MORE WISBOROUGH REMINISCENCES (updated March 7, 2003)
School walks and runs: As I recall, school walks were compulsory for most classes whenever they occurred, at certain weekends. The crocodile would often go down to a bridge across the river Arun and take off from a crossroads near there, winding through country lanes to circumnavigate the school and connected farms and properties in anything up to an hour's trudging. Sometimes we walked through the village too, which we knew well from the school walk to church every Sunday.
One day the whole school was treated by Mr. MacDonald and his staff to a quasi 'military 'route march' around the same lanes we knew. It was a coldish day and we were thinly clothed because we were made tojog trot as much as possible.It was not exactly popular and I don't think it was repeated.
Nature walks with Miss Cowlishaw: I particularly recall one glorious spring day around noon when Miss Cowlishaw took our class on a nature walk. We started from the bunglaow or 'White house' and walked behind it along the boundary hedgerow and into fields and eventually a farmer's cider apple orchard. There was a profusion of insects and butterfiles and bird life in the hedges. I first saw a wren that day. Miss Cowlishaw was a very relaxed teacher who chatted freely and taught us biology in this casual way, telling about the local wild life, naming birds, butterflies, grasses and flowers.
Then and Now It is sad to think of the 'desertification' of WL. Also
that the tall shade-giving tree (not an elm as I falsely remembered). beside the main road bounding the cricket pitch/athletics
ground was a sole depleted straggler amid gardens, the rest gone forever.
I visited WL once when driving through Sussex in the late 60s. It was empty
and locked, so couldn't see much, but everything seemed as it had been... but
perhaps the Bungalow had gone already, not sure. I was surprised at how tiny
the changing/locker room seemed. The jerry-built 'classrooms' opposite the house
were still there then, and the kitchen garden. In Wisborough village we were
told that the MacDonalds had closed it down not long previously, it seems they
may have farmed after closing the prep. school. It may still have been up for
sale. It is presently occupied by some IT firm, who responded to an e-mail I
sent them.
Recently I saw a TV film about Walt Disney's career in which
a long excerpt from an early cartoon animation was shown called 'The Skeleton
Dance'. This was the most popular film that Col Kennedy had in his collection
(unless Chaplin serving ice-cream on roller skates and on ice skates was yet
more popular, what with losing an ice down the BH of a fat lady, which went
right through her and fell down into the stalls below). But even now the skeletons
dance well up to scratch as far as ideas and coordination are involved.
Memories
of some of Wisboro' contemporaries: The only person from my Wisboro' days
I have ever contacted (before making the website) was Fothergill-Payne- by 'phone
in the early 60s. He was then a teacher at Eton. He had been at Oxford with a
fellow student here in Oslo (Harold Stonex).
Rhodes, who
was a new boy on the same day as me, so we talked a lot at first. He was older
than I and went into a higher class, so our contact did not last. He came there
straight from his parents in India, poor fellow, I think.. and had a tan which
he soon lost. He told me lurid stories about the war in Burma. How the Japs took
a dead British soldier, hollowed out his back and placed a booby trap bomb in
it, stood him against a tree, and then made his arm move back and forth as if
smoking. We communicated mostly thereafter by moving an arm with an imaginary
fag to our mouths! He also told me about the 'cages' in Bombay where one could
view the prostitutes. Rather shocking stuff.. I guess he wanted to impress!
The boys
I got to know and like best were Nicky Borrisow and Chris Rye, then Barry Dustin, John Gillingham, the two De Précourts (were they refugees from the war, perhaps?), Berry (or Bury?)
'the farmer's son', Shaun Mather, Rickett, Anthony Weill, and Sherlock (who lived on a farm between
Horsham and Billingshurst where they had the earliest TV set I ever knew about). I also visited Gillingham’s family mixed dairy farm in
Kent one weekend. Never having had real mud on my boots before that, not smelt
horse dung much etc., I was not duly impressed. But it was actually an idyll that
has probably been de-hedged and absorbed into some larger, efficient, less homely
undertaking now!
Some names
not mentioned in my writing on Wisborough Lodge. The boy who was detailed
to introduce me to the school was A.J.C.Weill (only boy from London, I think).
The two boys I befriended when they arrived and I was second-term (still regarded
as new boys, though!) were Chris Rye and Nicky Borrisow. The saddest and most withdrawn boy I ever
saw was Miller, there was some tragic event he was suffering under - he broke out into tears when I tried to says some words of comfort. I wonder if his dad had been killed in the war, or some such family tragedy. The Jewish boy
who I am still ashamed to have mobbed and mobbed along with the herd (by when I was doing o.k. myself)
was Samuel Salter. The boys who ran away were called Anthony Perry (taunted much as 'four-eyes')
and Mange. They were gone for days. I was the first to meet them on their return
and they were in poor shape, crying etc. I don't think they came back the next
term. I recall that Colin Henschilwood was rather dark-skinned, as if he had lived
long on the veldt or suchlike. He taught me to play chess, mainly for the pleasure
of getting me with 'fool's mate', I think.
Did any of
you take part in carol singing with Mrs. MacDonald around her piano in the drawing
room before Christmas hols.? I did, but I always was one of the last asked to
sing the lead, and I usually got a carol I hardly knew... so I was soon passed
over.
Mr. Brooke-Little
was the master who inspired most hero worship in my time. He was a breath of fresh
air, literally; he took us (out of school grounds!) on wide games like flag-raiding
in the fields and dells and once a paper-chase through the fields and woods around Wisborough. But all too soon, he left the school. He confirmed, somewhat
unwillingly, the rumour that he was a count. It was of some African place where
he had been during the war, I think. Stephen mentioned his interest in heraldry...
and I recall that it was Brooke-Little who taught me all I ever learned about it, the terminology,
permissible symbols etc. Some boys got very keen, inventing their own coats of
arms (boyishly hopeful of future recognition, knighthoods, lordships etc.?)
There was
an attractive young lady asst. who would stand at the end of the dorm and talk
to us before lights out- and she'd answer all kinds of questions. (Some were designed
to get her to blush, only once successfully with 'What is a prostitute?'). The
whole of our dorm. was in love with her... at that time I was in one of the so-called
'White house' dorms. Deprived of the actual presence of mother love, as we were
for interminable eternities, this was not surprising!
Some other incidents I recall - the long slide in the interminable winter of 1947, where practically the whole school turned out together, including for once the MacDonalds, to "keep the pot bilin'", in Sam Weller's phrase. I never tried it as I had recently slipped and had a nasty fall which destroyed my confidence! Lots of boys fell, and I think Rickett (or someone) was injured rather by his fall.
Berry brought a wind-up gramophone to school once and
had a number of 78s we got him to play over and over. This was very popular (starved
for all impulses from the world without as we were). One was 'Felix kept on walking',
then there was 'Sur le pont, d'Avignon', ' Frére Jacques' and last but not least
a yokel-voice singing 'Buttercup Joe' (which I only recently discovered to be
in the novel 'Cold Comfort Farm', but it was an old country song, as quoted in
full in the 1930 book 'Farmers' Glory' by A.G. Street). The text is:
"I can drive a plough and milk a cow, for I can reap or mow, I'm as fresh as the daisies what grow in the fieds an' the calls I Buttercup Joe."
The floods of Spring 47 filled the school cellar almost to the brim. Various boys worked the pump, but Berry was the hardest working (he was also the champ potato picker when once we were all taken to the local farmer's field to help pick). He and I had to stay on at school for about two weeks (eternal time) until after all had left that term... so he pumped and pumped and I just pumped a bit. It was a case of "This time next week, where shall I be. Not in this Academy... etc."
Just after I left Wisboro' in 1948: My bosom friends from the Wisboro' years, still facing imprisonment there for years ahead, begged me to write to them, and we vowed never to forget one another, whatever may come. I soon found myself removed to what was another world, relatively speaking. At the time I was very relieved at my escape from the double-life I had been living... the untruth of masquerading as one who everyone knew was soon to leave for the tropical wonderland of his father's South Africa. Lifted like a threatening thundercloud was the worry of keeping up with this lie that had gradually enveloped me and had been sprouting fresh deceits when I kept on having to explain new sides of the matter. I think I was partly unable to disbelieve it all fully myself, so strong was my desire for it to become true despite all. To admit my doubts, tell all the facts and lay my wounded heart open to the whole school had been more than I dared do. Due to my mother's circumstances and my father's absence in SA where he was apparently struggling, I had no real option but to go to live with an aunt and uncle in Gidea Park, and begin at the Royal Liberty Grammar School.
It
was therefore quite an unpleasant surprise to me one day when coming out of the
tube at Victoria with my aunt to run into Gillingham and his family, who were
going in the other direction. He wondered why I was still in UK and I don't recall
quite how I side-stepped the issue. We only had a few moments before we were chivvied
along by the adults.
Some months after leaving Wisborough, I went with
my aunt and uncle to a big wedding of a young lady they knew well and it was arranged
that I should be an usher in the church. When the day came I was ushering the
guests to their places when, to my shocked disbelief, in came one of my lady teachers
from preparatory school. Miss Oliver was most surprised to see me there and doubtless
asked my aunt how I came to be there instead of Cape Town. It was a shock to feel
that my crime, so to speak, had caught up with me. In conversation with my aunt
and I, Miss Oliver asked about my father and when I was leaving. The cat was soon
out of the bag, though nothing was said to me directly about it. Contrary to my
fears, Miss Oliver showed immediate understanding and tact.
My aunt
and uncle must also have felt something of how much I would have preferred to
go abroad to my father rather than live with them, though I would not say so myself,
a matter I had put a cheery face on when it had been mentioned during discussion
of my staying with them. All in all I thought it fair that my old school pals
should probably learn of my actual fate after all. But this did not make it less
impossibly difficult to write to them or know what to say. Thus, for a third time,
I lost contact with all my previous friends. Though I could not write, I was determined
always to remember everything about them, which I did occasionally by regularly
recounting to myself before going to sleep every detail of my times with them,
memories now consigned to the internet.