At Wisborough Lodge Prep. School

by Robert Priddy

One day when I was nine years old, my mother asked me if I would like to go to boarding school, something of which I had never heard before. As I gradually understood that this meant being sent away, I was extremely upset at the idea. Later I was gently told it nevertheless had to be. Week by week the idea was aired, both my parents tried to explain to me that there was no alternative and my fate became more real each time. I was being sent away and I could not comprehend why or how such an unimaginable future must occur. I then pleaded and begged not to have to go. I couldn't see why I couldn't stay at home and go to any school. My mother said I would be coming back for visits, but it would be awful if I had to go to the village 'ragged school', which was still the vernacular for the ordinary National schools. I only half-understood the complicated reasons of class-standing behind this. I was not made to feel unwanted but then nor could I quite grasp the necessity of it. What they did not tell me was that my father was in the process of losing his job and that they were in the crises of married life that eventually led to their final separation.

We made two trips in the car to likely schools, a well-reputed one on the cliffs above Beachy Head which had to be abandoned because the elderly headmaster showed homosexual tendencies towards me in on the sly. The other was deep in the countryside of West Sussex. After a friendly interview I was to be 'placed' there. The Scottish headmaster and wife, Mr. and Mrs. MacD., were charmingly nice to me over tea they served in their drawing room to my mother, father and I, painting a rosy picture of the school life, friends and activities and thus conning me into agreement at least to give it a try. I believed I could simply try it out, but I had unknowingly already passed the point of no return.

When the day arrived months later and we went to the school they said the rule was for new boys not to go on weekend visits home for 'the first few weeks'. I was taken unawares and didn't know what to do. When my father and mother drove off in the Humber I was sent off to wait in the library where Mrs. MacD. came with another boy of my age who was introduced to me as my befriender. He was told to taken me around and help me get into the way of things. I believed he was a pal and protector forever but as he was already part of the clique I think he was soon under subtle but strong pressures from others to stop associating with me, a 'new boy', that is, an outsider who was to be kept out for the first term at least.

Gradually he left me to my own designs, saying he'd told me all he could and hoped I'd be all right from then on... never mind, I'd soon 'learn the ropes'. Those first days were beyond my worst fears. Despite the novel aspects of being among so many boys, the unknown world into which I was plunged, with its possibility of awful enmities, held many indefinable fears that loomed larger hour by hour!

Some slightly older boys, who had totally ignored my arrival in their dormitory, heard me say something and told me I was a new boy and therefore had no right to speak at all unless spoken to. These boys picked on any idiosyncracy of speech or appearance for ridicule, imitating tones of voice or just repeating some phrase new to them that I had used to one another and laughing spitefully at me. When I ignored them they would follow me and become threatening. To show any sign of feeling was to be jeered at. Whatever sort of reaction or non-reaction I tried, a means of provocation was found. This atmosphere was often kept up in the dormitory towards myself and other relative newcomers while the rest of the boys said nothing, probably for fear of reprisal on themselves.

The headmaster had told me to come to him or his wife if anything was wrong. I did go soon and was led into the head's study, not into the drawing room with its cheerful fire, which I never saw again. Mr. MacD.'s attitude had changed over entirely to a disciplinary seriousness with hardly a smile. They had made it sound as though one could always go home, at least for a visit, if necessary. I could not express the magnitude of the overall shock that this near total change of my life was to me, so I could only say that I wanted to go home. The headmaster ignored that and appealed to me to give it a good try, to have patience and things would get better. Then I wanted to visit home at least for the weekend. Despite his apparent cheeriness, Mr. MacD. was quite stern: surely I knew that no visits were allowed for the first six weeks for new boys? He would hear no question of that, only wanting to know what was the problem. Telling anything, such as about the continual belittlement for no other reason than that one was a new boy, was to risk being branded a sneak. There were unspoken but ominous threats of what could happen if you did, too!

The headmaster told me that it was no more than homesickness and that I had to grow up and take it more like a man would. The coolness of his reasonability in his clipped Scots speech was itself like a blow. Run along back to one's friends and keep a cheerful front on it, boy! It was impossible to tell him that there were no friends, only boys who said that new boys have no right to talk unless spoken to. It seemed an absolute rule to me. To stand six weeks of outer and inner hell seemed utterly impossible. I began to realise that I was inextricably cast into that prison and would have to learn to survive in it.

When boys are thrown together day and night without the constant surveillance of adults, a kind of 'pecking order' in various kinds of activity soon comes about, often begun in a physical or verbal way and kept up by largely implicit understanding through non-verbal threats and collusion that no adult who is not permanently present could recognise or penetrate.

So I went through the painful lesson of learning the primitive law of the jungle. The particular law that held sway, at least in the lowest strata, was that might is the greatest right. When it came to it, as it always did sooner or later, the strongest or most aggressive boy decided the outcome of any issue, whether by force or just by the threat of it. There were no referees, seldom even any seconds, for the flock instinct of giving way to the top dog prevailed... not just giving way but usually also avidly following to be in at the kill. Those who disliked or feared the various dangers of the chase were usually only allowed to remain neutral with much difficulty and through covert subtlety rather than straightforward openness. A relentless law indeed ruled the day and it was applied as widely as the circumstances allowed. Though any physical enforcement was impossible when there were masters present, the rule was often made to apply at all times by threats of future retribution as soon as the chance occurred. When the cat was away, the mice would play. And similarly, when the bullies were temporarily absent for some reason... the timid would be friendly enough to each other, until a bully returned. Then conformity would reign just as much as the bully decided at his passing whim, such as "No-one can say anything I don't say!" or any other superfluous command he chose to exercise.

Cowed by the sheer cocksureness of the bully and the ignorance or disinterest of the masters, backed by the apparent weight of classroom or dormitory opinion - most of which was ominously unspoken and thus all the harder to grasp or to get to grips with - I realised that neither my uncertain words nor my secret tears were of any use. No one was there to tell me how to deal with the situation or that, if you confront a bully once, he will often back down and the entire situation can be transformed. There were no signs of any backing or support. Only slowly did the jungle sharpen my wits and, as with the weak of limb, teach me to camouflage the inner movements of my soul and also to see where there were small gaps that I could take advantage of in the defences of my opponents.

Disdain for those who lived on their might alone was strong in me and I used it in a personal campaign to gain a loyal friend. Silent unconcern irked the arrogant, a smile at someone who was also under their ire helped weaken their absolute rule, bit by tiny bit... until an unspoken conspiracy began to work.

The school regime was literally based partially on the ancient Greek ideal of the society of Sparta; no personal property, strict discipline, cool showers, no food indulgence and much sport. Even comforts like sufficient heating were in short supply, yet perhaps mainly because of the post-war energy crises and the extreme winter of 1947. In the name of healthy rigour all boys had to wear short trousers and blue knees even in winter until they were eleven years old. Before I qualified for long trousers I did in fact get used to the chill of icy weather and seldom felt it.

The so-called 'communism' of Sparta was behind the school rule that all gifts from home in the way of eatables, like birthday cakes, were cut up into equal portions by the staff and were then given to the recipient for general distribution to whoever he chose. He could himself take only the common share plus one piece. This was a fair enough system, which still allowed some individual choice. This was self-sacrifice in practice, which I look back upon as only right, though at the time the desires of my palate claimed otherwise. It did not lead, as one might perhaps expect, to the desire to compensate by over-eating later in life but instead rather to moderate habits.

All school fare was sparse and was carefully rationed out to each individual so that no-one could eat more than another, whatever their weight or age. There were no fat boys in that school. This policy was probably largely due to the hard times of national rationing, but partly also to the healthy ideal that one should stop eating when there was room for just a bit more. A second-helping was a rare occurrence. Afternoon tea was a mug of tea and a piece of bread onto which margarine had been scraped, then scraped off again. In winter we would try to make the bread-scrape more appetising by 'toasting' it, laying it on the classroom hot-water radiator that was only partially heated. One of the worst bits of luck a boy could have would be to be sitting where the head of a rabbit arrived when lunch was served. You had to take what came, wherever you sat, though you could at least leave it uneaten. The sparse meat rations were often supplemented by the seven-headed rabbits that apparently flourished near our school.

On a Sunday evening, after an irregular and infrequent weekend visit home, I would take a Southdown bus which sped along the uneven, bushy rural roads of West Sussex. I can still hear the approach of a tolling church bell that strikes a deep chord of sorrow and loneliness in me. Many times I returned to school along this forlorn way alone on the top floor of the bus viewing the deserted countryside at the time of Sunday evensong. Instead I could have been laying in the woods around North Lodge on my imaginary adventures in nature... near the warmth of the fire at home, my mother and father, everything that I had believed would go on and not disappear. But it was all gone forever, for soon my father changed his job and my parents had to move from Roffey Park. No longer having a house, they were staying temporarily in a cramped cottage with my very ill aunt and her husband, who had so often stayed with us.

The first holiday was bliss and the return for the second term was both heart-breaking and dismal. The first afternoon however, I came across a new boy standing forlornly in the playground and looking about anxiously. Once I learned that he was to be in my class I decided to make friends. I had determined I would never treat anyone as I had been when I first arrived as a 'new boy'. I gave him good advice to smooth things for him, but also because I hoped to make a new friend for myself too. Shortly afterwards he met another new boy whom he soon brought to me too.

My breakthrough came. I was no longer to be regarded entirely as that casteless pariah, a 'new boy'. Though the bully insisted I still was, the fact of the matter was that I already knew the ropes fairly well and there were also new 'new boys' with whom he would not be able to identify me fully without losing credibility. I struggled with the question as to whether it was honest to befriend new boys when it was I who needed and hoped for friend. Somehow I was able to identify with the two who were sent to us, standing there so forlornly and trying to look unconcerned. I decided straight away to befriend them, which was a risk because others would try to punish me for it, but which was worth it. While they still may have succumbed to the bully, I knew that they would still feel that a friend was better to have and, if not at first, would eventually come round to my policy and join forces with me.

To befriend them was simple enough. It meant only that I talked to them sympathetically and told them whatever they wanted to know, which was otherwise forbidden with new boys. Ignorant of what they were up against, they did not appreciate this fact at first. I tried to forewarn and forearm them. For a while the one wavered in uncertainty while the other seemed to withdraw into himself. Some time after their first experiences of being scornfully called down, told to shut up and all the rest, they evidently found the opportunity to 'compare notes', deciding that I was the person to come to with their troubles. They told me so openly and thanked me for talking to them. From then on I knew that the day was saved and our friendship was sealed and always had a feeling of solidarity, which made the days tolerable, enjoyable and even sometimes joyous.

We three gradually became an object of envy and perhaps even admiration. Other boys began to speak to us, we were something to be reckoned with. Being boys, none of the others gave outward signs of their desire to be befriended too... but soon we were on amicable and then friendly terms with several of them. The atmosphere became easier in the class we were in and also in each our separate dormitories. We kept fairly close to my policy all along and awarely so, because we agreed that there was no good reason to have or want enemies. At the same time, we already knew the danger of bullies and we intended to ignore them and support each other. Some boys were always quite nasty but, though they couldn't fit in, they soon left us all alone. Fortunately, the bully who had plagued me left the school after my second term and by then he had quitened down a lot and had no longer any silent majority to cow.

I missed being at home always and it was not only familiarity or the relaxing of discipline, not freedom of movement or even the personal security from bullying or the like, but love that made the difference. Mother and father love were more valuable and needed than any of the other things and the 'absence' of it because I was away from its daily aura was what caused the pain. The closest to a substitute for it came from my closest friends and from the few women at school, a 'matron' and a lady teacher. Not the headmistress, who was distantly wreathed in loving smiles like icing on a cake that was only for show. I was surely not exceptional in these feelings... I firmly believe they were and will always be shared by children, certainly most who are under the age of twelve.

In the first years, there were equal daily amounts of classroom learning and sport to ensure 'a sound mind in a healthy body', the Spartan ethos. Every afternoon was devoted either to cricket, football, gymnastics, athletics or 'wide games' of some kind. Gradually its benefits had dawned on me as I began to partake with more confidence. The team spirit helped in dissolving enmities and did weld us all together in comradeship for at least some of the time.

We lived in such confinement, both physical and otherwise, within school bounds that the most inconsequential matters were remembered and passed on as if they were events. Everywhere outside school grounds was strictly taboo, and this rule was always observed. We could not watch the movements of normal life, nor buy anything whatever nor even see a shop window. Not even a single radio was allowed. The chief daily enemy was quite simply boredom and frustration at knowing that there was, somewhere, a world of life out there where everything was happening, while we were marooned. The height of all bliss was the celebration of Guy Fawkes' day with fireworks and a bonfire in which we were allowed to char, roast or burn one potato each. Even half-day holiday outings were reserved for the boys with good behaviour marks and I never qualified for these. I now suspect one Montessori-trained lady teacher of actually having radically fixed the marks in my favour one term, for it was to my amazement that I at last found I was among the qualifiers. We were taken by train to see Nelson's Victory in its drydock near Portsmouth, a treat we lived off in memory for weeks.

One evening I found I could command the attention of most of the sixty boys in the dining hall by standing up and making faces behind the back of the duty teacher. To my shame, it was my lady champion herself. She was of extra-chubby build and, perhaps because of her name Miss Cowlishaw, I rather stupidly thought of her as cow-like. But actually I realise that I trusted her, unlike other teachers, because I sensed her fairness and open-heartedness. I may have thought I was safe, sensing that she would not have wanted me punished if caught. But the second time I did it, I was caught red-handed by the headmaster himself, who had presumably been tipped off by someone and had been watching us from behind a door with a glass panel. I was ordered to the study and there I had to bend forward and receive three swipes with a bamboo cane. It did not hurt much, just stung a bit. In fact, I became the centre of attention after all yet again, because everyone wanted to hear about the caning and show some sympathy at my 'bad luck', even though we all agreed it was not unfair. I think the fact that I had made something happen to relieve the dull winter routine of school life seemed to make me quite popular.

The worst part was that I had to go and apologise to her. Still, this saved me from feeling unnecessary further guilt. I had a proper sense of rue and genuine regret, for I was then able to feel how hurtful it could have been from the point of view of Miss Cowlishaw. She was still loving, sympathetically saying she wished I had not been caned as she was against it anyhow and she made me feel she understood it was just a prank, if a rather thoughtless one. I ended up with neither the slightest of physical nor mental scars. I am now able to appreciate the importance of the presence of one or two such teachers in that school, which was so lacking in the real warmth of human love, formalised and intellectualised as it always somehow was.

We boys regarded as a major event the discovery one day that two boys from a higher class were missing. The wildest speculations on the cause and nature of their disappearance flew about until imagination and common sense were both exhausted and the question was left out of sheer boredom. I happened to be the boy who first heard their story, for by chance I needed to go to the toilet well after lights out and there I met the two heroes. They were not at all in the best of spirits but they answered my astonished questions briefly, saying that they had run away and were making for home when they were found by the police. They had been on the run for two days, had soon run out of food and had slept out under hedges.

No caning had been given after their return to the headmaster and this was hard for us others to understand as all serious breaks of rules otherwise 'deserved' caning! Burning to know exactly why they had done it, all I could get from them was that they were very fed up or the like. I told them how brave everyone thought them anyhow. I didn't know what to do when one of them shed tears. We had not realised it but I was later sure that they had 'escaped' due to loneliness and desperation. The eldest of them had always been silent and dull-spirited. In the ready vulnerability of that non-private life where secrets soon leaked out it was never easy to speak of such personal feelings and one always had the sense it was 'just not done'. Whether or not masters encouraged this spartan insensibility I am uncertain, but it certainly ruled.

With one exception, the teachers were masters. One young hero we idolised because he was (or just claimed to be?) a count of some African village and because he organised 'wide-games' for us in an off-handed non-disciplinarian manner and joined in himself as if he were one of us. His wide-games involved the amazing unmonitored freedom to strife through the countryside like trackers on a paper chase, or as 'flag-raiders' trying to discover the hiding place of the opponents' flag-bearers and wrest the standard from them. All he required of us was common sense and our honour not to stray or go to the village. His treatment of us as responsible and akin to himself endeared him to us totally throughout the all-too-brief term that he was with us.

Each Sunday we had to sit and listen to sermons (or at least sit) in the fourteenth-century village church of Wisborough where the talk was of forgiveness, 'turn the other cheek' and Christian charity. One was supposed to be as Jesus-like as possible, meek and mild, so I kept clean out of fights. The diffidence this had formed in me was a disability, for in the world of schoolboys the law of the jungle prevailed, the ultimate recourse being only and always to physical size, strength and the willingness to fight (which was all too often confused with courage). I think it made almost no impression of the practical sort intended. In that dank and mouldy atmosphere one would wait in vain for something to laugh at or for anything to fire the imagination. Though the odd sermon may have been held by some likeable visiting vicar, the preachers' unctious voices usually gave them away as being Sunday spiritual showmen who probably didn't practice what they preached, unless perhaps before a mirror. Very little of what they said bore relevance to the details of our schoolboy lives and the problems and moral dilemmas that we were faced with.

One of the masters, an elderly ex-Indian army colonel (of a Gurkha regiment), was most popular. He spent much extra time entertaining us with athletics training, gymnastics, plus evening talks and showings of films from his army service in India. He also had a Silly Symphony film that was the No. 1 hit whenever he showed it, called 'The Skeleton Dance'. Nearly as popular was Chaplin as a waiter on roller skates, then on ice skates. In one of these he dropped an ice-cream he was serving down a fat ladies' bra. She shook with the shock until it came out below her, went through the gaps between planks on the balcony floor and caused havoc down below. There was a drawback to Col. Kennedy, however, he had less pleasant sides too.

Some parents sent their children at the tender age of seven, even less sometimes when accompanied by an elder brother. I felt great resentment of those adults, seeing two such children standing forlornly in the playground as if frozen by the shock, with tear-stained faces that eventually I remember thereafter as having become mostly dummylike and almost incapable of light-hearted expressions. There was a dumbstruck boy in my dormitory who was the picture of tragedy. The cloud of desperate sorrow that enveloped him literally made everyone shy away. The pain in his eyes I recall vividly is still also visible on each of the yearly school photos. Now and again we tried to befriend him but he would only burst into tears and turn away.

If my first months had been made hell by two young bullies who would pick fights over imagined or invented slights, there were others who suffered far more than I. Another boy whom I later understood was Jewish was taunted with his name and was repeatedly ragged and sometimes even struck by the boys in my class. I know how easily they partook for I became one of them myself. Despite my own sufferings, mild by comparison, I became part of the mob without any self-reflection or sense that it was wrong. The occasional torture of that boy went on for terms, unnoticed by the staff who must surely have reacted had they known. It was just after the war and the Jews' unimaginably terrible sufferings were widely known to any adults.

This shows me something about the way Fascist practices could and still can grow and flourish. The smallest bad example can multiply and cause sufferings that the perpetrators hardly even perceive. The greatest and continuous vigilance must be exercised if such aberrations, soon leading on to dramas that make William Golding's story Lord of the Flies seem feasible, are to be nipped in the bud. That even boys who didn't know what the word 'Jew' meant could act so much in accordance with the pattern of the past suggests that such traditional enmities are indeed hard to remove. The boy himself seemed almost to fit a pattern as if he already had learned the victim's role of pleading and cringing.

Eventually it was brought up and dealt with by a master and we improved for a while. But somehow that boy's occasional cringing way invited more of the same. Maybe a term later our class was visited by a Jewish lady of girth, outspokenness and real temper and nerve. In her lisping accent she told us (correctly) what she thought we had done, asked us why we had been so cowardly together, challenged us to speak up and read us the potential riot act as well against future bullyings of her son. She also reasoned with us and was kindly to us, saying we were surely good boys at heart but had just acted plain senselessly. In the latter, at least, she was exactly right... we had no idea why we had started or how we let ourselves go along with it. She exacted promises from us for the future. If I remember rightly, the teasing had become almost a conditioned reflex and there were one or two relapses before that boy was fully accepted as one of us.

One night just after lights out there was a sudden scare in the dormitory. Two boys were looking out into the misty autumn night and called others to come quickly. They saw the figure of a boy walking outside and beckoning to them, recognising him instantly as a boy they had known two years previously who had drowned in the local river by a weir where the school was out for a swim.

By the time I had realised what was up, the figure had melted into the mist. The reactions of the two boys who had recognised the figure convinced me that that they had seen an apparition. One of them went white as a ghost himself and was so shaken that he fainted and afterwards cried about seeing his lost friend. Both boys claimed the figure had been clear and close and that 'it' had tried to say something to them. Others who had seen it while it receded made it evident that this was no hoax. The duty master had heard what was afoot and had gone straight out to see if anyone were there, but he could find nobody anywhere in the vicinity. It was the talk of the school at breakfast next day until the headmaster and mistress asked us not to say anything about it so as not to frighten the younger pupils. That was doubtless sensible enough. The unpleasant reminder and publicity of a boy having drowned while in the care of the school was surely a motive for the censorship too. How much fancy might have been involved in that case I cannot know. But I have never myself seen a ghost or any such sort of apparition.

It turned out that I had a fairly lively fancy myself for I was able to convince my close friends of several stories that were quite untrue. I got a bit of a name for cooking up stories on our long and rather boring school walks at weekends. Once I tried a dramatic trick of putting myself at the centre of an account of hardy life in a croft in the northernmost wilds of Scotland near Wick amid snows and glens with red deer and polecats. It was a bit of a sensation and I had to tell all my friends in turn, then they wanted more of my experiences. I obliged as best I could and, when they were in doubt about the authenticity, I found it quite easy to counter their queries and doubts. The fact was, they wanted to believe me. So I was able to excite them with my exploits while living on the south coast (where I had only been on a few weekends) where I knew of smuggling runs and many things, the commonplace as well as the spine-tingling. They said that they hoped it was all true. For my part, I began to feel trapped in a complicated web I had woven, as I had done once before about having gypsy friends. It sprang of the desire to entertain and gladden, but I now knew somehow that it was also out of a sense of gaining some extra popularity. I had projected myself into those tales as if they were really true in order for them to seem true, and I even began to wonder where I had it all from myself. The stories, or the most tangible parts of them, must have come from somewhere.

One by one, my companions confronted me more confidently with possible discrepancies and searching questions. At length they concluded that it was all, or at least mostly, make-believe, but that it had been worthwhile. I was relieved that things were cleared up. They wanted me to go on telling more, but it was never the same because we all knew it was mere invention.

On a school walk we were taken to see some dramatic flooding in the spring of 1947 when the excessive snow of that longest of winters was thawing. We stared down into the violent over-swollen brown flood waters in a branch of the river Arun only inches below the bridge we were on. The river banks were broken and huge torrents bearing debris crashed over a fall downwater from the bridge. I had recently received the news that my parents had moved away from our home at North Lodge in Roffey Park, and no longer had a house. Roffey Park and all it meant to me was irretrievable and I felt intensely the loss of the beauty of the lake and of every spot of the woods and fields I knew better than the back of my hand. Something told me that the home atmosphere in the cosy lodge, tea-times before the fire was gone forever. There was also the insecurity of not knowing why this had happened, where my parents would live next and a family crises beyond my ken that I must still have sensed somehow.

All this shook me up and made me feel quite forlorn as I stared into the flood. My closest companions noticed this and I eventually told them that I felt like jumping into the flood, more so as to dramatise my feelings than in all seriousness. They were shocked and frightened on my behalf and the whole thing became rather melodramatic. At length I had to reassure them that I wouldn't really jump in. Despite having moved twice and having had to part from friends at several schools, the loss of my Roffey home was the worst I had suffered. Having won good school friends was not a full or proper substitute for parents and home. After this incident, however, we became closer as friends. We could then talk more openly about ourselves and our feelings.

After two years I had become used to prep. school life and was fairly resigned to its deprivations. Living in close contact with my friends, sharing all our interests, childhood was left behind and I began to feel established and secure. The unquestioning openness and trust between us became of a innocent kind that I have rarely experienced. Though each of us had our special traits and temperaments, we were, after all, largely naive, unformed as individuals and we all came from a very similar world, which made for such an unwitting sense of unity. Sharing every detail of every event, we spoke alike and thought so alike that I do not think such a degree of sympathy and self-surrender is approached by adults, except perhaps under very extreme and ego-levelling conditions, such as where complete togetherness is essential in the face of a life-threatening environment. The odd description of self-sacrifice on journeys in perilous places, like Scott's fatal polar expedition or the maroonings at sea in open boats or even life in concentration camps and gulags seem to me to evoke similar feelings and experiences in people.

We boys knew enough to see the possibility of injury and dismemberment, invalidism and death. The Second World war was just over, the atomic age had only just begun and we heard from one of the masters about the "super bomb" reportedly being developed by the Yanks and also about the terrifying cobalt bomb. The super bomb became the H-bomb, but the cobalt bomb was shelved. It would have consisted in an A-bomb within a sheath of cobalt. One such bomb was said to be capable of bringing all human life on earth to an end. The film that would dramatise the dangers of this, 'Dr. Strangelove', was then yet a dozen or more years ahead.

Apart from the values of being team-spirited, a good sport and a good loser, never big-headed, polite, correct and gentlemanly, our heads were full of the importance of being English and part of the British Empire, which was still then a global reality. No one I knew at that school questioned the thought that we were to represent all this, preferably as famous self-sacrificing but highly successful heroes.

There is a sense of futility in that, as if one really has no control over one's destiny and that what is fated is your fate. There was no adult, it seemed, with reliable enough knowledge of life to advise or reassure us with real confidence, to detect and to counter unfounded doubts about life that I picked up here and there. The headmaster would lay down rules and codes after morning prayers, but apart from that there was no guidance, neither personal nor spiritual. The only direct advice I received from any of the masters was at sports which, though confidence-building, hardly gave a sufficient basis for the many questions and choices with which life was already facing me.

Being long in the leg, I was good at athletics, particularly running and jumping, so that I won a prize on the annual sports day. This caused me to train better and the following year I cleaned up most of the prizes in my age group. Looking back I can see that I had become something of a hero to some boys, but at the time I had no such feeling. The modesty and sportsmanship we were taught may have accounted for that but I think I was so used to looking up to some of the popular eldest boys that I was simply unaware of my own relative stardom.

When I was eleven and a half years old, one day the quite unbelievable, joyous news came to me in my classroom that my father had arrived to visit me. I could leave the class and even go outside of school grounds with him. He and I set off down the road and I began to sense something wrong. When he broke the news I was unbelieving, then devastated. He was leaving to go to work in South Africa. I was to remain where I was and my mother would stay in England too. My heart was unprepared and defenceless. I cried long and most bitterly, pleading with him to stay or to take me with him. He made it quite clear that there was no chance of it, no money for it and so on. I never even dreamed that this was also permanent separation between him and my mother. I somehow felt some of his own agony too, for I never thought of blaming him for anything.

At length I extorted from him the half-promise of sending for me if things should improve. In the meantime I was to have to make do with a memento he would send me from South Africa, a gold watch, which was the latest craze at school. In an hour I was back in class, trying to put on a cheerful face to foil my keen questioners. I had just suffered what must have been one of the greatest shocks I have had. Only the half-promise I had extracted and the gold watch were my face-savers, and these also gradually became my hopes and my waking dream.

One of my school friends doubted me one day, saying if I was to get a gold watch, where was it? I began secretly to waver in my faith. Many weeks later, a package of magazines came for me, postmarked South Africa. I knew what to do. Sure enough, taped inside one of them was a gold watch! But it had come too late, really I was already wounded in the heart. It only had a tiny second hand but, worse than that, it was not itself of the small type I had asked for after scanning catalogues; I hadn't realised they were only for ladies. Some boys questioned whether it was real gold or only gold-plating.

Around that time I received a wartime pulp ninepenny edition of Jungle John by an Indian Army Colonel, John Budden. It was a story of a boy who was called to live with his father, a forestry officer, in the jungles and plains of central India. Human life and nature there were described in colourful detail - authentically too as I learned in later years - and, in addition to his father Jungle John lived with a sort of guru, a most kindly elderly tribesman wise in local lore and in the ways of animals. I pretended that the all-too-familiar countryside of Wisborough where we were sometimes marched out to help the farmers pick potatoes or to learn what a 'route march' was like, was the nullahs and the scrub of that heavenly place.

What a longing I felt for such companionship and adventures! Yet the ordinary round of prep. school discipline went grinding on while I dreamed of the South African veldt, poring over some maps of Cape Province my father had sent me. The scenes and intimations evoked by the place names in Africaans, lists of which I learned by heart, really seemed somehow to have been 'conjured up' by the intensity of my longings. I half-convinced myself that it was only a matter of time before my father would be able to send for me, and this leaked out to others through my closest friends. I did not deny it and it soon took on the nature of an accepted public fact which was too hard to alter.

Soon came the question of my date of departure for Cape Town. I played it down as best I could, for I began to feel that I may be deceiving myself. Yet the half-truths on which I relied at first had spun a web around me from which I could find no way out.

Eventually the situation caused the headmaster to call me to his study. Not knowing why the call had come, I went there feeling like a common criminal. However, he was pleasant and chatted with me. After a while he explained to me that my parents were as good as divorced. I had never once imagined this was possible, so his talk upset me and seemed very blunt. He advised me to give up dreams of going to my father and said I must know that myself as my father had not promised anything, despite my great hopes. He also mentioned that there was no money for such a journey and the full term fees had not even been paid! So that was that.

After being a full-time boarder for eight terms, I unexpectedly became a day-boy during my last term there, travelling back and forth on the bus to stay at a house where my mother was acting as nurse-cum-housekeeper. For her all this was a personal and social disaster and she felt acutely the shame of not being able to afford the full fee. We lived in one room in a house where noise was not allowed for the old lady who owned it was slowly dying of a lingering illness. Yet for me, for a term at least, I had the benefits of a home of a sort, discovering the world of the radio, going to the public library and travelling about unaccompanied.

Gradually I realised I was no longer in on the inside matters that concerned my pals. Those close friends of years no longer shared their every thought with me, perhaps partly simply because I was no longer able to be with them out of class very much. I realised that I was coming to be regarded in a similar way to the few other non-boarding pupils who lived at their homes and visited school each day. These so-called 'day-boys, we had regarded as not quite like us, not fully part of it... almost 'no-boys'. The growing sense of isolation from the only friends I then knew in the world confused me and hurt me for weeks, but previous intimacies did slowly seem to shrink and dull beside my new daily doings. I sensed that the cooling of relations towards me was a form of self-defence by my friends, who doubtless felt that their days held only trivial boredoms and worn-out rituals compared to a regular inhabitant of the wider world, a free-ranging soul, as I had become.

A day-boy called Sherlock was friendly to me as we took the same bus after school. I was probably the first of the 'old hands' to confide in him and share all I knew with him. I had no-one else to talk to really, except my mother. I felt a bit like an informer buying friendship, but that phase passed as I found him to be more charming and sporty than anyone had ever thought. In some confusion I began to perceive that what we had thought of all who were not like ourselves, boys destined for public schools and social privilege, was inaccurate and wrong. I now see that the norms and prejudices of the class were mostly not inculcated by anyone so much as absorbed through association and imitation.

One of my great longings, one shared by all inmates of the school, was fulfilled one day when my mother found me a cheap second-hand bicycle! Such were extremely hard to find just after the war. Though not my fault, I had simply become as of a race apart. There was no bad feeling, on the contrary... my old friends would sometimes profess to me that we would always be the same. But despite ourselves things were already different. I had no way to put such thoughts adequately into words. How could I have explained my luck in having a whole free-wheeling world open for me to explore? It would perhaps have been cruelty towards them. Sherlock and I cycled around the Billingshurst countryside together where his family lived in a beautiful out-of-the-way Sussex farm where they had one of the first post-war t.v. sets, a wonder of such magnitude that I had never even heard of before.

Due to her severe symptoms from a duodenal ulcer and loss of the latest housekeeping job she had taken of necessity, it became quite impossible for my mother to pay anything for my schooling or to look after me at all. I would not be able to return there the next term, nor was there any other alternative. My mother took me to visit an aunt and uncle who were my godparents, yet whom I could not myself remember. It was later agreed that I could stay with them during part of the summer.

Did those experiences - some of which would be called traumatic by the psychologically-minded - actually harm me? As I experience myself today I can say both yes and no. The harm was much more limited than eager therapists would believe, though I know that there was some emotional numbing and certain feelings of insecurity that took decades to work off. It was more the sense of how much better some things could have been instead that I would regret, if I still had any regrets.

The ability gained in 'surviving' was certainly strengthening and character-building in many ways, but it could have been much better if an atmosphere of kindness and expressive care had been cherished in that school. My experience tells me that there is no full substitute for the love and security that parents can give, especially at the earlier sensitive ages. The challenges I had to meet and overcome could have been less drastic in a better, confidence-building atmosphere.

My ideal of education today is firstly that teachers set the best possible example, especially in loving treatment of their pupils. How different from those ideals were those that mostly ruled the world that I had to encounter. The authority and discipline were mostly positive, but they should have been secondary to the loving spirituality that was almost wholly absent in most teachers and consequently tended to be stifled when it arose naturally amongst the boys too. It was such a lack that I now feel to have been the biggest 'harm' done me.

Spirituality is connected to the feeling of love, both of being loved and loving. Being 'sent away' from home and the love that is inherent there, despite irritations or problems that may dull or stifle its emotional expression, was a shock to me, as it has been even more so to many others who have spoken about this deprivation. How can sending a boy away against his sustained longing and wishes - even after many months of being away - express love? One cannot but think that it is because one is not loved as much as one thought. This again causes deep self doubt, which is the very worst medicine for a growing boy, because the thought that the reason can be more or less that there is something basicially wrong with oneself is bound to arise. How a boy faces this, without the aid of any other understanding and loving adult to 'explain' it all, must make a great deal of difference. In those who are not so fortunate in 'solving' the predicament both outwardly and inwardly, it must lead to some basic sense of mistrust and lack of emotional openness. I have been lucky in having been able fairly early in my youth to overcome the effects of most of the hard lessons, partly also because destiny released me from the private school system after three and a half years of it.

Looking back, it seems a long way I have had to come, a way I should not want to have to set out on again. By the time I was twelve, I had undergone enough losses to find that life is the uncertain undertaking it is. Despite everything, the trials of the spirit that I had to face in discovering fate and learning to shape my destiny have worked much more to my advantage than to the contrary, both outwardly in the self-confidence I gained amid my friends and more subtly on my ideas and attitudes. The insecurities I experienced were part of learning to be unassuming in myself and they fortunately also seem to have helped me in becoming quite equal-minded. The deprivations we suffer in life usually seem to be educative, even if we fail to heed their lessons or realise their full benefits until much later on. Thrown in at the deep end, I did learn to swim. Yet I cannot thereby justify this sort of educational boarding system because I feel the price was far too high for those boys whom I saw drowning.