The Day Gone By Read online

  The place began in 1850 as a sort of choir school for the village - a kind of serious hobby, one might say, of the founder, a local gentleman called Thomas Stevens. By 1881 Stevens had in effect gone broke. He couldn’t pay the staff, so he handed the place over to the then headmaster, Herbert Gray. Gray was to Bradfield what Arnold was to Rugby. During the thirty or more years (too long) that he was headmaster, he not only made the place solvent but built it up into a reasonable minor public school. Whitworth was the third headmaster to follow Gray and, although a limited man and in some respects even a little ridiculous, succeeded, largely by being a man of conscience and complete integrity, in keeping his staff loyal and even attached to him, favourably impressing parents and in general maintaining the standing of the place.

  As is well known, Bradfield’s unique feature is its Greek amphitheatre, constructed by Gray, during the late eighteen-eighties, from a disused chalk-pit, using the labour only of boys and locals. As far as I know, it is the only amphitheatre of its kind north of the Mediterranean. Here, triennially for the past century (except during the wars), an ancient Greek play has been acted in the original Greek. Gray himself, in his time, used to play the Choriphaios. The benefit and value of the Greek theatre and, simply, its power to influence for good and to confer happiness upon thousands of people - upon which I will expand later - have been another important feature of my life and had a great effect upon me. As I grew older it became - and remains - the best thing Bradfield gave me. To go there still brings its own singular delight. I am a Bradfieldian: this is my theatre - has been for more than fifty years - where I can honestly say that I have been more consistently happy than anywhere else. This blessing, however, was still to come.

  I was the first boy ever to go from Horris Hill to Bradfield. (Now they go in numbers.) Many years later I heard (from John Moulsdale, a kind of Bradfieldian Mr Chips) that Whitworth, meeting Mr Stow at some sort of academic get-together, said ‘Well, Stow, so you’re sending me a boy at last.’ ‘A very peculiar one,’ replied Stow.

  For a boy in the top form at Horris Hill to take nothing more than the Common Entrance exam, to a school like Bradfield was felt to be almost - if not quite - a discredit. Neither Mr Stow nor Mr Morris, of course, said anything to imply this, but my form-mates did - plenty. I had no recourse but to bear this as best I could. The way things turned out - and in the light of Nicholas Monsarrat’s account of Winchester at that time in his autobiography, Life is a Four Letter Word - I can only feel very thankful that I went to Bradfield.

  However, it would have been a strange new boy of thirteen who could have arrived at any idea of this. In those days life at Bradfield was - by modern standards, anyhow - harsh. At least, it was harsh at the bottom, though I was to find out later that it was not so harsh at the top. The academic work was all right – I came top of my class during my first term, and was told by the form master (that same John Moulsdale) that I ought really to have been placed in a higher form - and so were the games. But over and above these was the fagging, which was severe. This fell into four categories, of which the worst was house-room fagging. House-room fags were organized in gangs of four - a head fag and three others – who were ‘on’ twice a week. (The Sunday gang had only Sundays.) Their job was to sweep and dust the house-room (where all but the most senior boys lived when not in class or at games) in the evening, before prep. They had twenty minutes in which to do it. This doesn’t sound bad, but in practice it was murder. To start with, the brooms were worn and wobbly-headed from hard use, and the damp rags for dusting smelt sickly-foul. Twenty minutes wasn’t time enough for the job. The fags (not allowed to take their coats off) worked like demons, all of a sweat. The brooms raised a choking dust which hung thick in the air like fog and fouled your hair, your neck and your clothes. Afterwards, you could cough or blow your nose and the mucus would actually be black. The raised dust settled on the tops of the lockers and on the windowsills and undid the work of the fag doing the dusting. Bigger boys cursed you for the trouble you were causing. At last it was time to stop, though it could never be time to be done. Then came the crunch. The head of the house-room - not a prefect, but next in line - inspected the work. If he decided it was inefficient - and, like most jacks in office, he was usually hard to please - he could punish you – either the head fag or the whole gang. The punishment might be learning verse, or it might be doing an extra fag - that of someone else who had given better satisfaction. For consistently bad fagging — say, three times in a row - you were beaten by the junior prefect.

  Then there was bell fagging. You were bell fag for the day about three times a term. This meant listening out of the window for the school bell and, on hearing it, running, fast, to ring the house bell (in our house, a war-time relic, the bell of a submarine, B. 10). This wasn’t too bad, except that you were stuck with it all day and couldn’t settle to much else. You had to be ‘there’, listening out. Study fagging was much more of a bore. There were two fags to each prefect’s study, and they had to sweep and dust it, wash up the tea-things, clean the prefect’s shoes and so on, in addition to their other fagging duties. It left little free time for the junior boys.

  Finally, there was the practice known as a fag call. A prefect could enter the house-room and shout ‘Fag!’, whereupon everyone with less than two years’ seniority had to run and stand in front of him. The last one to arrive was landed with the job — going to buy Mars bars, etc., from Grubs, or carrying a note to a prefect in another house. It wasn’t a fair system, because the boys with lockers at the far end of the house-room stood the least chance.

  Punishment by prefects for breaches of rules was common. A few years ago I met a contemporary at the Old Boys’ annual dinner, and we began swapping memories. ‘It was fascism, really, wasn’t it?’ he said. I could only agree. If a prefect at Bradfield told you to climb up the wall, you not only climbed up the wall damned quick, but you thanked him kindly for not kicking your bottom while you did so. The house was forever full of people learning verse, writing essays so many pages long, picking up rubbish from the gutters of the road leading down the hill, or getting up early to call prefects in their beds at some ghastly hour. A beating in the dormitory was a not uncommon event. The house prefects were allowed to beat only with the heel of a shoe. For a serious offence, the head of the house could beat you with a stick. Later, as a young officer in 1941, with Hitler at the gates and all on the hazard, I had to learn that British Other Ranks were not going to stand for the sort of discipline which had been the order of the day at Bradfield.

  The school regime worked on the privilege system. As a new boy you had no privileges at all: as you gained in seniority you acquired some, and then more. It was a privilege to brew up on a Primus, to put your hands in your pockets, to whistle or sing, to wear a pullover, to call another boy by his Christian name. There was a whole host of sartorial privileges - brown shoes, coloured colours, tassels on mortarboard hats - for we all had to wear mortarboard hats and gowns - and heaven knows what else.

  But the worst one was the prohibition on ‘bitching’. Bitching was school slang for horseplay, but the term extended to any unbridled behaviour whatsoever. To push another boy was bitching; to take a hop, skip and jump or to swing from the branch of a tree was bitching. I remember a boy who was judged to be bitching by kicking a tin can. The rule against bitching was rigorously enforced, and the punishment was always beating. This meant that until you were in your third year, you couldn’t let off steam anywhere at all (apart from games), and even in your third year only in the house-room: and these were healthy boys of thirteen, fourteen and fifteen.

  In writing of Delmé-Radcliffe I said that with him and with only one other I have remained mentally stuck. This other was my housemaster, Mr B. M. Arnold. There was no way in which Mr Arnold and I could have hit it off. He was a most rigid and insensitive man, with no natural inclination towards literature or the arts, and a martinet who enforced the strict rules with no flexibility at al
l. His great obsession was with ‘leave’. For any out-of-the-ordinary activity, such as attending a College society meeting or going, when bidden, to see another master during prep., you had to ask and receive leave. If you were a hair’s breadth out of line - if you went early or came back a minute late - he would be on it like a knife, and any attempt to defend yourself only drove him into a terrifying rage. He was himself a distinctly limited man: he taught only lower school forms, and the general view (later corroborated to me by John Moulsdale) was that he had got his job only because Mrs Arnold was a close friend of the Headmaster’s wife. ‘Rather an unfortunate appointment, really,’ said Moulsdale.

  Mr Arnold had been a major in the Gunners during the Great War, and this - not his rank, but the war - he invoked incessantly. We must all be like the fellows who fought in the war, we must be worthy of their example, we must never give up but always fight on, etc. I can’t remember ever having a conversation with him in which he showed any real receptiveness or sensitivity. On one occasion he quite literally shouted me down and punished me with stoppage of all leave for a month (to the fury of my form master) for something I hadn’t done and given the opportunity could have proved I hadn’t done. The trouble was that he could be very alarming in confrontation and there was no reasoning with him. His nickname was ‘The Freezer’ - to ‘freeze’ meaning to quell with a fixed, hostile and intimidating stare. I can never forget that freeze: it was like waiting for a hand-grenade to go off.

  The harm was negative. To go to a public school and not to have a wise, understanding housemaster is to be deprived of something which ought to be a blessing and a major influence for good. The greatest single factor (for good or ill) in a boarding-school education is the boys’ relationship with their teachers, which ought, ideally, to remain potent; a helpful, warm memory in later life. (Hence the public status of ‘Mr Chips’ as a kind of archetype.) When I saw, a few years ago, in the West End, a successful and long-running play, called Another Country, about a public school in the ‘thirties, I was struck by the feature that the cast contained not one master and that no sort of relationship of the boys with the masters was ever touched upon. Yet this is what public school education is all about. The staff should be guru, wise advisers, liked, respected people whom you feel you want to emulate. A universal situation like this is, of course, impossible of achievement in real life, but nevertheless it ought to be possible to bring about some of it, with some masters and some boys, some of the time. A housemaster whom you both fear and despise (as one grew older one could not but despise Mr Arnold - not, perhaps, for his conduct but certainly for his want of sincere interest in the arts) is a misfortune. In Arnold’s time The Close (the name of our house) were reckoned a rough bunch of hobbledehoys. There’s no doubt that a lot of us were - philistines - and Mr A. did nothing to remedy this. I doubt he was ever aware of or thought about it. But I will say one thing for him. At least he was conscientious and took the job seriously, according to his lights. He visited the sick, got round the dormitories and talked to people.

  What I always felt and still feel about Bradfield at that time (and this is borne out by contemporary friends) was that the actual teaching - with certain honourable exceptions - was not up to much. In those days, a public school was a relatively remote, secluded microcosm. Parents were discouraged from poking their noses in. The media never turned their beams that way. It never occurred to headmasters and others to make public appearances (there was no television, anyway). In those enclosed communities, a master with good reasons for not feeling further ambition, having found himself a niche, could gently grow older and more eccentric in peace and quiet. The pressure of public examinations was nothing like what it is today. Far fewer parents and pupils thought in terms of a university, and for those who did, the universities were not difficult to get into, provided parents had the money. Quite a few of the masters at Bradfield were old shellbacks, some of them distinctly eccentric and certainly not people to push a boy on and devote themselves to getting the best out of him. This to a certain extent includes the Headmaster, for though a decent fellow, brisk, and knowledgeable about the staff and the school (he made an excellent first impression), he couldn’t teach for toffee. In point of fact he didn’t teach: he merely waffled. I don’t think he prepared his lessons at all. (And he had no sense of humour.) Fortunately, however, I was later to come under the influence of two quite exceptional masters, who changed my life.

  I have said enough to show that life for a junior boy (a fag) at Bradfield in those days was not only not very pleasant, but also a considerable strain - the academic work, the organized games and runs, the fagging — about as much as you could physically cope with.

  Unlike Horris Hill, at Bradfield there was no allotted time for private prayer. And there was no sex education; none. Yet any kind of sexual crime was very severely punished. In a homosexual relationship - and there were plenty - the bigger boy might possibly be ‘asked to leave’. Some of these relationships were touchingly sincere and helped both participants to find a bit of happiness and pleasure amid the rigours of College life. During my third year, when I was just sixteen and beginning to make a bit of a mark in the school by my writing, I got to know a senior boy in another house:; Anthony Jacobs, the editor of the school magazine (in which some of my poems appeared). Reader, I married him; well, something like that, anyway. This was the rain-drenched summer of 1936, about the worst on record; day after day of rain, making games impossible. Anthony and I were blissfully happy. He was so considerate, so unselfish, so kind and even-tempered a lover that I can only asseverate, after all these years, that that was one of the happiest love relationships of my life. I myself was not moved to sexual activity, but I loved being desired by Anthony; I loved gratifying him; and I loved talking with him and being with him. He was himself of unconventional disposition; no mean poet, as well as being a fine musician and singer and a splendid actor. In short, he was excellent value and very good for me. His influence helped me enormously and I was proud to be his lover. That summer he played Feste in Twelfth Night in the Greek theatre. It was a notable production. I missed him like hell the following term, after he’d left. He went up to Cambridge and then became - with his beautiful speaking voice — a radio actor with the B.B.C.

  I think the bad feature of the Bradfield régime was that it set out to hammer you into the deck, and in many cases didn’t lift you up again. No doubt it is a good thing for boys to ‘have the nonsense knocked out of them’ (‘Not fit to command until you’ve learned to obey’), but Bradfield had the effect of leaving me without any initiative whatever in objective life. It’s safest to obey; it’s safest to do what you’re told; it’s safest to take no offence, never to criticize and not to answer back. It’s safest to defer to authority and take no chances. Let others take the decisions.

  The only area of my life not affected in this way was the realm of the imagination, which remained untouched by the régime. In the realm of the imagination I move surely and independently, ready to take the initiative and to select and reject on no advice but my own. I know where I am and what I’m doing and have no apprehension. (‘You shut up: I’m doing this.’) Well, perhaps it was all for the best. Who can tell? But I think it’s a great pity that the concept of self-respect was virtually omitted from that public school system of the ‘thirties. Unless you came to be a prefect (which I never did) you couldn’t really have much in the way of self-respect. Like Doolittle in Pygmalion, you couldn’t afford it. You had to go in for lying, evasion and abject subservience. Getting round the fetters on your raw physical energy and your sexuality called for cunning and duplicity. I, of course, was no stranger to the unscrupulous. (The begonias.) But at Bradfield this developed into a policy of dodging and avoidance almost like that of Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich - except as regarded the academic work and the games, like fives and swimming, at which I wanted to excel.

  I think it is worth recording one particular thing - a good and valuable
thing among all the dreariness - which happened during my first term. The form I was in, known as Lower Shell B, had in its curriculum one period a week with the music master. What he did with us was entirely up to him. The music master was a quiet, reserved man called John Alden (who, as I was later to learn from Anthony Jacobs, on the whole disliked the system and most of the Senior Common Room). Alden’s principal notion for the weekly hour was to have a lasting effect on me. Towards the end of term a string quartet were coming to give a concert at Bradfield, and Alden’s idea was to familiarize us with the works which they would be playing. This he did partly with gramophone records and partly on the piano. He did it very well. By the day of the concert the principal subjects and the construction of the movements were clear enough, at any rate, to me. It was an excellently chosen programme: Haydn’s Opus 64, No. 6, in E flat; Mozart’s K458 in B major (the Hunting Quartet); and the Ravel Quartet. The whole business was a complete eye-opener to me: I had known nothing whatever of the construction of movements or how to listen intelligently to music. Of course, for a thirteen-year-old it was only scratching the surface. But it was a true start - a first step - an escape - into a valid fantasy world of solace and delight. Music is the most sure and splendid, the most estimable of all fantasy worlds - if indeed it is a fantasy world and not the only real one. Apart from anything else, that term’s work with John Alden and the concert itself left me with an abiding love of the sheer sound of a string quartet. And there were Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak, Bartok and heaven knows who else to come. That’s what I call education - adding new dimensions to life.

  After two years at Bradfield things began gradually to improve. In the summer term of 1935 I took School Certificate, got seven credits (not very difficult) and next term, at fifteen and a half, got my remove to the upper school. I pressed strongly, on my own account, to be allowed to become a history specialist, and so found myself back in a class of no more than nine or ten people. My first academic year there, 1935-36, was pretty disastrous and boded little good to come. The study of history and the writing of historical essays require a particular kind of mental discipline and application, and neither John Moulsdale (who taught the English history) nor Whitworth (European) got this across to me at all. I wasted my time, really. By the end of the summer term of 1936 I didn’t look like any sort of university entrant, and the Headmaster said as much on my report. (Not that my father cared.) However, in another sphere I had come under yet one more of the important and lasting influences on my life.