by John Cleese
So provided I avoided irony, conversation flowed quite easily, even if it was a little limited. What they liked best were stories of pranks I had played on my teachers. What they were keenest to tell me were statistics about dinosaurs and cricket and how people were tortured to death in China.
After lunch came the splendid St Peter’s custom called ‘Rest’. The boys went into the Big Room and sat at their desk and read something they enjoyed; except for the very youngest, who lay on the beds in an upstairs dormitory and were read to by Miss Lovell. The staff claimed their armchairs, and smoked and dozed and finished the Times crossword.
In the afternoons there were lessons and games. I was put in charge of the youngest boys’ soccer and since I’d loved the game for as long as I could remember, it came as a complete surprise that they had absolutely no idea how it was played. I had spaced them out at the start, explaining to each one what his position was as I placed him in it – centre forward, left half, right wing, goalkeeper – but the moment I blew the whistle the boy nearest the ball kicked it as hard as he could, in no particular direction, and then they all ran after the ball in a pack until one of them caught up with it, and then he kicked it and they all hared after it again, without taking any account of the whereabouts of the goalposts. It was all so wonderfully random and mindless that I stood there crying with laughter and unable for some time to summon up the breath to blow the whistle. By the time I did, they had disappeared into a field of cabbages, where they continued to play, apparently quite unaware of the change in the terrain. A few blasts and some shouting brought them back to me, so that I could calm them down and explain that some of them should try to kick the ball towards this goal, while the others should aim at that one, and that they should try to spread out a bit. They nodded, I blew the whistle and they continued exactly as before. I blew again. Same explanation. Same result. They were not being disobedient; my authority was not being defied; it was just that they could not understand, so the moment the whistle blew, instinct took over. Eventually I just let the ‘match’ continue. They were getting plenty of exercise and we had at least achieved stage one: they were kicking the ball, not trying to eat it.
Once games and afternoon lessons were over, my official duties for the day were done, so I could mark tests or prepare lessons for the next day, or just play chess or snooker with the boys till they went to dinner. Or teach myself some history, geography and English.
In the early evening I would join the Tolsons for dinner in a corner of the dining hall. Mr Bartlett was always present, as were a couple of the younger masters. I have no recollection of the kind of conversations that took place, but I think this was where I learned that the main purpose of such a social occasion was to avoid any embarrassment. Everyone was polite and well mannered, and there was even restrained laughter on occasion, and some evenings a glass or two of Bulmers Woodpecker Cider. In two years, I never heard a disagreement, or a belch, or a moment’s tactlessness, or a risqué joke, or a political or religious opinion, or a rude interruption, or even an embarrassing silence. A fart would have been physically impossible.
On Sundays we were all invited after dinner to the Tolsons’ drawing room, where we would sip coffee and listen to the radio. In retrospect I wish I could have taken everyone to watch an evening’s cage fighting. I can’t imagine what they might have made of such a display of bad manners. I know a woman who was in Paris once with her father, and because the rain was so bad they took refuge in a cinema that was showing a recently released movie called Last Tango in Paris, with Marlon Brando. Her father sat through the whole film (including the infamous butter scene) and didn’t speak until they emerged back into the daylight, at which point he announced, ‘Well, I thought that was all rather unnecessary.’ I think Mr Bartlett might have found the cage fighting rather unnecessary.
Now that I was an adult (or nearly one) I found that the impressions I had formed as a child of Geoffrey Tolson and his colleagues required a certain degree of modification. Mr Tolson, for example, still came across as the good-hearted, straightforward, decent chap I recalled from a few years before; but now I began to notice odd moments that suggested he was not the brightest lighthouse on the coastline. For instance, he once got very cross during assembly because he felt the boys had become lazy, and so he demanded that every single boy in the school should improve his ranking in class in the course of the next fortnight. It was not only the maths teachers who thought this too much of a stretch.
It was just as well that his instincts for running the school were so pitch-perfect because if he had to hold more than a certain amount of information in his head at any given time he could easily become confused. At the end of lunch one Saturday he made an announcement in the course of which he stipulated that boys who were going out with their parents that weekend should get their hair cut after they had been down to the changing room to move all their sports clothing on to the lower peg, if their peg number was between 1 and 37, to allow the visiting school’s teams to use the upper pegs, unless they were going out as the guest of a boy’s parents that weekend, in which case they should first collect their fortnightly reports so that they could include them with their letter home, provided they were not ‘off games’, in which case they should first collect their chit from matron, but not until they had moved their clothes down to the lower peg, and then present the chit to the master on duty and then . . . Here he went silent for some time, his brain having decided to go on strike. The entire school waited with bated breath in the hope of clarification of what the hell everybody was supposed to do next. Slowly Mr Tolson’s face took on a peaceful, if slightly sad expression, as scenes from his past life flashed before him; and then he inhaled deeply and announced impressively, ‘. . . should all get their hair cut!’ At which point he sat down. A bewildered silence followed, as the entire school sat there examining their nails and pretending they had not noticed that the person who was in charge of the place had just gone mad.
Twenty-three years later I had huge fun trying to recapture this moment on paper, for the start of the sex lesson in The Meaning of Life. I found I could not come up with anything better, so Mr Tolson’s real-life words became the introduction to the demonstration.
One aspect of Mr Tolson was that he could be charmingly old-fashioned. He was, for example, the only man I’ve ever met who literally put his tongue in his cheek when he made a facetious remark. He also adored great English sporting traditions, like cricket. If England had done well he would interrupt prep, beaming, to announce the scores; and he never missed attending the Varsity rugby match at Twickenham – as a good Cambridge man he was slightly crestfallen if Oxford won.
When it came to the world of emotions, I suspect he would have found something rather discreditable about a man discussing his innermost feelings (except, perhaps, in exceptional cases, with his wife). And yet he abolished the boxing competition, because he was touched by the boys’ complaints that they didn’t like punching their friends; and on another occasion, when a boy who specialised in pushing masters over the edge so infuriated me that I pulled his hair, which shameful act he naturally reported, Mr Tolson took me aside and told me gently about the boy’s background and how he had been adopted by parents who never ceased to remind him how lucky he had been and how much he owed them, and explained that was why he compulsively goaded authority figures, all of which enabled me to make a proper apology and, to my delight, develop a much better relationship with the boy. I can still recall the tone of the conversation with Mr Tolson and my surprise at finding someone, apparently so bluff and hearty, also able to show such concern and understanding for a boy generally regarded as a complete pest.
Despite his compassion, our headmaster did have a bit of a temper. Fortunately, though, bystanders could always see the explosion coming. This was because as he got angrier he got pinker. He was already quite pink to start with, with his fine, bald, domed head dominant, but as his ire built, he passed through a remarkable rang
e of shades of the colour on his way to puce, enabling an expert to calibrate accurately the right moment to depart. The reasons for his anger were never hard to discern: they always boiled down to a lack of moral fibre on the part of someone (or something). Such feckless behaviour was inevitably described as being ‘wet’.
What was unusual about Mr Tolson’s temper was that he always lost it. Once ‘wetness’ (in any form at all) was sighted, and the first sign of extra pinkness displayed, there was no way to abort the process – it took on a life of its own and could only be resolved with a good deal of noise. I think he literally did not know that anger could be directed into any other outcome.
This led to difficulties when the explosion had to be delayed. One Saturday, our great rivals from Burnham-on-Sea, St Dunstan’s, beat all five of our teams at soccer. In the aftermath Mr Tolson apparently decided that this shameful thrashing was due to serial acts of cowardice by members of our teams, to do with turning their backs on St Dunstan’s players who were about to kick the ball hard. (This was an eccentric analysis of the reason for the defeats, which was clearly to do with St Dunstan’s being much, much better at football than we were.)
The staff had no wind of what was brewing when the next day we assembled in the common room a few minutes before the Sunday morning prayers service was due to begin. We intuited that our headmaster would be feeling a bit snippy about the previous afternoon’s debacle, but when he knocked on the door, to lead us into the service, we were alarmed to note that he was a shade of pink hitherto unreported, one the other side of shocking pink, but none the less shocking for that. As we solemnly marched behind him into the Big Room to take our seats facing the congregation, I found myself wondering whether he might dispense with divine service altogether and get to his point straight away. But no, formalities had to be observed, and so prayers began.
There is something quite disorientating about hearing the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ delivered as a murderous rant, but Geoffrey Tolson was in the grip of a pink mist which temporarily obscured from him the beauty of the Gospel of Love, so that his delivery of the Lord’s Prayer made it sound more like an ultimatum, and the final blessing, as he tore through it at record speed, more like a war cry, as he grew nearer to the moment when, beetroot-pink, he revealed the cause of his fury . . .
‘. . . and now in the name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost may all good things be with you evermore, life without end and now I want to talk about our dreadful performance and especially St Peter’s boys turning their backs on St Dunstan’s boys as they were about to kick the ball . . .’
At last! With no noticeable transition whatsoever from the sacred to the profane, Tolson stormed away at the sheer moral turpitude of St Peter’s boys turning their backs just because someone was going to kick a big, wet, heavy football right into their private parts. Slowly he went from extra-shocking pink, to beetroot-pink, to puce, to carnation, to flamingo, to amaranth, to geranium, to coral, to incarnadine, and then . . . slowly . . . back down again to normal, everyday, common-or-garden . . . pink.
And so calm was restored and the St Peter’s boys looked suitably less moist.
The only other manifestation of Tolsonian wrath was bilateral. Sometimes, in the later evening, a few of us would be correcting homework or reading in the common room, just a few feet from the Tolsons’ living room, when we would hear bursts of shouting and door-banging, which left us frozen in our chairs. We were all terrified at the thought of the embarrassment that we would experience if any of us bumped into one of the Tolsons immediately after they had concluded a shouting match. Since the avoidance of embarrassment had become the main purpose of our lives, and since knock-down-and-drag-out quarrels were major infractions of genteel middle-class values, being caught as a witness of such a fracas would be rated only slightly better than accidentally observing them copulating. I think we all shared a nasty, if unspoken suspicion that if such a situation arose, the teacher in question might be obliged, out of a sense of honour, to shoot himself.
So, for some time after the noise of battle had subsided, we would sit very still, until one of us felt bold enough to creep towards the door and put his ear to it, and then, after opening it a crack, judge if the coast was clear enough for us to risk scuttling to our bedrooms. Had Mr Tolson seen his teaching staff behaving in this truly pathetic way, he would have promptly labelled us wet and fired us anyway, but then the whole reason for our mouse-like behaviour was to avoid being spotted. I feel our discretion cancelled out our cowardice.
Being caught red-eared by Mrs Tolson would actually have been worse, as she was deadlier than the male, if not as noisy. The key to her personality was that she could be charming. But then, so could Stalin, and, like her, Joe knew how to throw his weight about. In Jean Tolson’s case this was not a lot of weight physically, but what she had she threw about very stylishly, and with considerable effect. This was not a woman you wanted to get on the wrong side of.
But she was charming (and almost friendly) most of the time, provided that you played your cards right. Most noticeable of all, she was attractive, and in a town like Weston-super-Mare, she stood out like a matador at a Quaker meeting. Tall, elegant and slim (very slim by Westonian standards), she had immaculate dark hair and a striking, almost sharp-featured face that was handsome rather than pretty. Owing to my stunted sexual development I was not, at that age, able to discern whether she was sexy, though in retrospect I think she must have been. That said, anyone harbouring carnal thoughts about her would have been taking his life in his hands, because she exuded an air of designer barbed wire. But what was most intriguing of all was her slightly exotic, or perhaps just un-English, appearance: her complexion was somewhat Portuguese, her lipstick rather bright, and she conveyed the impression of a pent-up Latin temperament, albeit one that, in Weston, had to be expressed by slamming doors rather than through smoking Gauloises, or flamenco, or honour-killings.
Looking back fifty-odd years later, I can now see that Mrs T was really much too stylish and sophisticated to be married to a prep-school headmaster in a backwater like Weston. I think she would much rather have been the wife of, say, the president of France, using her excellent grasp of French to entertain visiting statesmen, and to host soirées of debonair nouvelle vague film directors and soignés enfants terribles and moody relatives of Jean-Paul Sartre, instead of being forced to hobnob with a bunch of moth-eaten teachers whose conversational staple was county cricket.
In a moment of unusual self-revelation, Mr Tolson once told me that at the end of their first year running St Peter’s, he and his wife had gone up to London, planning to spend a few weeks there taking in some shows and generally enjoying nights out on the town. After viewing the bill at the end of the first week, however, they were forced to beat a retreat back to Weston-super-Mare with their tails between their legs. I was rather touched that he had confided this to me, and felt a little sad that the lifestyle bubble that they must have imagined for themselves had been burst in this way, but I couldn’t help feeling that Mrs Tolson must have been the more disillusioned.
All things considered, I think Jean Tolson had accepted the diminution of her hopes with considerable grace, and that the easy condescension with which she treated the teaching staff was not only understandable, but indeed justified.
The only member of staff immune from her de haut en bas attitude was Geoffrey Bartlett. He was too obviously an Edwardian gentleman (and a scholar) to be treated as just another dowdy non-entity, and if not exactly an equal, he would certainly have found a place in the same lifeboat. When I met him again on rejoining St Peter’s, I was rather apprehensive, as I was still a little in awe of him, and I knew that he had not really liked me as a boy. Not that he’d ever been unkind, but there was something about the young Cleese that he had clearly found slightly distasteful – an incipient crassness, perhaps, that his refined, indeed, fastidious nature could not warm to. But now he greeted me with a courtesy that ap
proached warmth (the boys told me that their punning nickname for me – Themistocles – came from him), and we settled into a surprisingly comfortable relationship, based on my real respect for him. I began to notice that he was somewhat quieter than I remembered, but it was hard to tell whether this was shyness, or his cultivated Edwardian gentleman manner, for he took moderation and restraint to extremes: to have done anything with gusto would have been inconceivable to him. When he bowled in the practice cricket nets, he did so in his sports jacket, and without removing his pipe from his mouth. He was the epitome of the Oxonian code of ‘effortless superiority’, whereby to be seen trying really hard to achieve something was in many ways worse than actually failing at it. I’m sure that many of us boys who had been in such awe of him mimicked his attitude, not least because it came across as a distinct moral requirement, rather than just a matter of temperament. If we had hero-worshipped Mr Tolson instead, we would have left St Peter’s believing that the most important thing in life was to try jolly hard to do one’s best.fn1
Bartlett’s air of effortless superiority imprinted itself so strongly upon me because it chimed in with what I’d absorbed from my father’s stories of the upper class’s way of behaving, some aspects of which seemed (and still seem) to me admirable. Genuinely good manners are, after all, essentially a way of moderating one’s own egotism, often in the service of considering the egos of others. Even if it’s done mainly for show, it’s still a start.
It would have been unimaginable for Bartlett or me to have suggested a meal together – not improper, just beyond the bounds of possibility – but sometimes when we were in the common room alone, he would tell me a little about himself. He was obviously considered very promising as a boy at Uppingham, and when he left for Oxford to read Classics, I think he felt he might become a real scholar. But he had an experience at the hand of R. G. Collingwood, the famous philosopher and historian, from which he never recovered. Collingwood’s obituary in The Times just a few years later pronounced him ‘one of the six finest minds in Europe’, so Bartlett was thrilled to discover on his first day at Oxford that Collingwood was to be one of his tutors. He was assigned some reading before their first meeting, and, studying as he never had before, he prepared what he thought was a very insightful and original question, which he posed to Collingwood as soon as they had made their introductions. Without pausing, Collingwood told him that if he, Bartlett, would care to go to the bookcase behind him (he did not bother to look round) and, from the second shelf up, take the sixth book from the left, the one with a red cover, and then turn to page 134, the fourth paragraph would answer Bartlett’s question better than Collingwood could ever hope to himself. Poor Bartlett got up and found the book so described, and there, in the fourth paragraph of page 134, was a perfect complete answer to his question. At which he sadly thought to himself, ‘What is the point? Why devote one’s life to something like philosophy when there are people as outrageously brilliant as Collingwood, with whom one could never hope to compete?’ Not that Bartlett was ever hoping to get so far as the quarter-finals of the All England Metaphysics Championships, but if one can’t participate on roughly equal terms with the best, why bother? And at that moment, as far as I could tell, a shadow fell across Bartlett’s life which never entirely faded.
