Greetings Noble Sir

by Nigel Flaxton

  With youthful optimism I ventured, ‘How long do you think that will be - ten years?’

  ‘I’d like to think that will be the time scale, but I’ll bet it will be nearer twenty,’ replied Miss Carstairs with what I considered undue pessimism.

  Was there nursery education for all by 1966? No way! By 1970 20.5% of all children aged 3 to 4 were in pre-school education; by 2000 that had risen to 63.8%. I wonder what odds you would get on full provision before 2046.

  The other three chaps in the room had buttonholed the other two assistants and were pushing them equally hard to extract note fodder. On the overview of the children’s activity mine read with some pomposity but reasonable accuracy:

  The timetable is very flexible, the only rigidly fixed times being for meals and sleeping. The only thing that is actually taught is the Nursery Routine, which consists of washing, elimination, dressing, brushing teeth, and how to use a knife and fork. During the remainder of the day the children have complete freedom, the staff give them the apparatus and endeavour to foster in them the incentive to play and learn.

  It was when our questions turned to the role of play in child development that I gestured to the screen section of one wall. It appeared solid enough; the bottom edge was set three feet off the floor and some low pieces of furniture were placed strategically in front.

  ‘I presume that is the observation room,’ I whispered confidentially.

  Miss Carstairs gave a half smile. ‘Oh yes, that’s the famous room. Cupboard would be a more accurate word, though, as you will see.’

  Later Miss Webster agreed as she briefed us upon our period of observation. ‘You’ll find the room is very small. It’s only intended for two people really, but since the expectation is that they need to take notes there is usually some elbow room. We can’t leave the children totally unsupervised for long, of course, so to give all ten of you the chance to experience it I’ll allow you two sessions with five of you watching at a time. I’m afraid it’s going to seem like playing sardines!’

  We interchanged glances. ‘Sardines’ was a popular game at teenage parties about which we could hardly imagine Miss Webster knowing anything. Certainly not when played by the most interesting rules...

  ‘Now I can’t impress upon you too strongly the need for absolute silence in there,’ she refocused our attention. ‘You mustn’t talk to each other, you mustn’t cough, and for heaven’s sake don’t sneeze or try to blow your nose. There won’t be room in any case, but the whole concept of this place will be ruined if the children find out what that room is for. There are two psychologists from the university who are using it regularly and are preparing theses. We mustn’t do anything that would compromise their work. So do be careful.’

  We promised to be as silent as the grave.

  After the ‘seniors’ had enjoyed an outside session and were back in their classroom and absorbed once more in their activities, Miss Webster gave Miss Carstairs a signal through the window of the door. Shortly afterwards the latter sidled out quietly with one of the assistants.

  ‘I don’t think anyone has noticed,’ she told the Head, ‘and the others are out of site in the cloakroom area.’

  ‘Good, in you go then,’ came the command. Miss Webster led us into the corridor alongside the classroom and turned a small knob on a neatly concealed door set quite high in the wall. The door opened noiselessly and a bench seat alongside served as a step up. Holding our breath the five of us mounted on tiptoe and slid along a similar seat inside. We felt like Royalist priests evading Cromwell’s Roundheads as the door was carefully closed.

  The seat was smooth but the floor seemed to be of a rough, black and slightly soft rubber-like material designed to muffle footsteps. The room was indeed a deep cupboard with matt black walls, ceiling and seat. We five could just fit in with hips jammed together and arms extended forward unnaturally straightened. With backs against the wall our knees were about six inches away from the front wall, above which was the mesh panel.

  The view into the classroom, though dimmed, was reasonably clear. The light shining outside on to the mesh was shielded inside by a single strip of wood so that it didn’t shine directly into the observers’ eyes. From this side it seemed remarkable the children couldn’t see us. The scheme was a simple adaptation of the revelation scene effect, beloved by pantomime producers, where an apparently solid backcloth melts to reveal hidden depth when the lighting switches from the scene in front to the one behind. The theory was that so long as no sound or light emanated from within, the secret of the observation room would be preserved and educational psychology might be favoured with deeper insights into children’s learning. It was crude but effective, I thought, as I held my breath. The notion of two way mirrors and hidden microphones was quite beyond the meagre educational budget of those days, of course.

  At first nothing happened. That is to say the children continued to behave exactly as before, quite absorbed in the various activities available to them. We realised this absorption came from the simple fact that, in their lives, they could only play to this extent at the Nursery School. Toys were rare at home. Play there consisted of what could be done on the front doorstep, on the pavement and in the gutter, wherever all the other children congregated. Much was achieved there through the vivid imaginations of the brightest but apparatus and materials to enhance games were conspicuously absent.

  Gradually some realised Miss Carstairs and her assistants were not in sight. One lad, running near the easels where others were daubing paint to their hearts’ content, half tripped and fell against one of his classmates. Incensed the latter turned on the culprit with fist clenched and the lovely large brush held aloft as no mean weapon. We saw the momentary intrusion of a sixth sense as he glanced around. No adults! The brush landed with commendable accuracy on the miscreant’s head.

  ‘Yah, din’t ‘urt!’ the fugitive yelled over his shoulder as he set off again. But he was watching the possibility of chase being given and so could not avoid crashing into a girl who wandered rather aimlessly into his path.

  ‘Gerrout me way!’ he flung at her, roughly pushing her aside.

  The girl stood were she had been pushed, looking the picture of misery. The corners of her mouth turned sharply downwards as only a four year old’s can and tears welled in her eyes. She, too, looked for Miss Carstairs, but being unable to see the one person to whom she could confide her woes, sat down abruptly in the middle of a vacant space. She made no sound but her appearance, as she sat with arms clasped tightly around her and lower lip trembling, told all. In the midst of all this happy, noisesome activity she was completely alone.

  ‘Choo choo - choo choo.’

  The train hove into sight at the end of something of a cutting between three sand trays and the tables where children were happily bashing plasticene. I now had the opportunity of watching the driver more closely. It was obvious he had a reputation, for anyone who happened to be standing in the path of the train moved aside to facilitate its unchecked progress.

  He was adept at the job. With legs astride the engine he rocked forward and half stood up, at the same time pulling it forwards. Then he flopped back into a sitting position and contrived to help its momentum with two or three pushes on the floor with his feet. At the same time he yelled ‘Choo choo’ loudly and insistently.

  It began to dawn on me that his current route was bringing him directly towards our cell. As he steered it into the open space in front of us he came to about five feet. We sat, bolt upright and rigid, not daring to make the slightest movement.

  ‘Whatever happens,’ I thought to myself, ‘it’s not going to me that gives the game away.’

  The engine driver turned to his left and tried to steer the train parallel to our seat. As he did so the second of the two coaches he was pulling stuck on the leg of a nearby table. He dismounted and with a practised kick free
d it.

  As he walked back to the engine he looked directly at our wall. But it was not just a casual glance. He was about to jump aboard again, then changed his mind and walked slowly but purposefully towards us, peering up over the bookcase directly in front until his nose was as close as he could get. He put one arm across his forehead to shield his eyes from the light above.

  ‘Oo, look!’ he called slowly and deliberately over his shoulder to no one in particular. ‘There’s lots of people in the monkey cage to-day!’

  Chapter 4

  ‘I expect to hear nightly sounds of self-flagellation.’

  Berny Wilton neatly encapsulated several opinions when he looked for the first time at our accommodation in the College. The comparison with austere monastic cells was unavoidable.

  He was in what the College quaintly referred to as his room, but that was a misnomer. The walls were wooden screens, six and a half feet high, which once had been painted white but now were the colour of antique ivory. The large dormitory had a central narrow corridor with rows of doors on both sides. Each led into a tiny cell six feet wide by nine in length. Facing the door was a slim, vertical window heavily barred, alongside which the inside of half a gable sloped downwards to a point about four feet above the floor. Here a sink was located ensuring that, however irreverent we might be about other matters, at least we had to wash in a praying posture. Against one wall was a bed. A small and completely plain cabinet of drawers and a chair completed the furniture inventory.

  This was Upper North, one of four such dormitories each housing twenty students, ten on each side of the passageway. There was a Lower North and two similar Easts. The equivalent Wests had received knockout blows from bombs that had missed the middle of the College.

  Access to Upper North was by a winding and completely enclosed staircase of minimal width. It was quite impossible for two people to pass on it without turning sideways. At the top was an equally small, dimly lit landing on which two doors flanked the narrow entrance to the dormitory. Formerly these single rooms had been the exalted abodes of the ‘bucks’, lordly men from the senior year who took charge of junior year students. Now denuded of furniture, their tiny iron-fronted grates badly rusted and filled with rubble fallen down their chimneys, they were utterly decrepit.

  In time we came to realise that when the College was built these two rooms were the only private accommodation on the floor. The dormitory was then quite open. Our screen walls had been added as a touch of modernity at some point in the past.

  As winter progressed and increased the internal gloom it was darkly rumoured that, years before, one of the rooms had witnessed a hanging. Someone, it seemed, had taken the quick way out. Jon Kennton took his bed into it one wild January night and rose happily the next morning, having seen not a wisp of a ghost, to collect a few bets from us more imaginative mortals.

  The senior men soon had us yearning for the passage of our first year because their accommodation was on the opposite side of the playing field in a building completed shortly before the War and fortunately unscathed. This was South Wing which comprised accommodation for most of the year in truly single and commodious study bedrooms. Better still, their overflow was housed in the Principal’s house. But for us these were twelve months distant.

  Our feeling of monastic seclusion from the outside world was heightened at our second lecture on the morning following our arrival. The first was delivered by the Principal and was innocuously welcoming. The second was flung at us by the Vice-Principal who meant to make his mark upon us. He succeeded.

  ‘I’ve been involved with this College, student and lecturer, recruit and officer in the Corps, for thirty five years this month. There isn’t a stone I don’t know, so don’t imagine you’ll dodge me if you try to get out when you should be in, or come in after your absits have expired.’

  Major Darnley didn’t look a typical former officer. In fact he had a deceptively smiling, round, boyish face with blue eyes enlarged by his bifocal lenses, framed with neat but not severely cut grey hair. In his cap and gown, which he wore frequently in College, he looked far more academic. His fresh complexion belied his drinking and pipe smoking. We soon discovered the latter but the former lay concealed from us at this early stage.

  ‘I intend to give you an outline of the timetable to-day, gentlemen. The rising bell is at 7.00 am. but breakfast is not served until 7.45. Gone is the time when the day began with study from 6.30 to 7.00. We live in decadent times!’ he laughed indulgently. We chuckled politely but mirthlessly. What did remain from the Spartan past, we wondered. We soon discovered.

  ‘Chapel service is at 8.20 am. Attendance is voluntary but, naturally, as you have chosen to come to a Church College we hope the majority of you will attend regularly.

  ‘Lectures begin at 9.00 am. and continue until 12.50. Lunch is at 1.00 pm. Afternoon lectures extend from 2.00 until 5.00 pm., although on one afternoon each week you will soon be visiting schools for observational and later instructional practice.

  ‘Tea is served at 5.15 pm, following which you are free until 7.00 pm. At that time you will go to your study area where you will be expected to work until 9.00 pm. Evening study is an institution of long-standing in this College, gentlemen, and I expect you to make good use of it. Because your bedrooms this year are too small for proper study so you will be allocated in groups to various larger rooms that we have available, such as the Common Room, the library, this lecture room, and so on. These have sufficient tables and chairs to enable you to work adequately.

  ‘College is in session each Saturday morning except at the half-term break. Lectures extend from 9.00 am to 12.30 pm that day. After that week-end activities are, regretfully, rather limited at present. You will hear later what sports we can make available. On Sundays, of course, there are Matins and Evensong.’

  By now we were feeling mentally battered. Would we ever have any time to ourselves? Apparently not, for the VP continued -

  ‘College weekends are another feature of which we are proud,’ he beamed seraphically. ‘To foster the corporate spirit of working and studying together it is natural you should want to spend a reasonable time in relaxation with one another. Accordingly, twice each half term there will be weekends during which no absits will be issued. On other weekends,’ he conceded regretfully, ‘you are allowed to be absent until 10.30 pm on both Saturdays and Sundays.’

  He paused, suddenly. There was a moment of complete silence.

  ‘Any questions, gentlemen?’

  He wasn’t the lecturer in Psychology for nothing. No one dared move, let alone speak.

  ‘Good. I am delighted you are all in accord with our modus vivendi. I am sure it will not be long before you are completely at one with St Andrews and you will soon feel part of its very fabric.’

  Grimly I thrust aside the thought as the strictures placed on our freedom became apparent. But the memory was to surface the day I left, when I mooched around the deserted building until after 10.00 pm so unwilling was I to sever the bond that had indeed grown by then. But at the beginning I’d never have believed such a change of attitude possible.

  ‘Now, gentlemen, let me turn your attention to this term’s programme of lectures...’

  In retrospect I believe our feeling of being cloistered was fully justified, even for those times. The College expected to control almost as much of our lives as did a boarding school. There were gestures to our developing manhood, of course, such as being referred to as gentlemen. Also, from the outset, every lecturer without exception spoke individually of Mr Flaxton, Mr Kennton, Mr Forton. But the regime was still that of the pre-war era.

  But I wonder just how much the Vice Principal and some fellow lecturers, alert to the future, enjoyed something of a final taste of the past with our year. The next intake would be of men returning from up to seven years of life and fighting in the Armed Forces, of
years of privation and even torture as prisoners of war. Their frontal attack overwhelmed the cloistered life forever and cleared the ground for modern college life in which one’s time is one’s own outside lectures and tutorials.

  A great deal more has changed. Modern college and university halls have plenty of creature comforts - personal furnished flats with cooking facilities, high quality refectories and kitchens, multimedia lecture theatres, extensive study facilities, attractive buildings and surrounds, student union bars....

  The buildings survived for another thirty years. Then, despite modernisation to an extent we couldn’t have imagined, the College closed. Quite brilliantly, with support from the local MP who served a term as a government minister, it became an urban village, with small industrial units offering employment. Inside rooms were gutted and remodelled into cosy and attractive self-contained flats. The playing field was kept, enhanced with surrounding well-stocked beds, to become the venue for various sports. Spectators could close their eyes on summer days and listen to the gracious sounds of cricket untroubled by the cacophony of modern County Ground terraces. Beyond the walls, however, lay the contrasting scene of inner city unkempt sprawl and a dash of squalor.

  Bars! Even the notion of alcohol on site in our first year was unthinkable, let alone the idea of an internal business venture selling it. Nevertheless we were pioneers in the post war era and were keen to exploit the heady feeling of freedom pervading everyone’s thoughts. Surely we could let a little light into the monastic gloom? As Christmas approached we considered organising a Dance. Many of us were members of churches where socials had been welcome distractions during the war years, once air raids subsided. We were sure we could arrange a modest little affair. We were to learn just how tight the monastic grip really was!