by Bryan Magee
My addiction to music led me to take up the bass trombone, though it happened partly by accident. I wanted to learn the clarinet, so I went along to the bandmaster, Mr Stagge, and asked if I could do so. He said the clarinet was the most popular instrument in the band, and he had people queuing up to learn it, so his answer had to be no. On the other hand, he was going to be short of a bass trombone in a year’s time, and would I be interested in learning that? One of my father’s closest friends, Chopper, was a trombonist in a Salvation Army band, and I had often watched him play: I think this may have been one of the factors in my saying yes. I made a start, and learnt the rudiments of the instrument. But whereas Chopper was a tenor trombonist, and had splendid tunes to play, the bass trombone scarcely ever did anything but provide bass notes for the harmony. It was not even oompah, oompah, but only half that. This caused me to lose interest. I gave the instrument up before getting as far as playing in the band.
The authorities at Christ’s Hospital were not unanimously keen on music. Quite a lot of the masters resented it for taking boys away from games, or from their prep; and the headmaster himself once famously complained that there was ‘too much music going on’. Fortunately there was enough of it to have a momentum of its own that enabled it to survive this opposition. Corks had discovered that a particular note on a particular stop of the chapel organ set up sympathetic vibrations in the wooden panel against which the headmaster, Mr Flecker, leant his head during the services, so whenever Flecker made difficulties for the music staff Corks extemporised fortissimo voluntaries centring on this note.
It was at Christ’s Hospital that I first heard – and saw – Gilbert and Sullivan. Trial By Jury was staged at the end of my first year. From some source – I think it must have been my father – I had acquired a snooty attitude towards Gilbert and Sullivan, but I thought Trial By Jury was great fun. Its attitude of derision towards authorities and accepted hypocrisies was to my taste, and the match between words and music seemed right. The role of the Plaintiff was sung pleadingly by the attractive young wife of the most notoriously sadistic of the masters, thus insinuating sexual implications from an intriguing quarter. A boy, Bob Pitman, sang the Usher, and made himself the star of the show. For some time afterwards the rest of us went around singing ‘From bias free of every kind this trial must be tried’; and the first three or six of those words became our standard comment on any kind of stitch-up. The following year HMS Pinafore was done. It was brimming with tunes, and both words and music contributed permanently to the school’s stock of standard references. Again Pitman performed, this time the role of Sir Joseph Porter. I was astonished that a boy could be so good. With his stage presence, good baritone and satanic looks, which included black eyebrows meeting in the middle, he came close to stealing the show. I think he could have had a future as that kind of singer, but he was destined to become a star of a different sort, the star columnist on Express newspapers.
Stage productions of any kind came on at the end of term, when discipline was lax and the audience about to go home. But the whole term would be filled with preparations, so even boys not involved in a production would be constantly aware of it. Actors with roles to learn would be asking their friends to hold the book for them and prompt them, or would walk about declaiming their lines. Particularly good lines or jokes would go around and become quotations. If the production was a musical one the songs would become well known. Disasters at rehearsal were always plentiful, and stories about these would go the rounds too. Every house put on a play or plays in the winter term. The first such programme in my time included that unforgettable fable The Monkey’s Paw, by W. W. Jacobs (who was then still living). A level up from house plays were school plays. The first of these was Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The role of Maria was played by a boy called Ivan Yates, who from then on made a speciality of playing female comedy roles, in which he was uncommonly sophisticated without being camp. He gave us Lady Teazle a year later, and Lady Bracknell two years after that. He was to become a friend of mine at Oxford, and remain so for the rest of his life, though at school I never met him.
Whereas the school plays were chosen from the classics, the most popular kind of house play would be a recent success in the commercial theatre. A famous production by another house was Arsenic and Old Lace, in which the two old ladies were Ivan Yates and Bernard Levin. Those in my own house included Noël Coward’s Hay Fever and Terence Rattigan’s French Without Tears. I appeared in a couple of one-acters; but to this day the only full-length play I have ever acted in was R.C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End, a tragedy set in the trenches of the First World War. With us, casting was always type-casting: every role would be given to the boy who seemed closest to it. So I played Trotter, the cockney officer who had risen from the ranks. He is a sympathetic character, and the one with most of the funny lines, so I got most of the laughs. It was, I found, satisfying to play. But the experience taught me that I was no better at acting than any of the other boys, in spite of my special love for the theatre and the fact that I was soaking it in during the school holidays.
I reached puberty at what was then, I believe, the normal age for a boy, thirteen. What apprised me of the fact was that I had an explicit sexual dream that climaxed in orgasm, and I woke up having the orgasm, never having had one before. Still half-asleep, I had no idea what was going on – except that, whatever it was, it was alarmingly violent. As I came to in the darkness of the dormitory my whole consciousness was being electrified as if it had been plugged in to the mains, and a massive charge pumped through it, convulsing my brain. My first thought was that I was having an epileptic fit, or going mad. But then the convulsions died away and I became aware of something entirely different, a warm sticky mess in the bed. I felt for it with my hands, and found that my pyjamas and sheets were soaked with some thick, smooth liquid. I sniffed at it on my hands, and it smelt like mushrooms. It was some seconds before I realised that it had come from my penis. And then, of course, when I was properly awake, I put two and two together, and the realisation swept over me: ‘My God, so this is …’
Central to the whole experience was that it was outside my framework of understanding. The container of the only reality I knew had split, and something of a radically different order had come flooding in from outside, from some totally other elsewhere. There was already something else that I experienced in this way, and that was music. Just as people in love often think that no one else in history can possibly have felt the way they feel, so I did not believe that anyone else could have the same experiences as I had when I listened to music. It was not possible. Music came to me not as if from a different world but actually from a different world, from some order of being and reality unconnected with anything in the space I occupied. And from now on it was the same with orgasm, only more so, because orgasm was intense and climactic, more emotionally violent. The power behind it was at a higher voltage.
Fundamental to the difference in experience between men and women is that from puberty onwards boys have orgasms frequently whether they want to or not. Their bodies are unceasingly producing sperm that has to be got rid of, and if they do not induce orgasms in themselves, Nature does it for them in so-called wet dreams. So orgasms are inescapable. Boys grow up in the grip of this situation, and for most of them there is something overwhelming about it. They cannot ignore their own sexuality; and their sex drives and desires are as strong now as at any time in their lives. Yet the situation is new to them, and they have no experience in dealing with it. In fact, the truth is they are still children. And because of their age it is impossible for them to find the sexual outlets they feel a ravenous need for, and dream about. At the age of fourteen or fifteen I made some absurd attempts to have sex with one of the housemaids, a sixteen-year-old girl, but it all petered out into nothing. We were both terrified, first of all of the sex itself, and also because we knew we would be sacked on the spot if we were caught. We were more ignorant of how to do what we wanted
to do than either of us realised, and both of us were pitifully lacking in self-confidence. Our fumblings and gropings were almost paralysed by ignorance and inhibition, with the result that nothing of consequence took place, except for a lot of red-faced and inarticulate embarrassment. It is so painful a memory that even now I shy away from thinking about it. But behind all that, as the cause of it, was a drive of tremendous power, something which on my side came close to desperation. I was obsessed by sex, and tempestuously in need of it. I thought about it more than anything else during the years between puberty and my first relationship, which occurred when I was seventeen and still at school – but that is a story we shall come to later.
Meanwhile the only outlets we boys had for our animal sex drives were with one another. But the inner as well as the social inhibitions against this were very powerful, and exposure was usually met with immediate expulsion, so by no means everybody took part in that sort of activity, though many did. It went on patchily and in semi-secret – the activity itself was always hush-hush, and yet it was the subject of endless rumours and excited whisperings. It was on everybody’s mind. I never heard of anything happening that went beyond mutual masturbation. In later life I was surprised to be told by people who had been to Eton that buggery had been commonplace there. I never heard of it at Christ’s Hospital, nor do I think it occurred: I was as active sexually as any of the other boys, and so voraciously interested in sex that I tapped in to all the grapevines, and it would have been almost impossible for something like that to be going on without reaching my ears. What we did do was fairly mild, and always faute de mieux, or so it seemed to me. When I was involved I used to fantasise about the boy being a girl, and afterwards I would always feel guilty and ashamed, and swear to myself that I would never do it again.
In case what I have written has activated the curiosity of readers, perhaps I ought to pre-empt mistaken guesses by saying that I never got involved in sex with anyone in my own year or older. My preference was for boys younger than myself, who I was able to fantasise about being girls. And none of them is named in this book.
In adult life I have found that a great deal of misunderstanding exists regarding the nature of sexual activity in boys’ boarding schools. Wherever heterosexual males are segregated from females and forced together for long periods there will be sexual activity among them. It happens in the armed services, in camps and on ships, and in prisons, prisoner-of-war camps, and so on. These men are not homosexuals, nor are they being turned into homosexuals: they are normal heterosexual males. Their sex drive is so urgent, especially when they are young, that it compels an outlet, and if they are denied the outlet that they want they will seize on whatever is available until the real thing comes along. The vast majority of males who take part in homosexual acts in these circumstances have no desire to do so in other conditions, and do not do so during the remainder of their lives. The minority who do are those who are homosexual anyway, or at least bisexual. It is not, I believe, possible for a normal boy to be turned into a homosexual by being sent to a boarding school.
At about the same time as all this started to happen, I was made to specialise as regards my academic work. I was really too young to be doing this, but it was normal in all of Britain’s best schools at that time – they were notorious for it in other countries. The advantage was that by the time a boy went to university he was well advanced in his special subject, and the university could begin with him at a high level. The disadvantage was that his general education was not as broad-based as it should be: for instance, at the age of fourteen I gave up the sciences altogether, after only one year each of biology, chemistry and physics.
Near the end of our second year we were asked what we wanted to specialise in, but were warned that we might not get our choice – there had to be a limit to class sizes, so we might need to be spread. I said I wanted to specialise in modern languages, which for me would have meant taking up German in addition to my French. But when, on the first day of my third year, I looked at the noticeboard, I saw my name down for classics – and that meant taking up Greek as well as the Latin I was already doing.
I was appalled. For the second time I was being denied German, when I so passionately wanted to learn it. Apart from that I was dismayed at the prospect of having to study Greek, by which I was, if I can so express it, bored in advance. The natural step was for me to talk to my housemaster, which I did. He said that this was something that only the headmaster could alter, so he made an appointment for me to see God.
H.L.O. (Henry Lael Oswald) Flecker was a fearsome figure even to the masters. Looking down from a height of several inches over six feet, he was domineering in manner, and given to volcanic eruptions in which his speech would turn into a scream, and he would rant on and on, and stamp not only his foot but the whole of a giant leg. Everyone found him alarming. His nickname was Oily, or The Oil. At first I assumed this was because of his appearance – his skin was quite a dark brown, and shone – but in fact the name came from something he had said when he was new to the school, introducing himself via a sermon in chapel. He was describing how he saw his role, and having characterised the school as an already well-running machine he added: ‘I am the oil.’ From that moment he was known as The Oil, and then, by a natural extension, Oily. Although he was now at the top of his profession, the first thing anyone said about him was that he was the brother of James Elroy Flecker, who was then a famous poet – he had died in 1915 – and who possessed what was already, in my eyes, the distinction of having written a play for which Delius had composed the incidental music: Hassan, or The Golden Journey to Samarkand. It enraged The Oil that he should go through life being known to everybody as his brother’s brother, even all these years after his brother’s death; but there was nothing he could do about it.
As I crept into his study it seemed to me shadowed and congested, and full of dark wood; and he standing in the middle of it taller than any human being I had ever seen. He told me to speak up, and I said how much I wanted to learn German. He said I could not, because there was a unique problem with it: most of the German speakers among the staff had been called up for war work, so the school had a special shortage of teachers in that subject. In which case, I said, could I specialise in something other than Greek? He gave an exaggerated look of surprise. Classics was absolutely the right thing for me, he said. I was a bright boy, and the brightest boys in the school always specialised in classics, as a matter of course. Latin was already one of my best subjects. It was obvious I ought to do classics, anyway, which was really why they had put me down for it. I resisted. I started to say that I was better at maths than at Latin, so could I please specialise in maths; but before I was halfway through my second sentence a scream rent the air, bouncing back off the walls and drowning everything in the room. It was so loud, so violent, so sudden, and so totally unexpected that it had happened before I realised that anything at all had happened. By the time I took in that he was yelling an unbroken stream of imprecations down into my upturned face, it had been going on for several seconds. I stood there bewildered, utterly overwhelmed. His words poured over me like molten lava. There were no pauses between them, and I was too dazed to take most of them in – all I heard was that I was a something little something who something somethinged and needed to something something. One of his legs, which by itself seemed taller than I was, stamped again and again as he screamed. The only complete sentence I registered, because it was shouted louder than the rest, and in tones of cosmic incredulity, was: ‘Do you think you know better than I do?’ At last the screaming rose to its highest peak on the words ‘Get out! Get out! Get out!’ and I found myself physically bundled into the corridor. His study door slammed behind me with an almighty thunk.
I reeled back to my house, a cauldron of inner upheaval. The only recourse I had beyond the headmaster was my parents, so as soon as I got back to the dayroom I sat down and wrote them a letter, asking them to write to him. It was several days
before a reply came, and then, to my surprise, it was from my mother. Neither she nor my father had written to the headmaster. Her letter admonished me to accept my fate, and gave inane reasons for doing so – for instance, that Greek was worth doing ‘if only to be able to say that you have learnt it’. My disgust went beyond words.
There was nothing more I could do, yet something inside me would not accept the situation. I had no choice but to attend Greek classes, but I did not take anything in. It was not that I made a conscious decision to go on strike – the blockage was there of its own accord, insuperable. By the end of the school year I knew almost as little Greek as I had known at the beginning; and whereas in every other subject I was near the top of the class, in Greek I was bottom.
The headmaster sent for me again. I went to his study in terror, expecting another explosion. When I arrived he was sitting at his desk, and he turned towards me with a disconcerting smile.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘You win. You can do German if you’re still determined to. But I warn you: if you do, you’ll have to take it in School Certificate next year. And if you get a bad result it’ll be on your own head.’