Chapter Fourteen - Happy Days.

 The routines of the place were easy to follow as long as I did not think about what I was meant to be doing next before finishing what I was doing at the time, which was just as well given the extreme shortness of my attention span. 

Food was the most central point around which the routines of the main house varied. Bells were rung to draw us all to the common room for a roll call before every dinner and tea. The sound of the hand bell that was rung could carry to the top floor of the house from the ground floor because of the wide front staircase and the hard matt painted Anaglypta wallpaper surfaces that went throughout the house. The staff ate with the boys, one staff member per table. The boys saw it as egalitarian and an odd sort of honour that the staff ate with them. But like as not the staff were on duty in the mean and the boys simply did not recognise how personal the staff duties could become. The staff were there in lieu of our parents. The headmaster lead grace in every meal he attended, usually speaking his grace in Latin. When the boys were invited to say Grace before the meal it was always in English and gabbled it. After Grace there is a few seconds of quiet before there was a collective murmur and the clink of cutlery being distributed around the tables meant we could not hear each other talk. Whichever boy from each table had volunteered that day to collect the food went first to collect the plates, second the large metal jugs of water and glasses from the kitchen. Then he collected the food for that meal. Whoever collected the plates and the food did not have to clear the table at the end, or between courses. Another volunteer would come forward. Very rarely was anyone forced to volunteer by an otherwise collective refusal.

The food was good. Lunch was roast beef, roast potatoes, mashed potato and two veg (Sundays), cold meat and cold roast potatoes with a very decoratively arranged salad on a platter (Mondays), toad in the hole flavoured with onion (Tuesdays), liver and bacon, with boiled potatoes and veg (Wednesday), mildly spicy chicken curry and rice (Thursdays) either fish pie or fish and chips (Friday) and sausage, bacon, eggs, black pudding and fried bread or curried hard boiled eggs with rice (Saturdays). All lunches were served with puddings, including trifle, rice pudding with tinned pears in it, fruit crumbles, apple charlotte, a steamed pudding or last but far from least with all the bread the school bought, eggy  bread pudding.  

Tea was a lighter meal, say beans on toast, but it would be the meal time when any boy who had a birthday that day would be presented with a large sickly sweetly iced shop bought cake with their name on it and a candle for them to blow out. They were meant to share it with their friends, hangers on, and any boys who presumed that they were liked by the birthday boy, but were probably not as liked as they presumed. How a boy shared his cake was one way of casting favours far and wide and keeping himself a little more popular than he might otherwise be.

Supper was always served in the common room. The best supper was a cup of milk with a cold bread pudding type square of cake which nowadays I would find to be an interesting texture, but generally vile. But at the time it was much liked by everyone it was offered to. Many boys, me included, asked for seconds. Sat in the hall with my closest friend in the school, Kevin and I ate our bits of 'rubber cake', as it became known because of its glutenous texture together. As we sat Kevin and I created a nonsense word game called 'The Rubber Thing' where we each had to tell a story and had to make it absurd by adding adjectives unlikely to be apt to the material we described. E.g. we might have somebody going on a journey and the jelly road with the houses each side made of cardboard until the journey got so unworldly that we could not go on. We were too young to appreciate the punch-line free humour that Spike Milligan had made popular before we were born. My parents might have listened to 'The Goon Show', but if they listened then we would assume we could not. If they disliked the surreal humour of Milligan then we would not have known about either. It was easy to pick up cheap paperbacks of selected Goon Show scripts. I did this, but without hearing the silly voices of different characters and knowing how they satirised current events of their time I was somewhat at a loss with these books.

I said that the school had a staff member who was a banker. In the evening boys could buy sweets from The Tuck Shop. The sweets were stored below the right window seat, in the hall. Because my attention span was so AWOL on my first half term I bought sweets to share with other boys, the better to be liked, without checking whether I had the money to pay for them or not. The staff member did not check either, he just made his lists of the value of what the boys bought when The Tuck Shop opened. The postal order of my pocket money was for 75 new pence, half what other boys got. It was to be spent at a rate of 12 pence ha'penny a week. I did not do the maths, after four weeks of buying sweets and the staff not checking what money I had to pay for them I discovered I'd spent £1.05 and I was 40 pence overdrawn. My spending was still far less than other boys whose parents were more generous and accepting of the status game boys liked, almost needed, to play. There was both in shame in having to write to Mother for more money and a shame of being on so much less than what other boys my age were on, I am not sure now how they compare. The letter to Mother requesting more money to cover me until the end of term was an embarrassing letter to write. But she sent the money. If one embarrassment was temporary then the lesson about being sure of what was mine was a lesson for life. It is still with me. I try to ask for less, and restrict what I owe to what I can repay well within time. However much it might seem to be overly restrictive, it is a good discipline for living within the often tight limits that have been set for me.

Every Monday night two barbers would set up shop with their own swivel chairs, scissors and electric shears on the left side of the front hall. Before they arrived the bell would be rung to get us all into the common room. After an extra early evening roll call staff would inspect the boys for hair length, and which of them were to have their hair cut. It was a routine evasion for boys to try disguise the length of hair by tucking it in behind the ears and pushing their shirt collars down a bit. But long hair could not remain hidden from the staff for very long. Resisting the haircut was an agreeable bit of sport between the boys and staff that the boys  actually needed to help keep commonality with each other.

There were two sets of stairs to the dormitories. One set was broad and went up from the main entrance hall,  we were meant to use these stairs only when instructed by the staff. They were meant for the staff much more than they were meant for us. The other set of stairs was narrow and to the rear of the house, they were the stairs that the servants would have used when the house had servants. There was a pay phone underneath and a laundry room with several big machines in it near by. There were two phones in the building. One phone was in the headmasters office, second was a pay phone in a small booth under the servants stairs. That pay phone was for the boys to use to ring family of an evening. 

The medical room was on the first floor up the back stairs. I visited it every night that first term. Before I was adapted to the school's routines I did many of the things that I'd done when with Mother, one of which was to take a Haliborange tablet every night. They were a vitamin C supplement that Mother insisted I have. I'd been taking them for years. The school eventually dissuaded her from sending them the tablets to give to me to save them time, because with the good food that they served the Haliborange were not required.

Would that their persuasion had worked in other areas of my life with Mother, like the level of personal contact between parent and pupil. Everybody did the weekly letter both ways, my Thursday morning English language lesson doubled as letter writing day, other classes wrote on others days. I have no idea how Mother was able to read what I wrote with my left hand, and now I realise that probably the teacher had a similar difficulty as he read all the letters as we put them in their envelopes on his desk at the end of the lesson. Mother wrote in her scrawly script to me and filled two sides of one writing pad paper with safe trivia. I will gloss over that how frequently I wrote on the back of these envelopes S.W.A.L.K., Sealed With A Loving Kiss, an acronym more apt for a sailor to his sweetheart but I will admit that I did that, but instead present it as evidence of how three-sheets-to-the-wind-whilst-sober I actually was. 

As you might expect it was the being rung by Mother weekly that got to me, her list of minor concerns and family gossip and things I could do nothing about were an intrusion on my reality. My attitude to her phone could have been part of children play fake status games with each other. They pride themselves on token shows of independence, little aware that they follow many other rules without thinking. Making it out that the contact you got from your parents was on your terms, rather than on your family's terms, was one such status game. That was real enough for me, but there was more going on than that for me. At first Mother rang me in the evening on the boys payphone from a pay phone near the parental house.  With these calls she could hear the chaos in the background whilst she was telling me of life 'back home'. At times I tried to ask her to be brief because other boys also might expect their families to ring them. To take the perspective of the staff on this the more often Mother rang me the slower I took to integrate into the school's routines. The more often Mother rang the more the old jibes, which nobody in the school knew about, from Primary school about being wrongly dependent on Mother kicked in, in my head and the less able I was to coherently follow the agenda of the next school activity, whatever it was. 

But Mother was not to be stopped. She became more assertive of her needs. She pleaded poverty with Mrs Hunt, our social worker, over the cost of the evening phone calls. So in the new routine I would be rung at the school on Friday lunch times from the phone in the Social Services office which was free for Mother to use. I could have praised her for the mix of thrift and charm that had won her the weekly free phone call, and when she rang the school was quiet which was an added bonus to her. Instead of a rushed and noisy evening call at her own expense she got the luxury of sitting in a comfortable office, and ringing me every Friday between the end of lunch and and start of afternoon classes. 

But it was different at my end. First there was roll call then the phone always rang at some quiet point in the middle of us being told what activity we would be doing in the afternoon. The phone would ring, a spare member of staff would pick it up. I would be called away, to the point where my being called away every week without fail became a shared joke between the staff and the boys. A joke which the longer the phone calls went on the more it veered towards the cruel and condescending.

Would that a staff member had told Mother that I was in the bath in honour of that dusty old joke about displacement of water, from the 1950's 

Q What happens when a body is immersed in water? 

A The phone rings..... 

She would have known the joke, whether or not she would have enjoyed it was moot. She was as lost as her world as I was lost in mine. But at least with the phone calls she got to find out about what happened as a result of her letter of presentation to join St John Ambulance for me to join the branch nearest the school, and what it was like being a newbie in an organisation in which I was never sure why I was in it, what the rules were, and what I was meant to be doing. It might have reassured her to know that many others who were in it were similarly mildly adrift, keen to do something but they were unsure what.

Find Chapter 15 here 

Find the introduction and chapter guide here.