Growing Up In a War

by Bryan Magee

  The fact that the school existed for children with a special need for boarding education increased still further the difference it made to them. They were not problem children, but a sizeable majority came from problem homes, mostly well-educated families that had fallen on hard times – this, of course, being before the welfare state. Perhaps father had died, or become chronically ill, or was a failed businessman (of whom there were many during the Depression); or mother was an invalid; or there was a seriously handicapped sibling living permanently at home – there was no end to the variety of circumstances that could bring a boy to Christ’s Hospital. In all such cases the boy’s being there significantly improved his situation, and this increased the school’s importance to him. It was also likely to be his only chance of getting the sort of public-school education that alone in those days opened up all the doors of opportunity.

  If you go to a day school, being at school consists mostly of being in a classroom, but if you live at school you are in a classroom for only a small proportion of your time, so it constitutes a much smaller part of the experience. For most of us, I think, it was not all that important – it was never my chief concern. I was brimming over with interest and curiosity, but not for the sorts of things that were taught in class. In fact I was distantly perplexed by the fact that what was of greatest interest in life – things like music, theatre, politics, ideas in general – were not what schools were most concerned to teach you. The things they cared most about bore little relationship to anything else: they were just what you did at school, that’s all. My own attitude towards them was that they must be expected to be boring, but would be less so if you paid attention to them than if you did not. Most of the time I did. I performed well enough in my work to keep out of trouble, and those two considerations, rather than interest in the work for its own sake, constituted my main motive for doing it. I could see no point in a lot of it – I could not, for instance, see any point in learning Latin (though I am pleased now that I did). I think these are, or were, normal attitudes among schoolboys, and were the attitudes of most of my fellows. A small number of them had an active interest in work – they positively enjoyed Latin, say, and would put in extra time on it – but I thought they were dull dogs: anyone who preferred doing Latin to being in the hurly-burly of a dayroom talking nineteen to the dozen with his friends, or sitting alone reading some work of imagination, perhaps an adventure story, was a grey creature, I thought. That anyone could prefer classroom work to music was incomprehensible to me.

  Since I did enough work to stay out of trouble, my position in the class drifted lazily upwards. Having in my first year been near the bottom in those subjects that the boys around me had been doing before, by the end of my second I was quite near the top, though without actually being top at anything. I found that this was a good position to be in, because it meant that I was mildly approved of by the masters without their paying any special attention to me – I did not want to come under pressure to perform, or make a show of interest. So I stayed very happily there, and allowed myself to float along with the current.

  The first subject to ignite my imagination was geometry, in my second year. It was so counterintuitive as to be thrilling. Even the most elementary things in it were amazing. When you considered that the variety of shapes a triangle could have was infinite – and how bizarrely shaped a lot of them were – it was almost incredible that their angles should always and inevitably add up to 180 degrees. I learnt to prove that it was so, but I found it almost impossible to believe. And the fact was that if you made a right-angle between two lines, each of which was one unit long, and then completed the triangle by joining up the ends, it was impossible even in theory to give a precise measurement of this third line: its length, in whatever your units, was the square root of two, and that was an irrational number, inexpressible in either fractions or decimals. Again I knew that this was so, but found it mystifying. There the line was, in front of you, just a line, one of the three making up this simplest of triangles, and yet, unlike the others, you could not measure it exactly. Why not? If you could measure the other two, why not this one? I found it so peculiar that I could not get my mind round it. And yet I could prove it.

  When, also in the maths periods, we did what we called statics and dynamics, I felt the same combination of fascination and puzzlement. That everything around me should consist of a balance of forces, and that counter to every one of these forces was an equal and opposite force, which was why things were as they were, took my breath away. It meant that this apparently stable world was really an almighty struggle of forces going on all the time, everywhere in everything, and that stability existed not in spite of that but as an outcome of it, created by it. Each new piece of information that the master gave us was equally astonishing. For instance, if you dropped something, it would fall towards the centre of the earth with the same acceleration regardless of what it was – minus, obviously, the effect of whatever forces there might be acting against it; that went without saying. It meant that in a vacuum a feather would fall at the same rate as a ton of lead. This seemed self-evidently impossible: surely if other things were equal, the heavier a thing was, the faster it would fall. But that was not so. In lesson after lesson, mathematics and the mechanical sciences were revealing the world around me to be quite contrary to what any thinking person would assume – and therefore contrary to common sense. There was something hugely exciting about all this – the unexpectedness of it, the experience of perpetual discovery, the sense of revelation. Never before had I felt like this in a classroom.

  No other subject was to have this effect on me until I started doing physics. Meanwhile the next most interesting, in my second year, was chemistry; but that was because it was about sex. The school followed a laudable plan of giving every boy an introduction to biology in his first year, to chemistry in his second, and to physics in his third; but for reasons to do with our age (for most of us it was the last year before puberty) the chemistry got diverted into the biochemistry of human reproduction. What is more, we were taught by a woman, and an unmarried one, Miss Harvie. Perhaps this needs to be explained before we get to the sex.

  When the war began, the senior school had only ever had male teachers, all of them graduates of Oxford or Cambridge. The younger able-bodied ones, and some of the others too, were quickly called up, and could not be replaced. This created a problem that lasted throughout the war. The school tried to solve it in three successive ways. First, it invited retired masters to come back out of retirement. Several volunteered, but most of these (not all) no longer had enough energy to do the job properly, and to us boys they seemed ancient, a collection of old buffers and duffers. In any case, one or two of them proceeded to get ill or die. So that arrangement was unsatisfactory. The school then took what it considered the adventurous step of taking on women, young ladies not long out of Oxford or Cambridge. There had, I believe, been a woman teacher in the prep school, so the decision was not altogether without precedent. Nevertheless, having women in the closed world of a male boarding school led to problems – not chiefly with the boys, I understand, although one woman was thought to have been to bed with several of them before she was dismissed. With that, and in the depths of the war, the school was pushed into thinking the unthinkable, and took on a male graduate from a university that was not Oxford or Cambridge – Leeds, would you believe it – but found him so unassimilable that it reluctantly fell back again on Oxbridge women as a lesser evil. In the final stages of the war, the school’s original masters started to get special release from the forces so that they could come back and teach, and the problem began at last to resolve itself.

  I lived through all these phases, and had experiences with each of them. The first of the two old buffers who taught me called himself – absurdly, it seemed to me – Captain or Major (I forget which) Blamire-Brown, I assumed because he would wish any invading Germans to know what rank he had held during his previous encounter with them. He
was a pig, boorish and fierce; and I still remember some of his more unpleasant remarks, not that any of them were directed at me. He terrorised his classes. But despite his defects of character he did teach me some Latin. He also taught me one of the mnemonics that have stuck in my mind ever since, one that explains which Latin nouns and proper names carry inflected meanings without the use of a preposition:

  With island small, and little town,

  We put no preposition down;

  Also with humus, rus and domus

  We cast the preposition from us.

  I do not think there has been a single occasion when this has been of any use to me. I sometimes think I have a bigger store of useless knowledge than anyone I know – but that comes inevitably from having a good memory.

  The first of the two women I was taught by was Miss Harvie. She was clear, efficient, likeable and cool. She took it for granted, as she needed to in her situation, that we knew already about the mechanics of sex, and confined herself to explaining the biochemistry of it. Actually, I am not sure that we did know all that much about the mechanics, beyond the basic fact of penetration; but I do not blame her for not trying to tell us. What she explained was the structure and functioning of spermatozoa and ova, telling us what chromosomes were, and genes, and what was known about inherited characteristics, and how they were transmitted; and also a bit about how a baby develops in the womb. So it was not so much about sex as about the consequences of sex. It was fascinating and highly informative; but there was nothing there about emotions or relationships, or the social aspects of any of it. And nobody ever attempted to talk to me about those things. My parents never said anything, in fact never mentioned sex at all: they just started assuming, after I had reached a certain age, that I knew about it.

  Sex was a subject of obsessional fascination among us juniors; but when I think of how much time we spent talking about it, I am struck by how little we actually knew. I knew a bit more than the others, being streetwise for my age, and they hung on my every word; but I must have given them at least as much misinformation as information. It shows how little free talk there can have been about such matters between the younger and the older boys – a lot must have been known to the older ones that was unknown to us. I had only the dimmest, most distant ideas about orgasm, and did not know of the existence of masturbation. I was taken aback when I went for the first time to the school swimming baths, where most of the boys swam naked, and saw pubic hair on the older boys. It looked grotesque to me, not at all aesthetically pleasing. I had liked it on girls, but that was different. This was ugly. Given all this ignorance, little of our sex-talk in the house was about the realities that were going to face us in the near future: most of it was speculation and dirty jokes, the casual, flippant and yet obsessive obscenity common among boys. New jokes, riddles, limericks and songs kept arriving from goodness knows where to keep our supply of such things refreshed. I suppose most of it must in fact have trickled down from the older boys, but new items were continually coming in from outside the school. I contributed a few myself, having a capacious background of this sort of thing in my Hoxton street lore. But it was all very infantile.

  That wide gulf between the smallest boys and the biggest was due to the exceptionally wide age range of the school, with boys from eleven to eighteen living in the same house. One institution that helped to bridge the gap was fagging. Each of the house monitors was allowed a fag, a small boy who acted as his personal servant – cleaned his shoes, made his bed, ran his errands. This was a voluntary arrangement on both sides: no one had to fag, and the fag could give it up whenever he liked. There were two inducements to do it. One was pay. The going rate was ten shillings a term, the same again as the pocket money a fag would get from his parents. The other was that he was excused from what were known as ‘trades’. Every other boy apart from the monitors had two trades, a house trade and a (dining) hall trade. These were domestic chores. One boy would have to sweep the floor round one of the dayroom tables twice a day, two more would share responsibility for putting up and taking down the blackout shutters from two of the windows; and so on. In the dining hall a pair would have the task of setting out the big plates on the house’s table, another pair the small ones, another pair the tea bowls – and other sets of boys would clear them away again. It was all well organised and, with forty-something boys available, most of the domestic chores could be briskly dispatched. The trades ranked in order of status, like so many other things in our lives – like us ourselves – and were reallocated each term. The individual boy had no say in choosing his trades, they were given to him by the monitors who supervised them.

  After experiencing my share of trades I decided to try fagging. I have always rebelled against compulsion, and I have always especially disliked doing housework. I told myself that if I came to the conclusion that being a fag was worse than trades, I would go back to trades. But I was lucky with my fag-master, a boy called Homfray. He had one of the two studies at the top of the dayroom. A thin but tough young man, some inches more than six feet tall, he was of an ironic, easy-going disposition, inclined to accept whatever I did for him provided it was passable – the right sort of person to work for. My daily duties started with waking him in the morning after the rest of us were up, and then making his bed when I made my own. (The school – on the assumption that the air raids were over, at least for the time being – had gone back to sleeping in the dormitories, which were on the first and second floors of all the houses.) I also cleaned his shoes when I cleaned my own. I tidied his study, and made up the fire; and if he and his friends had had a fry-up the previous evening I did the washing-up. Admittedly this was housework, but the fact that I was doing it of my own volition, and could give it up whenever I liked, made it acceptable to me. It also interested me to see the life of the eighteen-year-olds from close to. One of the things I learnt from Homfray without realising it was how to treat a fag. Years later, when I became a monitor with a study and had fags of my own, I treated them that much better for it.

  Another of our many sub-worlds was the life of the dormitory – seniors on the first floor, juniors on the second, two dozen beds in each. Those who had studies had their own cubicles, but apart from that the beds were laid out in a great open space like an old-fashioned hospital ward, a regulation distance apart. The horsehair mattresses were unsprung, and so were the beds themselves, which had removable wooden slats. The school doctor propounded a theory that this was good for us, and perhaps it was: at first the beds felt hard, but we soon became comfortable in them, so much so that boys complained that their beds at home were too soft. Alongside each bed was an iron settle with a flat wooden top, to keep pyjamas and other things in, and to act as our bedside table: these were said to be ancient and to have come from the school in London. Each day when we got up we stripped our beds completely, folded the blankets and sheets, and piled them neatly, army-style, and half-turned the mattress, before going off to breakfast. After breakfast we had regulation bed-making, supervised by a monitor. The beds had to be made in a certain way, with hospital corners. Then they were poled. It was one boy’s house trade to take a long wooden pole that existed uniquely for this purpose and roll it up each bed to smooth out its surface. He poled two beds at a time, walking between each pair holding his pole like a tightrope walker. The whole dormitory could be poled in a few minutes and would then look regimentally perfect.

  At both ends of each dormitory were what we called lav-ends, each with rows of washbasins and lavatories, and a bath with a shower. During the war the government exhorted the population to save fuel on hot water by not having more than one bath a week, and by not putting more than five inches of water in the bath. A black line was painted on our baths at this level, and we were forbidden to exceed it. It was just like sitting in a puddle. Each boy was allotted his weekly bath night, two boys to a night. On other nights we were expected to wash ourselves all over while standing at a washbasin. There was always a lot of wet
and noisy larking around when the boys were washing, but ultimately that would be kept within bounds by the monitor supervising them.

  The moment we were all in bed the lights had to go out. By this time we were usually so tired that we fell asleep quickly. For the first hour or two we were supervised by a monitor sitting at a desk in the dormitory, where he did his prep. So that we would not be disturbed by his light, his desk had a tent-like superstructure that almost enclosed him. At weekends, when he was not expected to be doing prep, he read a short story aloud to us. On pitch-dark winter evenings it would be a horror story, and on light summer evenings a funny one, or an episode from a comic novel – perhaps one of the set pieces from P. G. Wodehouse, or Three Men in a Boat, or England Their England. Over the years I got to know most of the classics in both genres. Among my sharpest memories of school are of lying in bed listening to a disembodied voice in the darkness telling a ghost story, best of all with a wind sighing outside, and perhaps in some distant part of the house a window whose sash cord had broken banging menacingly. We all had our favourites, and when in due course I became a monitor I read mine. These included ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’, ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ and ‘The Room in the Tower’. There are some quotations that cling to one through life, and I still occasionally find myself saying: ‘Jack will show you your room: I have given you the room in the tower.’