Once Again Assembled Here

by Sean O'Brien

  Private schools have large playing fields ringed with woodland in order that in drizzly autumns, when everything but the churned earth disappears, the pupils will gain an idea of the fog of war. The rugby pitches at Blake’s (football is for the juniors) were named after sites of battle – Majuba, Spion Kop – and the pavilion, isolated in the murk, could be a farmhouse suitable for a last stand, or the location at which Blücher’s black-clad cavalry suddenly emerges like Death’s Imperial Guard. ‘On, my children!’ cries the Marshal, sabre aloft at the head of the charge. You may have seen the film.

  When I was a pupil we used to see all the films. Avoiding games on Wednesday afternoons, we would sneak off to the Cecil, the Regal, the cavernous and ever-empty Criterion and the rest. We used to see some of them twice – The Guns of Navarone, for example, The Dam Busters, The Red Beret, The Wooden Horse, and the one in which Jack Hawkins plays a British spy masquerading as a Nazi general. I have it: The Two-Headed Spy. Much of this material was already old by the time it reached us, but it was as much a part of our present as homework, as daily spam and chips in the dining hall, or as the streets beyond the school gates where those who were not us moved about their mysterious lives among the weed-grown bombsites.

  No one from Blake’s pursued us into the flickering dark of the Rexy or the Apollo, though the school knew where we were, perhaps because the cinema offered an education in itself, in, among other things, an idea of Englishness – bravery, endurance, an ironic obedience to necessary authority, a readiness to kill for the cause given half a chance. And, to me at any rate, there were those other things, harder to give a name to. Even now there comes to my mind’s eye a scene from Dunkirk, in a field hospital where Harry Landis (Dr Levy) looks up momentarily from typing a report as heavy machine-gun fire becomes audible in the distance while the British forces flee for the coast. Nothing is said; he returns to work. I recognized that implacable stoicism before I could understand it.

  I imagine that the survivors of those times, Old Blakean lawyers and businessmen scattered around the suburbs of the city, find themselves tuning in to repeats on weekend afternoons when their wives are out shopping and the golf or the tennis grows dull. On an old movie channel, by contrast, Stanley Baker at his most vaunting and demented, playing the parachute instructor, plunges to the earth when his chute fails to open. Those were the days – not our days, clearly, but the days of war and opportunity. It was our birthright we were watching. Although in the event most of us refused to serve, we were a violent tribe. And now there we sat, in assembly, waiting. Waiting for lessons, for the next thing, for the further postponement of life, for orders.

  I looked back at the stage below, where Gammon was still talking, with senior staff seated behind him, among them Captain Carson and Major Brand, who gave every appearance of complete attention. We rose to sing a hymn.

  When I was a pupil, in assembly, while Dunkerley, the Headmaster before Robert Rowan, delivered his latest instalment of threats to the degenerate and the idle from the podium, I would drift off and read the names listed in gold on the honours board. After the First World War they had run out of space to list the dead. The casualties of Hitler’s war and Palestine and Korea and Malaya and Cyprus and Aden had to shift for themselves. They were in no position to object.

  In 1968, when I was twenty-three and had returned to the fold as a master, I passed my eye again over some of the names on the boards. Those old boys would have thought of it as the Great War, always supposing that as subalterns they had chance to consider the matter before rising from their trenches to walk out with their men into flanking machine-gun fire, or while they crouched under drumfire, awaiting the shell that would dissolve or bury them a platoon at a time, at an average rate of attrition of three thousand per day.

  The last survivor of their generation, a tall, silvery classics master called Pember, had finally retired the previous summer. I remembered his patience with our A-level group’s blundering passage through Aeneid vi, but especially the time when he covered an absent colleague for divinity and recited, mostly from memory, large sections of Ecclesiastes, the oddest of the books of the Bible, with its wild self-contradictions and its haunting, addictive blend of beauty and despair. He stopped a minute or two before the bell and looked out of the window. We waited, uncertain of what was expected of us. When the bell rang, Pember simply smiled and nodded a dismissal. People said he was mad, and it may have been true, but so what? It was school, it was Blake’s, and it was in part his recital that made me curious in my reading, and for that I am in his debt.

  It is tempting to give in and drift, as I did in assembly that day. I must try harder. Get to the point, Maxwell. Less of the flannel.

  So. The boards in the Main Hall silently invited successive generations to recall, or imagine, all those who were absent, missing in time’s action. There were no prisoners. Age would not weary them, but it seemed that their perpetual absence wearied most of us. In a sense this was a kind of loyalty: imagination, which runs away with ideas or is kidnapped by passions, was for the most part not encouraged in the curriculum at Blake’s. The dead lay on us like a protective colouring, proof against the claims of the present.

  And now, somehow, I was a master. I looked down into the body of the Main Hall at the current cohorts in their black suits. I wanted to stand up and make a public declaration: at all costs get as far away from here as you can and don’t come back. And if I had done this, then what? I remembered once during my sixth-form days when Dunkerley, whose mood was soured by episodes of gout and who was in the habit of delivering damning impromptu remarks to the whole school, looked about him from the lectern and said: ‘Look how the sea gives up its dead.’ We absorbed the comment like much else, with invulnerable indifference. And, had I actually chosen to offer my words of advice, the dead sea of the school would simply have closed over my head again as if nothing had happened.

  When assembly ended we made our way to lessons, in my case to address the causes of the Second World War in a double period with the upper sixth in a freezing corner room off the ground floor of the Main Hall. I returned some essays, made comments and set to putting notes up on the board. The use of the Gestetner machine to reproduce material was frowned upon by Gammon as a dangerous novelty, akin to Cuban-heeled boots. Writing in chalk on the blackboard took time, of course, which could be useful in itself.

  ‘My uncle says the trouble started because of the Jews, sir,’ said Arnesen. Feldberg, the outstanding student in his year, glanced up expressionlessly, then looked down and made a note. The others waited: perhaps there was sport to be had. Horobin, my predecessor, had evidently been a hard nut, but he had left to take holy orders. The boys’ assessment of me was probably more or less complete by then, but you could never tell.

  ‘Is that meant to be a joke, Arnesen?’ I asked, turning from the board. Outside, the two ancient groundsmen in their faded overalls appeared through the fog with the wheeled device like a miniature gun-carriage that they used for repainting the touchlines. The white stripe slowly extended over the mud. The stripe would not outlast the day. I sympathized.

  ‘My uncle wasn’t laughing when he said it, sir.’

  ‘Neither am I.’ Arnesen was not entirely satisfied. He winked at his neighbour. I suppressed the urge to smash his white-blond head against the pitted lid of his desk. After all, this wasn’t the Science Department. ‘You’re in the cadets, aren’t you, Arnesen?’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘So in time of war you would be expected to be among the first to come to the defence of the realm.’

  ‘Course, sir.’

  ‘The realm which includes all your fellow citizens.’

  ‘Sir.’ Arnesen sensed a trap.

  ‘Unless you were a traitor and fought for the other side. At one time that would have involved fighting for Hitler.’ There were sniggers around the room. Feldberg looked up again, then made another note.

  Sergeant Risman, the porter, loomed out of the
fog on the gravelled parterre, a parcel under his arm. Even in his grey-blue portering suit the lean, leathery, iron-haired Risman looked as if he was in uniform. He looked up, nodded and disappeared.

  ‘Never do that, sir,’ the boy said, offended.

  ‘Of course not, Arnesen. Heaven forbid. Well, then, what can you tell us about the German reoccupation of the Rhineland?’

  From somewhere else in the room came a low chorus. ‘Three German officers crossed the Rhine, parlez-vous . . .’

  Arnesen looked blank. Outside, a herd of juniors in gym kit appeared briefly before running into the foggy woods, urged on by old Matthews, Head of PE, at his steady lope in his black tracksuit, cigarette cupped in his fist. Given the conditions, there was an extraordinary volume of traffic out there. Ignorant armies narrowly avoiding clashes. Feldberg’s gaze had also followed these movements. He caught my eye. His face remained expressionless. He put up his hand. I nodded.

  ‘Sir. The reoccupation of the Rhineland was a means by which Hitler could do three things: satisfy and create a public appetite for evidence that Germany could recover from the humiliation imposed by the Versailles treaty; display a renewed military vigour; and test the willingness of the Great Powers to confront the newly confident German state. In all three respects the occupation was a great success, sir.’

  ‘Thank you, Feldberg. I hope everyone managed to note down that succinct account of the matter. Arnesen, would you like to hear it again?’

  ‘I can manage, sir,’ Arnesen said with a sigh, beginning to write. He looked injured now, as if the rules of engagement had been altered without consultation. The others looked at Feldberg, who was making notes again.

  ‘And how should the Allies have responded to this provocation? Anyone?’

  ‘Send a gunboat, sir,’ came the unhesitating chorus. Palmerston – now there was a politician they could love wholeheartedly, this group of future lawyers and estate agents, auctioneers and embezzlers. Feldberg, the exception, then an admirer of Disraeli, would, it was thought, be going on to study history at Cambridge. Captain Carson was right about him. Feldberg was marking time in this group. He didn’t belong. Lower down the school the rest of these boys would have attacked him like dogs, because they were like dogs.

  I imagined a gunboat bombarding the besieged city, under the cover of fog. A bit like The Sand Pebbles.

  ‘Were you in the cadets, sir?’ It was Arnesen again.

  ‘Yes, Arnesen. In those days we all joined. It was expected.’

  ‘People don’t fancy it these days so much, do they? Boys, I mean. The cadets, I mean.’

  ‘So it would appear. Times are changing.’

  ‘My uncle says those who won’t join up are communists and conkies.’

  ‘It’s a point of view, Arnesen, but I think you mean “conchies”.’ Laughter. It appeared I could do this, keep these creatures at bay with what I flattered myself was irony. And the other thing, what was that? It bore some resemblance to pleasure. I might enjoy this dreaded outcome, then, this teaching game, though I’d once sworn I would sooner join the Foreign Legion than do it. But as my friend Smallbone remarked, perhaps even the Legion would have looked twice at my record.

  Feldberg looked at his watch. At his father’s request he had been permitted to leave the cadets when he went into the upper sixth, in order to concentrate on his studies. Feldberg had done his bit of boy soldiering by then, but for the likes of Arnesen the facts were not entirely the point. I turned back to the board and carried on writing. Causes, effects.

  Everything was in motion, I see. The story I have to tell was long underway by this time and a crisis was imminent, but I believe that this was really the moment at which I made my entrance. It was during that perfectly routine lesson that I realized finally, as if waking up while already conscious, that much of what I had considered the trivial adolescent dandruff of school life – the name-calling, the prejudices, the ignorant and immoveable opinions – were actually the very substance of that life, and of life in the city beyond the confines of the school, and of the world beyond that, remote though it seemed through the bars of the school gate. It was a disorienting thought. I don’t know what I’d been assuming or expecting instead. As it turned out, I didn’t know the half of it.

  TWO

  ‘Sir?’ I turned from the board.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Arnesen scented an opportunity. ‘You were just standing there, so I wondered—’

  ‘Thank you for your concern, Arnesen. In fact, I was thinking. As you yourself are no doubt aware, that can take time.’ Arnesen was not so dim that he could not enjoy this blow along with the rest of the class. It meant that in a sense we were complicit in the conspiracy that was the school.

  ‘Don’t want to overdo it, sir.’

  Erik Arnesen, Arnie to his friends, was the son of a trawler owner. When he left with his two Es at A-level, he entered the family firm. It was in the nature of the Arnesens that the male child should go to sea in order to learn at first hand how the family made its money. So Arnesen went as a deckhand learner on the Kingston Star. The vessel sank with all hands off Iceland in January. There was talk that its nets had been snagged by a Russian submarine, but the long-delayed enquiry revealed nothing; it was widely believed that this was the intention of the authorities.

  In a sense, then, Arnesen may, albeit unwittingly, have died in action. I labour this little biographical sketch in order to say, like the paranoid and the conspiracy theorist, that everything is connected; but perhaps where I differ from the conspiracy theorist is in wanting to affirm that Arnesen’s life was real, as real as yours or mine: it was not simply filler in someone else’s narrative. Arnesen was a bumptious thicko, but he was real. He was there in the room playing the fool in his dim, good-humoured, bigoted way. And then he was gone. I didn’t like him but he too was one of us, whoever we were.

  This was the kind of lesson that Captain Carson, Head of History, mentor and saviour of my skin, was anxious to pass on.

  ‘In the end, Maxwell,’ he once said, ‘it doesn’t matter what we think of them. They may be brutes or morons, or chancers, or spoilt rich boys who don’t need us. It doesn’t matter. We have to remember, in the teeth of temptation, that these are actual lives these boys are leading and that they will grow up to be men who must face responsibility. It is very easy to view this place like a novel or a Will Hay film or some sort of overlong comedy skit. I’m sometimes tempted that way myself. Some of our older colleagues appear to be permanently living inside such a performance. And it’s clear that at times you yourself are inclined to succumb. Try not to let your facial expression betray you in assembly even though you’re sitting at the back of the balcony. Mr Gammon notices such things. We must resist temptation, must we not?’

  Carson’s slow, melancholy smile at his own remark represented a kind of provisional reacceptance of me: I would obey and learn, and in doing so assist him in his civilizing mission. I would, albeit belatedly, learn a sense of responsibility. If he was prepared to believe it, then I could at least hope that it was true, even if, in the space of a few months since my appointment, I had in a sense already betrayed him again.

  He seemed to think I could be somebody else. I did not share his confidence, but it was Carson who made me imagine I might make something of this strange profession. By any measure he was a great teacher, as great in his way as any history don. When I’d returned from a couple of years abroad after making a mess of things at university, he gave me a breathing space in which, so he seems to have believed, I could discover my true direction. I don’t think the others on the committee – Gammon and Brand plus a couple of governors – would have chosen to employ me, even though one of the two other candidates with whom I shared the interview waiting room had a disabling stammer and the other, who slipped away several times to the lavatory, was clearly an alcoholic. Carson swayed the committee’s judgement: after all, I was to be his man and teach history. It saved me from Gabbitas–Thring,
who were offering me a choice between Hinckley and some vegetarian madhouse in Dorset.

  After the interview back at the end of May Carson and I drank whisky in the History bookroom. When he had laboured to light his pipe, he looked at me kindly and said, ‘Well, Maxwell. Once again assembled here, eh? I’ve given you my backing, so bear that in mind and try not to go swerving from the path of righteousness again.’ He did not refer directly – not that he needed to, given my own cringing sense of it – to the failure of my undergraduate career. At Cambridge I had fallen into a disastrous affair with a don’s wife. I was lucky to escape with a Third and a whole skin. After that I had gone to Paris and taught English and failed to write anything. There had been nothing for it but to come home. I admit it was a relief to surrender, to know the password and for the sentries to let me through the barrier.

  Carson appeared to understand that I was an orphan in mind as well as in fact, and that the only home I was likely to have was the school I had attended since the age of eight: so he took me in. I should mention at this point that my father never saw me – a captain like Carson, he was killed in the airborne attack on the Rhine, along with the rest of his unit, when their glider was shot down. My mother seems never to have recovered from the loss. I find that I scarcely remember her now. She died – that is all I was told – when I was five years old, after which I remained in the care of distant relatives, a rural clergyman and his unmarried sister near Wooler in Northumberland, until I was old enough to be sent to the prep school at Blake’s as a boarder.