Moab Is My Washpot

  But there again, whose grievances are ever minor? I am fully aware that my grievances, such as they are, are minor. The story of a sensitive young weed struggling to grow up in the robust thicket of an English public school is not likely to arouse sympathy in the breasts of every reader. It was a subject done to death in the earlier part of this century in novels, memoirs and autobiographies. I am a cliché and I know it. I was not kidnapped by slave traders, forced to shine shoes at the age of three in Rio or sent up chimneys by a sadistic sweep. I grew up neither in circumstances of abject poverty, nor in surroundings of fantastic wealth. I was not abused, neglected or exploited. Middle class at a middle class school in middle England, well nourished, well taught and well cared for, I have nothing of which to complain and my story, such as it is, is as much one of good fortune as of anything else. But it is my story and worth no more and no less than yours or anyone else’s. It is, in my reading at least, a kind of pathetic love story. I would prefer to call it pathétique or even appassionata, but pathetic will do, in all its senses.

  The first problem to dominate me at Uppingham was that of the fag test. Every new boy had to pass this blend of initiation rite and familiarisation exam in his first fortnight. He was instructed in this by a fag teacher, a second-year boy, in my case an athletic fellow called Peter Pattrick.

  The fagging system was in the process of winding down when I arrived. Personal fags, of the kind found in public school fiction, had become more or less extinct. Fags still had to run errands for pollies, but there was none of the toast-making, shoe-shining, study-tidying, bog-seat-warming, head-patting, thigh-stroking, buttock-fondling drudgery, slavery or abuse that I had dreaded. Fagging consisted essentially of communal chores, the most notable roles in which were to be morning fag, who had to wake the House (more on this later), and the unpleasantly named lav fag, who only had to sweep the corridors, and so far as I can remember, had nothing to do with lavatories at all. The paper fag was obliged to go into town early in the morning, before breakfast, pick up the House’s order of newspapers and deliver them to the studies. Another job was to go down twice a day and clear the school pigeonholes for senior boys, bringing up their messages to the House, that sort of thing. I can’t remember what this duty was called—pigeonhole fag, I suppose, but again it is madness to expect logic, he might well have been called kitten fag, balloon fag or ethics fag for all I know.

  When I use the word “House,” it must be understood that I am referring to the boarding houses into which the school was divided, miniature versions of an Oxbridge college I suppose, in as much as one lived, ate and slept in the House, and went into the school itself for lessons, much as an Oxbridge undergraduate lives, eats and sleeps in college and goes to university faculty buildings for lectures. There again, the collegiate system is not very easy to explain either, so it seems rather pointless my attempting to explain one mysterious system by reference to another equally baffling.

  Essentially, Uppingham was six hundred boys strong, and had twelve Houses of fifty boys each, give or take. Each House had a housemaster, who was most directly responsible for one’s discipline, direction and well-being, he was the man ultimately in loco parentis. Each House had a matron too, and a small number of staff. When I began at my House, Fircroft, there was a female kitchen staff, referred to by the boys, I am sorry to say, as skivvies. All I can offer in our defence is that we did not mean the word in any derogatory sense, it was simply the word used, we knew no other. The skivvies waited on the boys: if one wanted more water in one’s jug or more tea in one’s cup, one would, talking to one’s neighbour all the while, simply hold up the hand containing the empty jug or mug and wave it about a bit. If service did not come quickly, one would shout “Water!” or “Tea here!” and eventually the jug or cup would be taken away, filled and returned. Now of course, everything is organised along cafeteria lines and involves serving hatches and, probably, wide ranges of camomile tea, isotonic NRG drinks and vegetarian falafel. What I can’t understand is why there wasn’t bloody revolution in the town of Uppingham in my day. I suppose waiting hand and foot on loud public school boys is marginally better than being unemployed, but I shouldn’t wonder if some of the ruder, less considerate boys didn’t get a fair amount of spittle in their teacups and bogeys in their baked beans.

  Fircroft had a garden, a croquet lawn, a copse with a hammock, disused outside lavatories (the “House rears” in local argot, later to prove the unromantic scene of my deflowering) and, being one of the Houses furthest from the school, two fives courts. Fives is a game much like squash, except that the ball is struck with a gloved hand instead of a racket. It comes in two flavours, Eton and Rugby. We played Eton fives, a better game, all snobbery aside, because it involved a buttress projecting from one side of the court, presumably deriving from the buttresses of Eton College’s great Perpendicular Gothic chapel, against which boys once sacrilegiously bounced balls. Fives was still played enthusiastically by some, but Eton’s rival Harrow had its own old game which was rapidly becoming fashionable, not just in schools, but in the world of sweaty businessmen and newly emerging health clubs. Squash was already more popular than fives at Uppingham by the time I arrived and the fives courts were really just places where bikes were parked and behind which one smoked, masturbated or sipped cider with, or without, companions.

  My housemaster was a man called Geoffrey Frowde, an old friend of my parents. He had been up at Merton, Oxford, as an undergraduate, but his wife, Elizabeth, had been at Westfield with my mother. The Frowdes and my parents had camped out in the Mall together that rainy, rainy night before Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation and waved together at Queen Salote of Tonga as she rode by with her famous lunch sitting beside her. These experiences no doubt form a bond and it was on account of Geoffrey Frowde being at Uppingham that Roger and I had been marked down for it from an early age. All this made my subsequent impossibility as a pupil all the more embarrassing of course. To be endlessly frustrated by the uncontrollable wickedness of the son of friends must put a man in a very difficult position.

  Back to the fag test. This took the form of a written exam and required of its candidates a full knowledge of all the school Houses (in alphabetical order), their housemasters, their house captains and their locations. One had to know too all the form masters by their names and initials and where in the school their form rooms lay. Being an ancient establishment that had prospered in Victorian England, Uppingham, like a good English town, like the English language itself indeed, had rambled and swollen and bulged itself out in a higgledy-piggledy manner that demonstrated no logic, plan or rationale. The new boy had to know where each games field was, the layout of the music school and the art school and the carpentry and metalwork shops and all manner of other places. These were the compulsory and predictable elements of the fag test and held no terrors for me. I have always been able to rely on that excellent memory of mine; the unknown factor in the test lay in the right of the house captain, whose job it was to mark the results, to top off all of this factual quizzing with school slang tests and unpredictable questions about nicknames, customs and traditions. A cobbled pathway that led past the library through to the central colonnade, for example, was known as the Magic Carpet and an alley whose flooring was made of small square raised tiles sometimes went under the name of the Chocolate Block. There were dozens and dozens of similar nicknames for people, places and regions of the school that one naturally absorbed over a period of months and years, but to find them all out in a week and a half was difficult.

  The price of failure in the fag test was high: a flogging from the house captain. I had a dread conviction that boys beat much more mercilessly than prep-school headmasters. The captain of the House, whose name was Peck, sported splendid sideburns, nothing to Edward Thring’s Dundreary Weepers of course, but impressive none the less and an indicator, to my mind, of huge reserves of strength. There was something horrible too about the very word “flogging” which conjured images of
naval punishment at the mast, the victim biting on wads of leather as the lash was laid on.

  Peter Pattrick, my fag teacher, set about his task with vigour, for if I failed, he too would be punished. If I passed, and passed well, there was a reward: Pattrick would have to stand me a tea at the buttery. The school had three butteries, sort of cafés-cum-tea-rooms-cum-tuck-shops-cum-ice-cream-parlours. There was the Upper Buttery, the Lower and the Middle. The one I came to love and cherish was, as befits my nature, the Lower Buttery, a cash-only, high-cholesterol joint run by a couple called Mr. and Mrs. Lanchberry, or possibly Launchberry. Mrs. Lanchberry (we will settle on that, I have only a limited number of “u”s at my disposal) had a way of dropping two eggs into a lake of boiling lard that I have yet to see rivalled. To this day, double eggs on toast with baked beans, a glass of sparkling dandelion and burdock and I’m simply anybody’s. The Upper Buttery was run by a Mrs. Alibone and was really more of a shop, selling sweets, coffee, biscuits, bread, cheeses, ices and other consumables on tick. There was some system of order forms involved and she always knew exactly when one was bust, which I found irritating and in rather poor taste. The Middle Buttery was hidden somewhere in the Middle, one of the largest playing fields in England, on which dozens (literally) of cricket matches could be played simultaneously, as well as games of tennis, hockey, rugger and Christ knows what else besides.

  For the fag test then, they dangled a carrot and they brandished a stick. Like most small boys at new schools I was far more driven by the stick than I was drawn by the carrot. To tell the truth, the prospect of being bought a huge tea by Peter Pattrick frightened me almost as much as being flogged by Peck.

  Pattrick—I think I mentioned that he was athletic? Especially good at tennis—decided that the way to teach me was to take me to the House library, find the largest book he could, Liddell and Scott’s Greek Lexicon probably, and hold it over my head while he tested me. A mistake or hesitation from me and—bang!—down would crash the book on to my skull. This was of no help and only served to confuse me. I remembered everything perfectly well almost the first time I was told it, the sight of that huge eau de nil jacketed dictionary looming above me simply mesmerised me into stupidity. At one point, while the book was hovering and I was havering, the door to the library opened and my brother came in. He took in the situation at a glance, I rolled a pleading eye towards him and then he spoke:

  “That’s it, Peter,” he said. “If he gives any trouble, knock some sense into him.”

  I hate myself for telling that story, for it gives quite the wrong impression of Roger, who is just about the kindest man I know, with less malice in him than you would find in a bush baby’s favourite aunt. He will squirm with embarrassment and shame at reading this, which is undeserved. Facts must out, however, and I must record that I was a little hurt by his failing to come to my aid or defence. No grudge of course, for I thought it must be my fault and that this was how things were done at big schools. Prep school is, it goes without saying, no kind of preparation at all for public school, any more than school is a preparation for life. The alteration in scale, the sudden descent from seniority to absolute insignificance, these make any social lessons learnt worse than useless. Those whose early days at public school were least happy were those who had won most prizes, rank and power at their preps. Worth noting here the oddity too of my brother calling Pattrick by his Christian name. It was considered rather cool and adult amongst second, third and fourth years to be on first name terms.

  “Hi, Mark.”

  “Guy! How’s it going?”

  When Mark and Guy subsequently leave school and find each other again in their twenties, after university, working in the same merchant bank it becomes cool, of course, to revert back to surnames.

  “Bloody hell! It’s Taylor!”

  “Hallett, you old bastard!”

  All very puzzling and absurd.

  In the event, whether Liddell and Scott had anything to do with it or not, I scored 97 percent in the fag test, a House record. I remember the thrill of seeing the word “Excellent!” scrawled next to my result in Peck’s hand. Peck wore the striped trousers and black waistcoat of the sixth-former as well as the boater of the school polly, but I seem to remember that he also (unless I have gone stark mad) affected a sort of cream-coloured silk stock of the kind huntsmen wear. I thought him little short of a god—even more so when I watched him playing Volpone in the school play and saw that he was a magnificent actor. I think he was the only boy older than me that I ever had a thing for, if you’ll forgive the prissy phrase. I can’t call it a crush exactly, or a “pash” as they were sometimes odiously called; a “thing for” about sums it up.

  I can still remember the twelve Houses in alphabetical order, I suppose every Old Uppinghamian can—I’ll recite them for you.

  Brooklands

  Constables

  Farleigh

  Fircroft

  The Hall Highfield

  The Lodge

  Lorne House

  Meadhurst

  School House

  West Bank

  West Dean

  I do that to show the pleasingly bourgeois nature of the names of most of the Houses. “Meadhurst,” “Farleigh” and my own House, “Fircroft”—they sound as if they belong in Carshalton or Roehampton, peeping through laurel bushes and shaded by monkey-puzzle trees. These Houses were necessarily larger than the average suburban villa however, despite their names, because they had to fit in dormitory and washing facilities for fifty boys, study accommodation, shower rooms, a dining hall and kitchens, as well as boot rooms, storage space and what estate agents once called “the usual offices.” There had to be too the housemaster’s area, the “private side” as it was called, where he could live some sort of life with his wife and family. The Frowdes had two children and a golden Labrador called Jester. I don’t suppose an active dog could have a better life than in the boarding house of a school. No matter how pissed off a boy might be with existence, authority or himself, there was always room to share food and affection with a dog. A dog allowed an adolescent, struggling to be manly, cynical and cool, to romp and giggle and tickle and tumble like a child.

  Each House had its own character, its own nature, its own flavour and atmosphere. Some were known for having more than the average number of the academically able, others provided a disproportionate number of athletes. One House might have a reputation for being messy and ill-disciplined, another for being a hotbed of queering and tarting. Fircroft lay somewhere in the middle. Frowde was not a martinet and did not beat or terrify the boys. The housemaster of West Bank (its nickname spoonerized into Best Wank) was as fearsome a man as I have ever met and was rumoured to thrash like an engine … he taught me Latin and his contribution to my school report one term read:

  Feckless, fickle, flamboyant and evasive. A disappointment.

  Which about summed me up. I rather admired and liked him, he was at least more or less consistent. Masters who inspired complete, abject terror were rather a relief to me. Had this man, Abbot, been my housemaster however, I think I should have run away by the end of my first week. He once, in the middle of a Latin lesson, fell silent in the middle of some talk about Horace. We all looked up from our slumbers and saw that he was staring at a pigeon that had landed on an open windowsill. For three minutes he stared at the pigeon, saying nothing. We began to look at each other and wonder what was up. At last the pigeon flapped its wings and flew away. Abbott turned to the form.

  “I am not paid,” he said, “to teach pigeons.”

  School House was the province of the headmaster, a most extraordinary man called John Royds, one-time Indian Army colonel and ADC to Orde Wingate in Burma. He was physically short but had powerful presence and possessed all the techniques for inspiring awe that one looks for in a headmaster, the ability to swish a gown in an especially menacing way, for example, and a telegraphic, donnishly tart and lapidary way with words. His noticeboard in the colonna
de fluttered with memos, smartly typed by an IBM golfball:

  Re: The wearing of lapel badges

  I think not.

  JCR

  or

  Re: The birthday of Her Majesty the Queen

  The occasion falls today. Hurrah etc. Let joy be unconfined.

  JCR

  or

  Re: Litter in the Old School Room

  We begin to weary of this nuisance. Be aware: our vigilance is ceaseless.

  JCR

  That sort of thing. Every morning he would step out of his House, walk with a firm tread and upright gait that concealed the most painful arthritis and snip a red rosebud from a bush in the garden which he would attach to the buttonhole of his charcoal grey suit. At one stage he developed shingles, causing him to wear the blackest and most impenetrable dark glasses at all times and in all situations, including the pulpit which, coupled with the subfuse of his clothing, gave him the sinister look of Alan Badel in Arabesque or the menacing cool of a Tarantino hitman avant la lettre.

  The application form to Uppingham required a recent photograph of the candidate to be affixed to it. By the first day of term Royds would have studied these and knew every single new boy in the school by sight.