Growing Up In a War

by Bryan Magee

  I started trying to speak clearly, to avoid misunderstanding, so that when I said ‘A’ people would actually hear it as ‘A’ and not as ‘I’. Beyond that, I did not try to change my accent – I would not have known how to, not being able to hear it. Nevertheless, over the next couple of years, and without being conscious it was happening, I came to talk like the other boys. My musical ear probably had something to do with this. I did not know that the change had occurred until people elsewhere began to remark on it – and then again I was surprised, because at every point during the transition I had been talking spontaneously. The nearest thing to this situation that I have encountered in adult life is with the children of friends who emigrate to the United States: after a couple of years they are talking like American children, yet they have not made a conscious effort to change. Before the age of puberty such a change involves no act of will on the child’s part: on the contrary, it would require a strong effort of will not to change.

  In my house there were seven other new boys, six of whom came from prep schools and already talked like the older boys. This was when I first heard of prep schools. I had not known such schools existed, and looked with wonderment on boys of my own age who had already, for years, been learning Latin and French, not to mention algebra. The only other state-school boy was from Berkshire, and he had a rich country burr. Like me, he was talking like the others within a couple of years.

  After my first two days, my recollection of my own newness no longer contains many individual memories. There was so much that was new, so much to learn and come to terms with all at once, that it blurs into one. It was like starting life all over again in a new world. This was what the schools I had read about in school stories had been like, and at first I saw it as glamorous, though really of course it was no such thing, not glamorous at all. Among the boys, the prevailing atmosphere was one of rough good humour and a basic decency. This made things easy for a newcomer. In any case, my most immediate fellows were new too; and I had been used all my life to being in a motley gang of boys, and also to joining new gangs. Having grown up on the streets of Hoxton I felt myself to be streetwise in a way that the others were not; and as an inner-city child, still very much a London chauvinist, I thought of myself as metropolitan in a way they were not. As a typical cockney kid I was cocky, I know. But for all my follies and foibles the others accepted me as I was, and took the rough with the smooth. The school in general prided itself on its attitude towards the individual: it liked to claim that whereas other public schools tried to mould you into a standardised product, at Christ’s Hospital they tried to find out what your potential was and help you develop it. And there was some truth in that.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PEOPLE IN A war take it for granted that the war will bring upheaval into their personal lives, and children can usually adapt to this more easily than adults. As a nine-year-old on the outbreak of war I had accepted without question the need to leave my parents and my home in the East End of London to live in a village in Sussex; and then again, after a while, to go and live in a town in the Midlands. Even within that town I had lived first with one family of strangers and then another. Meanwhile my parents had been bombed out of our old home in London and gone to live in a suburb I had never heard of. I was repeatedly being plucked out of my existing environment and plunged into a strange one. I got used to this as the pattern of my life. As far as I was concerned, when I went to Christ’s Hospital it was another such change, my third or fourth in two years.

  Actually, though, unrealised by me, it was a turning point of a different order from the others. From then on, my life was to be lived in a world of well-educated people, and it never had been before. I was now on an escalator that, without any further effort or movement on my part, was going to take me to one of the best lycées in France and then the University of Oxford. And that was not all. I had entered a moral universe quite different from any I had known before. Up to then I had lived, in my little-boy way, by the laws of the jungle. All small boys are wild animals, and I do not want to exaggerate the difference between me and others, but I had grown up in circumstances more primitive than most. If I wanted something that I could get by theft or violence, I took it. If I felt that telling a lie would help, I lied. I thought nothing of cheating at games, or breaking a promise. I had no feelings of loyalty to anyone except those closest to me, and with them I behaved myself only because I needed them. I had no guilt about any of this. I thought that anyone who behaved otherwise was a fool, and so was anyone who got himself into trouble by telling the truth. I was like an animal intent on satisfying its needs.

  The most basic thing Christ’s Hospital did for me (and perhaps against me too) was to socialise me. It imbued me with a different value system: telling the truth, keeping my word, being loyal to friends and also, amazingly, behaving decently to everyone else, never cheating or taking what did not belong to me. The surprising thing is that I took to it and liked it. If anything, I carried the change to excess, as converts tend to do. Looking back, I think I embraced it with such intensity because, unconsciously, I saw it as the only way of being secure and at home in this new environment, which gave me such an exciting way of life – for, from the time I arrived at Christ’s Hospital, I loved being there, and would not have wished to be anywhere else. Being an all-boarding school, it was a closed world, more structured and ordered than anything I had known before; and it could be that I needed something like that. Even when I rebelled against it, as I was later to do, I liked having it there to rebel against. Underneath everything, I was happy with it until I left six and a half years later to join the army.

  And of course, life there was very much a communal affair. Only the house captain and his deputy – who seemed to me Olympian figures, remote – had studies of their own; the rest of us milled around in the dayroom, which was the focus of our lives. It contained four long tables, each seating six a side on its backless wooden benches, though only in the evening were we all sitting down, doing prep. During the day the tables were used in a haphazard way for games – ping-pong, chess, cards and the rest – or as workbenches by boys engrossed in various hobbies, and by scattered individuals writing letters or reading – there was nowhere else to sit. When the newspapers arrived after breakfast they were pounced on, dismembered, and the separate sheets spread out across the tables so that each could be read simultaneously by a bundle of boys bunched up like a rugger scrum.

  Banked against two of the walls were rows of lockers. Each boy had one, and it was his private space. They could not be locked, but the taboo against opening another boy’s locker was absolute, so he could keep anything in it he wanted to, however private (except food or drink, which had to be kept in the tuck cupboard). The number on his locker distinguished him for all purposes: it was the laundry mark on his clothes, and the number on his peg in the changing rooms, and on his pigeonhole in the shoe room; and he himself would put it on anything he wanted to mark as his own. Mine was 29. If I lost anything I could be fairly sure that sooner or later I would hear a voice yelling over the hubbub in the dayroom: ‘Who’s 29?’ and I would shout: ‘Me!’ and then what I had lost would return. I have thought of 29 as me ever since.

  Among themselves the boys had an acute sense of status, and this was determined by seniority. This seniority thing was new on me. It was automatic, and went by year of entry to the house. In any organised activity, the senior boy in a group was automatically its leader, regardless of his suitability to be so, as if he were the ranking officer among soldiers. And you accorded respect to this rank, simply as rank – you never cheeked a boy ‘above’ you: for instance you never called him by his nickname, even though he called you by yours. As a way for people to relate to one another it had the advantage that every boy knew exactly where he stood in every situation, and what he could do, and not do; but the disadvantage was that this bore only an accidental relationship to his capacities. It also made it hard to have a free-and-easy relatio
nship with anyone on a higher or lower level. I never ingested this sense of hierarchy, and have never had it at any time in my life, but it is something I learnt about at school, and I became, perforce, an accurate if cynical assessor of it.

  In various ways all the separate little aspects of our lives seemed to be governed by rules. We had to clean our shoes at a certain time each day, and when we had cleaned them they were inspected by a monitor. After the juniors had washed at night, before going to bed, we trooped along in our pyjamas to the matron’s room and queued up to have our cleanliness inspected. She looked especially at our feet, our fingernails and our ears, and might send one or two of us back to have another go. (By this time I was keeping my ears clean, at least.) We had to get up very early in the morning when the school bell rang, and were marched in columns of four to the dining hall for breakfast. We marched to all our meals, though not away from them; and the same went for daily chapel services. There was much complaint about this, and the authorities maintained defensively that it was the only way they could be sure of getting eight hundred and fifty boys to the same place at the same time. The weakness of their argument was that we were not marched to classes, yet we got there on time. I disliked all this marching about, and avoided it whenever I could.

  On weekday mornings there were four classroom periods. During the break between numbers two and three we had to go back to our houses, change into gym clothes, and do ten minutes of organised physical exercise. After lunch, which we called dinner, there were compulsory sporting activities – rugger and other outdoor games, cross-country runs, swimming, gym and the rest – which at least were highly diversified. Then more lessons. Then the evening meal, which we called tea. Then compulsory prep in the dayroom. Then bed. In amongst all this there were two lots of prayers at opposite ends of the day, one in the dayroom and one in chapel. The only period we could rely on having to ourselves – and very precious that made it – was the three-quarters of an hour between the end of morning school and lunch, the period we called ‘twelve fifteen’, because that was when it started.

  Such was our day. This mass of organised activities in different places (it has to be remembered that the school spread out across twelve hundred acres) confronted the new boy like a maze, so for his first term he had another boy to guide him through it. This other boy was called a nursemaid, and was in his second year. Mine was Jennings. His initials were L.H.C., which stood for Lancelot Hereward Cedric. He was chipper, sparky, with a touch of the Artful Dodger about him, just the right sort to teach me how to be streetwise in my new environment. In my first few days he had to help me dress by tying my bands for me, and to tell me which classroom or playing field was where; but as time went on his teachings grew more arcane. He taught me the nicknames of all the masters, as well as of other boys, and amusingly mimicked their personal characteristics. He explained not only the rules but how to get round them, and which of them could be ignored. For him the distinction between morality and the rules was clear-cut, and I imbibed it straight away: the demands of morality were absolute, but we could play ducks and drakes with the rules. There could not have been a better guide.

  The seven other new boys with whom I was learning and doing all this, my only equals in seniority in the house, were a congenial bunch. Some had the sort of names I was used to – Hudson, Griffiths, Mercer, Batts – but not all. There was Piers Hector Erskine-Tulloch, for instance. I knew about double-barrelled names from books and comics, but here was my first one; and there were lots more in the school. From a military family, he was destined for the army from the day he arrived, and was a tough, no-nonsense extrovert even at eleven. He was more thickly built than the rest of us and seemed armour-plated, like a tank. We liked him, but viewed him as a good-natured thug. The one of us most friendly with him was entirely different from him in personality: Richard Cavendish, son of a West Country village parson. He thought differently from the rest of us too, partly because he half lived in the world of the books he read, supposing that world to be real. However, he coped with our world as well, even if he found it disappointing, and was good enough at whatever we had to do, so he was reasonably well integrated. His conversation was characterised by pleasing and appropriate turns of phrase from his books, and was always interesting. The quietest one among us, Graham Courtier, a doe-eyed, olive-skinned boy, flowed along with the stream without being passive or negligible. Peter Batts was small and bucolic, a country boy from a state school, and a little at sea at first – though when he found his feet, what emerged was a competent and reliable person, a future house captain – as also was Chris Griffiths. Mercer (his first names were Sebastian Andrew, but we called him Sam because of his initials) was the odd one out, a problem child who could be goaded into uncontrollable, hysterical, foot-stamping, screaming rages. I am ashamed to say that the rest of us experimented in finding new ways of doing this, and he had to be removed from the school after a couple of years. My skin crawls when I think of it – I was no worse than the others in tormenting him, but no better. Lionel Hudson had just arrived from a prep school in Horsham and spoke in a high-pitched, highly affected way. On my third or fourth day I overheard one of the monitors say to another: ‘I’d rather have Magee’s cockney than Hudson’s ridiculous haw-haw.’ Hudson and I both immediately acquired nicknames based on the way we spoke. Neither of these survived much beyond our first year, but for our first three or four terms he was known as Lady Hudson and I as Blimey Magee.

  The set-up in the school kept our year in the house together. The sense of hierarchy set a small but real distance between us and the boys in the years above us. And it was difficult to make friends in other houses, because we were not allowed to go into them, nor they to visit us. Only in classrooms did we mix freely with the other boys of our own year. So the basic grouping in the house stayed always in the background as we moved on up through the school. Within this group, different friendships formed and re-formed over time. To begin with, Batts and I, as the only two who were new to this whole business of boarding-school education, befriended each other: a little, stocky, taciturn country boy and a tall, skinny, garrulous cockney kid – we must have made a disparate pair. Then Hudson decided that I, a real-life East Ender, was a tough guy to be admired, and attached himself to me. At that time he was reading a book by Sapper called Jim Maitland about a character who did ridiculously adventurous things, so he identified that character with me and addressed me as Jim. Most of us were reading books of this kind, the most popular being those by Leslie Charteris, about a romantic criminal called the Saint. In direct imitation of him, Hudson and I started committing ‘crimes’ and leaving our trademark

  at the scene – apple-pie beds, sewn-up rugger shorts, hidden tuck and the rest. Our success exceeded our daydreams. ‘Who is the Saint?’ became the talking point among the juniors. To our incredulous astonishment no one suspected us. It was delicious. But then, by sheer bad luck, we were blundered across one day by our housemaster, Snugs Burleigh, at the scene of a crime we were committing. Our secret was out. He said with an admirably straight face that he would not punish us or reveal the secret if we would promise not to commit any more crimes. And that was the end of the Saint’s career.

  Except for our relations with Mercer, who was our butt, the whole group of us got on well together. Our foibles as individuals could be a subject of teasing, but such teasing was always good-natured. Griffiths, known as Griff, a Welshman and a Christian from an unusually strait-laced background, was a stickler for doing everything according to the rules, and was relentlessly judgemental from a conventional point of view, so we teased him for that. I talked all the time, and was teased for that. A lot of my talk made fun of convention, and this could get up Griff’s nose. Cavendish talked too, but his talk was like a rather good book and paid little regard to what the rest of us thought. At that stage of his life he had enormous cheeks that seemed to be permanently puffed-up, like a cherub blowing a trumpet, and he was known as Cheeks Cavendish: pe
ople would puff out their cheeks when he came on the scene. Actually, he was the boy with whom I had most in common, and it turned out that he and I were to become lifelong friends, but that was not evident to begin with. Hudson was giggly and camp, a bit pseudo-posh, and had a piercing laugh, all of which we mimicked. Tulloch eyed the rest of us as if he was itching to sort us out with a group of the Gurkhas he was later to command, and we were wary of him. There was plenty of physical rough-and-tumble among us, wrestling for possession of things, and pushing one another out of the way; but fist-fighting, to which I had been so accustomed, was taboo. Our aggression found its outlet in games, and perhaps also in a certain verbal bluntness that was without malice, and was taken for granted among us – a necessary outlet for people living in such close proximity. The whole experience was a training over many years in getting on day after day at very close quarters with people who were of astonishingly different characters, while remaining on good terms with each of them, and being one of the group while retaining one’s individuality.