Once Again Assembled Here

by Sean O'Brien

  At length, as though wordlessly selected by his companions, a boy called Weyman raised his hand. He was not, I thought, representative of the actual opinions of the dissenters, which would be herd-like and incoherent, but he drew the short straw by being presentable and articulate and capable of rational thought.

  ‘Stand to address the officer commanding,’ hissed Risman.

  Weyman rose. He held a ruler in his hands, having learned from the Debating Society that this would prevent him fidgeting. ‘We believe war to be a thing of the past, sir,’ he began. ‘And that peaceful solutions to problems mark the way forward. We hope for an end to the war in Vietnam and an end of all imperialist conflicts, sir.’

  Where had Weyman got this stuff from? Hardly from Blake’s, where Suez seemed only yesterday. It sounded quite exciting. There was an air of expectancy in the Memorial Hall now. A thunderbolt might strike. Or Risman might leap down from the stage with a terrifying roar and with a single blow dispatch Weyman to the Hell of scrimshankers and barrack-room lawyers. But Weyman resumed his seat, unharmed for the time being. The air of expectancy intensified. In the boys’ minds a row would be good entertainment as long as you weren’t singled out.

  ‘Well, yes, nobody likes war,’ said the Major. Risman looked at him for a moment. ‘I myself have no enthusiasm for it, believe me. But the unfortunate fact is that wars do occur, as I and several of my colleagues here today would testify. It is not something we care to speak about very much – and I promise you it is not in the least like the things you see in the films. But we followed the example of our elders who served in the Kaiser’s war and in South Africa before that, and now we in turn seek to set an example, to show the way, to young chaps like you. As I say, wars do take place. And regrettable as that may be, in those circumstances all of us – including all you boys – have a duty to something other than our own pleasure and convenience, a duty to Queen and Country.’

  By the Major’s lights this was an eloquent appeal. But if silent jeering is possible, it took place now. The Major, largely and perhaps by choice innocent of the 1960s, had appealed to precisely the wrong loyalties: he was playing to the wrong crowd, those aspiring to become the satirical, free-thinking awkward squad of the day. They would oppose any established principle as long as there was no personal cost involved. Cut one from the herd, though, and he would probably conform: revolt and self-interest were strangely mixed and adaptable.

  I was in some ways of their party, but I recognized their muddled contrariness, and I sympathized with the Major. His hands clasped behind his back, he studied the nearby piano for a few moments, while the silence deepened. At last he went on. ‘It may be fashionable to mock these things, these principles, but always remember this – great sacrifices have been made in their name, not least by old boys and staff of this school, among them members of some of your own families. It is because of them that you are here, that you are at liberty to be here.’

  Or as Carson’s history put it, ‘Blake’s tradition of service and sacrifice was maintained with distinction during the Second World War, when seventy-three old boys gave their lives in the conflict.’ Not even Risman could identify the voice which spoke into the next pause.

  ‘We don’t want to get killed.’

  The Major nodded. ‘No, indeed. Who does? The ultimate sacrifice is not offered lightly. But I think, gentlemen – no, I fear – that many of you may come to regret the decision you are thinking of making today. It seems a simple thing to you now, perhaps a trivial one, a subject for humour and easy, fashionable satire, but I beg to assure you that it is not. These are dangerous times, whatever you may prefer to think. There are enemies, alas, both abroad and here within.’ There was an audible snort at this. ‘In the times to come there may be a terrible price to pay.’ He paused. ‘So I would urge you to reconsider in the light of sober reflection, to set aside cynicism and remember the honour of your school and all it stands for.’ There was steel in the Major. No one mistook the firmness of his gaze. He was angry now but would not give in to it. ‘For now we shall say no more, only that I would urge you to search in your hearts and minds.’ I found myself stirred and ashamed and sceptical all at once. The Major, followed by the other masters, made his exit. Risman held the silence for a long time.

  ‘Now,’ he said, eventually, ‘those of you gentlemen who intend to join up, form a line at the foot of the stage so that your names can be taken. The rest of you – the rest of you little conchies, think on. And don’t come crying to me when the Reds are interfering with your sisters. Dismiss.’

  There was a mood of palpable disappointment as the meeting dispersed to lessons. This was a hollow victory: the pacifists had failed to get a row out of the situation, and the authorities had made a tactical withdrawal while claiming a moral advantage. A good many of the boys rose and straggled out into the yard. They wore an air of frustration. The bell rang.

  Maggie Rowan whispered in my ear. I could smell her perfume. ‘Place needs shaking up.’

  ‘Anarchist,’ I whispered in reply. She smiled in the backstage shadows.

  So much of authority depends on consent and conviction: at that date the boys withheld the one and the school lacked the other. The school did not press the point; the Corps would now rely on volunteers. The Major retired the following summer and the boys never heard of him again.

  The revolt against the CCF preceded the release of If. After the present narrative was over, having no games duties, I saw the film one Wednesday afternoon at the Rexy. The truanting boys downstairs in the stalls cheered Mick Travis and his chums on as they massacred the staff and prefects from the chapel roof. They were quieter when the staff regrouped and fought back. ‘A bit far-fetched,’ Dent, one of the history A-level group, remarked when the subject came up in class. Arnesen laughed, rose in his desk and made as if to rake the room with an army-issue Sterling submachine gun. He would of course have been on the side of the establishment. Whatever had happened in the previous months, the waters had closed once more over Blake’s.

  FIVE

  Not even Dr (Captain) Carson’s trump card had helped with recruiting for the CCF. He possessed a document signed by Hitler, acquired in his work as an interrogator following the German surrender in 1945. The single page was preserved like an unholy relic in a leather-bound folder which he would bring in from home to show selected boys. In my day I had been impressed and chilled by the jagged, mad but oddly precise inscription, but in 1968 perhaps Carson considered the dark magic to have worn off and the boys were not shown the exhibit, as being considered unworthy of its import. Although they might kick lumps off each other in the quad and on the rugby pitch, a majority found better things to do after school and at weekends than line up and be shouted at by Risman and ‘that ponce Culshaw’ as the boy corporal was universally known among his peers. The interchangeable nature of principle and convenience was thus established early and made clear.

  Carson himself expressed no view on the boys’ dissent, except to remark that the bible of the older boys now appeared to be Private Eye, and that cynicism was often used to justify ignorance. At the time I assumed that he recognized the inevitability of change, but now I suspect that he was doing as a priest was expected to do when deserted by his faith, by continuing to observe the forms and rituals of belief.

  As I went up the rear steps to the library, I heard the company marching off under the arch that led on to the field. They began to sing the song of the Corps of Engineers as they moved away:

  You make fast, I make fast, make fast the dinghy

  Make fast the dinghy pontoon.

  For we’re marching on to Laffan’s Plain,

  To Laffan’s Plain, to Laffan’s Plain

  Where they don’t know mud from clay.

  It was comic and poignant. The CCF would not be going anywhere near Laffan’s Plain or Aldershot. These days money was tighter: they would count themselves lucky to end up in annual camp at Strensall with two blank rounds each.
But I paused to listen to their voices fading beyond the arch and away over the darkened field. The melancholy diminuendo seemed somehow already historical.

  The cadets had been building a raft that could ferry them out to the island in the lake. The lake, big enough to be exciting for military purposes, was a survival from the school grounds’ previous mid-Victorian incarnation as a zoological garden, and had been artificially created by putting sluice gates in the creek that marked the western boundary of the school grounds and then piping water underground to replenish the lake. Around its mile-long shores there remained an unusual variety of plants and trees, fruits of the botanical labours of long-forgotten collectors. Among those of most interest to the boys was hemlock, which was said to be there for the use of disgraced masters. Recently there had also been an invasion of the sinister giant hogweed, whose hollow, woody stems, often growing to eight feet in height, had proved irresistible to Arnesen. He appeared in the Memorial Hall attempting to use one as a giant trumpet, not realizing that Maggie and I were there painting flats. She called out a warning but it was too late. Arnesen developed a rash and went about looking disfigured for a week or so, after which the ground staff set about burning the stuff out. It seemed to some like an omen. ‘Change and decay in all around I see,’ said Topliss, the music teacher, after a rehearsal of Ruddigore, gazing out from the Memorial Hall across the fields towards woods newly charged with menace from these cousins to the Triffid.

  ‘Decay, certainly,’ said Maggie Rowan. ‘Dry rot beginning in the head.’ Topliss, a mouse for whom every day was a struggle to survive and be allowed to give his life to Handel and Mozart, looked appalled but said nothing.

  When the raft was at last complete the cadets would spend the weekend camped out in the woods, staging exercises, attacking and defending the island and in all likelihood developing bronchitis. For Renwick, the woodwork master, the building of the raft was a game played in deadly earnest, as though the Red Menace might manifest itself on a wooded island in the school lake. I remember that the project brought to mind an episode in The Ministry of Fear, where a British officer confined to a private asylum run by Nazi collaborators spends his days trying to defend an island in a pond single-handedly against unseen enemies.

  Notwithstanding his madness, the officer’s fundamental belief is correct. There is indeed an enemy within. Elsewhere in the same book, a well-to-do lady arrested following a séance at which secrets were passed to the Germans tells her interrogator, ‘They don’t hang women in this country,’ to which he replies that she has no idea what they might do during wartime. When I first read the book as a sixth former, this struck me as merely an extravagant flourish. Events would prove otherwise.

  A world within or behind the known world is something in which it is always tempting to believe. Much of the literature read by schoolboys depends on it, from the Hardy Boys to Sherlock Holmes, to Buchan and Erskine Childers. I read all that, and I went on seeking out similar material as an adult. There must always be a secret. It was an irresistibly exciting notion: such a thing would lend meaning to events which might otherwise remain merely their empty selves, like the long school days and the sobering prospect of equally mundane employment and responsibility to come. When I was in the sixth form, Carson had warned against conspiracy theories, directing us to the findings of the Warren Commission following the Kennedy assassination. The facts were tangled enough, he said, without letting the imagination loose. But fiction, I’ve come to think, appeals to our sense of necessity quite as powerfully as attested fact. In The Ministry of Fear, Greene’s hero was over-age and recently released from prison. His involvement in the espionage plot ran wholly counter to his private preoccupations, but without realizing it he was enacting the classic thriller role of the man who knew – or was believed to know – too much. Carson was also very strict about the distinction between history and ‘entertainment’, a word he handled as though with tongs. What would he have made of the present, where it can seem that entertainment is the only form in which history is palatable? To illustrate his point, and to indicate the proximity of entertainment and propaganda, he arranged a showing of Went the Day Well?, which was written by Greene, in which German paratroopers take over an English village and are held off by the locals until help arrives. It remains a stirring and rather frightening film. Propaganda, said Carson: essential to morale and the conduct of the war, but propaganda, and, when the smoke cleared, to be firmly separated from fact.

  A distinction is sometimes made between Greene’s serious fiction and his ‘entertainments’. The Ministry of Fear belongs among the latter, but it keeps company with Eric Ambler and some of the poems Auden had written a few years earlier as the world accelerated towards catastrophe and the cinema threatened to overtake literature. If The Ministry of Fear was an amusement, its disposition was sombre. Richard Hannay was honour-bright: Greene’s hero was compromised by the necessities of love. But at least he had a story to be in. When sometimes I walked by the lake in the grounds at dusk and dawn the place seemed almost supernaturally representative of its kind and class, as though perfectly fictional, its existence sustained by the novelist’s art – the art that for some unaccountable reason I had quite recently thought was to be mine.

  The cadets’ exercise at Blake’s should have been undertaken in the summer, but in April the lake had been drained to clear some of the weed. It was not refilled until the end of August, by which time Renwick, ex-Royal Engineers, known as the Beast with Three Fingers after an unfortunate accident with a circular saw, was beside himself with fury at the delays to the construction of his beautiful raft. It was unthinkable for the project to suffer further delay: ergo, November or bust. The work was completed by the light of lamps that Renwick got a squad instructed by Sergeant Risman to rig up among the trees, run from a generator in the groundsmen’s hut. Such an undertaking, with its slightly demented ingenuity, would be viewed as criminally dangerous nowadays, but the boys involved viewed it all as an adventure. ‘The thing is, sir,’ Arnesen had told me, ‘it makes it all more real, if you see what I mean, at the same time as barmy. It’s hard to explain. It’s a story we can really be in.’ Perhaps in some ways Arnesen was not such a fool.

  Renwick had also recently constructed the Memorial Hall piano, much to the sorrow of Topliss, the one-man Music Department, who had been hoping for a Steinway from the allegedly substantial School Fund. Gammon was not keen on spending money from the fund. As far as he was concerned, the sole business of the fund was to grow larger. Since, as he pointed out, there was an urgent (though not in fact fulfilled) need to replace many of the more pitted and obscenely graffiti’d desks which had been there since the school was founded, other means must be found to pay for less essential items. Enter Renwick. He made the instrument in his own time, as a gift to the school, or perhaps as a way of undermining the Music Department, whose instrumental lessons often clashed with his own. Like the raft, the piano took rather longer to complete than originally planned. Smallbone suggested that this was because Renwick kept losing more fingers in its innards. It was said by the despairing Topliss that the raft and the piano could have been swapped with no loss of function or aesthetic effect. It was said that the tone-deaf Renwick himself, when the quip was reported to him, suspected that Topliss was right and as a result never forgave him.

  Topliss was indisputably correct, but one day after school at the beginning of term when I was backstage painting in the Memorial Hall, Feldberg appeared with a pretty dark-haired girl in the green velour hat worn at St Clare’s. They both sat at the piano, the girl removed her hat and they played a handful of duets, occasionally flinching with amusement when an irredeemably sour note issued from Renwick’s spavined creation. Maggie was there too, and we listened to the performance without making ourselves known. When they had finished, the girl leaned over and kissed Feldberg on the cheek. He turned and smiled and placed a finger on her lips. She put her hat back on, they rose, gathered their things and slipped
away again. They looked as if they had nothing to do with us.

  I made a noise of sentimental approval. In defiance of the regulations, Maggie lit a cigarette.

  ‘They’re a clever pair, aren’t they?’ she said. ‘Not seen her before.’

  ‘I’m sure she’s a nice girl,’ I said.

  ‘Of course she is,’ said Maggie, turning back to the flat she was painting. ‘They’re all nice girls, up to a point.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  SIX

  The cadets’ voices faded over the field. When I entered the library there were few lights on among the dark stacks. I saw Feldberg sitting behind the issue desk, reading. He glanced up and nodded. I did an hour’s work, then looked out what I wanted and went back to the desk so that he could stamp the books.

  ‘You’re on night shift, then, Feldberg. Where’s your oppo?’ The place was open until seven.

  ‘Off sick, I think, sir. Anyway, I get more time to read this way.’

  ‘What is it this week?’ He held up a copy of Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler.

  ‘Good. Keep reading around, won’t you?’ Feldberg didn’t need telling, of course. He gave me a slightly pained glance and uncovered another volume, Elie Wiesel’s Night. Then he looked over my shoulder and his expression emptied and closed. Charles Rackham, another Old Blakean, who taught modern languages and was our only poet, was approaching from the stacks, making his characteristic motion of smoothing his hand across his lank black hair. He was still in uniform. I hadn’t realized he was in the library. He must have come up by the rear staircase from the caretakers’ storeroom. As far as I could remember, we had hardly exchanged a word since my arrival. I had never been taught by him as a pupil.