Find Another Place

by Ben Graff

  That first morning we had one period in the gym and arrived before the PT master, so started to mess about on the equipment. I climbed up the rope on the far left, without using my feet, did a Tarzan act from one rope to the other, before sliding down the one on the far right. Stevens was watching thoughtfully and must have been sufficiently impressed as he never gave me any bother. He was subsequently expelled when arrested by the police for stealing a car and joyriding. Yes, even in those days.

  So it was that I established myself, made some friends and showed some athletic skills to a point, albeit not really when it came to cricket. I do pause to consider how I might fare should I try to scale some ropes today, but of course I know the answer. It had turned out not to be like Tom Brown’s School Days after all, but it was very much the case that you needed to keep your wits about you. Danger lurked and it could take many forms – good preparation for life more generally perhaps. Well, perhaps.

  When I was due to return to Shaftesbury for my second term, there was a thick fog. In those days before radar this meant that no boats were running, so I arrived back at school one day late, just after lunch. My immediate concern was to discover if Sheyale had returned. He had told me there was a possibility that he might not. I hurried to find him, taking a shortcut behind the jail courts, a small yard at the back of the school separate from general view, which enabled you to head up to the dormitory without having to traipse through multiple corridors and up the main staircase.

  Preoccupied, I failed to hear footsteps behind me, so was taken completely by surprise by a massive open-handed blow on my ear, which knocked me off my feet. I jumped up, feeling decidedly cross – and there was Roger, a broad grin on his face, accompanied by two Frenchmen who usually followed him about.

  “You’re out of luck, Holmes, your protector hasn’t come back, and by the time I’m finished with you, you will wish you hadn’t either!” With that he drew his enormous right fist well back for a good round arm swing, leaving his left arm loosely by his side. Sheyale was right: he had no idea how to fight; two short arm jabs to the unprotected solar plexus and he was on the ground, gasping for breath.

  I smiled at his two distinguished gentlemen. “Just keep out of my way in future.” Quite a pleasant moment. A somewhat exaggerated account of this fracas went rapidly round the school, and I lived in peace from then on.

  About three or four times a term, one could ask for a Sunday off. On those occasions I would leave after morning service at Holy Trinity Church, and head to my Uncle Bill’s farm; it was like an escape into another world. I would take the main Westminster Road out of town, across the border into Wiltshire, turning right down a road, closed off in those days by a gate, as cattle were grazing on common land. Then halfway down a steep hill was the wonderful old stone farmhouse, facing the farmyard.

  A warm welcome, a glass of sherry, a super Sunday lunch, possibly a ride on one of the horses in the afternoon, then a drive back to school in time for evensong at 6pm. The weekends I spent there in my last year at Shaftesbury in 1933 were a real pleasure. It saddens me now that they are all passed, that I cannot go back and see them one last time, one last glass of sherry and pony ride, but there we are. The memories are happy ones, which should not be tainted just because it pains me a little that they are from a world that does not exist anymore.

  I have just eaten lunch. Somewhat chewy lamb and over-cooked roast potatoes, not so dissimilar from school fare back then, an experience, unlike the one described above, that I would have been happy to forgo repeating. At least the pudding was apple crumble and custard, not rhubarb. I will eat any food that is put in front of me, apart from rhubarb. Years and years of this pudding, seemingly every day, have left me with an aversion to the sight of a stick of the stuff that could not now be shaken.

  So yes, onwards with this story, although perhaps it is a coincidence but my next memory is also about food. I was appointed a prefect, a position of power and privilege, toward the end of my time at the school. The head prefect, Peter Bathurst-Brough asked me for £2 at the start of the term, about £65 in today’s money. With a similar amount from all six prefects he went off to a grocer’s, who then made sure that the food served to us sitting together at the top table was vastly superior to that served to everybody else. The benefits that can come with age and rank!

  As a prefect, one of my duties at bedtime was to take charge of dormitory three. I was now in charge, which was always make or break (and was very much a case of break for some who were destroyed by their charges.) Keeping order in dormitories was certainly a very important part of a prefect’s job.

  There were fourteen boys in dormitory three, aged thirtenn to fourteen beds down each end of the room, washbasins and jugs of water on a long stand down the middle. Shaftesbury, on its hilltop, is a very cold place in winter, and there were times when we had to break the ice before we could wash in the morning! It is unlikely that the conditions would be deemed legal in today’s health and safety culture, but we managed.

  On arriving at the dormitory you were required to kneel at your bedside and say your prayers. No talking was allowed until everybody had prayed. The space on the left-hand side of your bed was yours and you were not allowed to trespass into the space belonging to anyone else. Anyone breaking this or any other school rule was likely to be beaten by one of the prefects armed with a slipper. In fact, hard house shoes!

  The boy in the next bed to me on my first night in charge was a pleasant enough chap called Galihouse. He obviously knew that newly appointed prefects were supposed to be tested to the limit. “So, we get you this term,” said Galihouse. “We had Cartledge last term; he is a very strong fellow, you know.”

  “Yes, I agree.”

  “He is a friend of mine and he is very, very strong.” Galihouse looked up at the steel beam above his head. “He used to do his exercises on that, you know. One day he went halfway across the dorm. You have to be very strong to do that.”

  Those poor little innocents had chosen to challenge me in the one field of athletics at which, unknown to them, I was reasonably expert. Ordering Galihouse to stand away from his bed, I used it as a trampoline to reach the RSJ (rolled steel joist), then without any real effort I went hand over hand to the other side of the dorm.

  Facing my crestfallen troops I said, “You all thought Cartledge was strong when he got halfway across. I am obviously twice as strong as he is, as you will find out when I tan your bottoms!” No rebellion was likely from then on: I omitted to point out that Cartledge had eleven and a half stone to support, while I had only nine.

  The other prefects were all members of the 1st x11 cricket team, so I was appointed scorer (I had been 2nd x11 scorer the year before). I also scored for the masters x11, which contained two or three Dorset players.

  So that summer we played several matches a week at places like the county ground in Southampton, to schools and village teams in Somerset or at home on our own beautiful playing field, with superb lunches and teas. This was surely a wonderful summer, and a fitting end to my schooldays.

  A short holiday camping with the St George’s scouts in Jersey, then to work. From being a VIP at Shaftesbury to becoming the most junior member of our family business was a somewhat rapid descent to earth!

  It is hard to imagine myself now as the small boy I was then. I have seen and learnt so much since those days, how can it not change your perspective somewhat? I do not think a father would send a child to school like that today, but it was more normal in the 1920s. Equally I am unsurprised that my happiest memories from that time are of my Uncle Bill, rather than of going home, but all of this it was and it cannot be changed.

  You can go from being young to old in the blink of an eye. At least this is how it seems to me now. As I sit here today and write this, I feel somewhat old and fragile. But when I think to my former self shimmying up ropes or climbing across the dormitory it does make me smile
. Such ability does not survive in my body but it does in my memory.

  I expect some day someone will be amazed to learn that Ben went to school once too.

  Playing Games – 1989-2014

  We left Aldershot when we were seven and I don’t remember much about it. A poster in which bright pink pigs urged you to wash your hands pinned to the school cloakroom wall. Not being able to read the word ‘turquoise’ on the classroom colours mobile. Playing with sand and water and making things out of pieces of card and plastic. A goldfish that died and was either given a funeral or flushed down the toilet; I half remember it both ways. Looking for bits of broken china and glass in the school flower beds. A picture of the Queen that hung in a school canteen of wooden, metal-framed hexagonally-shaped tables and orange plastic chairs. The whole place smelt of cheese, egg, cellophane and damp, and like most of the children I struggled to eat in it.

  Swinging a boy by his gloves and snapping the string, his mother complaining. A teacher moving to the Scilly Isles. Dave turning up at the school gate once and me being unsure who he was. Walking on the range with its gorse bushes, mud and tanks, where the soldiers used to practise. The smell of exhaust fumes on the busy road that led to and from the school. A swan painted on a stone given to me by a friend’s mother; I liked the feel of the coolness of the rock on one side and the smoothness of the paint on the other. A children’s party, where I wanted a bar of chocolate, but when I got it, it was plain and bitter.

  There had been a certain tension with the immediate next-door neighbours and our parents were never keen to have much to do with them. I think I remember that. It was only years later that we were told they had been wife-swappers. There was some sort of plant in their garden which apparently was meant to be a sign of this, Mum and Dad thought, next to their large caravan, which now I come to think of it could have been used for who knows what.

  “Did they ever ask you?” I once said to Dad.

  “Let’s not even go there,” he replied with a shake of his head and perhaps the hint of a grin. At least I think that is the conversation I remember.

  We were back again for a weekend to stay with other neighbours, in their chaotic house, although they had moved to a different part of Aldershot soon after we had left. A large house with a big garden, but not kept in a way that met with my parents’ approval. Bash Street Kids stickers on many of the walls. Piles of laundry and dishes, wine from boxes rather than bottles, which Dad said was never a good sign. Cat litter trays and bowls in multiple places. Paperwork piled up in corners. Her university course work, his Inland Revenue files.

  “Why can’t they tidy up a bit?” my father would mutter, and Mum would seem to sigh quietly in agreement. But in the garden, in the heat of a summer game, none of that seemed to matter. Dad was at his most natural here, present and engaged, properly one of us, a real player, far removed from the world of polite adult social chit-chat going on at the margins of the lawn and on the patio.

  Mum said that our dad’s parents hadn’t encouraged him to play when he was a child and it was like he was making up for it now. They took all forms, our games on that Aldershot summer lawn scorched yellow by the sun, with so many of the families we had once lived close to back together for an afternoon. We usually played football, sometimes a game that wasn’t quite rugby, occasionally cricket or rounders. Barbeque smoke scented with burnt meat and charcoal in the air, plastic cutlery and discarded serviettes blowing across the lawn, as the little grass that had survived the heat turned to dust under our feet.

  Lee, who lived further up Cranmore Gardens, who had been fired from the local paper for embezzlement and now owned an art gallery, was very much the other key adult in the mix of the games. Years later Lee wrote to my father after Mum’s death, to say that he felt an affinity with him as he too was a Jew who had married a Catholic, even if they had since divorced. “Never propose in the middle of a blazing row,” was one of the pieces of advice Lee shared with me, shaking his head. It wasn’t yet a funny story. I don’t know if Dad ever wrote back to him. He did not find it easy to reciprocate gestures of openness from others and I know what my guess would be.

  The games would last for hours. 30–29 score lines were not uncommon, as often we would agree that the ‘next goal wins,’ and then find ourselves unsated and wanting to play more. Often times somebody would be injured or storm off in a huff. Occasionally there would be complaints made to the players by other adults that things were perhaps getting a bit out of hand. We barely noticed. I was no athlete, but I had a kind of determination that made me quite good, or at least carried me into the action. I had near unlimited energy and in those moments the game was everything and all else disappeared. In a rare flash of insight, I once thought that this is what it is like to be young, as I forced the football through the jumper goal posts, a moment that mattered to me then but now of course will be remembered by no one else. I do not know if it counts for less because of this, or not. Once, after a particularly bruising game, Lee said that he must say something to me about how he thought I had played. I could tell from his tone that it was going to be a compliment, but then Dad interrupted him and he never did finish his sentence.

  It was around the time of the Aldershot visit that my father taught us to play chess, sliding the lid from the box and removing brown and white weighted wooden pieces with care, as if about to perform a magic trick, which in a way he was. The pieces were not quite Staunton, the design a little off standard, the kings with turbans and the bishops with mitres of the opposing colour, but these were minor details and everything else was close enough. The board itself was made of stiff card that folded in two. Large squares of black and white, an oriental-style brown and black patterned back. ‘Chess and Draughts Board’ was embossed in solemn lettering on a rectangular patch of orange and white.

  We took our first steps with him into the labyrinth and he showed patience for explaining and coaching, at odds with my more general impression of him. Sometimes we would play each other, sometimes I would play Matt and Dad would advise. At ten it would never have occurred to me that I would ever beat him. By twelve it was trivial, though that was more about being at a school with teachers who played in weekend tournaments, far ahead of hobbyists like him, than anything else. I always saw beating Dad in this context; my realisation as to the limitations of a parent’s knowledge was to come later, and for different reasons.

  Dad had been a right-footed left back at school but didn’t make the team; his father, Dave, had played cricket for the army at Lords but had been knocked out first ball. But the facility was there and it often surprised; he was better at sport than you might have thought. Or perhaps more likely, if you were not his son you would have been more open to the possibility that he might have been good at things from the outset. Perhaps children are always destined to be their parents most critical judges, to see them as either all-knowing or embarrassing without much in between, which can but lead to a disappointed awakening or confirmation of what we already know. Either way it is not good. I know all this must go for how my children see or will ultimately see me too.

  I was horrified when he took part in the fathers’ race at sports day. He was older than some of his rivals, chunkier too, and I had enough to live down as it was. But from the moment the starting gun fired, his strength was obvious. There was real power in the core of his body as he ploughed along his green, white-striped furrow, coming home second much to my amazement, only run down in the last few yards by one of the farmers. The way he brushed off my congratulations afterwards surprised me less.

  Once at a clay pigeon shoot, he hit with both of his shots, spraying fragments of clay across the field. Impressing his hosts, he grinned broadly at us, briefly the hero of everyone in that muddy field, even the local farmers. We were at one with our country neighbours that day.

  We played most things and his skill level varied. He was alright at snooker, on the ageing table we ke
pt in the garage, and about the same at darts as the rest of us. His golf was appalling, not an issue on Bognor’s putting green, more so at Appley pitch and putt on the Island. At least he got value for money, given the number of strokes he would take.

  Cricket was more of a leveller and would sometimes bring in other family members who did not take part in other games. Both Mum and Martin were known to play. I remember Martin in his eighties still able to bowl with spin on the damp sand, hand–eye coordination with the bat strong. Some of the training from his boarding school days was ingrained in him and he looked to me to be a better player than he said he had been in his journal.

  Dad was pretty good with bat and ball, Mum’s effort more nominal but appreciated. Sometimes we would play on Brook Beach and then go to Hannover House for afternoon tea, hot buttered toast, scones and cake. Not open all year. A green caravan that doubled as a travelling library parked under the large oak tree in the grounds, overlooking the sea. All of it bored me at the time.

  Once, travelling down to the Island years before, a car bumped us in near stationary motorway traffic and Dad’s power surprised me. He got out, bare-chested, looking straight at the much younger guy in the vehicle behind, who held his hands up in acknowledgement or fear. Dad slowly satisfied himself that there was no damage, before turning and strolling back to the driver’s seat. I was impressed, but also conscious of the fact that I wasn’t the only one who could find him unnerving.

  “You know he’s quite shy really, don’t you?” a friend once said to me. He was certainly quiet when we were younger. It was easier to play with him than it was to talk. In later years, as he became successful and started to drink more, he was to become at first more bullish then belligerent. Talking about sport, playing games, some things we could do more easily than approach certain other topics.