by Bryan Magee
Another sub-world was the dining hall, a high, handsome place hung about with those immense pictures. We were there for three half-hours a day, and always more than eight hundred people would be sitting down to a meal. Each house had a long table that seated all its fifty or so boys, and on a dais was a high table for masters and visitors. Sometimes these would be joined by the house captains, but otherwise a house captain would sit at the head of his own long table, with his most senior colleagues on either side of him and the rest of us stretching down in order of precedence to the eleven-year-olds at the far-distant bottom. As the years went by we progressed up the table. All the serving, waiting and clearing away was done by boys, with the most junior doing the most menial jobs. The kitchen staff appeared only to bring and remove the Brobdingnagian metal containers in which everything came to us. All the dining-hall equipment had to be big and tough, including the cutlery and crockery. We were given our tea not in cups or mugs but in bowls. When these were full they were heavy, but they had no handles, and we became dexterous at using them with one hand. Once, standing at a table of empty bowls before a meal, I dropped one that landed on another in such a way that it exactly replaced it on the table while sending the other crashing to the floor, exploding in a fountain of glitter. It looked like a trick, the sort of thing a performer might do on a stage. I was so entranced by it that I called Batts over to tell him what had happened, and while I was trying to explain, with two other bowls, I let one slip, and precisely the same thing happened a second time.
Halfway along one of the long sides of the hall was an ancient wooden pulpit of unknown origin, from which grace would be said by a boy. Opposite this, against the other wall, was a raised desk for the hall warden, the master supervising the meal. To start things off, the hall warden would bang his gavel for grace, and then again for us to sit down and begin. At the end of the meal he would do more banging for grace and our dispersal. In between, there was not usually much for him to do, but he was present to cope with emergencies, and to arbitrate problems. In my day the role was played with chilly authority by Noel Sergent, the only French master who was a real Frenchman – had, indeed, played rugby for France – a fact which made it all the more impressive that he completed the Times crossword every day during our breakfast. In his absence his place was taken by Fred Haslehust, a classics master who was even quicker with the Times crossword, but had to cede points on this because he was a setter of crossword puzzles for the Daily Telegraph.
The food … Language quails. Words cannot describe it. The fish pie stank. The stew consisted of lumps of grey gristle floating in a fatty brown grease with skin on top. The spaghetti we called ‘worms in carbolic’. Whatever leftovers there were from these nightmare dishes were recycled into an all-purpose pie. It defies serious understanding. The official excuse was wartime rationing, but older boys swore that the food had been just as bad before the war; and in no other place during six years of war did I encounter anything like it. But we ate it, because it was what we lived on: we were hungry children, and there was nothing else; and in any case we were not allowed to leave food on our plates. We conditioned ourselves to eat it without thinking about it. Years of doing this had a lifelong effect on some of my attitudes: I enjoy good food with a special and keen-edged enjoyment that has an element of surprise in it, as if it is not what I expect to be given; and I will eat without fuss whatever is set in front of me, no matter how bad it is, and feel an inner impatience with anyone who complains about it. Having said that, I have to admit that I was defeated by the fish pie. As soon as I entered the hall and smelt it my gorge rose. I would go to any lengths to avoid eating it. Usually I managed to get somebody else to take my helping, but if not I would wrap it in my handkerchief and smuggle it out of hall under my clothes, to put it where it belonged, down the lavatory.
Some of my readers may suspect me of exaggerating. After all, in most institutions where food is served, the people who have to eat it complain about it. But I am not exaggerating. In the mind of everyone who was at the school in those years the memory of the food is encrusted with scar tissue. Wherever they meet, more than half a century later, it is one of the first subjects to be mentioned. I have heard one say, not wholly jokingly, that the conditioning it gave him enabled him to survive in a Chinese prisoner-of-war camp during and after the Korean War when his friends were dying all round him. The black joke among us at the time was that we had two complaints about the food: it was impossible to eat, and there was not enough of it. We never felt satisfied, and were always slightly hungry. One curious thing is that although this was so, and although the food was vile, it constituted an adequate and perfectly balanced diet, owing to the dedicated fanaticism in this regard of the school doctor, who enjoyed a national reputation as a child dietician. We were a tough and healthy lot – most of us, anyway – lean and muscular, rarely ill. I doubt if I have ever again been as fit as I was at school. This is especially remarkable given the meagreness of wartime rations – meat once a week, one egg a week, one piece of cheese a week, and all the rest of it – and speaks volumes about our peacetime eating habits.
Yet another sub-world in our daily lives was chapel. The problem with that was boredom. The daily services were bad enough, but matins and evensong on Sundays were like oceans of time that had no shores. I had never at any age believed in God, and I saw these services as mumbo-jumbo that I was compelled to take part in. Once the novelty wore off I found them offensively tedious – I was being trapped in chapel and compulsorily bored. Inside me a huge rebellion swelled up against this, which I had great difficulty in controlling. Later, it became a serious problem for me. It was to be in the school chapel that the panic attacks and claustrophobia began that have plagued me ever since.
The chapel, like the dining hall and Big School, was built to hold a thousand people. These were seated on two sides of a central aisle, six raked-up rows on each side, so that one half of the school confronted the other. Above the heads of those in the top row ran a succession of murals by Frank Brangwyn, eight on each side, big enough to dominate the interior of the chapel. In sixteen crowded tableaux they told the story of the spread of the gospel from the preaching of the Apostles to an Edwardian street mission in the East End of London. The scenes are jostling with highly individualised characters and faces, and are brightly coloured. In a book written about the school before I went there, when the pictures were new – Christ’s Hospital by G.A.T. Allan – there appears this passage (p.94): ‘I cannot but feel that such wonderfully imaginative drawings would look better in some building designed for less sacred use. To my mind they produce no religious atmosphere, rather the reverse; and I think it is a pity to provide boys with grotesque pictures, to be studied during divine service, amongst which may be found apparent caricatures of masters and others waiting to be spotted.’ This is, indeed, spot on. It is precisely what I did. In my epic struggles against boredom, and the feeling of being trapped, I studied those pictures with grateful intensity, seeking from them all the different kinds of distraction they could yield. I found likenesses of my friends, the masters, my family, people I had known in Hoxton and Market Harborough. I cannot imagine how I would have survived those services without them. They left me with a sense of personal indebtedness to Frank Brangwyn, who at that time was alive and famous – he was knighted in the year I went to the school. (Later I discovered a Brangwyn Museum in Bruges.) When Teddy Edwards asked us to write a poem about some aspect of our experience of life at the school, I penned a hymn of gratitude to him that finished, after two lines ending with the words ‘know’ and ‘sanguine’:
I’d’ve died of boredom long ago
If it hadn’t been for Brangwyn.
Teddy reproved me dolefully for this in front of the class, but I had the feeling that the boys were nearer to being on my side than on his.
Every school contains worlds within worlds, and every school has its own distinctive character, but Christ’s Hospital is extra-different
in that its history, diversity of intake, physical scale and wealth are all unique. In keeping with this it developed over the centuries a language of its own. The terms sixth form and fifth form were not used: instead there were Grecians and Deputy Grecians; and below them the Great Erasmus and Little Erasmus forms. The school itself was Housey, and this was adjective as well as noun – housey food, housey clothes and the rest. These usages are in the Oxford Dictionary, and other dictionaries too, so they can be said to have entered the English language. As for the slang, it was so extensive that two or three separate dictionaries of it have been published. Among the private slangs of other schools, it is said that only Winchester’s equals it in extent. It would weary my readers if I were to print a mini-dictionary here, but a few words will give the feel of it. A fag was a swob, a dormitory feast a bonfast; a blow to the head was a fotch; lavatory paper was bodge. Not surprisingly, the largest special vocabulary had to do with food: bread was crug, butter flab, tea kiff (so the bowls out of which we drank were kiff bowls), waste food was skiffage, or skiff for short. A high proportion of the words were curt, bold and crude-sounding, like Anglo-Saxon. In addition to our own slang we used some ordinary English words in eccentric ways: for instance our all-purpose word of commendation, perpetually on our tongues to mean just good or nice, was genial. Because German was the school’s main foreign language we took everyday words from that too: beautiful was always schön, and we as often said danke schön as thank you. If a boy was lacking in vitality he was said to be tot (the German word for dead, pronounced ‘tote’). About most of our speech there was an unadorned directness that was characteristic of most things to do with the school, not least its buildings; but our sentences were so thick with specially used words that some of what we said would have been unintelligible to outsiders. This encouraged play with language, and there was a lot of that in our conversation.
One way and another, the school constituted an environment that exerted an enormous pressure on its members. A few of them hated it altogether, and a few loved it uncritically, but most of us had divided feelings that were strong in both directions, loving some things and hating others. Never did I wish I were not there – on the contrary, I would always have chosen that rather than any of the alternatives – but there were things about it that I detested. Compulsory chapel came first, but there was an atmosphere of compulsion generally that I resented. Most aspects of our lives were governed by rules and regulations. Compulsory sport and religious services were only two of them, but both put me off for life: I have taken no physical exercise since my earliest undergraduate days, and for years after leaving school I was unable to bring myself to go to a religious service. If I was invited to a friend’s wedding I would go to the party afterwards, but not to the service. I can only thank heaven that I had started to see Shakespeare’s plays in live performances in the theatre before they were introduced to me in the classroom: I never thought of them as belonging in class, where they had been dragged from another world. On a desk instead of a stage they were like fish out of water, gasping their lives away.
Compulsory activities brought to the surface disabilities which, whether or not I had had them before, I had not been aware of. Late in middle age I was told by doctors that I had almost certainly had undiagnosed asthma as a small child, and that it had left me with inadequate lung capacity. This would explain why my mother was always going on about me having had ‘a weak chest’ before I could remember. It also explains why, at school, whenever I exercised to the point of getting out of breath, I would get into a distressed condition: I would gasp noisily, and gulp for air, desperate, and have fierce stabbing pains in the chest. At its worst, if I were made to go on, I would become almost distraught. Yet it never occurred to me at the time to think of this as a problem to do with my lungs: I supposed it to be a more general physical weakness, something all over, muscular if anything. I was a little puzzled in that my arms and legs were strong, but beyond that I resigned myself to it in an unthinking way. I just supposed that the other boys were physically hearty, sturdy, in a way I was not, and I felt slightly ashamed of my weakness, and tried to hide it. Any activity that involved sustained running was torture to me. Cross-country runs were among the worst, because we were not allowed ever to stop, so it meant unremittingly driving myself forward into the pain, and they seemed never-ending.
However, there was something more to be feared than cross-country runs, and that was the institution of punishment drills. These were like something in the eighteenth-century navy. They were the school’s alternative to corporal punishment, which was not used at all by most masters, who instead gave out these drills. One of our three retired sergeant majors, Sergeant Usher, who was the school’s village policeman, conducted these drills a couple of times a week. The malefactors changed into games clothes but kept their leather shoes on, and reported on the asphalt playground behind the houses. Here Sergeant Usher ran them deliberately to exhaustion over a period of half an hour. His explicit aim was to make them suffer, and this he was skilled at doing. For me the experience bordered on the intolerable. My hatred and fear of these punishment drills was such that, after I had ingested the public-school ethos, there was only one occasion on which I lied when called on to own up, and I did that to avoid a punishment drill. It shamed me profoundly in the eyes of two of my friends, and in my own eyes too.
The other disability that was brought out in me by the school’s physical activities was a psychological one. Again, I had never been aware of it, but I now found myself in extreme terror of anything that would take me, even momentarily, out of control of myself. The simplest example occurred during morning PT. We would be asked to do a headstand – that was easy enough – and then roll over backwards on to our feet again. It was simplicity itself, and the other boys, perhaps after an initial awkwardness, did it with a fluent, effortless movement: they merely let their upended bodies crumple into a roll, and their own weight carried them up on to their feet. But I could not do it, because I could not let myself go. I had a complete mental block against it. If anyone had asked me what I was afraid of I would not have been able to answer. There was no danger of pain or injury. Yet I had what can only be described as a phobic terror of letting go control of my own body, and it was a terror that I could not, by any act of will, overcome. I felt it even more on the rugger field. When I saw how, when a boy was tackled, he was swept along off his feet, I felt an unnameable horror of being tackled. It was nothing to do with a fear of being hurt: it was fear of control of myself being taken away from me; and it was panic of an extreme kind. I felt it even when a scrum lifted me off my feet. Being carried along helplessly, not being in control of my body, was intolerable to me: I would willingly have borne any amount of pain in preference to it. So throughout each game, my efforts were focused on never getting possession of the ball, so that I would not be tackled; and also on never being in a scrum; and on disguising as much as I could the fact that I was doing these things. It put me in a very odd relationship to the game.
If I were asked now to explain how I came to have this phobia, my guess would be that I was physically abused by my mother, violently shaken, when I was a baby, and that the experience was an all-engulfing terror from which there was no escape; and that this annihilating sense of powerlessness implanted in me a panic fear of being helpless in someone else’s hands. I am fairly certain that such abuse took place, because it happened also during the period of my earliest memories, and I emerged into consciousness being frightened of my mother. But when I was a pre-teenager at Christ’s Hospital it never occurred to me to make any such connection between these things. I just felt swamped by irrational fear, and then all my thoughts had to go into coping with it on the spur of the moment. I never understood it. And I was concerned to conceal it from others.
All the things I have described in this chapter were elements of daily life. But what I was most conscious of living with was the unique individuality of each of the other boys close
to me. Our lives together were full of incident: friendships and rows, feuds and peacemakings, showdowns with authority, misunderstandings, two-day dramas, crazes that swept us all up and then ebbed away leaving no trace, passionate arguments, crimes and punishments, victories and defeats, entertainments, diversions, plans, stories from outside, crises offstage at home; it all flowed on like a formless drama, with our relationships among ourselves at the centre. This was what filled my consciousness most of the time. We were learning always from one another, the most important things having to do with living together, coping, managing, getting along, in a variety of different and often stressful circumstances; and this was probably the most valuable part of the education I received at school. In addition to all that, we were learning specific things from one another. One boy, Bailey, had a passion for chess, and through watching him and listening to his stories I learnt the classic openings and defences, and something of the history of the game, and heard the most famous anecdotes about well-known players. Another boy, Garrard, had a gift for caricature: he had a disenchanted eye for the peculiarities of all of us; and to leaf with him through the dayroom’s copy of Punch was to get a funny and instructive introduction to the art of the cartoon. One boy was hooked on aeroplanes, so from him we learnt about the different planes on both sides of the war. I was forever talking about music, and I seem to have sparked off an interest in it in one or two of the others. It was a rich soil for us all to grow up in.