The Day Gone By Read online

  Why not a day school in Newbury? the reader may ask. Don’t be silly! Only lower middle-class boys went to day schools. If you didn’t go to a boarding-school you weren’t a gentleman, and on top of that you would grow up to be a wet and a weed. Worse still, you wouldn’t be able to wear an old school tie and begin your career by being able to say ‘I was at Wrykin’ (or wherever). It would be an unthinkable social disadvantage, and reflect badly upon your parents. Such values were in those days unquestioned.

  Horris Hill, whatever its merits - and they are considerable - was not and is not a beautiful place. The buildings are downright ugly — tall, gaunt, asymmetrical and horribly institutional in appearance. Although it is in open country, there is precious little pleasure in nature (or none such as I was used to) to be found in the grounds. A gravel playground adjoining what is called ‘the lower field’; and an upper field which in my day was used only for nets, cricket, football and golf; a sloping pinewood on one side of the lower field and a thin belt of half-starved trees along the other; these were our confines. The whole place formed a bare upland, inhospitable alike to wild-flowers, birds and animals. Years later, when as an adult I visited the prep. school called Elstree, near Woolhampton, to watch Horris Hill play them at football, I was struck by the charm and beauty of the place (it is basically a sixteenth-century manor, with delightful grounds) and could not help wondering how much influence the ugliness of Horris Hill and the beauty of Elstree respectively had upon those who unconsciously soaked up their environs during four impressionable years of boyhood.

  Horris Hill’s domestic facilities would strike any parent today with amazement. There were adequate water-closets, certainly, and wash-hand basins a little way off; but that was about all. On one side of the changing-rooms were some stone troughs, which you could fill with cold water to wash the mud off your arms and legs after football. However, this activity was neither supervised nor compulsory and few bothered with it. Everybody got one hot bath a week.

  In the dormitories there were no taps; only carafes of cold water. Everyone cleaned their teeth into the same wash-bowl, to facilitate the task of the maid who came round to empty it and rinse it out. Under each bed was a chamber pot, and these must have been emptied and cleaned by the maids as part of morning bed-making drill. In one corner of each dormitory was a lidded, wooden commode, for use by anyone who might be taken short in the night. I never knew one to be used; though during my time I knew three or four people to have involuntary ‘accidents’ in their sleep and beds.

  In the mornings, winter and summer alike, there were cold baths. In those days cold baths were a common institution of all boarding-schools. We’d have despised any school that didn’t have them. (I believe Bryanston and Dartington Hall didn’t: they were ‘progressive’ and ipso facto ‘weedy’.) Two or three baths in the bathroom were filled with cold water and thither we proceeded in our dressing-gowns. You had to get in and out carefully, not to spill any water — a degree of deliberation which lengthened the nasty process. Cold baths, as well as evening hot baths, were supervised by the under-matron, Miss Archer, a spare, leathery, middle-aged, unsmiling woman who was universally liked and respected because she never raised her voice and was the same to everyone; firm, consistent and fair, and impossible to bamboozle. We never thought it in the least disconcerting to be naked in front of Miss Archer; and she herself was equally equable in the matter.

  In those days there was much less fuss about nakedness. If some occasion, such as bathing, cold baths or the doctor, required you to be naked, you simply undressed without a second thought. Only ill-bred people were self-conscious about nakedness. As is well-known, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) used to photograph the little daughters of his Oxford friends naked, and they were delighted for him to do so, as he did it very well. Any innuendo about it would have been met with silence, raised eyebrows and an immediate change of subject: the offender wouldn’t have been invited again.

  Like most other people, I hated the cold baths. But from the school’s point of view they had their advantages. To start with, Mr Stow didn’t have to pay for hot water in the mornings. Secondly, they saved labour and were a quick, convenient way of getting ninety-odd boys up, washed and wide-awake. Thirdly, we never seemed to get colds and our general resistance to cold was good.

  There was no electricity anywhere in the school. Downstairs there were gas brackets with incandescent mantles. Some had low pilot jets which burned all day, but these were only in relatively dark places such as storerooms, where they might need to be turned up at any time. At dusk, the pantry boy would go round the entire ground floor with a taper on a stick, turning on and lighting the gas. I still like to see a mantle, for instance on a Tilley lamp, take on its brilliant, dazzling glow: it tells of cosy snugness (not that we had any curtains), falling twilight and attention to books. I like the smell, too.

  At Horris Wood, a house providing extra dormitory accommodation about three hundred yards away and situated just beyond the pine-wood I have already mentioned, there wasn’t even any gas. As evening fell Vera, the buxom, pleasant, gentle-voiced maid, would light a whole battery of paraffin lamps and range them together on a tray. This she carried from room to room downstairs - hall and corridors too. Each had its place and each burned on until lights out. Sometimes one or another would suddenly flare and smoke, requiring quick adjustment from the nearest passer-by. These lamps had a smell all their own. It is one of pleasant associations for me, since I was - when the time came - happy at Horris Wood, as I will relate. Paraffin lamps at evening - that soft light, illuminating print, knitting or mending, but leaving friendly gloom in the room’s corners - well, I’m sorry, reader, that you should have been denied the blessing of this gentle, homely change from the rhythm of the sun to the rhythm of nightfall. This is something vanished for ever, as surely as the dust on the hedges.

  The routine of going to bed never varied. After prayers in the big schoolroom, a mug of milk and two biscuits were dished out to each boy. Then, after a reasonable interval, Mr Stow, standing at the big invigilation desk, would call out ‘One!’ The captain of One (always a second-year boy set over a new boys’ dormitory) would lead his little file up to shake hands with Mr Stow, who said ‘Goodnight, Trevor’, ‘Good-night, Basil’, to each. They would be followed by Two, Three and so on, until the last, Ten. The biggest dormitory had about twelve boys in it, but the two smallest had only four. The make-up of each was a cross-section of the school. The dormitory captain (whose responsibilities were vague but whose authority most certainly was not) would be a relatively senior boy, while the rest ranged gradually down in seniority to the ‘dorm. squit’, who might be a mere second-termer. This system, on the whole, worked well, for it meant that you had some regular company other than your contemporaries, and that you learned how to deal with your elders (and, in due course, your juniors).

  When you had said good-night to Stidge and climbed the stairs (sometimes with your biscuits still hoarded in your pocket) there would, in winter, be a single candle burning in each dormitory. (In summer, the fading daylight was enough.) Initially silence obtained, and everyone knelt by his bed to say his personal prayers. The silence lasted for about three or four minutes and I never knew it to be abused. It was taken very seriously (though we never received any actual instruction about private prayer). Then a little, hand-held, tinkling bell was rung by the master on duty and undressing, tooth-cleaning and the rest proceeded. We got about twenty or twenty-five minutes for talk before being ‘shut up’ for the night. Reading, except on long lie-in on Sunday mornings, was not allowed.

  To Horris Hill’s lack of electric light I owe more than I can tell. Indeed, it may very well have been the greatest blessing of my life, for it was this which made me a dormitory story-teller. The shadowy, candle-lit dormitories of winter; or those same dormitories in the fading twilight after sunset; these were settings for a storyteller such as no electrically lit room could ever have provided. They possessed what
Padraic Colum has called ‘the rhythm of the fire’ (the story-teller’s rhythm, as opposed to the rhythm of the sun, the worker’s rhythm). Often, at the beginning of term, a captain would ask his bunch, with whom he was not yet familiar, who could tell a story. It was unwise for the squit to volunteer; usually a boy of middling seniority would take up the business. As a rule the stories were homespun enough in narration - told conversationally, with little real sense of climax or flow. Still, I have since heard adult Irish and Scottish story-tellers with equally conversational and even bathetic styles. A true folk-tale teller is usually rather colloquial. Many listeners don’t like a dramatic style of narration, especially from someone they know personally. It embarrasses them. They consider it pretentious and false. The dormitory stories nearly always lacked originality, too. They were likely to be paraphrases of Bulldog Drummond or Sherlock Holmes, or of some play the narrator had seen in the holidays or heard on the wireless. Ghosts were always popular, but were often laid on rather too thick. (‘The door opened and in came a clanking skeleton …’ Sometimes this sort of thing drew mocking interjections: ‘… who said “Good morning, boys: baths!”’ - Miss Archer’s invariable reveille.) All the same, good story-tellers did crop up from time to time. I remember how, when I was in Dormitory Seven, two boys called Wilkins and Meredith used to enact, vocally (we weren’t allowed out of bed) nightly episodes of a whole serial play. It was about a stolen diamond, I recall, and continued, to much acclamation, for two or three weeks. At intervals the protagonists had to be in a car or an aeroplane, and another boy called Job - a nice chap who was later killed in World War II - was required to maintain continuously the Brrrrr of the engine. I didn’t envy him. On the whole, dormitory talk could be amusing, informative and a lot of fun. You heard much about life in the school at levels other than your own.

  You never knew what dormitory you were going to be in until, at the beginning of each term, you went upstairs to the locker-room and asked Sister. (Sister’s name was Miss Wood. She was a strange, uncertain lady of emotional crushes and odd moods; she was not terribly popular. Looking back, I think now that her naturally passionate temperament was badly frustrated, poor woman.)

  After some two years, at the age of about eleven-and-a-half, I became one of those selected to go over to Horris Wood. My dormitory captain of the previous term, S —, had been a bully and a beast: one of his devices had been to make you strip your pyjama-top off so that he could pour the hot candle-grease onto your back. Then you had to put your top straight on again. When you woke in the morning, the congealed grease tore the skin off your back.

  I remember Sister Wood calling out across the crowded locker-room ‘You’re over at the Wood, Dicky!’ I could have danced for joy; it was such an anxiety off my mind. I knew S— wouldn’t have been sent over to the Wood: he was too senior. Either you went when you were about half-way up the school, or else not at all. Selection was entirely random. What was more, once you had gone to the Wood you remained there for the rest of your time.

  Horris Wood was a soft option, and those who went there were, on the whole, envied. To be a Wooder set you a little apart, for it was a world of its own, with separate ways and a separate atmosphere. To start with, it was much smaller than Horris Hill, with only about thirty boys in five dormitories. Stidge was not the resident genius loci, but the third master, Mr Liddell (known as Twid). Twid could keep order all right, but he was unpredictable in his emotions. Most of the time he was gentle and kind-hearted to a fault - he hated punishing anybody - but he was apt to break out into sudden rages which could be frightening. The angrier he got, the less he could pronounce his ‘r’s’, and I treasure a memory of my friend Jim Wilson imitating him with a cry of ‘Oh, you howwible little bwat, can’t you wealize it’s a pawallelogwam?’

  After evening milk and biscuits, instead of waiting to say goodnight to Stidge, Wooders went off to the boot-room and put on overshoes, kept specially for them. These were not galoshes, but a sort of rubber-soled ankle-boot fastened across with a clip: I’ve never seen them anywhere else. Then you sallied forth into the night — starlight, fog, moonlight, rain, even snow, sometimes — to cross the three hundred yards to the Wood.

  Matron-wise, the Wood wasn’t run by Sister Wood and Miss Archer, either. No; it was run by May Gozzer - beloved, adorable Gozzer - whose regime was, I am inclined to guess, more motherly, kind, warm and indulgent than anything which a lot of those boys had known in their lives; I can tell you, many of the mothers I saw visiting on parents’ days, tight-lipped, impersonal, unsmiling, fur-coated and lipsticked (‘Don’t do that, Geoffrey’), made me feel jolly glad that none of them was my mother. Gozzer was warmth and benevolence personified.

  Her position as matron to thirty boys at the Wood - a sort of half-job - was typical of the kind of semi-official arrangement that could so easily be set up in those days when distances were greater, places more isolated, parents less critical and headmasters undisputed rulers of their own realms. The three Misses Gosling - Moggy, May and Ethel — were maiden ladies - patients of my father — who lived in a good, solid, Victorian house called ‘Gorsefield’ (or ‘Gosfield’ by the facetious) across the Common and about three-quarters of a mile from the school. They had the pleasant, sizeable house and they had a competence of sorts, left them by their parents, but it was too small for more than a modest establishment. They were of good family, but none of them had ever married (though the man who married May would have been lucky). Once, when I asked my mother why, she replied sardonically ‘No one was ever good enough for them.’ Now, appreciating my mother’s own class background and marriage, I can see the force of her answer - an implied but very valid criticism of a silly social system. Be that as it may, the three Gozzers, though indulgently made a little fun of behind their backs, were popular and respected in the neighbourhood. They sometimes gave tennis parties on a court which was so mossy that the balls would hardly bounce, and at which they gave you ‘lemonade’ consisting of a lemon sliced up into a jug of water. They were dears. Ethel, the youngest, was deaf, and Moggy, the eldest, was an Oxford Grouper. But I am concerned now with May — ‘Gozzer’ to hundreds of Horris Wood boys of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties.

  I don’t believe Gozzer had any nursing qualifications and I’ll bet she was paid next to nothing; yet I can’t remember anything ever going medically wrong at Horris Wood. People got ‘flu in the spring term — common in those days. Gozzer put them to bed in the sick-room, made them beef tea, spoiled them and fussed over them. My father came and looked at them and they duly got better. That was about the extent of it.

  I suppose Gozzer - the tears come to my eyes as I write of her –wasn’t altogether good for us, really. A matron needs to have some sort of authority, and Gozzer exercised virtually none at all. Yet bestowed upon her, as it were, like a nimbus, was the natural authority of a person universally loved. We all addressed her as ‘Goz’ as a matter of course. Once, Mr Liddell gave us a talking-to about it, but it made only a temporary difference. In any case, Gozzer didn’t really care for Mr Liddell exercising much discipline. The punishment for talking after lights out was invariably beating (and with a cane, in pyjamas, that hurts a lot). Gozzer would, as often as not, get wind of Mr Liddell’s intention to ‘go round’ after lights out to hear whether anything was going on; and when she did, she would tip off the captains of the dormitories. If it was to be a boy’s birthday, others in the dormitory would let Gozzer know, and when she made her rounds to us in bed, with her tray of laxatives, medicaments, plaster and cotton wool, there would be ‘celebrations’ (known as ‘celibries’). Gozzer, strictly against the rules, would give out butter drops all round (known as ‘brown pills’). I have never known anyone - not even Miss Langdon – from whom sheer kindness and benevolence poured in such a stream. She loved to be kind. You could tell her anything: you could weep on her sympathetic shoulder. Perhaps, in that tightly disciplined world, that was her real secret. She loved us for the dangers we had passe
d, and we loved her that she did pity them.

  If there came a point, as there sometimes did, when things got out of hand and something simply had to be put a stop to, she would go into a ‘Goz fluster’. Speech would pour from her in a stream of unfinished sentences - ‘No, no, no - you really mustn’t – now stop, dear, stop – quite wrong – very bad for you, too – if Mr Liddell got to know -’ (We knew he wouldn’t.) A Goz fluster always worked - calmed things down - simply because it was so embarrassing to see this charming lady out of countenance; we knew we’d abused her indulgence, and would pull ourselves together.

  Gozzer’s diction was very U and correct, in the Victorian/Edwardian manner which even then was old-fashioned. She always dropped the final ‘g’ of present participles: So-and-so was ‘charmin’: he was comin’ over on Saturday’ etc. Perhaps he was goin’ to play ‘goff, for this was another of her turns of speech. People were liable to have nasty ‘cawfs’. Marian Hayter was ‘an awfully jolly girl’. I recall now that the Gozzers had a brother, known as ‘the Major’, who played tennis with a racket which had a fish-tailed handle. I’ve never seen another.

  I cannot refrain from relating the story Gozzer once told me about her visit to Chartres before the Great War. ‘We were goin’ to see the Cathedral and then we were goin’ on for a picnic and some fishin’. We got orf about ten o’clock and the only thing that was worryin’ me was that we hadn’t got anything to put the bait in, so it was messin’ everything up. And then, as we were comin’ out of the Cathedral, I saw this man sellin’ bottles full of water, with round tops like jamjars. So I said to Ethel, “Look, the very thing for our bait!” So I bought two - although they seemed rather expensive - and poured out the water on the ground; and I was just puttin’ the bait in when all these French people started makin’ a terrible fuss and chatterin’ away: we couldn’t understand a word they said. But then it turned out that what they were sayin’ was that it was holy water, and we had quite a business gettin’ away from them. Well, how were we supposed to know about their silly old holy water?’