Growing into War

by Michael Gill

  It was more painful than I could have imagined. Those meetings were held once a week on a Friday afternoon in the headmaster’s study. No one else was present. On this occasion he produced a twenty-page pamphlet, murmured in his pinched voice: ‘Read this. I’m sure you’ll want to talk it over,’ and sank back behind the opened pages of The Times. Clever chap: he had covered himself in approximately three feet of heavy protective newsprint. I had only six inches or so of his miserable little pamphlet. And it was the cause of my confusion.

  What I had to read in front of him were detailed descriptions of all the unmentionable things that were happening to me when I retired to bed. Things that I knew were happening to all my school contemporaries. Yet things that must never be mentioned, because adults never did talk about them in polite society. And such things certainly could not be discussed with this desiccated, dried-up shrimp of painful intent. I must not even let him know by a change of breathing that I was responding to the descriptions in his horrid pamphlet.

  I got to the end as quickly as I could and put it down firmly on the small table between us. Simultaneously Canon Balmforth looked over the top of his newspaper like a rat in a store house.

  ‘Well?’ he said sharply.

  ‘Well, I’ve read it; thank you very much, sir.’

  ‘So what are your main problems?’

  ‘Problems? Oh I don’t have any.’

  ‘But haven’t some of the things described there happened to you?’

  ‘Oh no sir, not at all sir, never.’ I made my voice as firm as possible. If only it didn’t go up into a squeak at the end of a sentence.

  The Canon folded up his newspaper, the better to look at me.

  ‘You mean you haven’t experienced any one of those symptoms?’

  ‘Oh no, absolutely not.’

  ‘If you look at page two – please look at page two – if you look there, you’ll see that the findings are based on a sample of over three thousand Scandinavian students, 98 per cent of whom displayed some of the sexual symptoms described.’

  ‘Ah well, but I’ve never been to Scandinavia.’ That seemed the best line to follow.

  ‘The facts apply universally. It doesn’t matter where you are domiciled. As you’ll see 94 per cent of young males masturbate with a bar of soap or some such. Has this really never happened to you?’

  ‘Oh no, certainly not, never.’

  ‘Well, perhaps proximity; friends all showering together?’

  There was the way out. ‘I don’t have any friends,’ I said firmly and truthfully.

  The pupils at St Edmund’s were very unlike those at Wootton Court. For a start they went in age up to elegant young men of nineteen. On Saturday, when they were allowed out into town, they wore cutaway jackets and top hats and carried canes. The junior forms – the Remove and the Lower Fifth, where I languished – looked quite different. Everything you wore was designed to make you sweaty and uncomfortable: stiff white Eton collars, blue-and-white flannel shirts, woollen underwear, heavy worsted suits and straw boaters that were a perpetual incitement to attack from our neighbours, Kent College. They were lucky enough to wear plebeian caps, easy to stuff in your pocket in a scrimmage.

  Some of the St Edmund’s boys would undoubtedly have made good friends if I had had the opportunity to know them better. Being the only day boy in the school was an insuperable barrier. The young boarders of my level had nowhere to go in the evening except to sit in their smelly grubby classroom. The older boys had a big common room with armchairs and piano. They also had tiny cubicles with bed and desk in which to carry out their own studies. The younger boys had no privacy, only the inside door of their work-locker on which to express their personality, usually with a glossy pin-up of a film star, but occasionally a favourite dog or pony.

  Their life seemed to me a fair representation of hell. Every Monday night, huddled up on the wooden benches of their classroom prison, they would hear an ominous thunder overhead. It was the grand piano being pushed back into a corner. No master at St Edmund’s was allowed to cane a boy, but the prefects were. It was they, the elected representatives of the sixth formers, who maintained school discipline. Bad behaviour got penalty marks. Enough of those earned a caning. This was delivered on Monday evening and covered the marks of the previous week. The canes were the whippy smart objects that the sixth-formers slapped their legs with when lining up the classes on speech day and for every morning service. When used as a punishment, the cane was not allowed to be raised above waist height. Hence the rolling away of the piano, allowing the prefect a long run to gather momentum before delivering the stroke.

  I was never caned, but many boys regularly got eight to ten strokes a week. When their names were sent down, they would go up to the common room with an affected swagger. On their return they would show the crisscross of weals on their palms with an attempt at bravado. But, even with those who were regularly punished, I sensed a shock that was near to tears. I found the whole concept of an internal hierarchy maintained by pain deeply disturbing. It seemed to me entirely wrong that older boys should be bribed by special privileges to punish their juniors.

  Though I never fathomed it at the time, I feel sure that this closeness of punishment, which was condoned and accepted by the real authority, the teachers, and carried out by the oldest and most physically developed boys, often on the most youthfully pretty, was deeply involved in the massive sexual prohibitions needed to control the urges of so many suppressed youths. Pain became a substitute for love. Or, perhaps even more common: masochistic love became the most pleasurable.

  Something of this we all knew. On the morning when we were going to be confirmed, one of our number, a freckle-faced Scots lad, went around saying over and over all the dirty jokes and blasphemous expressions that he knew. He did this, he said, because once the Holy Ghost had come into him there would be no room for anything like that.

  ‘There won’t?’ said one of our fellows. ‘So you’re going to leave school straightaway then?’

  When it came to my turn to kneel before the splendidly robed prelate, I felt no sudden flash of illumination. Instead, the pressure of the Archbishop’s hands on my head was surprisingly forceful. Perhaps that was appropriate for such a worldly priest – physically pushing out the Devil.

  Afterwards we all went with our parents to have tea in the school library and I was introduced to the Archbishop. What did we talk about? I think it must have been the novel The Cloister and the Hearth, which I had just been reading. The subject, the choice of religion or art, was sort of appropriate, though I actually thought it long and rather dull (I would never have said that, of course).

  I do remember the Archbishop talked in a glittering, sophisticated way, with a gently teasing manner which alleviated the faintest trace of condescension. He carried himself with the conscious grace of a Renaissance cardinal. It was no coincidence that his brother was the romantic actor Matheson Lang. I had seen him play Dick Turpin in an old silent film we had on our home movie projector a few years before. It was Cosmo Lang’s relationship with a film star that most impressed me (though I naturally would not have said that either).

  Years later he said something I thought memorable enough to keep. On his resignation from the see of Canterbury in March 1942, he said: ‘Of all the sorrows of parting, I think the saddest is parting from this holy and beautiful House of God.’

  I agree. What I miss most from childhood is the sight and the sound of the sea, our garden at Highfields, the companionship of my dog Patch, and coming out of the bustle of narrow little Chancery Lane into the serene calm of the cathedral close.

  V

  Just round the corner from our house on the New Dover Road was the county cricket ground. It is one of the most charming of cricket fields; not grandly beautiful like Worcester, where the ground seems the ideal frame for a splendid view of the cathedral across the river, but friendly and – like Canterbury itself – full of history. It is the only ground I know that ha
s a magnificent tree in full foliage on the pitch itself. And during the August Cricket Week, a military band in scarlet and gold, provided by the Buffs, marches up and down playing in the lunch break. Lunch could be an event in itself, for all around the edge of the field were tents with comfortable deck chairs from which to watch the game and shaded bars and lunch tables in the tents themselves.

  My father had access to one of these tents – probably he was a member of Rotary. He was able to invite me to join him in the Cricket Week at the beginning of August 1938. I had never thought much of live cricket till then. I was quite bowled over. The conditions were ideal. The sun shone every day. When the game ran into a dull patch I could buy an ice cream choc bar from the light refreshment centre.

  But the real stroke of luck was that I was able to see Frank Woolley bat five or six times in this, his last season. How to describe this experience to someone who has never seen Woolley play and probably only has a confused idea about the rules of cricket? Well, it was like having a privileged close-up view of Torvill and Dean iceskating when they were at their peak, or Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev dancing a pas de deux in a ballet by Tchaikovsky. The physical perfection is right, but the element of partnership is not. The batsman is alone playing against eleven men who are seeking to bring about his downfall. There is in every serious cricket match the spirit of contest distilled through many tactical choices and nuances. The wonder of cricket is that it is in some ways like a three-dimensional chess game to which all twenty-two players are contributing, and yet each team has a captain who, like a conductor, has to bring out the best in his team. And it is also like war – war between rival platoons. So, hold the analogy of the chess game with its infinite potential of alternative strategies, and superimpose on it the formality of the dance. And then give to that discipline the individual choice of movement and stroke play which a great actor gives to his interpretation of a major role in Shakespeare – say Vanessa Redgrave in her first youthful portrayal of Rosalind in As You Like It.

  It is not surprising that the greatest English cricket captain of the post-war years, Mike Brearley, is a psychoanalyst. And equally not surprising that he was not in the absolute top class as a performer. Through the history of cricket runs the conflict between rational control and instinctive physical response. This has drawn to it the most unlikely admirers – Samuel Beckett, Mick Jagger, the philosopher A.J. Ayer, Imran Khan. All have agreed that Frank Woolley was a unique genius. Even I, watching my first matches of first-class cricket, could see that Woolley, aged fifty-two now, was playing on a different level from everyone else. And I was watching some of the greatest players of the century. They included Len Hutton, the twenty-three-year-old Yorkshireman who had just made the highest score in test-match cricket, 364 against Australia, and the captain of the Australians Don Bradman, the great run-making machine himself. No batsman has ever been so ruthlessly, remorselessly successful. You could tell that all he cared about was making runs, and he started the moment he got in: a quick push down the wicket and he was off with a scoring stroke off the very first ball he received. And he went on like that prodding, pushing, flicking the ball just where the fieldsmen were not. It seemed inevitable that he was going to make a big score, and there was no particular reason why he would ever be out.

  Woolley, on the other hand, looked as though he might be out at any moment. At six foot four inches tall and beautifully proportioned, he, too, played to score off every ball. But, whereas Bradman achieved his ends by grafting and a marvellous command at placing the ball exactly where he wanted, Woolley played with an imperial flow and elegance that was like looking at a painting by Tiepolo: effortless brilliance of execution made everything seem possible, yet anything could happen.

  By this time you will be thinking this is the infatuation of youth. All right, take some other evidence. Here is what one of his contemporary players, Sir Pelham Warner, said of Woolley: ‘His method of play is an almost unique combination of ease, grace, style and power and, above all, of correctness, the foundation of the art of batting.’ The foremost historian of cricket, H.S. Altham, wrote: ‘Technically one can review any stroke Woolley ever made and discover that every ingredient is perfect . . . I will always regard the brief innings of 41 with which he opened the Lords Test of 1930 as the most perfect piece of cricket I have ever seen.’ And the greatest writer on cricket, Neville Cardus:

  Cricket belongs entirely to summer every time that Woolley bats an innings . . . The bloom of the year is on it, making for sweetness. And the brevity of summer is in it, too, making for loveliness. The brevity in Woolley’s batting is a thing of pulse or spirit not to be checked by clocks . . . An innings by Woolley begins from the raw material of cricket and goes far beyond. We remember it long after we have forgotten the competitive occasion which prompted the making of it . . .

  That must be true of all great sporting achievements. But the lonely elegance of cricket, of one against eleven, sets it apart from other games. Each individual batsman, sensing this, gives it his own interpretation in the innings he plays.

  It was my great good fortune that I saw its peak achievement through a famous innings of 81 that Woolley created in 1938, the last occasion when he played against the Australians. And it was not only Woolley, the supreme embodiment of the transient essence of this most subtle and profound of all team games, who was about to leave the field for the last time. The very game of cricket was undergoing one of its fundamental changes. In the early nineteenth century cricket was a rich man’s whim. He would pit his team of champions against other star players. Out of this evolved the county side with its mixture of gentlemen and players. The gentlemen were given their initials on the scorecard and entered the pitch through a different gate from the players who were simply recorded by their surnames. It was a typically Edwardian demonstration of class hierarchy and continued up to the Second World War. Teams chosen from the best of the county players voyaged every four years across the oceans to the far reaches of the Empire: Australia, South Africa, New Zealand. They were bringing England’s greatest game, with its lessons of sportsmanship and team spirit, to all the lands where the Union Jack flew. Ultimately, the sport was also taken up by the lesser breeds without the law: the ex-slaves of the West Indies, the crowded millions of India and Pakistan.

  There was an unforeseen result. In the 1970s, the tough media tycoons in Australia saw the game as an exploitable event. It had to be jazzed up, compressed into a series of single-day contests, played by floodlight at night, the players squeezed into new colourful and distinctive outfits (which had enough space on them to advertise the names of the sponsors of the show). Teams went all over the globe and there were endless World Series, as though it was baseball or netball.

  At the opposite end of the sports authority, the more conventional matches between the various countries took on an increased competitiveness. Test matches (as they were called) grew to be five days long. Winning them was an important gesture of national feeling and rejoicing. A potent weapon in achieving victory was the fast bowler. So lethal became his deliveries that the batsman had to wear an increasing amount of body armour, helmet and visors. Broken bones were commonplace. Standing up to this sort of battering often reduced the game to a dogged survival. The glory of stroke play, which had particularly graced the carefree brilliance of a side like Kent (under the visible influence of players such as Woolley), was no more. Of course, there were occasional players of such genius that they could still transfigure the experience of watching the game. And many such were from the ex-Dominions. England was no longer the dominant partner in the cricketing league. It had fed into cricket a unique mixture of top professional skills, largely from the mining and industrial areas of northern England, and amateur elegance, bred by the public schools.

  St Edmund’s produced its best-ever player in the brief years while I was a student. In 1938 G.P. Bayliss scored seven centuries against other schools and averaged over 70 per match. That was an unpreced
ented figure in a side where the next player averaged 16. I remember Greville Bayliss as standing out in the line of prefects for his dark, casual good looks and Irish charm, which extended to jollying on the small fry. He went up to Cambridge for a year or so and played in one of those unofficial varsity games that reflected the absence of so many students at war. I heard of him only occasionally after that. He was commissioned in the Irish Guards. After the war he went into the City and married a well-known beauty, the actress and television presenter Katie Boyle. Her real name was Caterina Irene Elena Maria Imperial di Francavilla, and she is perhaps best remembered for the years in which she introduced the Eurovision Song Contest.

  Greville Bayliss died tragically and suddenly in 1976, but remained a powerful influence on his widow. She was convinced he continued to guide and protect her. In a newspaper interview she said: ‘I’m tremendously psychic and get this extraordinary sense of being guided, nudged in certain directions.’ His adeptness at striking the ball between hostile fieldsmen in his cricketing life has continued in the afterlife in finding free parking meters for Katie Boyle. ‘Grev’s wonderful with parking meters. I know perfectly well that when there is a drama, he will be there to help.’ Does he return to the scenes of his boyhood cricketing triumphs to help guide the successors to his old teams?

  We should remember that the greatest of all poems about cricket concerns ghosts:

  For the field is full of shades as I near the shadowy coast,

  And a ghostly batsman plays to the bowling of a ghost,

  And I look through my tears on a soundless-clapping host

  As the run-stealers flicker to and fro,