Light and Shadow

by Mark Colvin

  And my broken arm was still not right. We had begun seeing a specialist in Melbourne, and eventually, several months after the original accident, I had some freedom. But the damage was done: the arm would never straighten and always look somewhat deformed. Because of its peculiar malformation I would never be able to play the piano or to bowl properly in cricket, a game my dad had already started to teach me. Because of the way the radius and ulna were aligned, I would also always have some pain or discomfort writing for any length of time. Eventually, thanks to boarding-school bullying, it would also leave me with a humiliating sense of physical inadequacy and a grating self-consciousness about baring my arms in public.

  On the other hand, I could still swim, and, thanks to all those lessons in Kuala Lumpur, I did so confidently and strongly, especially once the arm began to regain some strength. We went to the beach at Anglesea, my first Australian beach experience: white glare off fine sand and Tarax lemonade and learning to bodysurf. To be able to harness the power of a wave, even a small one, to emerge with your head and shoulders clear as its power propels you towards the shore, even to crash out and get dumped, was liberating and intense. Later, those memories kept me going through a lot of cold English boarding-school winters.

  Australia, when we flew back to Kuala Lumpur in early 1960, was now fixed in my mind as one of the places I’d call home, wherever I ended up in the meantime. I wouldn’t actually be back in person till 1969, but some part of me always remained here.

  * * *

  Accidents and bereavements apart, my life to this point had been largely protected and idyllic. My father was away a lot, but when he was around we played cricket in the garden. My little sister ‘fielded’, which mostly meant sitting in her little wicker chair reading the Beano Annual. My parents took us on breaks and holidays: driving through the Cameron Highlands, visiting the Chinese old town in Malacca, going to the beach. But in September 1960 this was all set to change. I was to go back to England, to boarding school.

  Again, my expectations were all derived from books, mainly the Billy Bunter and Jennings series. On the whole, I had an impression of fun, companionship and jolly japes. I had read Tom Brown’s Schooldays but assumed, since it was a century old, that its portrayal of misery and uncontrolled bullying was as outdated as, say, that of Victorian animal cruelty in Black Beauty. I had no sense of foreboding.

  My mother and Zoë and I flew to London, where we went to the (now-long-defunct) Gorringes department store with a long list of uniform items and equipment to buy, starting with a school trunk which would be emblazoned with my initials. It gradually filled as we marched around the shop, with a blazer, shorts and trousers, sports clothes, socks and underwear, and so on.

  It seems insane now, but there was a machine where you stood and looked down through a viewer as it X-rayed your feet. It was called a ‘shoe-fitting fluoroscope’, manufactured by the British Pedoscope Company, and it showed your feet inside the new shoes in glowing detail. You had to wiggle your toes so the salesman or your parent could see whether there was ‘growing room’ or you should go up half a size. The only ‘shielding’ between you and the radioactive tube was a thin sheet of aluminium.

  Once I was well irradiated and fully equipped, my mother took me and my trunk to Summer Fields, a prep school on the outskirts of Oxford, and hugged me goodbye. Here I would be ‘educated’ from the age of eight to thirteen. ‘Mens Sana in Corpore Sano’ was the school’s Latin motto: ‘A Healthy Mind in a Healthy Body’. Opened in 1864, it was still, almost a century later, imbued with its founder’s values of ‘muscular Christianity’: sport and discipline, inculcated with copious doses of corporal punishment.

  I was not in the least surprised when the son of the Prince of Wales’ second wife, Camilla Parker Bowles, told the media a few years ago that an adult master at Summer Fields had shared communal showers with little boys when he was there in the early 1980s: that was a daily occurrence in the early 1960s. But although I believe some masters were (in practice highly repressed) paedophiles, the way most of them expressed it was not through sex but sheer violence. The system made that easy for them. If ‘carrot and stick’ was the guiding principle, the carrots were all collective, while the stick (and it was a stick) was all personal.

  During my first year there were cold baths every morning, though after that they were abolished—luckily, because in the Big Freeze winter of 1962–63, the coldest of the century, they would have been intolerable. As it was, with the nearby Cherwell River so solid with ice that year that boys who had the right equipment skated on it daily, we were made to carry on playing rugby on fields still thick with snow.

  The school was divided into four ‘houses’—Congreve, Moseley, Maclaren and Case—though your house bore no relation to where you lived; each was just associated with a different colour. In any case, you were a number as much as a name: I still occasionally think of myself as ‘MRM Colvin 138’. I was in Case, whose colour was red. If you did well, academically, in conduct or in sport, you added points to your house’s total. If you did badly, you yourself were punished.

  Summer Fields was a collection of nineteenth-century buildings around a large Victorian-Gothic Hall and a chapel in the same architectural style. Its dining hall was arranged like that of an Oxford college, with masters sitting at a table on a raised dais and boys at long refectory tables down the length of the hall. Wooden plaques lining the walls carried the names of old boys who had died in the world wars. The youngest boys slept in the main housing around the hall, the older ones in dormitories in houses dotted around the campus.

  You had to learn the rules on day one, and there were a lot of them. Punishment could descend if you were seen running in the corridors, had your hands in your pockets, gave ‘cheek’ to one of the male masters (there were no women on the teaching staff except for a couple of classes for the very youngest boys), were late to class, had forgotten or lost a textbook, were found anywhere off the school premises, or for a host of other infringements. Breaking one of these rules meant a ‘blue’. This could mean either an hour or more of copying out Vergil’s Aeneid or Caesar’s Gallic Wars during after-school free time, or a ‘ten-minute discipline’, which entailed running up and down a path during the whole of the brief morning break. Despite the tedium, I preferred the Latin ‘lines’: I suffered from what was then called ‘chronic bronchitis’ but which modern medicine now calls asthma, and even five minutes of running during the English winter could turn my lungs to sandpaper and make me double up with coughing.

  But a ten-minute discipline, under the martinet history master HWH Hartley, was just the beginning. If you got two blues, or, worse, were found doing something more serious, like fighting, that added up to an entry in the Black Book. The Black Book meant the cane. And the cane meant lining up for a soul-eating half-hour or longer, in a line of other small boys, on a Wednesday or Saturday evening—sitting on hard chairs in their pyjamas and dressing-gowns outside the green baize outer door of the headmaster’s study, waiting for a thrashing.

  It first happened to me in the middle of my first week. Lost, frightened, and above all conscious that my family home was an impossible six and a half thousand miles away, I was crazy with loneliness and anger, and I reacted by striking out. I think that first time, in a red mist of rage, I threw a chair across a classroom, just as a master came in.

  The canings took place in the office of the headmaster, Patrick Savage, but the man who did the beating during my first few terms was his deputy. His name was Pat Marston, but he was universally known—to his face, not just behind his back—as The Ogre. A heavy, thickset man with beetling brows, his quietest register seemed to be an angry shout. In a commemorative book commissioned by the school at the time, one Summer Fields old boy from years before suggested this was a mere front: ‘His appearance was formidable. He growled and shook the room as he entered. But once I learnt that he didn’t actually eat little boys, even on Black Fridays, the classes became amusing, exh
ilarating and even relaxing.’ This genial portrait—in a rose-tinted book the school used extensively as a sales pitch—was completely misleading, certainly by the time I arrived. Any honest account would have described Pat Marston as a brutal sadist. ‘Bend over the arm of that sofa and pull down your pyjama trousers, boy.’ And then the beating would begin.

  In theory, the barrack-room lawyers among the boys would whisper, there were supposed to be rules about the cane. Masters were not allowed by law to give you more than ‘six of the best’. Masters were not allowed to take a run-up. Masters were not allowed to draw blood, and if they did they had to stop. But we all knew that was just rumour, and even if it had been true, who were we going to tell?

  In the headmaster’s study, Pat Marston would take a step or two back, so he could really get some force into his backswing. Lash! Down came the thin, whippy cane, then again … Lash! It stung horribly on the stretched skin of the bare bottom, and it stung equally badly when Marston missed. Is his eyesight failing, you’d think, or is his aim deliberately bad? None of us knew, but the result was a web of welts and cuts that descended as far as the backs of your knees, or even lower, on to the backs of your calves.

  This happened behind a heavy oak door, inside the green baize door. Sitting in your dressing-gown in the line outside, you could not hear the cane (known as The Swish) land on your predecessor, nor whether he was crying (known as ‘blubbing’). It was a guarantee of actual silence, in a culture of psychological silence. Even if you blubbed, you’d have to wipe away the tears and make it look, as you walked out and down the line, as if you hadn’t been.

  One of the other key lessons I learned in my first week came in a class called ‘Letter Writing’. ‘Now, boys, time to write a letter home to your parents so they know that you’re all right.’ I wrote a note saying I hated it here and wanted to go home, put it in the envelope and wrote the address. The master in charge took it from me, read it and tore it up. ‘Start again, and this time don’t say anything bad about the school.’ It left me with a lifelong loathing of censorship, and it added to the claustrophobia, the sense of being in a prison, which had closed in on me from the first day.

  I believe it was in the third or fourth week that a boy a year older than me was paraded at High Table before the whole school at dinner. He had run away, said the headmaster, and been found at Oxford station trying to get home. Now he was going to get six of the best. Let this be a lesson … I had hardly even thought of running away. After Oxford station, where would I go? Heathrow? Stow away on a plane? It was inconceivable.

  Telling tales on other boys was ‘sneaking’, and by the end of your first term you had internalised the idea of censorship and extended the concept of ‘sneaking’ to encompass the masters and the school itself, as well as your coevals. It was rare for a boy, even in the holidays, to tell his parents the truth about the school, which was, as the literary agent Toby Eady (another Summer Fields old boy) said in an interview with the Independent in 1994,

  completely based on fear. We were frightened children, living in suspicion and fear, fear of the masters, fear of the people who were meant to be giving us an education. And because they could punish you totally at will, and you had no one you could appeal to, you never trusted any of the teachers, and children should trust adults. To learn to trust again is very difficult when it is taken away from you so young.

  I wonder, now, why no adults, not even the under-matrons, some of whom did seem to care about the boys, seem to have ever reported or protested against this abuse. Blood-stained pyjama legs should surely have been enough of a clue.

  It diminished only in my third term at the school, the summer term. My mother was back in London and came to take me on a day out. For the first time, I was wearing shorts instead of grey flannel trousers. ‘What are those cuts down the backs of your legs?’ she asked. Some of them were old and scabbing over, others were fresh and new. I told her rather matter-offactly, ‘Oh, The Ogre beat me last night.’ It was so normal to me by then. I’d inured myself to the beatings to such a degree that I would never give Marston the satisfaction of blubbing, even while he was thrashing me. I kept a stiff upper lip: the literal expression of what English private-school education had been intended to create in future Empire-builders.

  My mother was furious, more furious than she let on to me that afternoon. Dropping me back at school, she went to see the headmaster and told him what was happening. It didn’t stop the canings altogether, but from then on, every time I was braced for another encounter with The Ogre, it was Savage who beat me, not Marston: in fact, though there was never any formal announcement, The Ogre was never allowed to beat anyone again.

  Savage’s beatings were more accurate, it’s true, but to me there always seemed something slightly odd about his manner: I see it in retrospect as bordering on the prurient. Savage’s obituary in the London Telegraph called him ‘a tall, spare, meticulous bachelor with beautiful handwriting … He anticipated personal tutors, taking boys for walks with his two King Charles spaniels, and introducing them to the pleasures of smoked salmon and James Bond.’ If so, those boys were, shall we say, few and attractive.

  Summer Fields was a school where those who excelled at sport, particularly, could lead golden lives. On my part, academically I was reasonably clever, but I was completely inept at games, and hampered by my deformed arm, which both drew down the bullies and made me the butt of the sports masters, because I couldn’t do press-ups, climb a rope, bowl, or properly leap a jumping-horse. Given my disability, it still staggers me that my father insisted on having me enrolled in boxing classes.

  Though I never heard that Savage did worse than play favourites with some pupils, the headmaster’s reaction when he came into the dormitory one night when I was changing was bewildering. I had committed the ‘crime’ of taking off all my day clothes before putting on my pyjamas. Something about my brief nakedness triggered a red-faced explosion. I was to go straight to his room, where he caned me very hard indeed.

  Sexual abuse of children is rightly at the forefront of people’s minds now, but isn’t it time people also recognised the profound trauma that sadomasochistic brutality, even without an overt sexual aspect, wreaks on small boys and girls? At Summer Fields it was routine, and not confined to the cane. One geography master who was also the cricket coach had an extraordinarily powerful and accurate throwing arm, and a boy looking out of the window was liable to be struck on the side of the head by a piece of chalk or even a wooden blackboard duster. The same master once managed to pull an eight-year-old’s fine blond hair so hard that a small clump of scalp tore bloodily free.

  Some masters were generally benevolent, but with a few of them there was a volcanic sense of lurking danger. Of all the beatings I took, one which remains with me happened on a very hot summer night in my first year. Three other boys were having a pillow fight. I was trying to sleep, but my sheets had got tangled, so I got up and started to remake my bed. A master came in and decreed that all those out of bed were for it: six of the best: ‘Downstairs. Now.’ I tried to explain but was told to be quiet. ‘It’s unfair, it’s unfair, it’s unfair, it’s unfair’ kept going through my head. By then I’d accepted that it could be ‘fair’ to be beaten for breaking written rules, internalised a system of values that said it was all right for adults to hit children regularly and sometimes mercilessly, as long as they had a reason. But that one night, I took my ‘six of the best’ with fury and resentment.

  The prevailing sense of injustice, a system without any recourse or appeal, stays with you for the rest of your life. That and the physical bullying by other boys, which, again because of the ‘no sneaking’ ethos, you could do nothing about, even if the masters had been willing to listen. The British journalist Nick Davies, who uncovered the News of the World hacking scandal, told me recently that he thought his lifelong drive against injustice was fired by childhood physical abuse. I can’t help seeing a similar pattern in my own career. I don’t trust a
uthority, because authority early on proved itself to me to be brutal and arbitrary.

  On some emotional level, arguably, I have found it hard to trust anyone, certainly until they’ve given me reason to do so. This fits a pattern that comes up again and again in accounts of the many who have joined boarding school ‘survivor groups’ in Britain. The writer Alex Renton, himself a boarding school abuse victim, says there are now at least 150 private schools with serious current or recent allegations against them. It’s a system that psychiatrists describe as ‘attachment fracture’, one which seems almost purpose-built to turn out dysfunctional individuals, and which perpetuates itself because so many of those individuals in turn find parenthood too difficult and send their own children away.

  Renton, who was deluged with survivor stories after he wrote in The Observer in 2014 about his own experiences, says his correspondence is

  full of people apologising for not having a story of sexual predation to tell. ‘It was only bullying’, people write, ‘not what you’d call abuse’. But emotional cruelty is what exacts the greatest toll on the developing mind … what most reliably damages children is long-term emotional neglect, the absence of safety, the failure of justice, the loss of love.

  * * *

  The first friend I made at Summer Fields was another new boy that day, Caspar Fleming, son of Bond’s creator Ian. Although neither of us knew it—Ian Fleming’s own intelligence history was not then public—both of our parents were spies or former spies with a naval background. We walked around together until we found the school’s World War II air-raid shelter, a long grassy mound with a padlocked iron door. We were both fascinated, but only he thought of picking the lock, and insisted he could get the tools to do so during the Christmas holidays. (It never happened.)