Before we venture through the hallowed portals of an English public school, there are a few more pieces of the jigsaw to throw on the table.
I was reasonably solitary. I wasn’t interested in sport. I spent long afternoons at the weekend in the public library, browsing and daydreaming. I had discovered wargaming, and my evenings were spent researching the accuracy of the Brown Bess musket and the tactics of the infantry square, and painting my white-metal Scots Highlanders, shortly to be unleashed on an unsuspecting Napoleon.
My uncle Stewart, a teacher, had been a county table-tennis champion, so, for Christmas, a rather fine table-tennis table appeared. Dad and his brothers batted away and argued over who had won, then went off to the pub. I immediately organised the Battle of Waterloo to be refought on it the next day. It was green and it was flat – perfect. It was one of many small events that caused my father to regard me somewhat strangely, as if subverting a table-tennis table was somehow unmanly.
I had developed a wonderful set of spots as I approached the day I would leave home and take up residence for the next four years at Oundle School in Northamptonshire. Not great, but seeing as there were no girls anywhere on the horizon, not a showstopper. What made them break out into suppurating sores was the application of engine oil, burnt rubber and grime-encrusted fingernails. Just before semi-leaving home, I’d been introduced to motor racing.
Tim, a friend at school, and his elder brother Nick had a very enthusiastic father. He drove a massive Cadillac and had a huge trailer, in which was a miniature racing team for his sons. As far as I could gather, he owned a nightclub and drank a great deal of barley wine.
The karts were 100cc rotary valve, and they were very fast. I had never even turned a wheel before, but I just got in the seat, got my bump start and hurtled off towards the first corner down the long straight at Lindholme, the former RAF base.
I turned the wheel, did a 360-degree spin and stalled the engine. I did the same thing at just about every corner round the circuit before I got back to the trailer, followed by two very sweaty brothers gasping their last after chasing me round the circuit and restarting me half-a-dozen times.
We debriefed. Clearly I needed more information as to what was going on.
By the end of the day I thought I was flying: foot flat to the floor, down the straight, braking as hard and as late as I dared, the adrenalin shooting through my hands and heart. The truth is, I probably just about made it round without spinning off, but bugger that, steam engine driver, fighter pilot and astronaut – add racing-car driver to the list.
Angelic Upstart
Before we go to boarding school, with all that entails, can I just have a word about religion? Something I experienced, and experimented with and had experimented upon me at four, too early an age. The outcome, though, was totally unexpected, and if God ever moved in a mysterious way, here was proof positive.
I don’t recall my baptism, but apparently I somehow managed to ingest quite a quantity of holy water. I could have drowned in the font. I am not sure that swallowing God’s special sauce caused any sort of aura to appear, but it might have been an influence on my early interest in angel wings.
School had the usual harvest festival and a bit of dreary carol singing, but it was only when I arrived at Birkdale that I was exposed to evangelical religion, bible black and fighting Satan on all fronts.
There was a cabal of zealous teachers and, by chance or design, they were the same teachers that ran school expeditions, including one to Fort William in Scotland. It consisted of 10 days’ camping, playing robust semi-military games, climbing mountains, bridging rivers, leaping from tree to tree (‘The Lumberjack Song’, anyone?) and religious brainwashing. Think Bear Grylls with no possibility of escape.
There were prayers and lectures, and every evening there was a group assembly in which 10-year-olds were encouraged to stand up and identify sins, and would be rewarded for their folly by rapturous praise, hugs and applause. I stood up and identified a fly on the wall, which was clearly a servant of Satan, because it had been distracting me from the balderdash being spouted by the part-time messiahs and full-time school teachers.
With no sense of irony at the age of 10, I was welcomed into the fold, and told that I was now evangelised. My purpose in life was to go and convert people to Christ.
Well, being a mission-oriented sort of chap, I sallied forth into the town and set about converting a couple of Highland girls by handing them a leaflet and inviting them to the campsite for a fun evangelical evening of happy-clappy hymns accompanied by bad guitar-playing and Aran sweaters.
‘Fuck off, you twat,’ was the robust response.
At home in Sheffield I was enrolled in the Christian Union, where I wore a little badge and was encouraged to read The Screwtape Letters and lots of other rather less inventive tracts, some of which covered subjects like masturbation and marriage. Confused, I thought, Did they go hand in hand?
My parents were a bit bemused, having seldom been near a church since I half-swallowed one when I was nine months old. However, they tolerated it on the basis that it seemed harmless enough and gave me something to do on Sunday mornings.
Not too long after this, hormones kicked in, and I began to look at girls in a rather different light. I no longer wanted only to convert them; there was something more that you could diddle about with. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
My school friend Tim was discussing the subject of exactly where to put fingers. Incredibly, it was the only time anybody had spoken about sex thus far, other than being told it was, by and large, sinful, except for making babies. Further in-depth enquiries about what this fairly sexually advanced chap got up to revealed that he did something on his own time involving a sock and his pyjamas.
‘Then what happens?’ I asked, trying to picture the scene.
So he told me.
‘Really?’ This was all news to me. Well, God hates a coward, as the expression goes, and my monastic existence turned into an onanistic one. As for Sunday school, given a choice between wanking yourself silly and Christian Union, there was a clear winner. It was masturbation and libraries that saved my soul from the narrow-minded proselytising and a stifling, evangelical straitjacket, and thank God for that.
But I never got around to telling you the good bit about God and his mysterious ways.
The official custodian of our spiritual health at Birkdale was the Reverend B.S. Sharp, at the time the vicar of Gleadless at the splendidly dark Victorian Millstone Grit church. Unlike the part-time evangelical types, ‘Batty’, as his nickname suggested, was more than a little eccentric, and he was stone deaf. As reverends go, he was regarded as being harmless.
Batty would conduct hymn practice, and the entire school would traipse into his church and commence singing while he walked up and down the aisle waving his arms about, seemingly oblivious to the out-of-time, out-of-tune and smirking schoolboys (no girls, of course). As he passed me – I was standing at the end of a pew – singing, or rather mumbling, he paused; he cocked his head, rather like a parrot, and peered round at me. I suspect he was positioning his good ear.
‘Sing up, lad,’ he said.
So I sang a bit louder. He brought his entire face close to my mouth. I realised he was missing a lot of teeth and I tried hard not to laugh.
‘Sing up, lad.’
Well, I like a challenge, so I yelled at the top of my lungs, and once I started I didn’t stop. The embarrassment left me and I carried on to the end of whatever verse it was in whatever hymn. I confess that it felt wonderful – not that I would admit it at the time.
He stood up and waved his arms about a bit more, then leaned back over to me.
‘You have a very fine voice, boy,’ he said. And then he strode off down the aisle and I never saw him again.
Like I say, nothing in childhood is ever wasted, and if there is a God, he or she is full of mischief.
Sadly, the choirmaster at Oundle didn’t share Batty�
�s enthusiasm for my dulcet tones. It became clear that singing, as in singing in church, was very undesirable, although to describe the school chapel as a church would be to do it an injustice.
Oundle’s chapel had pretensions of being a cathedral at the very least. It had a choir and the usual, and possibly verifiable, rumours about choirboys and choirmasters. The school choir dressed in frocks and had their free time spirited away from them in fruitless praising of the ineffable one until their voices broke.
There was a singing test, which was compulsory. I was very proud to say that I failed in spectacular fashion. Every note that was white on a keyboard was black when I returned the favour. I was given a chit – a piece of paper – to deliver to my housemaster. On it was written: ‘Dickinson – Sidney House, NON-SINGER’.
The Kipper’s Revenge
I was never too sure why I ended up in boarding school. My parents kept asking me if I wanted to go, and my immediate instinct was, Anything to get out of this place. So I smiled and passed the crazy exams, and sat the IQ test and did the interview. The only part I remotely enjoyed was the IQ test because it was interesting and there was nothing you had to remember by rote. You only had to do your best. In early summer the letter arrived. I had passed: here are the uniform restrictions and please pay lots of money.
Oundle was, and still is, a small market town near Peterborough in the rolling countryside of Northamptonshire. Nestled in a bend of the sleepy but often disobedient River Nene, it sits on a mound above the flood plain. Fotheringhay Castle is a couple of miles down the road, along with its associated church, and the whole area is steeped in English, as opposed to British, history.
Half the town was occupied by the school. Most of the old buildings were either school rooms or accommodation, and the Worshipful Company of Grocers of the City of London founded the whole enterprise in the sixteenth century. The hub of it all was a faux-Oxbridge quadrangle with pillars and porticos, grand marble balustrades and architecture to remind you of your place. That is to say, small, ignorant and insignificant.
Hundreds of alumni hung on boards at every turn in the quadrangle. Rugby, fives, athletics, Classics, mathematics and all those boys whose names never got written down until they came back in body bags as dead heroes from two world wars. There were quite a few of those.
I still didn’t know why I was here. It got me out of the house was my best guess, and I must have proved something by passing all the wretched exams. One reason, though, could have been that my aunt was the cook. There was no clear logic to this, and even I was confused as to the relationship between school dinners and academic excellence, but there was some suggestion that life might be easier for me if people knew that my aunt cooked the school meals.
No one in my family, from any branch of it, had ever been to a private school. My father had been denied a place at university after getting into grammar school because Ethel could only afford to send one son out of four to higher education. Stewart was the eldest, so he received the college education.
Dad never forgot that.
My sister was to go down an entirely different path, leaving school with few academic qualifications and taking a long, hard road, virtually self-taught, to becoming one of the world’s leading show jumpers. When I was dragging my 19-year-old arse around East London playing pubs to three people, my 14-year-old sister was debuting a horse she’d trained herself in the Horse of the Year Show at Wembley Arena.
So, at the age of 13, having left Sheffield, I began a process of disengagement from family, and involuntary alienation from the human race, at least for a couple of years. It is hard to say, even in hindsight, whether there was a net gain or loss as a human being.
Academically, there is no question that the hothouse environment pushed up the less able and enabled the truly talented to excel – with the odd possible exception. I remember myself being stolidly average, but memorable for a variety of other reasons.
All boys were assigned to a house, around 50 or 60 strong, and this served as their tribe. Everything about the place was competitive. There were inter-school competitions, inter-house competitions and intra-house competitions. No stone was left unturned in the search for winners. If you weren’t a winner on the sports field, you might be a winner as an academic. If not as an academic, well, things got a little stickier – perhaps Oundle was not for you.
My house was called Sidney, and it had a grand mock-Georgian façade with a sweeping gravel drive. It backed onto acres of rugby and cricket pitches, and was miles away from the school classrooms. To this day I walk at breakneck pace everywhere in mortal terror of being late for English Lit. I covered, I guess, about five miles before lunch with an armful of textbooks. Nowadays, it’s probably hoverboards and iPads doing the hard work.
One of the first things to strike me, before the whips, chains and blunt instruments (more of that later), was a most-illuminating bout of salmonella poisoning. Along with red lipstick and beehive hairdos, you can add fish pie to the chamber of horrors that haunts me to this very day.
My auntie Dee attempted to kill me, along with 20 of my house mates, and a sharp piece of microbial detective work traced the offending pathogen back to a serving spoon. Those unlucky enough to take the left-hand path (fun though it might seem for witches) in the serving line were struck down by Pasteur’s revenge. Those in the right-hand queue suffered no ill effects. The stomach cramps began three hours after ingestion of the emetic fish pie. Shortly afterwards I was admitted to a ward to join my similarly stricken schoolmates. For three days stuff erupted from every available orifice. The lyric ‘And I filled them – their living corpses with my bile’ from ‘If Eternity Should Fail’ didn’t require all that much imagination.
We were kept rather busy with sport. Being no good at it meant being designated ‘pathetic’. Being good at it meant you walked on a small cloud and were infallible.
The school had innumerable rugby teams, and had a boathouse with eights, fours and sculls, plus cricket teams, shooting teams, tennis, squash and the somewhat obscure but popular game of fives.
Before being allowed to go in a boat of any description, children underwent the ‘boat test’. In the Middle Ages witches underwent a similar ordeal. It involved being dressed in army boots, jeans and a thick wool army sweater, and then being chucked in the river.
A road bridge over the River Nene served as the vantage point to observe the drowning of the adolescent witches. Victims were picked up and tossed into the freezing water, and had to swim 25 yards or so without drowning. Imagine how much I enjoyed that. I was regarded as being a possible rower, so I had a discreet second attempt, and a third. I think they would have just carried on until I drowned, so I gave up breathing, thought of my baptism and swallowed a lot of water before finally being fished out by a boat hook. The practice was discontinued shortly thereafter, when dead cows were found, infected with some horrendous bug, floating bloated upstream.
I was, of course, bullied, and as before in my previous school I didn’t back down, change my opinion or shut up. So, two years later, a bit of a fuss blew up, parents were called in, pupils were suspended and then it all petered out. But for those two years life was average-to-middling hellish.
We slept in dormitories, army-barrack style: cold giant windows with no curtains, and two lines of iron beds; a thin mattress on a chipboard base, a couple of blankets and cotton sheets. There was no privacy, no locks on drawers, and it was communal baths and washrooms. Things got interesting after lights out. After the teacher had left, the senior boy would wake me up. Half an hour later, a crowd would gather round. He was around 18, a big lad. He had a pillow wrapped into a tight ball.
‘Time for your lesson, Dickinson. Defend yourself,’ he’d say.
Not exactly Queensberry rules, and not much you could do about it, except build a reservoir of rage and anger. Often, my bed was pre-soaked or covered in eggs, or my personal kit was covered in washing-up liquid, or any number of petty infractions of
personal space.
By year two I was pretty fucking angry. Rugby didn’t even touch the beginning of my rage, and I quite enjoyed rugby. Believe it or not, I was a prop, and as others got bigger but I did not, I was variously a hooker (not enjoyable), scrum half (not very good) and I finally settled down as a flanker, or wing forward as it was in rugby pre-history.
My sidestep was the Army Cadet Force. Sure, there was a hierarchy, but oddly the regime wasn’t directed mindlessly against me. It was the same bullshit for everyone. We had 400 in our cadet force, and I progressed rapidly through the various ranks, until one day I found myself being promoted to the exalted rank of under officer.
There were only two of us, and the other was one of my few close friends at Oundle, Ian, who went on to be a lieutenant colonel in the Highland Regiment and served in some pretty hairy locations. The last time we met, after 25 years, was in a grubby hotel in Jeddah. I was a captain flying a Boeing 757 chartered by Saudi Airlines during the Hajj and he was in charge of the Saudi National Guard. Go figure.
At Oundle we found ourselves with unexpected privileges. There were enough guns and ammunition in the school armoury to start a coup d’état in a small African nation. All of it was Second World War vintage. There were 100 or so 303 Lee–Enfield rifles, half-a-dozen Bren guns, thunderflashes, two-inch mortars, smoke grenades, and live and blank ammunition. Both of us had attended the UKLF leadership course, where we were equipped with all the latest army kit and spent two weeks in Thetford being chucked out of helicopters, doing 24-, 36- and 48-hour exercises, and getting a lot of blisters.
My platoon supervisor had been in the SAS, and he told me I was above average in teamwork, but average everywhere else. I spent summers on attachment with the Royal Anglian Regiment and the Royal Green Jackets, and dangled off lots of ropes at Lympstone with the Royal Marines. I was pretty serious about joining the army.
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