by Jon Pertwee
Into this ministrels’-gallery-cum-organ-loft came many visiting musicians and singers to enrapture the congregation with music and song of a higher standard than that we could provide for ourselves. Not that that should be denigrated, as our own standard was of the highest. The boys’ choir was very good indeed and Mr Cameron a most able choirmaster. I myself had a fine treble voice and with the rest of the choir was recorded by Regal Zonophone on a 78 singing the inevitable double Oh for the Wings of a Dove and Hear My Prayer. I’ve got it hidden away somewhere to this day and am most anxious to find it so that I can prove to my children once and for all that I was not always a groaner.
But our star chorister was a young singer quite unsurpassed by even the world famous Ernest Lush. His name was Peter Pease, and when he sang the earth stopped spinning. The pure clarity and tone of those soaring notes entered my head and stayed there for life, and I was forever reminded of him when the young chorister sang the theme song for John le Carré’s television series Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Peter Pease was sadly killed in the Battle of Britain and will be remembered by many from what was said about him in the classic book The Last Enemy written by Richard Hilary in 1941, but by me and all who heard him sing he will be remembered as a gift of God.
At least once a year the chapel gallery would be occupied by a certain ‘Smelly’ Satiswood, an exquisite violinist who introduced Bruch’s Violin Concerto to me with memorable soul. The reason for Mr Satiswood’s strange nomenclature was choice. The gentleman was a redhead and redheads as you know are a unique lot. Not only do they usually possess pale translucent skin, freckles and usually beautifully textured hair, but they also have a very distinctive odour. In most females it is the subtle musky smell of a perfume, but in some males this muskiness is potent to a degree. The chapel must have been 150 feet long with the gallery at least twenty feet up from the aisle, yet within seconds of Mr Satiswood coming to the edge of the gallery to play, the chapel would be permeated with the most extraordinarily pungent whiffy, niffy smell I have ever snuffed up.
Although we have been taught all about the speed of light, no-one to my knowledge has ever gone into the speed of smell, and to my mind this shows a gross lack of interest in a most fascinating phenomenon.
The boys’ giggling reaction to the muscadine odour and the subsequent holding of noses and raising of handkerchiefs to nostrils, with accompanying sotto voce ‘Poohs!’ was unjust in the extreme, for the smell, as I have said, was by no means unpleasant and in any case was far outweighed by Mr Satiswood’s exquisite playing.
Over the years I have frequently been jerked back in time to my place in the pew of that lovely chapel, where my nostrils were assailed by that peculiar and quite unique muskiness. I was attending an evening of boxing only recently at the Albert Hall, when right in the middle of a bout of considerable mayhem I cried out, ‘Smelly Satiswood!!’ My companions were not particularly bemused as followers of ‘the fancy’ are prone to shout out strange epithets and incomprehensible instructions to their favourite participants, and my cry might well have come under one or other of those categories. But the fact is, that involuntary cry had been wrung from me by that familiar pungent smell reaching my olfactory senses once again. Amidst all the reek of cigar and cigarette smoke, and the fetid odour of hot socks and armpits, the same distinctively redolent aromatic aroma of the red-headed Mr Satiswood came churning nostalgically through the noxious offensiveness to transport me back through time via nothing but my nostrils.
*
It is strange that Peter Dawson was my best friend at W.H., for he was ‘academic and well behaved’ according to his reports. Mine were by no means in the same category, as can be readily seen by the sample included among the photographs in this book. There was one thing you could say about my reports – that throughout my schooldays they were consistent – reading ‘bad’, or at best ‘improving’. Peter used to take me out to tea at Kingscliffe, a smart hotel near Margate, whenever his parents or friends came down to visit him. Naturally when my parents or friends came down to visit me I was expected to do the same, and as we had so many visiting relatives between us, we were able to enjoy more outings than most. We became so close, that visits to each other’s homes during the holidays became a regular part of our curriculum. Peter’s family owned a beautiful Tudor house in Sussex. Here Peter’s father, mother and sisters lived in considerable splendour with butlers, footmen, chauffeurs, and gardeners galore. It was a gloriously kept house, with Mrs Dawson, a gentle timid soul, keeping it ablaze with cut flowers and plants throughout the year. Her husband was a quiet introverted man who liked to be left alone. His command was my wish, for in truth I feared him, for all his introversion. He lived in the ‘old way’ and morning and night held prayers for family, friends and staff in the drawing room. A most solemn occasion, but one where all participation had to be at full voice, be it psalms, hymns or even prayers. These meetings were never long and in retrospect I rather enjoyed them. Sunday was different. On Sundays, Mr Dawson would demonstrate his prowess as a Hot Gospeller. For half an hour, as was expected of us, we stood in awe of him. Then suddenly an extraordinary change would come about. The entire family, except Mrs Dawson, would hurry to various corners of the room to collect their instruments, the girls their violins, violas and cellos, and Peter his clarinet. Gathering round their father, by now already seated at the Bechstein, they proceeded to play quite beautifully classical quartets in the ‘Amadeus’ mould.
I sat silently, both loving and at the same time hating their musicianship and expertise – the latter reaction being one of extreme jealousy at my inability to provide something of equal calibre.
The bedroom allocated for my first visit was situated by itself at the end of the west wing. This necessitated crossing the minstrels’ gallery, overlooking the vast Elizabethan dining hall. There was at the end of this passage, a dark, oak-panelled room of perfect linen-fold, with a bathroom converted from an early priest’s hole. A large antique bed faced this bathroom with the bedroom door on my right.
Sometime during that first night I awoke feeling desperately sick. So suddenly had this nausea attacked me that I had no time to find a receptacle and was promptly sick all over my bedcover. Mortified by what I had done I failed to notice the foul stench that permeated the room. Snapping on a bedside light I staggered into the bathroom heaving and retching. Eventually, feeling a little better, I proceeded to attempt a clean up. The bedcover had mercifully caught the brunt, and this I was able to wash out in the bath and dry, by wrapping it round the hot water tank in the cupboard. Putting the dreadful experience down to a ‘bilious attack’, l went back to bed and fell instantly into a deep sleep.
Good morning, Jon, did you sleep well?’ asked Mrs Dawson solicitously at breakfast.
Yes, thank you, very well,’ I lied bravely.
Good, I’m so glad!’
I thought I detected a strange look pass between Mrs Dawson and her husband but decided it must’ve been my imagination. The next night at around the same time I awoke, attacked once more by the self-same nausea, only this time I smelt the reason for my retching, an odour so foul I am unable to describe it. Perhaps the smell of a long dead, fly-blown sheep would suffice. I sat up, my hand clapped over my mouth, when I saw the cause of all my vomiting. Between the end of my bed and the now open bathroom door, there was an undulating greenish shape in the form of a tree trunk. It was translucent and appeared to be bubbling like marsh gas. As the bubbles burst, so did the room fill further with the odour of noxious putrefaction. I was temporarily frozen in terror, but as soon as the ‘presence’ started to move towards me, I made the all-powerful effort that enabled me to get out of bed and fumble my way frantically out of the door. Hurtling up the corridor and screaming my lungs out, I ran smack into the arms of Mrs Dawson, who on hearing my screams had come out of her bedroom into the passage. Clasping me consolingly to her, she turned on her husband like a tigress. ‘I told you to see that nobody wa
s ever put into that room again. You just won’t listen. From tomorrow that wing will be permanently locked and sealed.’ No explanation was ever given and the matter was never discussed. Even Peter could not be drawn on the subject. Perhaps he was ignorant of the fact that his west wing was so well and truly haunted.
Since that time, I have had several strange encounters with the unknown, although I do not consider myself to be psychic in any way.
*
My all-consuming desire to be an actor took precedence over everything else at Wellington House. My studies were not so much ‘shelved’ as ‘pushed temporarily to one side’, to make way for the more important things in my life, such as writing plays and sketches, and trying to band my friends together to make up a company of players to act in them. The resultant side effects on my progress in scholastic matters were ‘lowering’ to say the least, but the Reverend Underhill did not seem particularly concerned at my lack of academic interest. By now, I think he realised that the theatre was all I thought and dreamed about, so the fives bat was ‘retired’ as far as my backside was concerned. From then on in he allowed me full rein, to ‘brush up my Shakespeare’, poetry, history, carpentry, and any like subjects that he felt would be of use to me in my chosen profession. He and Mrs Underhill encouraged and helped me to write, produce, direct, act in, apply the make-up and even provide the intermission music in many an evening of ‘Pertwee’s Delights’. The content of these entertainments I have completely forgotten, but Laurence Jolivet recently sent me the actual roneo’d programme sheet of the first show I ever put on. There is at the end a reference to Jack Sacosta’s Saskatchewan Syncopators’. As, at that time, ‘Jack Sacosta’ (an alias of mine) was incapable of even blowing a raspberry on a bugle, I can only assume that the few popular tunes played by the ‘Syncopators’ were upon combs and lavatory paper, the ‘Submarine Kazoo’ having, to the best of my knowledge, not yet reached our shores.
An informative and entertaining few years, played out in a school with a great tradition and a perfectly splendid cast!
*
My penultimate chance of a reasonably academic education came when I left Wellington House at thirteen and a half and joined my two brothers at one of the world’s oldest public schools, Sherborne, in Dorset.
I was in Abbeylands House, under the Housemastership of Mr ‘Mauk’ (why, I know not) Elderton, a completely ineffectual man, of little character but gentleness. He seemed frightened of his own shadow, let alone anyone else’s.
I was informed that I must not chum up with boys of a previous term, as they were my seniors, and when new boys came the following term, I was not to chum up with them either as I was now theirs. ‘Make friends with boys of your own term,’ they said. This was difficult, in as much as there was only one other new boy in my term. He was a pimply Australian called Nooler, and I hated him on sight. So, what to do? I struck up a friendship with a kindred soul in the next house, one D. P. (Dippy) Walker. His Housemaster, Mr Parry Jones, very soon put a stop to that as ‘Friendship between boys in different Houses is not to be tolerated!’ Lonely now, I would visit Michael at School House near the main buildings. He was senior enough to have been allocated a ‘study’, a pokey little room furnished out of his personal pocket from a junk shop at an outlay of some four pounds. A poor place, but his own, and I envied him.
My ‘place’ was a bench-locker and a desk in the far corner of the Junior Day Room, where every few minutes, the cry of ‘Fag!’ echoed commandingly through its portals. It was always the last boy in the queue of fags formed outside the fagmaster’s study that had to undertake the chore, and my desk being situated where it was made getting any place other than last in the queue a virtual impossibility! Therefore, in an endeavour to avoid this inevitable situation, I took to standing by the Junior Day Room door, reading a book, and ready the moment the fagmaster’s study door opened, to anticipate his summons by hurtling up the passage to arrive first, instead of last!
The end result of this brilliant piece of logical thinking was to receive a vociferous complaint from the queuing fags that I had cheated.
Accepting their accusation as proved, the prefect switched procedures and said, ‘Very well then, first fag!’ . . . I was hoist with my own petard!
My visits to Michael were cold comfort as, ‘It is not permitted to enter the study of another boy’s house.’ Standing outside the open window was all that was allowed.
‘Not too long, I’m afraid,’ said Michael’s study-mate, ‘it’s cold enough in here as it is.’
I looked forward to these visits talking to Michael, and I distinctly remember laughing uproariously at a record of Sandy Powell singing his famous patter song Can You Hear Me, Mother? To think he went on making us laugh with that song until he died in 1982.
*
School routine was a rude awakening from the comforts of home. No extra half-hour in bed, and no relaxing in a leisurely hot bath. It was early rising and a cold bath.
First, a cacophonous hand bell was rung to facilitate wakefulness, followed by cries of ‘To the bath, to the bath’ from the supervising prefects. At once lines of completely naked boys with retracted penises formed shivering in the corridor outside the bathroom. Inside, there awaited three enormous baths filled to the brim with freezing water.
If the baths had been filled the previous night, it was not unusual for the ‘preparing’ fag to have to break the ice that had formed upon the surface.
The custom was to leap into the bath and, with nose held, immerse oneself entirely in the water, at the same time causing an icy wave to deluge the unfortunates standing behind. Any ‘lagging’ in the queue was promptly discouraged by the overseers’ accurate flicking of the cheeks (buttock variety) with the corner of a wet towel. I have never been given a lucid reason for this pagan ceremony apart from ‘It’s good for you,’ or ‘Because it’s been done since 1407,’ and what can you say to logic like that, other than ‘Oh, I see!’
It’s always difficult when you really hate something, to understand that there can possibly be those who actually enjoy it. But lots of my contemporaries loved school, and partook with intense enthusiasm of those activities I so detested – early ‘Long Runs’, and ‘Short Runs’ and the downfall of the British Empire - ‘Team Games!’
I never was very much good at rugby, soccer and cricket, although I had enjoyed fielding at long leg at Wellington House, because there, after each over, I was able to back slowly off the field, further and further into the tall grass, and at the precise moment when all attention was focused elsewhere, I would fall backwards into the weeds and wild flowers, and surprisingly remain there undiscovered staring up at the sun and the sky for the rest of the game. Only once was I caught in flagrante as it were, and that was by H. ‘the Rebel’ Riley, who just winked at me.
No, if you weren’t into games at Sherborne, you had a pretty rough time of it. If you weren’t a scholar that is. A scholar had carte blanche and that certainly didn’t apply to me!
They say that the public school fagging system develops character, so let me give you a case in point and allow you to be the judge.
For some reason, perhaps the influence of the Dawson family’s love of music, I decided to learn, of all things, the trumpet. Dad agreed and I started private lessons at a guinea an hour, with a professor of that chosen instrument. The lessons took place in the music-block some quarter of a mile’s distance away from my house. In the middle of one such lesson, a fag came bursting into the music-room and with a quick apology for his intrusion, informed me that my presence was urgently required by my fagmaster, Carden.
‘Why? I asked.
‘No idea, he just told me to get you, quam celerrime.’ Fearing as always the worst, an accident to one of my brothers, or a death in the family, I excused myself and ran back to my house at full speed, arriving breathlessly before Carden’s study door some moments before his courier. I knocked and entered.
‘You wanted me, Carden? I asked anxiously.
‘Yes, I did, Pertwee, make me a piece of toast.’
I was temporarily speechless. ‘A what? I queried.
‘A piece of toast – golden brown – and buttered, followed perhaps by another one.’
I couldn’t believe it, here I was in the middle of an expensive music lesson, being called back to my house to make some lazy sod a piece of toast. My Gallic temperament burst into flame, and I let rip. ‘Are you bloody mad? Are you crippled? Don’t you know how to make toast? Well I’ll tell you! You take a slice of bread, stick it on the end of your toasting fork, and hold it before your fire, allowing it to turn a nice golden brown. Try never to burn it, but if you do, don’t be tempted to cover your misdemeanour by scraping it, otherwise some sadistic bastard like you, will beat your arse black and blue for anarchy.
There is not much point in continuing this story, suffice to say that I was sent forthwith into the quad where I was given six of the best, in my gym shorts.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, have you reached your verdict? Of course you have!
This incident so rankled in my mind, that my career as a trumpet player never really took off; leaving Louis Armstrong to continue unchallenged as ‘numero uno’.
The teachers at Sherborne were a bumpy lot. Amongst others there were ‘Doughy’ Randolph, ‘Long-Bun’ Thompson, ‘Short-Bun’ Thompson and ‘Crippen’ Hornsby-Wright. The latter in a class with a modicum of new boys, was wont to ask each such boy to stand up and give his name to the assembled class.