The Doctor took a silk handkerchief out of his sleeve and blew his nose with such violence that dust spurted from the head of the nearest owl. Then he recrossed his legs on the desk, and with both hands clasped behind his head and his body tilted so far back he was almost prone, he rattled off the schedule, which he described as “Ponson’s timetable,” adding as he did so that Ponson was the kind of chap who understands timetables.
Rising bell was at 6:45, breakfast at 7:15, prayers at 7:45, and then there was a half-hour break.
“Bowels,” said the Doctor. “Give ‘em plenty of time to move ‘em. The secret of a good school’s a happy boy, and the secret of a happy boy’s a comfortable intestine.”
From 8:30 to 12:30, with a fifteen minutes’ break in the middle, were classes. Then came lunch, followed by a half hour break and then more classes till 3:30. These were followed by detention and/or games. If the master was on duty he took detention and if he was not he supervised games. If he was on duty he also patrolled corridors, attended the prefects’ court where junior offenders were caned by senior boys, took the two-hour evening prep and when that was over he put the junior and middle schools to bed.
“Keep ‘em on the hop and you have no moral problem,” explained the Doctor. “But give a boy time to think and you know as well as the next man what he’ll think about. Have you ever used a cane?”
“No, sir.”
“Then go to Cutler – he’s our sergeant-at-arms and an old Green Jacket – and ask him for one. Preaching at a boy, chivvying him, making him ashamed of himself, there’s nothing worse for the character. But give him six of the best if he deserves it and you’ve made a friend for life.”
The Doctor contemplated the eagle which stood on his window ledge and rubbed his head some more.
“Well, Stewart?” he said after a while, genially.
“Yes, sir?”
“I’ve noticed you’ve been admiring my ship-of-the-line.” He jerked a lean thumb over his shoulder at the engraving of the seventeenth century battleship and his voice became excessively cordial. “She’s H.M.S. Terrible, first of the name in the Navy List if I’m not mistaken. An ancestor of mine had her once, an ancestor on the maternal wing, Prisser, Admiral of the Blue. I don’t expect you’ve ever heard of him. My full name actually is Prisser-hyphen-Bigbee, but Prisser won’t do in a school for obvious reasons, so I drop both the Prisser and the hyphen out here. Did you ever notice the motto over the school door?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It was Prisser’s. Caveat Gallus – ‘Let the French Beware!’ I rather fancy with good reason, for they never came out to fight him. He watched ‘em for years and they never came. I’d wanted a naval name for the school, but it wasn’t as simple as it looked. Nobody out here’s ever heard of Camperdown. If we called us The Saints in this province they’d think we were Roman Catholics. The Nile? Copenhagen? Obviously wouldn’t do. Trafalgar naturally – but do you know, Stewart? In Montreal there’s a girls’ school called Trafalgar. So I settled on Waterloo willy-nilly, though it wasn’t the Duke’s best battle. Salamanca was that, but out here who’s heard of Salamanca?”
With a crash the Doctor dropped both feet to the ground and rose towering among his birds, and with an expression disconcertingly roguish he pointed his finger at me and wagged it.
“Stewart, you’re the first native, I mean the first man not from home we’ve ever had here. So go in and win.”
“I’ll do my best, sir.”
“Of course you will. And by Easter, instead of being the wrong Stewart, you may have proved you’re the right Stewart.”
CHAPTER II
So began five years of servitude. I liked the boys and got on with them and I was thankful to have a job of any kind, but I was nervously exhausted most of the time, for Waterloo was as wild a jumble of improvisations as a British army in the first year of a war, with life a constant emergency.
“The Duke,” Dr. Bigbee said, “preferred to do the business himself.”
So did Dr. Bigbee: I truly believe that if it had been possible he would have run the school with no masters at all. He taught a full schedule, and did so with such enthusiasm that the masters in the rooms next to his were unable to teach because his voice boomed through the paper-thin partitions and drowned them out. He liked boys and had an uncanny understanding of them, and at least three-quarters of the boys worshipped him. He played cricket, rolled the pitch himself, watered the rinks and was busy every instant of the day. For recreation he cycled, and I can still see him peddling on his English cycle, which he rode very tall in the saddle, singing sea chanteys out of tune. He would have been a great schoolmaster if he had possessed an education, or even if he had enjoyed reading. But he was too busy, so he said, even to read the newspapers.
That may have been why the staff was what it was. The contrast between Dr. Bigbee and the rest of us, I thought in my bleaker moments, was the contrast between the Duke and the troops he once described in a famous phrase. Only one of us had ever wanted to be a schoolmaster; the rest of us were like me. We had ended at Waterloo.
There was Ponson, who was old Boer War and composed the timetable: he had come to Canada after a commercial misfortune in Portugal. There was Callendar, who taught Latin, had been trained as a church organist, and whose hobby was brass rubbing; Callendar was bitter because in Canada there were no brasses to rub. The science master had once been purser of a P. and O. liner. The mathematician was a militant pacifist who infuriated Ponson by his nasal reiterations that England was dying and that he intended to dance at her funeral. There was a shaggy youth – the only one who had wanted to be a schoolmaster – who believed in the Montessori System. There was a trio of vague young men who had obtained degrees from British provincial universities and, in the words of one of them, “taught odds and ends to the odds and sods in the middle school.” There was a former clergyman who looked like the archbishop of Canterbury and insisted that Webster’s Dictionary was no authority for the English language. There was McNish. And finally there was Shatwell.
Jocelyn McNish, the axed naval officer, was forty-two years old, lean and tall. He had black hair surrounding a twitching scalp rendered horseshoe bald from years of wearing a naval cap, and his black brows were as straight as a gridiron’s bars. McNish lived for the outbreak of war – any war – which would restore him to active rank as a lieutenant-commander with full pay, and the only times I saw him cheerful were the days when the headlines were terrifying. He was not a bad schoolmaster when he was sober, but he hated weekends and duty days and drank on them, and liquor made him surly and savage. He used to prowl the corridors on duty days with a waxed rope’s end he called a starter, and the boys when he was on duty padded the seats of their pants with towels. He never got wise to this shop-worn trick and their fortitude under his starter had given him an admiration for my countrymen unshared by any of my other colleagues.
“Say what you like,” McNish used to announce with a twitch of his scalp, “say what you like, but these local yokels take a flogging Dartmouth-fashion. That’s more than you can say for the little buggers at Eton.”
McNish’s combination of names seemed so bizarre to me that I once asked him how a man with such a surname had come by the Christian name of Jocelyn.
“Nothing to that,” said McNish with a twitch of his scalp. “Jocelyn was the Pater’s name, and the Pater was no bloody Scotchman.”
He then informed me that the Pater was a Somerset viscount who had begotten him during a grouse season in Kintail.
“Naturally the old boy couldn’t acknowledge me publicly,” McNish explained, “but he always showed an interest. He put up the necessary to send me through Dartmouth, and the day I was commissioned he sent me his check for fifty guineas. I’ve never heard from him since, but I’ve always thought that was jolly decent. Not many chaps’d’ve been so handsome if they’d knocked up the chambermaid on a weekend.”
And there was Randolph Shatwell.
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p; When I first saw Shatwell’s ramrod back, bullet head, clipped moustache and walnut countenance, I thought he must surely have been cashiered from the Bengal Lancers. But Shatwell had never got as far as that. His soft mouth and calf’s eyes, his raffish smile and his languid voice, together with his air of cheerful and perennial defeat gave him a kind of saving grace wherever he went, and (he said it himself) women had always been kind to him.
“A chap with the name of Shatwell,” he explained, “learns rather early on that things are likely to go against him, you understand. I thought of changing the old name once, but I’d become rather attached to it, you understand, so I decided to make do.”
Shatwell had emerged from an English public school (I think it was called Lancing) into Sandhurst, where he had gone because his father had gone there before him, but all he learned at Sandhurst was how to keep a straight back. Leaving Sandhurst without a commission, he had spent several agreeable years in Smyrna in raisins and dates, but something had gone wrong in Smyrna so down he went through Suez to Kipling country, where over a period of twenty years, broken by a stretch in the Army Service Corps during the war, he had failed in teak in Calcutta, in jute in Madras and in rubber in Kuala Lumpur. He had spent a year in Java in an enterprise he described as ephemeral, and six months in Bali (“Absolutely the best time of my life, old boy.”) doing nothing at all. For a year after that he had been a shipping agent in Brisbane, but something had gone wrong in Brisbane and he had been toying with the idea of South America (“Just turning the Argentine over in my mind, you understand.”) when the long fingers of Dr. Bigbee, scraping the bottom of some teachers’ agency barrel, closed on Shatwell and dragged him without protest halfway round the world to Waterloo, where his natural inertia had held him ever since. It was his dream to return to Cheshire where he had been born (“I know of a rather charming cottage near Knutsford.”), but he never expected to bring it off.
“A chap has to be rather a brain-wave to get along in England, you understand. It’s not at all as it is out here, where anyone can get along.”
Shatwell differed from my other colleagues in one respect; he was the only one of them who had seen anything of Canada beyond what was visible around the school and from the windows of the trains that conveyed them to and fro between Lachance and Montreal, their sally port and escape hatch. The moment the summer term ended, all of them except Shatwell made a concerted rush for the first steamer home, and when they reached England I suspect that most of them eked out their funds by tutoring backward boys in coastal resorts. But in June Shatwell could never afford the passage money and had to get through his summers as best he could. Once he lived with a woman he did not particularly like, but who liked him; another year he went as far west as Winnipeg, from which he returned with the comment that there didn’t seem to be much out there; generally he got through his long vacation in a shack beside a Laurentian lake, eating out of tins. When I knew him he lived for his weekends in town, where he was acquainted with a widow he liked so well that once or twice he toyed with the idea of marrying her. But always, after weighing the pros and cons, Shat-well decided against this.
“If I had her out here all the time there’d be nothing to look forward to, you understand. But as things are, I can always look forward to the weekends.”
As I said elsewhere, the character of Waterloo has changed out of recognition since the Doctor’s day. The Doctor, who boasted that he was too busy to read the newspapers, in the spring of 1940 suddenly discovered that England was in peril and that his post was not here but in the firing line. He sold out and went home, and one after the other his masters followed him. Today the school is run by natives of the country who have made it unrecognizable. In my time the walls of the dining hall were lined with minute pictures of Admirals of the Red and Admirals of the Blue, interspersed with the heads of wild beasts. Now they contain a portrait gallery of Canadian prime ministers and the trio of leopard heads which used to snarl at us over the headmaster’s chair has been replaced by a group photograph of the new board of governors. Waterloo, quite a few old boys complain, is no longer the place it was, and in these days of conformity I confess there are moments when I regret it.
CHAPTER III
But during my actual time at Waterloo I saw nothing humorous about the place, and it was the weekends that kept me sane. Every fourth weekend I was on duty, sometimes I was down with a cold and often I was broke, but whenever I had a chance and could afford it, I fled from the place on Friday afternoon and went to Montreal.
Never before was Montreal as it was in the Thirties and it will never be like that again. The unemployed used to flow in two rivers along St. Catherine Street, and I used to see eddies of them stopping in front of shop windows to stare at the goods they could not buy. There was a restaurant that used to roast chickens in its window over electrically-operated spits, and there were always slavering men outside staring at the crinkling skin of the chickens and the sputtering fat. I remember how silent the unemployed were when they emerged after a snowfall to clean the streets, often without mittens on their hands, and how pitiful their cheap worn shoes looked as the snow wet them and turned the unpolished leather gray. And above all do I remember my own guilt as I saw them, for I had work and they had none.
In those days the streets of Montreal were a kind of truth to me and I roamed them. I learned them block by block from their smells and the types I saw, I came to love the shape of the city itself, its bold masses bulging hard against the sky and the purple semi-darkness of the lower town at evening when Mount Royal was still high and clear against bright sunsets. I loved the noise of the ships booming in the harbor and along the canal to the Lakes, and the quiet little areas some said were like London but which were actually indigenous to this wise, experienced, amiably cynical town.
Though I slept in my parents’ flat in Notre Dame de Grâce, I seldom went there until after midnight when they were asleep; Sunday was the day I reserved for my parents, Sunday when I was tired. On Friday evenings when I arrived in town I checked my bag in the station and roamed. The streets were so candid and unashamed that they made everyone who walked them seem equal: housewives and office clerks and the thousands of unemployed, threadbare boys and girls in love with each other and whoremasters sliding around corners after silent girls and the hideous olive-green street cars of that period with their graying conductors half-sitting, half-standing in their cages at the back while the crowds read the bad news in the papers – all these people seemed part of a collective sameness which had a character entirely its own. In winter the city was more than ever itself. In winter when the snow slanted like black wires against the lights, or creaked under foot when the stars were hard overhead, I would see the young people in hundreds in their skiclothes going down to the cheap special trains that took them north. And in those days you could see the hockey for fiffty cents.
In my first year at Waterloo I spent nearly all my Montreal weekends alone, and it was the autumn of 1934 before I began to make friends in town. The first ones I met were through Adam Blore, the young sculptor who had been expelled from Waterloo and now sold carpets at Eaton’s, the man who had told me I would get beriberi from the Waterloo food. With him began a chain which eventually led me to Jerome Martell and back to Catherine after all those years.
I have heard Adam Blore described as typical of his time, but he was probably typical of nothing. His father was a Superior Court judge and his mother came from one of the old business families, but Adam himself was a sport. After spending thousands of dollars of his father’s money pretending to take advanced courses in Cambridge, Berlin and the Sorbonne, he had finally announced that he was a genius and his father had finally got tired of paying his bills. Now he worked at Eaton’s and sculpted in his spare time and his rooms in a disintegrated district of downtown Montreal had become the focus of a group of angry and discontented young people who met to drink beer, make assignations with each other and talk about politics and art, the
ir villains being every conventional politician and artist and their heroes Picasso, Soutine, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Kafka and Gide. Among them was Adam himself, who came closer to being a genuine nihilist than anyone I ever knew.
But I owe Adam something. He taught me to look at pictures and he introduced me to one of the kindest people I ever knew.
Her name was Caroline Hall, and I often wondered what chance of taste had led her to Adam’s group. She was a buxom, brown-haired physiotherapist excellent in her work, and she made every man feel that she liked him. She was cheerful, buoyant, healthy-minded and absolutely amoral so far as her sex life went. Her attitude to sex was simply this: “It’s good fun so long as you like the fellow.”
It was Caroline who kept me returning to those long evenings of beer and cigarette smoke where the young artists and poets wrangled and intoxicated one another with talk. It was also from Caroline that I first heard mention of Jerome Martell. She worked in the hospital where he served on the staff, and she described him ruefully – ruefully because he had failed to notice her existence – as the most attractive male animal in Montreal.
Adam also knew Jerome, and I was anxious to discover what sort of man he was.
Adam gave a sardonic laugh. “Martell? Underneath he’s pure rhumba.”
“Isn’t he supposed to be a great surgeon?”
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