As may be imagined, this was not well received. The riposte of the other nine houses, much in evidence at house concerts and on athletic occasions, turned upon the circumstance that the school’s pious founders had injudiciously exhibited their aspirations or apprehensions in too explicit a fashion in certain tags and apophthegms incised and gilded in the Gothic woodwork of the hall of School House. It is true that those which were not in Latin were in Greek. But every new boy in the nine later houses was obliged, at peril of penalties of a drastic sort which his immediate seniors were all too eager to inflict, to make himself sufficiently a classicist to be able to offer on demand a specious but ingeniously garbled translation of those noble exhortations and awful warnings – as, for example, when two resonant Greek words in the sixth book of the Iliad were turned into the injunction, ‘Always be the little gentleman’. And just as street Arabs (as they used to be called) were believed to taunt one another with the question, ‘How’s your mother off for dripping?’ so were School House boys prone to be solicitously asked for news of their own and their fellows’ current moral tone. A good deal of inventiveness went to ringing the changes on what must sound rather a stupid amusement.
What of this is at the moment relevant to my narrative I can briefly explain. As with the boys so with the masters – at least during the fairly brief period with which I am concerned. School House was under a man called Taplow, an able fellow with a clever wife. He was our senior scientist, and before he had been with us long he had so made his mark in the school as to be quickly rewarded with a house. It was a rule-of-thumb and, as it turned out, not wholly judicious advancement, since Taplow was an easy-going man where the rigours of physics and chemistry were not concerned, and proved to be without much interest in watching over the everyday life of his boys. But he had reorganised and transformed the labs – securing for the purpose a bigger share of the school’s financial resources than many of us quite approved. At the universities, however, the science dons were beginning to look out for Helmingham boys, and at the same time alert heads of prep schools were learning to steer those of their pupils given to maths and ‘stinks’ to harbour, if possible, in the supposedly superior intellectual milieu of School House. There is no question of how the rest of us felt about all this. Just as our boys spoke of ‘the little gentlemen’ of School House so did we, the other housemasters, speak of ‘Taplow’s young eggheads’. We were decently proud of those boys when they carried off scholarships at Oxford or Cambridge, and I think there was a sense in which we liked Taplow well enough. But the underlying feeling was there, and since it affects my story I have to touch it in. But I must not be misunderstood. Nothing approaching ill-feeling was involved. School stories used to make much of the conception of a ‘cock house’ as often in the minds of schoolboys, and School House, as I have implied, subscribed to the notion, although I don’t think they used the term. Jocularly, we used to pretend to believe that it was quite urgently in the mind of Tim Taplow himself. We didn’t, so far as I can remember, extend our facetiousness to the extent of adopting the ‘moral tone’ joke. There is much to be said for a good moral tone, and it is something that has come to be taken for granted in a modern public school. Occasionally, however, it is capable of vanishing – at least in some luckless single house – virtually overnight.
Going into our masters’ common room for a cup of tea on an afternoon shortly after the episode of the swimming-pool, I found a debate going on between Taplow and a young man called Johncock. Johncock had joined the staff only in the previous school year, and was still, I believe, the junior man among us. He was a mathematician, but without the predominant withdrawn quality that mathematicians commonly exhibit. There were always a number of assistant masters who had not been at public schools themselves, and he was one of them. John Stafford was keen on this mix of backgrounds – which was one of the policies (few in number) in which I was in accord with him. And Johncock was never slow to entertain us to expositions of his own point of view. It had been one of his earliest lines that on coming to Helmingham he felt as if he had tumbled straight into Noah’s Ark. But quite soon he had abandoned this facile response to our days and ways for something rather more interesting. Cultivating the conversation of the most senior among us, he was building up what he called a symposium of views on how the life at English public schools (‘private’ schools, as he was fond of calling them) had been changing over the previous thirty or forty years.
The argument I had come upon must have taken wing from this territory; it was over the nature and causes of that earlier maturation (to my ear a somewhat barbarous word) which it was generally agreed that adolescent boys – and no doubt girls – in general exhibited.
‘It’s perfectly simple,’ Taplow was saying. ‘The little brutes have been better fed from the cradle onwards than any previous generations have been. And masses of antenatal care, postnatal care, decent standards of hygiene, and all the rest of it.’
‘Won’t wash,’ Johncock said. ‘Think of a hereditary aristocracy. Fat of the land all their days. But do they come on, emotionally or intellectually, faster than their less privileged contemporaries?’
‘Yes,’ somebody said, through a mouthful of cake. ‘Certainly they do.’
‘It’s a matter of social assumptions,’ Johncock continued, ignoring this. ‘We’ve come to agree that you’re grown up at eighteen and not twenty-one. That’s because at eighteen a lad is fit to carry a gun, and get himself killed while trying to load it. And for some time before that he has himself been licensed to kill in a motor car or on a Honda or Suzuki or whatever. So it’s only decent to give him a vote before he can tell a fool from a knave. Useless to expect him to remain in a place like this and behave like Tom Brown.’
‘But they all do,’ the cake man said. ‘Just scratch any of them, and he’s revealed as being as infantile as ever.’
‘Sexual mores, too,’ Johncock said, unregarding. ‘Plugged at them on the telly from the age of about five onwards is the view that copulating is no end interesting. And all the rubbishing acquisitive attitudes thrown in. I’m all right, Jack. So bang goes continence, and all the pitiful junk about loyalty and fair play.’
‘I’m not sure,’ Taplow said, ‘that this whole argy-bargy isn’t based on a false premise.’ Taplow was shifting his ground. ‘Certainly in School House my young egg-heads, as you call them, sometimes seem to me to get younger every year. Take crazes. Crazes used to be a prep school phenomenon. You remember how it was. Quite suddenly every boy in the school playing conkers, or manufacturing a new sort of ink bomb, or being a Chinaman talking pidgin English. But now our own boys suffer such epidemics. It scarcely stops short of the sixth formers themselves.’
‘There’s a good deal in that,’ I said – somehow prompted to intervene. ‘Has any of you come across tummy-pummelling?’
‘Yes,’ Taplow said. ‘I think it began in School House, and perhaps it has spread from there – as so much is said to do.’
‘Wherever I go in Heynoe, there it is,’ I pursued. ‘Being carried on unblushingly.’
‘Something with a sinister sexual significance?’ Johncock asked.
‘Nothing of the sort.’ I was annoyed by this, which seemed uncalled for. ‘My point is that it’s a craze, and that it’s among the most senior boys. One of them will be on his back with a bare belly. That’s because a buckle or button might do mischief and spoil the act. And it is an act – quite an astonishing one. The boy tautens his belly muscles in some way, and another great hefty lad bashes a clenched fist, or two fists clenched together, down on this exposed victim. To no effect at all. But it’s exclusively a senior boys’ amusement. And it couldn’t happen in a prep school, because young boys couldn’t manage the necessary muscular control.’
‘And tummy-pummelling,’ Johncock asked, ‘is something you go stumbling over as you do your prowling round?’
I hesitated to reply to a question thus rather offensively expressed. ‘Prowling round’
was a malicious travesty of one of my known habits. It had for some time seemed to me that I could no longer rely upon the traditional schoolboy’s acceptance of the prefectorial system. Prefects were often regarded as spies – and this was the more true the more were old-fashioned (and to my mind brutal) sanctions denied them. So by keeping an open eye on things as I moved about the House I contrived to make it apparent that one or another turpitude had been detected by my own vigilance. But it thus became possible to represent me as doing too much fussing around, and this had been implied by Johncock. Taplow must have observed my discomfort, for he cut in with something else.
‘What about dyed hair?’ he asked. ‘There’s been enough of that for it to be called a craze. Robert, didn’t I see a couple of Heynoe boys with green top-knots the other day?’
‘I don’t doubt you did,’ I said. ‘Two boys who are normally reasonable enough. When I asked them why they had done anything so senseless, one of them replied, “We’re the New Jumblies, sir”. It’s hard to know how to cope with such nonsense.’
‘How did you cope?’ Johncock asked.
‘I told them they weren’t Jumblies but copy-cats, and that the working-class lads who daubed themselves like that were demonstrating against social deprivations which Helmingham boys ought to be thinking about.’
‘Edifying,’ Johncock said – humorously, this time, and without malice. ‘But what did you do? What dread penalty did you impose?’
‘An uncomfortable and rather futile scrub down by the school barber. I did add that if it happened again they’d go home. So they said, “Thank you, sir” in that stiff, offended way they command – and took themselves off like two animated gooseberry-bushes.’
‘Good old Mister Chips!’ Johncock said – outrageously, but without at all displeasing me. ‘And now let’s talk about the bug.’
‘Which bug?’ the cake man asked, turning round from cutting himself another slice. ‘Place full of the things. Bugs, bugbears, and buggers. Not to speak of bugaboos.’
Nobody found this very funny. And Taplow, who owned a surprising skill with such moments, again spoke at once.
‘Yes, of course. It’s just during this term, and just in the crucial week of it, that the bug rears its ugly head. Will it strike again – and if so, in which house first? Usually it’s School House, naturally. And then there’s that customary spread. But School House stands to suffer most. That’s a matter of statistics, so none of my colleagues will take offence at it.’
Taplow, whose sense of fun was very simple, laughed happily.
But the bug was no laughing matter. What was meant by it was one or another variety of epidemic illness such as afflicts most close communities from time to time. We know that in the Victorian period simple children’s ailments – scarlet fever and the rest – were the terror of every nursery, since they were in fact the Angels of Death to many infants. Boarding-schools seem to have been less afflicted, presumably because their populations had already been sifted through the operation of some Darwinian law. The modern boarding-school is affected in any grave sense hardly at all. Half a house, nevertheless, can go down with influenza or something of the sort within a week – and the week is always liable to be a disastrous one from an academic point of view. It may be the very week in which the senior boys are due to write their examination papers for university entrance – and if they have mumps instead nothing can be done about it. In remarking that School House stood to suffer most from any awkward coincidence of that sort Tim Taplow had been reminding us, as ‘a matter of statistics’, that he commonly had more than his fair share of clever boys on offer when these competitions came along.
Within days of that idle conversation in common room the bug had arrived – and its first abode, sure enough, was in School House. Two circumstances, however, made this something less than a calamity from Taplow’s point of view. It was still early in the term, so that there was a good chance that the epidemic, whatever its nature, would have run its course well before that fateful week arrived. And this bug was – as Johncock expressed it – a choosey bug, with an apparently exclusive predilection for tender juveniles. In the context of the particular anxieties involved, brats could be regarded as virtually expendable. Let them be put to bed, glanced at now and then by the school doctor, and have their self-importance gratified by regalement with delicate broths and jellies. They could then be forgotten about. But their isolation from the all-important exam-confronting sixth formers must be absolute.
Taplow was unperturbed. He had coped with just this situation before. And indeed no seasoned schoolmaster agonises over such matters. But it is otherwise with some of the boys – and not only those who see their smooth progress into a university as at hazard. Epidemics can play havoc with games, particularly with rugger, for which thirty players are required if a house is to field both a first and a second team. And there are elaborate strategies and timings which may be upset among that ambitious élite for which (in our particular nomenclature) house caps are seen as a stepping-stone to school colours. Here again it is the older boys who are most in the picture and the under-fifteens whom nobody much bothers about. Once the threat is established there are everywhere to be observed beefy six-footers studying games lists from beneath furrowed brows with much the concentration of alarmed citizens confronting ominous chalkings-up during the plague in Shakespeare’s London.
V
The next episode I have to chronicle is the visit, some weeks later, of Robin Hayes’s uncle, Jasper Tandem. He had made an appointment with me and arrived on the dot – which was a proper preliminary to seeking out a nephew under my care. It was indeed my first impression that he was proper all over: a well-groomed middle-aged man, dressed and comporting himself in a manner that stopped just short of formality, without any premature expression of anxiety lest he should be encroaching unjustifiably upon my time, but also without evincing any disagreeable disposition to settle in. I think I had prepared myself to receive one whose achieving of a near-corner in the peddling of canned popular music (not to speak of ‘sleazy clip-joints’) would be reflected in a considerable confidence, or even loudness, of address. But Mr Tandem was not at all like that. If there was anything of excess about him, it seemed to lie in the direction of the unassuming or even the diffident. It struck me that in this he was exceedingly unlike his sister, Mrs Hayes, either as I recalled her, or as her son had described her to me, or as the letter I had received from her exhibited. I speculated as to whether the misfortune which had befallen Mr Hayes had somehow impaired the confidence of his brother-in-law. I even wondered – although it seemed an unworthy idea – whether this so correct Jasper Tandem had himself fallen a little short of financial probity in his own professional affairs, and was as a consequence disturbed by the spectacle currently on view at Hutton Green. And it was of Hutton Green that Mr Tandem almost at once began to speak.
‘If I have come in the first place to see my nephew,’ he said, ‘and to buck him up as well as I can if he seems in need of it, I have also had it in mind to thank you most sincerely for your great kindness in visiting my poor brother-in-law in his prison. My sister, too, is most grateful, and has charged me to assure you of the fact.’
‘I could scarcely do less, Mr Tandem, Robin being a Heynoe boy.’
‘She also bids me tell you how touched she was that you took the trouble to write to her so kindly afterwards.’
This was a bit steep. I had indeed managed a brief note to Mrs Hayes, since decency had demanded it. But that the woman had really sent me these messages I somehow didn’t believe for a moment. Tandem had merely judged that a fiction of this sort would be agreeable to me.
‘What I discussed with your brother-in-law,’ I said, ‘was the question of Robin’s future career. And I suppose the problem does a little fall within my province. But our talk was really very brief, although the prison people set no limit to our interview. I gathered that Mr Hayes doesn’t favour the idea of Robin being called to the ba
r.’
‘It would cost money.’ Tandem said this in a sensibly matter-of-fact fashion. ‘What do you think yourself, Mr Syson? Or rather, what do you think of the boy in a general way? How would you describe his character?’
Although there was nothing challenging in the way these questions were delivered, I was a little put to a stand by them. When parents catechised me in similar terms I commonly did my best to manage a faithful reply, perhaps tempered at need in the interest of tact or charity. But parents are one thing, and uncles and aunts are quite another. I felt – and with an almost disconcerting force – that my visitor had no right to demand from me, in this stand-and-deliver fashion, an account of the light in which I regarded his nephew.
But this was an intemperate reaction. The man had as much title to be concerned for Robin as I had, and it would be injudicious to produce only some sort of snubbing response. Tandem, I recalled, might be proposing to invest hard cash in Robin Hayes, and as a business man he would feel it only prudent to vet his prospect in advance. If I happened to have concluded, on the strength of what was necessarily a certain amount of close observation, that there was something flighty or unreliable in Robin’s character, there would almost be an obligation upon me to speak about the boy at least with some reserve. As I had concluded nothing of the sort, I must not, through any appearance of hesitation, convey what would be a false impression.
‘Robin is an excellent lad,’ I said. ‘His temperament is generous, and if he is sometimes impulsive it is in a thoroughly wholesome way. And there’s what I’d call a useful hardness somewhere in his constitution. When he has made up his mind to a thing, he’ll go straight ahead and put it through. He is far from afraid to come to judgement, even on difficult and painful matters. And when his feelings are clear to him, he commands considerable pungency in expressing them.’
An Open Prison Page 6
