Boarders were never bored. Keeling supervised an elaborate Hornby model railway to the delight of many of the boys and painted exceptional scenery himself for the annual school play, always a highlight of the Michaelmas term. Music teaching was available at extra cost, which may be why I never had any, but I learned to shoot a rifle – not a skill I maintained – to jump a wooden horse, to climb a rope in the gym and to box. The mentor there was Ken de Torre, a former sergeant-major who taught PE, gymnastics and the art of self-defence with just the right mixture of humour and enthusiasm. For some reason I was quite good at boxing, winning little silver cups at more weights than one in the annual competitions which would be judged by an outsider, a Captain Stansfield, whose qualifications for the task were unclear. Presumably he was simply military and lived conveniently close.
One year he ruled that I and my opponent, a tough but slight little boy called Denison, were inseparable after three rounds so we fought a fourth which was deemed to be an epic. Eventually I triumphed but when I came to apply the skills taught me by de Torre in my one and only boxing tournament at my next school, Marlborough, my experience was very different. I was matched on that occasion against a tough little nut called James Tweedie who was stronger but shorter. He was wary of my reach and I of his aggression. After a couple of minutes the judge, Ivo Payne, whose squashed nose advertised his own qualifications, rang the bell and pronounced that, much as he admired our mutual elusiveness, it was high time for one of us to throw a punch.
I subsequently made Tweedie’s nose bleed, but he was adjudged the winner and I retired from the ring. I was not so clever or devious as the now successful literary agent John Rush, my contemporary at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, who worked out an ingenious way to get a Blue. Word had got round Cambridge that Oxford’s heavyweight representative in that year’s University boxing match was John Coker, a massive African who had already made a name for himself as a powerful wing three-quarters for Oxford and the Harlequins. He had knocked out his light blue opponent the previous year and such was his formidable reputation in the ring that Rush was the only entry for the 1964 Cambridge team at heavyweight.
I was amongst several of his friends to go to the Corn Exchange in the middle of the City to support him, all of us aware that he was almost certainly about to be mangled. When the bell went, however, Rush was true to his name. He dashed straight at his magnificently muscled opponent with his bearded head down, aiming straight for his private parts. Immediately the bell sounded and the referee warned the Cambridge man that if he did that again he would be disqualified. He did and he was. Thus he won a Blue without throwing or, more importantly, receiving, a single punch.
If boxing was a passing success for me, acting in the various plays brought out a more genuine minor talent. I apparently brought the house down as the King of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland with the line ‘If he’s got a head of course you can cut it off!’ The school Chronicle used such words as ‘authority’ and ‘mastery’ about my performance, undoubtedly from a generous reviewer, but there was a serious actor in the making (not to mention a keen little wicket-keeper) in Nicky Henson, son of the music hall star Leslie Henson. He had been brilliant in a production of the Brothers Grimm’s Rumpelstiltskin and sparkled as the Mad Hatter. He duly became a professional, although I have only occasionally seen him performing since he reduced a slightly inebriated Sybil to loud laughter with his ‘Pretentious, moi?’ story in the wedding episode of the immortal series Fawlty Towers.
Henson was not the only thespian produced by St. Bede’s. Peter Cook had gone before him and Eddie Izzard arrived later. As for cricketers, the best days may lie in the future. Recent products have included the Sussex players James Pyemont, Ollie Rayner and Luke Wells, son of Alan, the former county captain who now coaches at the senior school. Pyemont, son of one St. Bede’s headmaster and nephew of another, captained Cambridge but I doubt that he had the tactical acumen of my own contemporary Nicholas De Jong, who captained the prep school in my penultimate year. We had been bowled out cheaply by Ascham, the Eastbourne College preparatory school, a fine example of one of those catastrophes that abound in Under-13 cricket. Our captain was not fazed. He instructed me to loosen my bootlaces and to bend to do them up frequently on my way back to my bowling mark. What is more, I was told to double the length of my run up and not to hurry back after each ball. If memory does not play tricks, we came very close to drawing the game.
These days I might have written a pompous article about such shameless delaying tactics but at the time I think the adults rather admired De Jong’s brazen tactics and ingenuity. Cricket played by boys of that age remains wonderfully zealous, innocent and error-strewn. I thoroughly enjoyed watching my own sons when work allowed but I feel for the schoolmasters and their club counterparts, running junior teams, because results are so unpredictable. I have never been able to verify one story in all particulars but believe it to be true. Richard Parsons, who became a wine merchant, was, during his brief time as a schoolmaster, put in charge of the Under-11 team of the Wellington College prep school, Eagle House. To his immense embarrassment they were all out for one. Apologising profusely to his opposite number, he suggested that it was a little early for tea. So the opposing school batted instead. Fifteen minutes later they, too, were all out: for nought.
5
WESTBORNE: LIFE AT MARLBOROUGH
A large Georgian house, but not too large, its two wings in perfect symmetry, joined by a pillared porch and approached through an avenue between a double row of lime trees. This is the old Castle Inn, the heart and birthplace of Marlborough College, solid below the Wiltshire Downs.
I was a borderline entrant to Marlborough. My Common Entrance exam was a curate’s egg, the bad outweighing the good I suspect, and the school’s austere-seeming Master, Tommy Garnett, summoned me to be assessed by various ‘beaks’ (teachers) in subjects in which I had failed to reach a pass mark. Having produced such an uneven performance in my written exams I apparently rose to the occasion in the oral ones and was accepted in Shell C, the lowest form, in May 1958.
Garnett had forgotten about my inauspicious start when I sat next to him years later at a dinner in Melbourne after his retirement as headmaster of Geelong, but at the time my cricketing reputation no doubt helped because he himself had been an outstanding schoolboy batsman at Charterhouse. Unlike Charterhouse, Marlborough was a genuine country school with a wide intake of boys whose parents needed to make sacrifices to afford the fees. I was lucky to be there.
In his Rural Rides Cobbett somehow managed to observe that Marlborough was an ‘ill-looking place’ in 1821 but his was a singular view. If there is such a thing as a quintessential English market town, Marlborough might be it, with its long, very wide high street, St Peter’s Church at one end, St. Mary’s at the other, the river Kennet meandering through and the Downs beyond. It is ancient, with a borough charter first granted in 1204, and almost literally magical. Right behind my first dormitory at the school was a small prehistoric hill known as ‘the Mound’ with legendary association to Merlin. A few miles away along the road to Bath lies Avebury, with its circle of sarsen stones, not so huge as the ones at Stonehenge but just as mysterious in origin; and the much larger ‘mound’ of Silbury Hill.
My teenage mind, alas, was not exactly bursting with curiosity about these things – the Mound was strictly out of bounds for a start – but I could and did appreciate the timeless beauty of the general environment of a school created by a few public-spirited philanthropists in 1843 for the education mainly of the sons of Anglican clergy. Its original centre was the large country house built for the Seymour family (Jane Seymour, Henry VIII and all that) between 1702 and 1715. In 1751 the Duke of Northumberland leased it to an entrepreneur called George Smith, who had previously managed the most famous of the early cricket grounds of London, the one still staging cricket matches for members of the Honourable Artillery Company almost 300 years later.
Under Smith’s
management it became the Castle Inn, the most famous stopping point for well-to-do passengers travelling by coach and horses from London to Bath. It was, in fact, one of the largest inns in England, with its twelve ‘parlours’, each with two beds, situated on each wing of the hall, a spacious ballroom and outside attractions that included the Mound, a wilderness, pleasant gardens, stables and, as the Bath Journal reported in August 1751, ‘a dog kennel with all conveniences’. When the swiftly burgeoning railways began to put the coach owners out of business less than a century later, an even better use was found for this classical example of Georgian elegance. In my day it was divided into C1 and C3. With typical public school perversity, C2 was in a completely different building on the other side of the Bath Road at the base of the playing fields. For the last four of my five years at the school I lived in the other half of Field House, known by the same lack of logic as B3.
As the school grew, however, it began to take in smaller ‘outhouses’, some of which, like Elmshurst, Littlefield and Preshute, were allowed to keep their original names. They were less specifically functional, more homely and a bit more expensive for the fee-paying parents. We in-College boys looked on the out-College types as northerners do southerners. They had to be softer.
All bravado, of course. Not that I was not a fairly soft little boy at thirteen, enough to be deeply distressed in my first few weeks at the school when a letter from my mother told me that our much adored Staffordshire bull terrier, Garry, had been put down. I can remember crying bitterly during a service in Chapel but there was so much going on all day that there was little time to wallow in homesickness. Marlborough, albeit much reformed since Victorian times, still had a reputation as a tough school but I had a caring first housemaster in Ian Beer and the sensible system of placing boys in ‘junior’ houses for a year eased the transition for those coming from smaller prep schools or, in a few cases, boys boarding for the first time. By the end of my time Garnett’s successor, John Dancy, was preparing the way for sixth form girls and, eventually, full co-education.
Had they been there in my time I would undoubtedly have been less shy with the opposite sex than I was until life became more normal at University but apart from one swiftly passing attraction my experiences of the well-known danger of being incarcerated in an all male adolescent community were limited. Totally unaware that rugger practice with a plastic ball in a class room was an arousing experience for a friend in my house I was very surprised one afternoon when he suddenly began rubbing himself against my leg like a randy dog. I laughed it off and he remained at a respectful distance thereafter before going on to a distinguished army career. On another occasion I found myself involved equally unexpectedly in an attempt at mutual masturbation with two or three older boys after an invitation to ‘tea’ in a study shared by two of them. A joss stick had been lit to add atmosphere but, happily, I found it embarrassing rather than exciting.
There were better things to do with spare time. Town, Downs and the majestic Savernake Forest were all easily accessible by foot or bicycle and although one might constantly have been, as John Betjeman famously put it, ‘summoned by bells’ for various activities at all hours of the day, there was just the right amount of freedom. Being able simply to wander in the town after lunch gave a sense of release, even if my £10 pocket money a term seldom allowed any actual purchases from the shops. Most of it went at Bernard’s, the tuck shop. Little corn flake cakes encrusted with chocolate were the favourite treats, at threepence a time. Over the road stood Crosby and Lawrence, the sports outfitters, where I was able to sign for longed-for equipment, such as my first squash racket and fives gloves.
Starting with the Sun Inn at the College end of the town, the high street was littered with pubs and small hotels. The Ailsbury Arms and the Castle and Ball were the two best hotels but for those with less to spend there were plenty of alternatives. A year after leaving the school my brother David planned a return with one of his old mates and asked me to book him a shared room at the Green Dragon to save money. Much too innocent to enter pubs by myself normally, I duly stepped sheepishly into the dusty hostelry after lunch one day and, peering up to the man behind the bar, asked rather nervously for a double room. Whether it was my halting tongue, in my embarrassment at being in a pub, or the rather elderly landlord’s hardness of hearing, I don’t know but, after a quizzical look, he placed a glass to the base of a bottle above the bar and poured me out a double rum. I wish that I could claim that I was bold enough to drink it.
The school itself was going through an enlightened era under Garnett’s guidance. His great belief, like St. Paul’s, was that everyone has a talent and at Marlborough he made it his business to develop each boy’s gift. There was a beagle pack, a pottery school, a printing house, fishing and climbing expeditions for the country types, an extra music hall built by the boys at his instigation, a farmhouse bought with a legacy to be restored by other boys wanting to learn the arts of building, and other additions to the traditional curriculum of academic subjects, sport, art, religion, the Corps, music and theatre.
Marlborough has produced more than its fair share of poets, notably the contemporaries Betjeman and Louis MacNeice and three at the school just before the Great War, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Sorley and Frank Lewis, but of my contemporaries the stars came mainly from other fields. Looking, for an aide-memoire, at the December 1962 issue of the Marlburian, the school magazine produced once a term entirely by the boys, I am amazed by its sophistication and lack of pretence, except, perhaps, in a poem written by myself and published by the editor, Angus Dunn, with whom I had shared a study for a term or two. He lived then in a village quaintly named Christmas Pie. A tall, academic, serious chap as a schoolboy, he became first a diplomat, then a successful banker.
My less than immortal lines, entitled ‘The Bitter Rose’, apparently reflected an unrequited love affair that I no longer recall, unless I was imagining the grief of the delightful girl from St. Mary’s, Wantage, one of the local schools ‘against’ whom we had occasional social fixtures. I spent a romantic evening with her during a school dance, only to ditch her, callously, when it became apparent that she was looking for a serious relationship.
My efforts as a poet – I am surprised to find that others found their way into the magazine at different times, including an anonymous one under the initials C.A.D, were colourful but superficial. By lack of pretence, however, I mean the matter of fact way in which it was mentioned that Peter Medawar, at Marlborough from 1928 to 1932, had just won the Nobel Prize for his work on skin tissue grafting, which paved the way for medical transplants; and that ‘F.C. Chichester’, an older Marlburian, had ‘successfully completed the double crossing of the Atlantic in Gypsy Moth III, outward passage 33 days, homeward 26’. Good British understatement. Sir Francis Chichester and his little boat had not, of course, finished their liaison.
Naturally, for every outstanding boy there were scores of ordinary ones, almost certainly no less worthy contributors to society in their later lives. Contemporaries of mine who made a larger than normal impact in the early sixties included the shy, precociously gifted Mike Griffith, who later won Blues for cricket, hockey and rackets, captained Sussex and played hockey for Great Britain; and Jonathan Harvey, a fair-haired giant who won Blues as both flannelled fool and muddied oaf, the first as a fast outswing bowler, the second as a strong second row forward who could also kick like a prototype Jonny Wilkinson. ‘Jack’ Hopper was a natural at all games who briefly became a golf professional and remained a very good amateur, and Bill Hadman, an Oxford scholar who must have played rugby for England but for injury. He was made, apparently, of solid teak and I can still feel the force of his customary greeting, a ‘genial’ punch on the shoulder.
The sheer diversity of types and talents at that time reflects well on Garnett’s philosophy, not to mention his staff. Amongst my other contemporaries, Iain MacDonald-Smith, slim, frail and freckled in his youth, partnered Rodney Patterson to an
Olympic sailing gold medal; the 400-metre runner Martin Winbolt-Lewis, another British Olympian, could have done many things well but was content as a prison and hospital chaplain; Ian Balding, trainer of Mill Reef, and Peter Makin both became successful racehorse trainers; Ben Pimlott was a renowned left-wing historian; and Alastair Goodlad, who won a school election as a flamboyant Conservative candidate, became Tory Chief Whip then Tony Blair’s surprise choice as ‘Our Man’ in Australia, where he served a second term because he was so popular. In his schooldays Goodlad’s main fame came from being a mazy wing three-quarters, although he was not so fast or powerful as two of his successors in my time, the brothers Louis and Charles Mbanefo, sons of a Nigerian judge at the time of the tragic Biafran War.
Amongst the more artistic types, Christopher Lloyd, engaging but wonderfully pompous even as a mere A level history student like me, went on to become Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, in the footsteps of the more notorious Marlburian Sir Anthony Blunt. Robin Janvrin is now ennobled, having served with the utmost distinction and discretion as the Queen’s private secretary. Crispian Steele-Perkins, a mischievous boy with a twinkle in his eye, was clearly destined to make a name as a trumpeter and duly did. Nick Drake, the singer, guitarist and songwriter, was part of a talented little school band group that I believe briefly included one Christopher Davison, alias Chris de Burgh, the hugely successful singer. He has made a fortune and maintained his dignity far better than most pop stars. Drake by contrast was little known in his time and was brought to an early death by drugs and depression, but he is revered by the cognoscenti as a highly influential musician, whose songs had a pained originality.
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