by Josa Young
To Pearl, who lived in a semi-detached house in Eastbourne, anything that involved outlying farms sounded enormous. Bert looked quite indifferent.
‘There isn’t much left, but there is a house in Sussex called Castle Hey. It was commandeered by the Army as a listening post, and up until now they haven’t relinquished it so you don’t have to worry about it yet. There may be some compensation for the damage which you must be prepared for. Some families have had to pull their houses down as they were completely wrecked.’
She turned and smiled at Bert, who was sucking his unaccustomed Coca Cola through the straw – his grandparents refused to stock American drinks – with a great deal of pleasure and clearly not listening. She asked him if he had any questions, but he just blushed and muttered, ‘No, thank you.’
The meeting went on for an hour. When they got up to leave Pearl was still not at all sure what to think. The only immediate impression she received was that there was a fund available for the heir’s education.
As soon as they got home to Eastbourne, Pearl went round to call on her parents and give them the news. She could see that they too had no idea how to react to the information that their only grandchild was now a lord. Pearl led the way in deciding to ignore Albert’s elevation until the family was forced to build it into their world view. That happened faster than expected. Having ascertained the age of the Mount-Hey heir, and obtained all the proofs they needed, the trustees specified that Albert must go to public school, even though the academic year had already started. So stunned was the family that they simply complied, writing anxiously to Mrs Jenkins asking for recommendations.
She decided that Armishaw’s, a guild foundation school up on the Downs above Eastbourne, was the best choice. Albert would not find the hurried transition from grammar to public school so difficult there as it was on home territory.
Six
Albert
September 1954
Whap – loud, painful and shocking, it came out of nowhere. Bert’s head reeled with scattered sparks at the blow.
‘Daydreaming, Hayes? Is that what they teach you to do at these grammar schools? You’re at Armishaw’s now, boy, you need to buck up.’
It was his housemaster Mr Featherstone known as Eggy for his shiny bare pate which he tried to hide like a fat man behind a sapling with a slick strand of hair. After more than a term of it Bert was used to the slaps and jibes about his previous schooling, but he still wasn’t used to Greek. It was a passion for Eggy who couldn’t bear to be ignored when teaching his pet subject. Incomprehensible squiggles instead of the usual Roman alphabet had simply switched off Bert’s attention.
Bert found Eggy to be a peculiar man, but he had an accepting nature. He wasn’t particularly used to men at all, not having a father, and Eggy seemed always to be about to explode, his face red, his eyes watering. Hoping to keep out of Eggy’s way, Bert just kept his head down and did nothing to attract attention. The inmates of Reynolds House split neatly into two groups: a minority of sporty boys who hated and despised Eggy as a jumped-up little social climber (Bert thought he wasn’t in a position to judge) versus those who revered his classical scholarship and wanted to follow him to Oxford. Reynolds boasted a disproportionate number of Oxford Greats entrants due to Eggy’s dubious but unrelenting efforts.
Eggy loathed any kind of sport and tried to force the classics into all members of his little fiefdom, promoting his pet scholars as prefects and heads of house. Set apart from the main block, Reynolds House had a reputation for being peopled by swots and was thus ignored by the rest of the school.
Bert didn’t fit into either group. He wasn’t particularly sporty. He could hold his own at both football and cricket, although he disliked rugby. But it was too late for him to develop a passion for the classics. He much preferred history. Quite soon, he realised that he had been assigned to an unpopular house, replacing a boy who had left in the middle of the Lent term.
The abrupt disappearance of Tomkins had been preceded by a perfect hailstorm of slaps, according to Bert’s new housemates. When Eggy erupted, which he frequently did, boys jumped out of the way. Beating was falling out of favour, but that didn’t prevent an atmosphere of barely suppressed violence. Eggy had one redeeming feature, his plump and gentle wife Marjorie. She provided a haven of tea and ginger biscuits and organised a ‘house-father’ programme, where she picked a boy in the year above to help all new boys find their feet.
Bert had arrived at the beginning of the summer term. He'd been invited to get there early to meet his house-father and settle down a bit before the rest of Reynolds House barged in, high on testosterone and holiday-flavoured boasting. Mrs Featherstone had assigned as house-father to Bert a boy called Richard Payge. Payge had comparatively liberal leanings and a benign nature. His mother was an artist and his father a vague and dilapidated landowner of ancient lineage and few material assets. There was in the Payge family none of the rampant snobbery that infected public schools like a rash. Mrs Featherstone had waited for Bert in the hall when he first arrived and greeted him kindly, introducing him to fourteen-year-old Payge who was hovering behind her well-briefed and ready to do his stuff.
The taxi driver, who had brought him up to school on his first day, having deposited his new trunk in the front hall, came back to help him carry his cumbersome food hamper into the House Study. Glancing round, paralysed with shyness, he saw in every cubbyhole a wooden box, some pristine and new, some shiny with use and engraved with graffiti, all with black metal hasps and corners. He remembered, from being shown round with his mother, that these were called ‘tuck boxes’ and contained the boys’ treats. No one else had a hamper. He felt uneasy and exposed by this difference, when all he wanted to do was fade into the scarred panelling.
‘What’s that you’ve got, Hayes?’ enquired Payge immediately.
Sugar rationing had ended, and the bulging hamper contained a large fruit cake, tartan biscuit tins of shortbread, a can opener to deal with all the ham, turkey in jelly, condensed milk and fruit salad. His grandparents had added packets of peanuts, wine gums, Murray mints, Smith’s crisps, Bourneville and Cadbury’s chocolate bars and White’s lemonade and ginger beer – all barely subdued by the wicker lid’s straining leather straps.
‘Just some food and stuff from my grandparents,’ he replied shyly.
‘Tuck!’ exclaimed Payge and, his eyes gleaming, immediately took charge. Bert had nothing to worry about. Difference in the area of tuck was wholly acceptable.
Soon the hamper was concealed under the travel blanket prescribed in his kit list, in the dark space beneath the battered and carven shelf that served as a desk in his cubbyhole.
After that, Payge let it be known to a few select companions that Hayes had unlimited access to tuck, and word spread. His new friends seemed ravenous and Bert noticed that they wished to be in his good books to feed their insatiable hunger. Born just before or during the war, none of them had ever known anything other than rationing. Even now treats were scarce.
And never mind that Hayes’ grandparents were ‘in trade’. The trade they were in was food, and that made up for everything. Moreover, Bert had a generous nature and, having been brought up with groceries, took the food for granted. He had no desire to hoard and it was no novelty for him. Each time he went home for an exeat, his grandparents replenished the hamper with a lack of caution that was their silent way of loving their only grandchild.
Armishaw’s stood on the Downs above Eastbourne, its high clock tower dominating the skyline and causing grumbling resentment among certain elements in the town. Bert had always been aware of the school, but without taking any kind of personal interest. Before he had ‘gone up the hill’, he had seen the senior boys out of uniform and on their superior bicycles on Sundays, circling aimlessly, going to the pictures or looking at girls. Their accents gave them away. To begin with it was strange to be transported up there himself, leaving his old friends down below.
It was al
l so odd that Bert didn’t dare open his mouth to begin with, but Payge was friendly and put him at his ease. He was what Bert imagined himself expected to be at some cloudy point in the future, used to the whole business of public school, a country house sitting there in the background not mattering too much. Bert had never seen his house, and had no clear ideas about what his random inheritance meant to him or his future. He didn’t know how he was meant to behave in this new world, so he got on with copying Payge’s manners and demeanour.
Payge’s bottomless appetite for fruit cake was the mortar that cemented their friendship, but it was Bert’s anguished confession that he had inherited a title, and that there was a house somewhere, that sealed their bond. Without fruit cake, Payge would undoubtedly have wandered back into his own year, having done a bit of perfunctory showing Bert where the lavs were in those first few weeks.
After a term of getting used to school, he felt he could trust Payge enough to confide. He waited until Payge was quite stupefied with food one autumn evening, and began stumblingly to explain himself.
‘Not Albert Hayes then. Mount-Hey? We should call you by your real name. But it’s a bit of a mouthful, is it pronounced like that?’
‘I don’t know. I never met any others. Everyone else is dead.’
He tried to recall what the solicitor had said, but only remembered the novel taste of cold Coca Cola sucked up a straw.
‘Well they would have to be, wouldn’t they? Otherwise you wouldn’t have inherited. Much more straightforward in my family. Lots of sons in every generation, including mine.’
Payge stopped, thinking.
‘We should shorten Mount-Hey, it’s sort of awkward sounding. Knock off the corners, wear it in a bit. Like St John is always called “Sinjin”.’
He rolled the name around his mouth, muttering the syllables over and over again. ‘Mount-Hey, Mount-Hey, Munt Hey, Munt-hay, Muntay, Munt, Munty.’
Bert sat quietly, not wanting to interrupt the process of his re-christening.
‘I think Munty,’ pronounced Payge at last. ‘It’s easy to say, and sort of amusing sounding. Could be the making of you. Goodbye, Hayes. Hello Munty.’
And he shook the younger boy’s hand, clapping him on the shoulder.
Munty, the cornucopia of decent tuck, now had a nickname too. His acceptance was assured. The name caught on as crazes run through closed communities, and it helped him to accept his new identity for himself. Shortened and tightened, it was less alarming, more friendly. He was grateful.
One evening, a couple of townies (as he had learned to call them) attacked a chap named Melville who had gone out for a smoke in the sheep pastures around the school. He was small but they had miscalculated, as Melville was the school’s best flyweight. Both townies had to be unstitched from barbed wire by the neighbouring farmer.
This marked the beginning of a series of skirmishes. Boys from the town would come loping up the Downs intent on mayhem and a little light sabotage, breaking windows and attacking isolated groups of smokers, gathered in the evenings under cover of the scant woodland on the south-facing side of the school. Bert didn’t smoke, but he liked to saunter down with the others. It was sociable, before it became exciting with the prospect of a battle in the ongoing war.
Boys who were used to them – usually farmers’ and landowners’ sons – had permission to keep shotguns in their housemaster’s gun cupboard. They were allowed to sign out their guns and go after rabbits in the gloaming among the woods and fields around the school. Payge was one of them.
One June evening when he was sixteen, Munty was preparing to go out in the company of a loose alliance of shooters and smokers, as they chatted idly about the prospect of an attack by townies.
‘It’s getting worse, you know,’ said Atkinson, displaying a healing split lip.
‘What did you do to him?’ Munty asked. He half dreaded meeting someone he knew up from the town in these encounters. Luckily it was unlikely, as the grammar school boys believed they were above ‘going up the hill’. It was the technical college lot who were rowdier and always spoiling for a fight. There was still a chance that one of his fellows from Mixed Infants might appear. Not only that, but he had to live in Eastbourne during the holidays and was visible in his grandparents’ shop. So far, no one had recognised him in the few years he had been at Armishaw’s. But still he didn’t have the confidence to go in, fists flailing, as he saw the other boys do.
‘I couldn’t get close enough, he had a longer reach,’ Atkinson was saying. ‘They don’t seem to care what they do now.’
Payge, his broken gun resting on his forearm, chipped in: ‘Perhaps we could give them a fright. Guns might be more effective than hockey sticks.’
Eggy, high-stepping in his nervy way past the group just outside the House Study doors, overheard.
‘Ha!’ He let out a barking laugh. ‘Why don’t you let off a couple of rounds over their heads? That’ll show the beggars who’s in charge.’ Grinning, he lurched onwards, leaving a trail of winks and sniggers in his wake. Bert wandered off with the smokers, the shooters choosing to go in another direction.
It was getting darker, and after an hour of peaceful chatting, the boys spotted shapes moving up the steep fields that separated the southern extreme of the school grounds from the outskirts of Eastbourne.
‘Here they come, lads,’ said Atkinson, touching his lip. ‘What shall we do tonight?’
Nothing, as it turned out – the pearly evening was rent by a series of loud bangs, followed by screams and yelps. The shadowy figures were galvanised and running very fast down the hill.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ yelled Munty. ‘Stop! You might kill someone.’
Then he recognised Payge coming towards him through the gloom.
‘No chance of that, old Munty,’ grinned Payge. ‘We swapped the shot in a few cartridges for rice and salt. My father told me about it, Burma police used to do it to disperse a crowd. Hurts like hell but can’t kill you. But we only used it to remove any risk as we were strictly firing over their heads. Didn’t hit anyone, I promise.’
He had a wild look in his eye and Munty recoiled. It had all been over in a matter of moments. The townies had scattered far and wide, and the shooters broke their guns and strode back towards Reynolds House with the smokers. In the distance could be heard the siren of first one, then more than one, police car. The boys climbed the stone steps to the veranda of the House Study, where they were met by an incandescent Eggy accompanied by several grave policemen.
‘What the hell’s been going on?’ the housemaster raged at the boys.
The police officer beside him said simultaneously, ‘What’s been going on here? There are reports of shotguns being discharged.’
‘But Sir,’ said Payge to Eggy, ‘We were only doing what you said, Sir. You told us to show ’em who’s in charge, Sir, by letting off the guns over their heads. Sir.’
Eggy fell silent and his bright red face drained to putty. To Munty’s relief, he was gone within days, taking his random violence and obsession with the classics with him. But also removing his sweet wife, who had befriended the fish-out-of-water new boy and encouraged him to come to her sitting room for tea in the early, homesick days.
The house settled down after that under a calm and quiet man called Mr Rawlings, and became much like the rest of the school – increasingly sporty and thoughtless, smelling of feet and armpits. Munty had long since adopted the Armishaw’s camouflage of the drawling accent and special language. A football was a bladder, a bicycle a bagger, trousers toggers and exams zaggers. The townies never again came up the hill, and the smokers and their friends were left in peace.
Munty risked joining his two worlds together by taking Payge to meet Pearl and his grandparents. Payge was charming, and his appetite for high tea filled the family with awe. Then Payge began inviting Munty to stay with his parents Lord and Lady Grangemere in the holidays, and Munty discovered a comforting world of friendly grub
by chaos that was nothing like his image of how the upper classes behaved. Payge’s family home was a large, flat-fronted Georgian barracks of a house. Parts of it were uninhabitable with damp. It was full of animals and children, and everything was covered in a fine layer of dog hair. The food was inedible, and Munty understood why Payge loved his tuck so much. There was no particular formality, and certainly no luxuries, and Munty grew more comfortable with his inherited identity. He knew his mother would be horrified and bewildered by what she would see as squalor. Having a clean tidy house was a daily preoccupation for Pearl. Munty found the mess soothing.
Payge had asked Munty about Castle Hey, what it was like. Munty had no idea, and decided that he ought to find out. He wrote to his mother, who contacted Mrs Jenkins. The house was still under the jurisdiction of the military, although they had moved out. Mrs Jenkins’ reply mentioned that the house was in poor condition and its future uncertain and that they would have to wait until the War Compensation Office decided on their award before they did anything at all.
Other families had cut their losses and pulled down the scarred remains left by military use, as compensation was not generous and dry rot had run riot during the war years. A visit was arranged for mother and son but they were warned that they would not be able to go inside. They took a taxi up from the station, asking it to wait and stepping out on the overgrown carriage sweep looked up at the crumbling façade with mixed feelings.
It was as if Castle Hey had died, probably killed in the war, thought Munty. The pink brick bled green from overflowing gutters. The windows looked blank. An uninvited buddleia flourished above the front door. He hesitated, the pull of history for him was very strong. He noticed the pretty ogee arched windows and the toy battlements. It was undoubtedly romantic but also overwhelming, so big and decayed. He wanted to go away and think about it, and soon succeeded in persuading his mother to leave. They caught the next train back along the coast to Eastbourne. When Payge asked him about it again, he just muttered that it was a ruin.