby, joint-Master of the Quorn Hunt; Barbara, their mother, was a garrulous, gossipy, enchanting, shoptalking, fox huntress who rode side-saddle under a top hat bigger than Tommy’s, swore like a trooper and, along with the rest of her family, never could grasp the fact that Grizel and I were not actually afraid of horses—we were just too impecunious to hunt. We loved the Pagets.
Easter holidays in English schools being short—three weeks—Tommy would arrange to be away while my mother found a variety of places in which to house us. Sometimes, it was Bembridge, but Rose Cottage was barely habitable at that time of year. Once we were sent to a sister of Tommy’s who lived in a noisome little flat in Portsmouth—far too near the Bollards and the scenes of my crimes for comfort—but the worst was when Tommy decided to be a real estate tycoon.
