Bamboo

  The Lion Griefs

  I went to boarding school at the age of nine. This was not exceptional: when I arrived at my school in September 1961 I found boys of six and seven. One exceptionally tiny boy—tawny-skinned with crow-black, dead-straight hair (was he half-Chinese?)—was rumoured to be five, though he angrily denied it.

  I was not unhappy to be going away to school. In West Africa, where my parents lived, all the children of expatriate Europeans were doing the same at around my age. It was entirely normal and for years we were gently prepared (a form of benign brain-washing, I suppose) for the day when we would be left to fend for ourselves. Neither of my parents had been to public school or boarding school and both were unfamiliar with where or how to introduce me into the system. In the end it was decided that I should go to the same school as had a son of close friends. They had heard good reports of it; it was not horrifically expensive; I had seemed to like the place when I had been interviewed one summer when we were back on leave and, as I was Scottish, it was an advantage that the school was in Scotland, albeit in the remote far north. This northerly aspect provided the school with a not entirely deserved reputation for a Spartan, no-frills style of education, its most obvious manifestation being a proclaimed fondness for cold showers and early morning runs and the odd fact that the boys wore shorts throughout their school career, regardless of the seasons and the weather, until they left, aged eighteen.

  The main school was serviced by two prep schools: the junior for boys up to the age of ten and a senior for boys from ten to thirteen who then, if they passed an undemanding entrance exam, were claimed by the parent institution. It was to the junior school that I was driven that September afternoon by my mother, all the way from Edinburgh, to find the field in front of the school house filled with forty or fifty small boys, dressed in navy blue jerseys and shorts, running about, kicking balls, wrestling and generally horsing around. It seemed like fun and I was oblivious to my mother’s brimming tears as she said goodbye. She told me later she had had to stop outside the school gates, had pulled the car in to the side of the road and wept for an hour.

  The junior prep school was housed in a former shooting lodge called Wester Elchies (now sadly demolished), a rather magical-looking Scottish baronial building with turrets and castellation set in fair-sized grounds with its own home farm. There were extensive woods, a telescopeless observatory and a curling pond. Over the hill was an orphanage (we were terrified of the orphans—sinister yahoos to our over-privileged eyes) and not far away, in the valley below, the River Spey flowed where salmon were caught by our headmaster, a legendary fly-fisher.

  I was introduced to my “minder,” a tall rather glamorous blond boy called Holland. Holland was rich (his father had a Rolls-Royce) and he had an older brother who played in a pop group. This was a stroke of luck for me as, with Holland’s patronage, I was introduced to his “set” and achieved almost instant acceptance into the relatively innocent, tribal world of a prep school.

  We were not particularly cruel to each other at this stage of our scholarly life, cruelty (sometimes exceptionally vicious) came later, after puberty, at the main school. For the pre-adolescent there seems to me to be only one requirement for success at prep school and that is popularity. Academic and sporting achievements at that age are so ephemeral and inconsequential that they gain little kudos, and at Wester Elchies the only miserable boys I recall were the unpopular ones. They were unpopular because they looked peculiar: Webster had the aspect of a puppet or cartoon character—with thick, springy carrot-coloured hair and heavy black specs; Sedley had dark, bruised eyes and unusually dun, greasy skin. Sed-ley was genially and routinely persecuted because he cried so easily. All it took was three or four of us to gather round him making quacking duckbill movements with our hands and chanting “Baitey! Baitey! Baitey!” and Sedley would obligingly break down into incoherent and hysterical weeping fits. We found this very amusing and never tired of the game. It was gratuitous but not malevolent. I don’t think life at prep school as I experienced it was ever malign. The school’s regime was good-natured, on the whole, the staff kind and tolerant. Sex and power, the two elements in boarding school life that really corrupt, even to the extent that they can make people evil, were waiting for our older selves up ahead.

  Life at an all-boy prep school, though unreal (as all monosexual societies must be, by definition), was still an extension of childhood, and consequently our ambitions and disappointments, our desires and our hatreds retained some quality of childhood innocence. Most of our carnal energies, for example, were expended in trying to see female members of staff in the nude or, second best, to find some way of peering up into the dark recesses of their skirts. I and many others nurtured simultaneous passions for Miss Grey, the art teacher, and Miss Cibber, the music teacher. Miss Grey was tall and languorous with glossy dark hair wound round her head in a loose Bloomsburyesque bun. Her clothes were rich-looking, romantically hued. Miss Cibber too was dark, almost swarthy in fact, with a sturdier more curvaceous figure. For a term she ousted Miss Grey from my fantasies as I found myself allotted to a dormitory outside one of the staff bathrooms which she used. There was an inch-wide crack between the bottom of the door and the floor through which, if you pressed your head to the cold linoleum of the corridor, you could obtain a partial view of the bathroom beyond. Miss Cibber’s strong legs from the thigh down became very familiar. We kept praying she would drop a towel or her toothbrush and have to bend over. She excluded herself from all our affections when she was surprised one day in a passionate kiss with the English master—a dull, weak fellow, to our eyes—called Hearn.

  We did not like Hearn and therefore could not like anyone who liked him. Our affections were extremely fickle. Miss Cibber was dropped and I returned my loyalty to Miss Grey.

  Ah, Miss Grey, Miss Catriona Grey! Strange how passionate the pre-pubertal crush can be. She must have been very young, in her early twenties, I suppose, and, as I recall her face, I realize she was very pretty too. I was good at art and saw a lot of her and became something of a favourite. Because I was close to her it is with Miss Grey that I associate my first adult feelings of envy—a pure, elemental, resentment-driven emotion. Miss Grey’s beauty was not just apparent to her acolytes in the art room: the headmaster, Mr Vaughan, was also susceptible.

  I was impressed by Mr Vaughan: he was the first person whom I recognized—unconsciously—as “sophisticated.” He drove an MG roadster with leather straps holding down the bonnet. He wore suede shoes, he smoked a lot, Player’s Navy Cut, and had a deep, raspy smoker’s voice. I can recall his flat in the school house with real clarity. A dark blue carpet, loose cream lineny covers on the sofas, good pictures on the walls. He was, I now realize, genuinely urbane, a confirmed bachelor, a throwback figure from John Buchan or Sapper who had taken up schoolmastering before the war in the way that young men did coming down from Varsity with a poor degree (think of Waugh and Auden) and had been too lazy, or found the life too congenial, ever to move on. He was white-haired—in his fifties—and being headmaster of a small prep school in Banffshire was to be the pinnacle of his professional life. But he seemed perfectly content and he used regularly to invite Miss Grey (a fellow smoker) to share a cigarette with him at his table at the end of the midday meal.

  I can conjure up the tableau now, and the green fog of envious bile through which I viewed it, as we filed out to go to our dormitories for the obligatory postprandial rest. Mr Vaughan would push his chair back so he could cross his legs and dangle one brown suede shoe. He smoked with a small flourish, his hand describing a generous arc, a flexing, cuff-shooting movement, as he brought the cigarette to his lips. Inhaling avidly, laughing, leaning forward to share a throaty smoky confidence with Miss Grey who, her body language tells me in hindsight, was not wholly at ease with Mr Vaughan’s raffish innuendoes. Miss Grey stiffly upright, an arm crossed below her breasts, a palm supporting the elbow of the smoking hand, the cigarette more demurely, more deli
cately, puffed at—a social smoker, then, not with Mr Vaughan’s nicotine craving. I can hear Mr Vaughan’s barking laugh crossing the emptying dining room as we troop out, degenerating into a barking lung-tearing cough. I look back, hating him, wanting to kill him, to see Miss Grey leaning forward, helping him to a consoling glass of water.

  What kind of person was I then, in my pre-teens? Memories are vivid and precise but I cannot summon up a retrospective self-consciousness. The world is a simpler more straightforward place when you are ten, eleven, twelve. It is adolescence, the burgeoning hormone-swarm in the body, that brings home real intimations of character and personality. I look at pictures of the fair-haired lad I was and gain no real access to the persona. The alternately carefree and moody fifteen-year-old, say—both precocious and deeply lazy—is far more familiar. And yet the pre-teen places and the people, the events and the adventures lurk in the memory bank pristine and available.

  I was popular, thanks partly to Holland and his cronies, and I was tall and a fast runner—did not let the side down at rugby and cricket—but I realize I never made it into the first rank because I did not have a nickname. The real stars were called “Ducky” or “Fitzy” or plain “Johnnie.” Once for a week or so a few boys took to calling me a Latinate “Boydus” but it never caught on and soon died away, never to be resurrected. What made these boys so liked, what was the secret of their charm, so evident that even the staff addressed them by their nicknames? The answer, I think, is that they were unrelentingly cheerful. As they became teenagers they seemed almost visibly to fade away, without exception, puberty robbing them of their unfailingly sunny demeanours. But somehow at the age of ten or eleven an initial personality had developed, sufficient to make them the life and soul of the party, and this was enough to make them everybody’s favourites. These boys were loved, admired and cherished, I am sure, by all of us without any jealousy. I remember when Johnnie’s mother suddenly died the sense of collective grief in Elchies was palpable: his loss affected us all in a profound way that can only be explained by the role he played in our midst. Johnnie’s loss was, of course, our loss too.

  Indeed, within the small community of the prep school a kind of covert favouritism operates, rather as I imagine it does in a large family, with no real resentment being expressed by those excluded. For a while I was the beneficiary of such advancement when I became the favourite of the matron—I think as a result of having suffered a very bad dose of chickenpox—Mrs Herrick, a pallid but no-nonsense, vivacious woman, married to the Latin teacher (we called him “Shirley” for some forgotten reason). Mrs Herrick was not the most powerful patron among the staff, but her benevolence did pay dividends.

  Every morning—part of our Scottish heritage—we had porridge for breakfast. The school would gather in the assembly room before filing through to the dining room (a pre-fab wooden hall tacked on to the rear of the house). Mr Vaughan would declaim a prayer, read the day’s notices and then Mrs Herrick would appear to select the sugar-server. This was one of the most coveted jobs in the school (our sweet ration was one Quality Street per day). The sugar-server’s job was to place one dessertspoonful of brown Demerara sugar in the middle of each bowl of porridge. The key perk of the job was that one was permitted to sugar one’s own bowl of porridge with boundless liberality. And, naturally, friends of the sugar-server benefited also. During my reign as Mrs Herrick’s chosen one she would come into the assembly room each morning, scan the eager pleading faces of the boys and then, as if the result of spontaneous whim, select me. This went on for many weeks and nobody ever appeared to express surprise or complain at this manifest unfairness. I became rather smug and developed a sweet tooth that I have never really managed to neutralize.

  My move to prep school from my school in Africa meant the first of several progressive steps that shifted me away from being an “African” child to becoming a British one. The winter of 1961 was the first time I saw snow. As I remember it there had been a heavy fall in the night, some six inches or so, and we woke to the refulgent, muffled, eerie landscape that dense snowfall brings. For two of us—me and another boy who had been born and raised in Jamaica—this was a surreal lifetime first. Amazed, astonished, we stepped outside and picked the stuff up, tasted it, felt its cold numb our fingers, heard its crump beneath our feet. Other boys and staff, amused, looked out at us from the big library windows—two aborigines out of their element—as we struggled to come to terms with this new natural phenomenon that we had heard and read so much about but never experienced—stamping our feet, throwing handfuls into the air—before we were gently summoned back inside for breakfast.

  Quite a number of us lived abroad and made the long plane journey home at holidays—to India, West and East Africa, Singapore, the Caribbean—to a world of sun and humidity, ocean beaches and palm trees. On our return we wore our exclusivity proudly in the shower room, our deep tans contrasting strongly with the pale pink bodies of our coevals, quite unconcerned to be known to the others as “wogs.” This sort of cheery racism was quite common, even at prep school, but, as with many of the less admirable aspects of boarding school life, our prejudices and bigotries tended to become more extreme as we grew older. Any deviation from our self-ordained norms was more mercilessly pilloried—accents, deformities, perceived ugliness—anything strange or out of the ordinary was grist to the intolerance mill.

  But at the junior prep school our energies and animosities revolved instead around the forts we built in the woods. This was a form of peer-group creation, joining a gang combined with war-gaming, a kind of obsessive militaristic territoriality that dominated our free time. Who was in, who was out, whose loyalties had been transferred and so on. In the dense woods around the house we would build elaborate shacks, lean-tos and tree houses, erect earthworks and construct trip wires and booby traps. Membership of the most splendid forts was eagerly striven for. Certain substantial forts of the recent past had assumed almost legendary proportions. There had been one called “Laramie”—but somehow Laramie had fallen into disrepair and all that remained of it was a jumble of roped-together logs in a clearing. Old hands would take new boys to the site and reminisce about its Ozymandian splendours.

  One was elected into a fort either by patronage (Holland helped me into his) or by the possession of tools. In this way feeble or unpopular boys could gain admission into elites by offering the use of a hammer or drill or, in one enterprising case, by having his father send up supplies of six-inch nails at weekly intervals. The six-inch nail was the key currency—you could buy your way anywhere.

  The move to the senior prep school, a few miles away on the other side of the Spey, marked an end to the Edenic pleasures of the Wester Elchies. The new house was grander and larger, with a great pillared portico, a stable block and generous formal terraces leading down to playing fields. It represented a larger society, too, and within it were played out early and inchoate strategies of power and responsibility, and with that development came a corresponding loss of innocence. Here were thirteen-year-olds in the first hot flush of adolescence, voices breaking, pimples sprouting, the first snouty stirrings of pubertal lust. The easy egalitarian-ism of the junior school ebbed away, the sense of being part of a large, unruly but essentially loving family was replaced by the divisions familiar to all closed societies. There was the public face of the school—sporty, academic, disciplined—and there was the inevitable private face, one that was created and shaped by the boys and ran like a cold, unseen, dangerous current beneath the placid surface.

  At a prep school, however, the tacit acknowledgement of this fact—that the two distinct worlds coexist, one overt, one hidden—is never really established. The real world (the world of the boys, the hothouse society) never gets full purchase because there remain old elements of that unspoilt innocence of childhood in place—we were still children, after all, even though, at the end of our prep school careers, the embryo adult in each of us could be perceived taking shape.

  I
developed a curious relationship with one of the matrons. I can’t remember her name but she was attractive, energetic and a little plump with reddish blonde hair and a nicely cynical, gently mocking way with her charges. I can see her face in my mind’s eye, see her in her white coat serving spoonfuls of malt to the needy and malnourished, dispensing aspirins for imagined headaches. In our pre-teens the female members of staff played a far more important part in our lives than the males did. I can bring all these young women to mind instantly, have them fixed in my memory far more vividly than all but a few of the men. It was as if we unconsciously realized that here was the only likely source of any vaguely maternal affection—a smile, a pat on the back, a literal shoulder to cry on—which we all, even the most rambunctious and independent spirits, separated from our real mothers three months at a time, periodically craved.

  Thinking back, I suppose that what happened was that this matron and I must have become friends, an odd state of affairs to arise between a thirteen-year-old boy and a young woman in her twenties, especially given the institutional roles imposed on us. Perhaps, quite simply, she was lonely. There is another side to prep school life which the schoolboy seldom considers, if at all—that of the solitary teacher in his or her room, little more than a bedsit, whiling away their off-duty hours. What did you do if you weren’t married? I suppose there were occasional visits to a pub or a local restaurant (though the junior staff must have been paid a pittance); or you could hopefully attempt to find a soulmate amongst your colleagues … And the social life of a staff common room need not necessarily be congenial, populated—as all common rooms are—by its share of bores and petty martinets, third-raters and sadsacks. This matron, however, seemed a more feisty and worldly character and, inevitably, she did not stay long with us, no more than a term or two. I never thought anything particular about her announced departure: she was popular with the boys and we were collectively sorry to see her go but, most unusually, before she left she came into my dormitory late at night to say goodbye and sat on my bed and talked for an hour or so. The other boys fell asleep or tried to eavesdrop but she sat close to me and we chatted in low voices. Chatted about what? I can’t remember exactly—where she was going, I suppose. I recall something about her telling me she was sitting more exams, better qualifications leading to a better job. Did she kiss me farewell, squeeze my hand? I hope so. I never saw or heard from her again.