Winter term in boarding school was when the school was at it's most most shut down. Even with our return to the school in the minibus, after the Christmas break in the first week of January the journey seemed longer for it being mostly in the dark. I felt the relief when the minibus turned that last right turn up into the private drive and we finally turned left to see the light on outside the back of the main house, through the bay window we could see the dining room being set for the next meal. Then the minibus was parked next to the laundry room and the back door through which our suitcases went before we reported for first roll call of the term.
The drawn in nights, the cold outside, and the snow when it happened, all served to limit our movements. With the snow we were not allowed to have snowball fights. Before assembly in the sports hall a member of staff would clear a path from the main house to the entrance of the school. The headmaster made it key part of assembly to personally instruct us to walk single file in the path that had been cleared for us and not to deviate to the left or the right. I knew how easily I could confuse my left from my right at the mere mention of them, and knew how quickly the shoes I wore could became slippery and wet, and I could slip and fall, however often I cleaned and polished them to preserve them. It was well that there was no spontaneity allowed in the wet snow, for all that I was now a senior I would have come off the worse for it and against people of lower rank than me as well.
Winter became the time to watch films at weekends, often films on television but also real, or should I say reel, films. The school owned an 8 mm film projector and films they got to show us looked fine on the painted white Anaglypta of the common room wall. They were always British made films and we would watch them on Saturday nights, when not only were they a treat for us, but, unlike television, the staff had control of their scheduling and how to combine the start of the film with serving supper, so we could have our cocoa in the dark. The younger the boy the bigger the treat it was to be allowed to stay up late enough to see the end of these films.
As I look back I find it hard to imagine how these films came to the school and what sort of film industry it was that sold these commercial standard 8mm films to the education department, and why the film distributors sold them to the Department of Education. Were the films sold to private film clubs and the education dept bought them as if they were a private film club? Private film clubs for serious films that were in no way connected with the porn industry were one known way of getting around censorship laws in the England at the time. But these films were standard fare, as shown in cinemas but in 8mm prints rather the 35mm of the movie house. I understood that Department of Education bought them for the entertainment of us and other boys in other schools, but what seemed affordable to the department but we had been told that austerity was coming. Watching these films, life did not feel like austerity was coming to us.
Other boys would have had different favourite films among those that were shown. For me the best film by a country mile was 'The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie', a 1969 film starring Maggie Smith, Gordon Jackson of 'Upstairs Downstairs' fame, and Celia Johnson as the headmistress. It was a proper 1930's drama about a pretentious and controlling teacher who does not even see her downfall as being hers even as it happens to her. That the teacher paraphrased Spanish fascist leader General Franco and Italian wartime leader Mussolini was quite lost on us. History, even popular recent history, was on the list of subjects that was more covered by television than ever it was covered in the class room. To most boys World War Two was something that had happened to their parents and their parents were part of the opaque reasoning that had got them to the boarding school, which was just as opaque about the war.
Whatever understanding we may have gained from the film we did not know how to process it but the school preferred it that we did not know how to process complex entertainments. The staff had no problem with the Mussolini references but did need to have a discussion among themselves to decide whether the brief sight of a pair of women's breasts in one scene might be too risque for the younger of us innocents to see. They decided that the film contextualised the incident well enough that bearing of breasts on a film in front of us was okay, just this once.
Day boy, John, missed the fun of watching the films but he had much more than we had in so many ways. He had his own bed to sleep in at night and the right to be as untidy in pursuit of electronics, his hobby, as he wanted to be. His parent's flat felt like a home to me. As a senior I used my privileges to maximum effect and visited it as often as it seemed friendly for me to visit because I liked John and because when I took an interest in his hobby I also quietly sustained the fiction that had been foisted upon me that 'Amateur Electronics' was my hobby also. John was happy for me to be around him so much.
The flat, and his room, were places that were free from the emotional baggage the school made seem normal where of everything was made to feel that quite large bit less personal. As if even what we had brought from our parents houses was ours, but ours to use, but still more the property of our parents, who seemed rather detached from us whilst owning what they did, than ours. Everything that did not belong to our parents belonged to the school, nothing, no physical space and no material object was ours in our own right, off limits of the school's or our parents' idea of what was their property. Effectively we were their property, albeit graciously treated property. And for the limits put on how personal the space we shared could be made, our main public expression of doubt was admitting to, in the cliche, 'mixed feelings'. These were feelings that were 'mixed' because they were the feelings that were very direct in us, anger, fear, elation and more, but they were severely diluted because of where we were and who, benignly, owned us. To me it seemed worth sustaining the fictional interest in amateur electronics simply to be allowed the experience of the relative directness and normality of John's household.
John had anger and communication problems. When he was angry he literally could not say why he was angry because he would automatically put the finger next to his thumb of his left hand in his mouth, by the middle joint, and he would bite hard around this joint until where he'd bitten his finger was utterly calloused, discoloured a dark brown, and very hard. He would growl rather than speak and his right hand would be shaped into a fist with which he would be banging the table. At the time there was an early evening local news programme which had a theme tune that he felt was particularly good for almost ritually releasing his anger in this frustrated way. By the time he left the school most of the hard skin on his finger had softened for his having ceased to bite it. I can't remember his back story, what initially made him chew his finger and bang his fist, but his parents seemed to be rather nice. 'Seemed' is the clue, I doubt they knew what it was of their reasoning that diverted his personal development so he got so angry so easily, and it came out in such contorted ways.
Winter mid week nights in the school were often times times for playing games with the newest boys. When I was new enough to be engaged by the card games and board games I remembered the staff playing them with us, now they seemed to be there to play the games less often and as a senior who was hoping to leave in the summer I stood in for the now more distant staff. One game that I avoided both as an organiser and player, and not always successfully, was 'Monopoly'. This was partly because I never won a game, not even once. Ultimately, the di always seemed to be cast against me. Partly I avoided that game because it took hours to complete a game and all the players who had started the game wanted to be there when the winning player bankrupted the bank. I preferred more strategy and skill based games like Majong a game where sets of tiles were exchanged from a pile, until they formed a hand, a series of sets similar to a Poker hand. At an aesthetic level I liked the colours and abstract designs that the many tiles were decorated with.
That the school want to slow down our maturing seemed obvious to me. Our maturity-or the lack of it-was something for us to discover when we left the school. Our relative immaturity was useful for us cohering to the school values better. But sometimes glimmers of light poked their way through the limits set upon our education. The school had an early video recorder, the first I ever saw such that I did not know what it was or that such things existed. In one media studies lesson a teacher put together forty five minutes of adverts back to back so that we could forget the usual logic about the programmes being the point of television and look at the adverts that paid for it all on the commercial channel, and therefore see a little of how commerce and industry 'gave us choice'. It was the nearest we were going to get to a lesson in how politics worked. The class agreed that in the adverts for toys there was always a lot more space for the toys than there was in a real life house, and toys were the central attraction in that space, which was an equally false picture of where the toys went into. In adverts for more grown up subjects like drinks openly fake airs and graces being punctured by humour was the norm. The adverts for smoking were the most difficult to decode, the pleasure in them seemed the most abstracted that anyone could imagine. I forget how the teacher dealt with the sexual humour and content in the adverts. I am sure that when mid-lesson we referred to adverts that coded sexual behaviour he did his best to lead us away from that content, as if the adverts were temptation and he was applying the values of The Lords Prayer upon us without us being aware of it. He left the subject of real lust and the constant reference to sex/seeing women partially unaddressed in the advert until last when the class was running out of time. It was as neat a way of dealing with the subject as any. Like the adverts, the teacher left the subject up in the air, pretend-dealt-with but clearly not actually dealt with in any depth at all.
As Winter gave way to Summer so we older boys were taken outdoors at weekends, whether we like it or not. I don't know whether our being taken outdoors was to reduce the food bills and staffing levels of the school at weekends or whether they meant it as part of a package 'for our personal development', probably both reasons were strong motives. It started with a seven mile hike to the nearest YHA youth hostel. Walking was fine, going with Kevin made the walking even better for me, though the journey did disrupt the fine flow of conversation between us as if we had reversed the priority of the exercise to engagement with each other rather than get there at same speed as everyone else. The hostel was primitive but homely. I was quite relieved to be away from the school. With how the school both provided for us and limited our contact with everyday local society we seemed to be kept in some sort of bubble. In the youth hostel the bubble seemed thinner, and the basic reality of the place seemed closer for us sharing it with people who were not from the school. A few weekends of this was quite pleasant. I had never been shown how to read a map, not for myself nor for a group but with some simple instruction the route became easy enough to remember by sight. One small 'gift' I did have was that I could remember routes by sight. It was a fallible gift, and at worst I got there slower for the odd missed turning and steps retraced.
Then the local education authority decided to have their own youth hostel in which they reduced the risk of us being treated like the ordinary public that we so enjoyed being part of. One Saturday morning, out of nowhere appeared walking boots, rucksacks, warm clothing and cagoules for up to ten boys. I was one of the ten who were volunteered. Our new hostel was the same distance from the school as the YHA hostel, much less than half a day's firm walk, and the route there used some of the same narrow roads as the route to to the official YHA hostel. Our new destination was an ex-farm building in it's own site next to a road. It had a small derelict looking 'garden' outside the single room structure but inside three sides of low stone walling. Outside the wall there is a large field. The building felt isolated because it was, it was a mile from the next nearest abandoned looking building with very few trees between here and there.
The education authority had put bunk beds and single blankets in the building, and a rough table or two near a sink that in total passed for a kitchen area. There was a single tap for cold water well away from the sink area and that was more or less it. The first weekend was the worst, between five and ten of us arrived with our lunch and an evening meal to heat up and means to heat it early in the afternoon. It felt like a dump soon after we settled in, after finishing our packed lunch. The two staff members were okay but the mix of boys who were there that weekend was the wrong one, myself included. When we arrived and stopped at our new hostel we were poorly motivated to be sociable with each other to try to overcome the flat atmosphere of the place. If the aim was some sort of team building exercise then it failed. The place itself was that minimal in it's resources we did not know what sort of team we could be, or to what purpose. Mostly we shrank into ones and twos, the usual level of cliquey disengagement with each other, where we avoided who we did not get on with. We did not even bring anything as simple as a pack of cards to help while away the hours more agreeably. Tea came out of a tins, heated in a pan on the gas stove that the staff had carried with them, and we had a lie in on the Sunday. We left the hostel late Sunday morning and we were back in the school mid afternoon. The routine improved over several weekends as we went better prepared, but the autonomy we had going there and coming back were the best parts of the whole idea. What we did not realise was these weekends were part of a bigger plan where the simple autonomy we thought we had would taken from us by the scale of the exercise.
There had always been trips organised away from the school. The first was a visit to another school in the south of England which culminated on a day return ferry trip to France, I missed that one. It was expensive and my parents refused to stump up the money. The second was cheaper a day visit to Grimsby and a go on the ferry to Hull and back which I liked. Then there were the annual days at the seaside arranged with the girls from the nearest girls school. On them a staff member stood in the sea up to his waist to indicate that we could go no further than where he stood. When the waves buffeted us further then where he was we were told to get out of the water. I was not in the sea very long before I had to get back on land. There was more grit in the sandwiches than there was in each of us.
The big plan was for a group of ten of us us who were fourteen and fifteen were to go camping in The Lake District for a week in June. This was meant to the holiday of a lifetime for me. I am not sure how much I wanted to go. I liked walking but I was hard to organise, if something went wrong to anyone in the group then it usually happened to me first. I was the test of the teachers planning skills, their canary in a coal mine for my being physically awkward, uncompetitive and less team oriented than other boys. But this holiday that was within my parents budget and it was rare that the school and my parents actively agreed about much. Mother had never been camping in her life, and the only time dad might have slept in a tent would have been in his army training, which he never completed. That side of his life was for him to keep to himself. So I had permission to achieve something they had never done. But, knowing myself even partially, I was not going to excel in it on the terms that the school wanted.
Ten of us filled the minibus seats and underneath and between our seats was bunged with rucksacks, food, and camping equipment. Three staff members sat at the front, which was also full up with stuff, two staff on the passenger seats, one driving. One of the staff was going to return the minibus to the school when everything and everyone in it had been unloaded. Then we were on our own. The staff member who drove the minibus away to a school with ten fewer pupils in it surely knew that he had got the best part of the deal, and the staff who were there with the tents, the rest of the kit and the boys to sort out knew it too.
We walked for two hours to the site that the staff had chosen, according to his map. Setting up several several three man tents at a distance from each other and we slept two to a three man tent. Arranging who slept where seemed easy enough. It was nice to have somewhere to put our rucksack down and arrange our sleeping bags. Next came sorting out food and making the evening meal which went smoothly enough, what felt slightly odd was how we were both in school but out of it for us being away but still organised by the staff. The first two days were easy, light local walks where we travelled only short distances. The staff even had postcards and stamps set side for us to write postcards to our families with. There was no shirking communications to our parents, everything had to be seen to be right.
Day three was the big event when the teacher planned a day long hike up one of the steeper peaks. The teacher lined everyone up to instruct them to empty their rucksacks of clothing that they were not going to need and carry their rucksacks on their back. This where my capacity for mishearing or mis-remembering instructions came into it's own. I did not remove the spare clothing from my rucksack, everybody else did. I got very hot carrying all the unnecessary weight. I was as disappointed with myself as the staff member was angry at me for this latest mistake. But all was not lost, when one boy tore his trousers on some bushes I could lend him some get down the hill with in greater comfort. Worse was to come on our return, somebody, we did not know who, had left open the flaps of the food tent and some cows had been, tramped about, and gone. We had enough food to cover if we were to wasteful but the teacher who was organising us was the same one who shouted at me that I was 'Too bloody soft' for using a 2B pencil, I did begin to wonder why teachers who could be so easily short tempered continued to put themselves in the path of temptation to anger, us. Or was the whole idea of the staff designing exercises in leadership for others meant to prove how difficult we were to lead in the way they expected? The jury ran out on that question, there was no further incident that week. Maybe I should have predicted one blow up on the week even if we all proved to be model pupils all the time. The teacher needed it.
Canoeing became another reason for the school to take us off campus for a whole day at a time, I preferred it much more over camping or waking to the school youth hostel to stay there overnight. I don't know where we were taken, but I remember it being narrow streams rather then broader deeper waters. It became something to look forward to. For several weekends running the minibus was loaded with towels, life jackets and half a dozen boys, the trailer with the canoes hooked to the back and off we went. Canoeing was a relatively solitary activity which made me take to like, well, a canoeist to water. I really enjoyed the feeling of moving within a landscape at distance where I could see other boys but I as not with them directly. Since I could not swim I was nervous of capsizing and nervous of the bully boys I was out with. But that was dealt with quite well. When one of the half serious bullies approached me, it was natural for him to threaten to capsize me, and I did feel afraid, but also I practically dared him to do it, the better to lose my fear of the water. I felt emotionally buoyant, particularly after the second time which he had nothing to do with.
Finally there was the day spent picking strawberries on a local farm, Kevin and I both decided that this was another day away from the school and one that was more on our terms, and we could each earn some money at it. We were dropped off at the farm by a teacher and left for the day. We did not pick as much as we had hoped to, nor did we earn as much. We left the farm half past three or so, after we could work no more nor eat any more of the strawberries. We walked together part way and I put my thumb out for a lift, I had temporarily stopped thinking of myself as being in, and part of, the school. Nobody knows what might have happened if a stranger had picked me up and I had said where I wanted to be. Suddenly a teacher appeared in his mini with Kevin already in the back. I was ordered to get in the back of the car in mildly annoyed tones as if I had offended my keepers, whom I should have had more deference towards. But I felt highly unsure of what I could learn from deference.
The final seal on the school year came when it became obvious that amid all the character-building outdoors activities something rather large was missing. The careers advice that would have signalled my exit from the school was simply not there. By default and deference it was settled that I should be returning to the school in September. Kevin got the green light to leave that summer because he was older than me so when I returned it would be with few, if any close friends left. Still I could always try writing to maintain contact......
Find Chapter 28 here
Find the chapter guide here.
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