Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  The free-for-all of abuse that I saw was usual for the private schools in our area. When Debby was a child, she had learned about local private school “discipline” when Mr. Fausto, the gym teacher at Beau Soleil (Beautiful Sunshine)—another misnamed “school” a little way up the road from Gai Matin—broke her little finger by flinging a twenty-pound medicine ball at her repeatedly as a punishment for not catching it.

  As for actual education, I didn’t learn much more than I had in the old days with Cynthia and Susan. (Cynthia had moved back to London to do more language studies; and then, several years later, she did find her Korean and went to Korea, where she and her husband started a mission.)

  All the classes at Gai Matin were in French, save one taught by Miss Spink. Miss Spink was a pink, curvaceous, Rubenesque young woman who wore tight bright pink sweaters, or jumpers as she called them, over wonderfully huge and bouncy breasts, tight knee-length tweed skirts, white blouses, and shiny black Wellingtons (rubber boots) on school walks, and little silver-colored slippers with roses painted on them when indoors, it being the rule that inside the school no one wore their outdoor shoes. She was probably twenty years old, had full lips, the creamy coloring of a Victorian English milk-maid, and thick strawberry-blonde hair, spoke lovely high-class English, and smiled all the time. I was in love with her.

  Miss Spink came from a born-again English family who had recently left the weirdly cultic Closed Plymouth Brethren (the English version of the same group my aunt Janet had joined in America). One reason Miss Spink took the teaching job was to be near L’Abri, to strengthen her shaken post-Closed Plymouth Brethren faith. She came to Saturday night discussions and Sunday church. On one occasion, Miss Spink visited our chalet for church with her parents, people my mother later declared were a “real English gentleman and real lady.”

  The Spinks were wealthy art dealers and had been in the news for discovering a Rembrandt that Mr. Spink bought for twelve pounds and sold for a fortune. Miss Spink had a little brother my age who was in a boy’s British boarding school. Miss Spink would tell me about how wonderful that school—Great Walstead—was in comparison to Gai Matin, and that it was a pity I could not go to a “real school, instead of this foreign sham.”

  Miss Spink played a big role in my life. She wasn’t much good as a teacher and let her students more or less just mess about in her class, where those of us (about seven children) who were studying in English spent our days. But Miss Spink talked to my parents about Great Walstead. She said her brother was happy there, as was his cousin from the other branch of the Spink family. That other branch was even wealthier than Miss Spink’s family and had also recently escaped the Closed Plymouth Brethren. The David Spinks—my teacher was one of the Robin Spinks—were gem, antique gold, silver, and rare coin dealers whose company, Spink and Sons, bore the impressive “By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen” insignia.

  Miss Spink talked to Mom about the fact that a boy of nearly eleven should be able to read and write a lot better than I could and that she thought boarding school would do wonders for me. Mom asked me if I wanted to go.

  27

  The idea of going to England fascinated me. I had never been there, but I had received a steady stream of books, postcards, letters, gifts, candies, and glowing accounts about the wonders of English life from Mom and Dad, as well as from the English guests who came to L’Abri. My room was filled with postcards of the Tower of London and the Queen and her guards at Buckingham Palace. And my favorite books were by English authors. Our greatest heroes were the English martyrs killed by the Roman Catholics and described so glowingly in Fox’s Book of Martyrs, wherein there were grim and wonderfully descriptive accounts of our Protestant saints’ excruciating deaths, as Protestants went willingly, even joyfully, to the stake and were burnt to a crisp because they would not bow to the pope. Latimer was the best. As the flames licked off his skin, he declared himself to be “a candle lit that will never be put out in England!”

  And I would get to ride on a jet airplane! Maybe I would even eat at Lyon’s Corner House Restaurant, where Dad had once had supper just after the end of the war, when the only meat you could order was whale steak that tasted of oily blubber. I would have proper English afternoon tea with crumpets, a food I’d heard about in books but never tasted. I would eat kippers and real marmalade and Devonshire cream, and all the other literary delicacies that everyone from Bertie Wooster to E. Nesbitt’s children heroes in the Would Be Goods seemed to love so much, washed down with tea or ginger beer, a drink that the children in the books craved and that Mom said she tasted once but that was hard to describe. And I would be in a country where they all spoke English! I would be in a country where they played cricket, and if I played cricket I would look just like the young Prince Charles as featured on a postcard Mom had sent me. And I would be in a schoolboy’s uniform also just like the young prince, with a school cap, and wearing shorts and a blazer as well as a shirt and school tie. Best of all, I would be doing something normal, be like other boys my age. Mom said that someday I might even be able to wear an old school tie.

  “What is an old school tie, Mom?”

  “Men who have been to the finest schools wear them.”

  “Why?”

  “That way, when they meet another man who went to Cambridge or Oxford, they recognize each other.”

  “Oh.”

  “You see, dear, with the Lord having opened this door through the Spinks’ offer to pay for your tuition—at least for the first year, then we’ll just pray the Lord meets our needs—you are going to be able to go to a school where you will meet boys from fine English families. And who knows but that there will be a future Hudson Taylor there [founder of the China Inland Mission my grandparents had served in] or a future Winston Churchill!”

  “Oh?”

  “And someday, after you have gone to English schools and then on to Oxford or Cambridge, you’ll be wearing an old school tie and will be moving in those sorts of circles. And the Lord will really be able to use you. And you will be the sort of Englishman that. . . .”

  “I’m going to become English?!”

  “Well, not actually, you will have an American passport still, but having gone to the best English schools you will be one of them, be part of what they call an old boys’ club.”

  “What is that?”

  “It’s the association of men who come from the upper classes who naturally know each other and are able to use those contacts in a way that benefits them. And those contacts you’ll have with the finest English gentlemen will last you a lifetime. And who knows how the Lord will be able to use you.”

  “I might want to be a doctor.”

  “That would be fine, as long as the Lord leads you into that field. You want to be where He wants you. In any case, you’ll be moving in the right circles. You will not be like poor Fran.”

  “Why?”

  “Your father has had to make do. But you will be able to begin life with all the advantages and the good manners of an English gentleman and the contacts the Lord gives you and the education that your father never had. But when you get there, begin as you mean to go on and be a witness to the other boys. The Spinks say the headmaster is a real believer. The Spinks speak very highly of him.”

  I was excited, terrified, and homesick even before I left. What would the other boys think about my polio leg? And how would the school uniform, shorts and knee socks, look on me? Would the knee sock on my left leg fall down because the calf was atrophied? Miss Spink said not to worry. “There is no bullying allowed at Great Walstead. You’ll love it.”

  28

  After the first term, I always traveled alone to and from Switzerland. But that first afternoon, Mom and I were driven over to the school from the David Spinks’ farm a few miles away in Seven Oaks, where we had spent the night.

  It was a bright sunny day. The lawn had just been cut and smelled good. The main house of the school seemed huge. I was seeing everything thr
ough a blur of tears. I felt as if the sights and sounds belonged to someone else, that somehow this was just not real. What had I done in agreeing to leave home? I burst into tears and, feeling ashamed, dragged Mom into the cover of the rhododendrons next to the school.

  “Please don’t leave me, Mom!” I was saying between sobs.

  “I won’t if you really don’t want me to. Dad will be furious if I bring you home now that it is all arranged, but if you really don’t want me to, I won’t.”

  “I guess I do want to stay, but I wish I didn’t have to.”

  “I love you so much, darling,” said Mom, wiping her tears. “I’ll write every day, and you write to me, too. The term will fly past; then you’ll be home for the vacation. And you’ll have so many wonderful stories.”

  Mom left me crying in the rhododendrons. Eventually Spink One—since there were two Spinks in the school, they were designated “Spink One” and “Spink Two”—my appointed “new-boy’s shadow,” found me, and we went in to tea. I hoped my face wasn’t too puffy. But no one was looking at me. A new boy was the lowest form of life.

  During my first term, I was often in Matron’s small sitting room huddled over her single-filament electric heater while she offered words of comfort. She sat at a tidy rolltop desk filling in health certificates or folding mountains of laundry along with the two assistant matrons who would periodically march back and forth to the various dormitories where we boys would later find our socks and underwear neatly piled at the end of our beds, ready to be put away in our lockers.

  Matron must have been in her late twenties. Her assistants were probably in their early twenties, perhaps even late teens. They wore pale green housecoats and were pretty and unfailingly kind. When our nametags came off, the matrons sewed them back on. When we missed our mothers and cried, Matron gave us tea and digestive biscuits. When we were ill, she nursed us in sick bay or drove us in her little red Mini-Minor up the road to the Lewis cottage hospital to get stitched. Matron also referred boys to the headmaster for punishment when she felt the need, say after repeatedly catching one of us talking after lights out.

  During my first term, my favorite place in the school, besides Matron’s sitting room, was the library. I sat at a huge oak table that covered half the floor, and at which Prime Minister Lloyd George had once presided over meetings during World War I when he occasionally used our school as one of many secret meeting places. I would pore over the huge atlas. Actually, what I pored over was the double-page fold-out map of Switzerland. I traced the road from the Rhône Valley up to where I knew our chalet’s front door was and fell into homesick daydreams.

  Mom wrote to me every day, and the desperation of my homesickness during my first term can be measured by the fact that I even read her pages and pages of spiritual advice and her litany of martyrdom, wherein Dad was always the ogre, L’Abri such hard work, and she always the long-suffering heroine. Dad wrote postcards about once a month, but sometimes he would scrawl a hasty “I love you, boy” at the bottom of Mom’s seven-or-eight-page letters.

  I was the only American at Great Walstead, an outsider who had never even lived in his own country. I had grown up in a Swiss mission, a place even less explicable to the other boys than America. At first I felt as if I were walking around in a cage, peering through the bars at the other boys’ normal lives. But Miss Spink had told the truth about the no-bullying ethic of the place.

  Great Walstead (GW) reflected the character of its headmaster, Mr. Gordon Parke, and his wife Eunice. Mr. Parke was fair, kind, decent, friendly, open, and admired. Where Madame Moraz had played favorites, Mr. Parke was impartial, treating each boy with a firm respectful kindness that was the best example of leadership I have ever seen. Where my father hid a deeply flawed character and huddled reclusively in his bedroom-study, Mr. Parke lived out in the open.

  GW was the place where I discovered who I wanted to be. I wanted to be like Mr. Parke. He had a handsome, symmetrical, square-chinned face with deep frown lines, perhaps from his time at sea as an officer in the Royal Navy. He was usually smiling. His idea of being a headmaster was to be unfailingly cheerful, play riotous games on the school lawn with us boys on Sunday afternoons, get sincerely angry when provoked—his face would flush, and he would yell. He was not just the law, but a god. And his wife Eunice was a goddess and, in her way, even more feared and loved.

  Mrs. Parke was small and athletic and had birdlike sharp pretty features, bright dark eyes, and a natural authority, but with the added threat of Mr. Parke’s wrath if anyone showed his beloved wife the least disrespect. Together they ran the best and happiest school I was ever in or have ever seen or heard about. The boys did not ask about my bad leg. And even though I was an outsider, most of the boys either left me alone or were kind.

  At Great Walstead, no one knew anything about me. I never talked about the Bible studies or endless prayer meetings or the fact that the other boys had fathers with real jobs while we Schaeffers were living off God. My dad was a teacher, I said, which was almost true.

  I also ignored my polio leg, never wore my brace again, and, by my second year at GW, even made it onto the First Eleven football (soccer) team as right back, a position that I played so fiercely that I helped take our team to an undefeated season one year. Mr. Marsh, our sports master, told me I was the “most dogged” defender he’d ever coached.

  When I made the team, I felt as if I had just won a gold medal at the Olympics, joined the human race, been vindicated in some cosmic way, was declared normal for the first time in my life, and now was “just like other boys,” as I thought of it. The joy was right up there with getting my first novel published, actually better.

  When I was fifty years old and Mr. Parke had just read one of my novels, he wrote to me out of the blue and said he remembered me as being “a very courageous boy.” I hadn’t heard from him for many years. His compliment meant more to me than anything anyone else has ever said, as if God decided to show up unexpectedly and say something nice.

  When an attacker would break through and leave the rest of our team scrambling, and there was no one left between the goalie and the attacker but me, and the whole school was on the sidelines yelling while Mr. Parke called out “It’s up to you, Schaeffer! Stop him!” and I did, took the ball away, then managed to land on my left leg, so my wickedly strong good leg powered the foot I used to clear the ball, and I cleared it the length of the field while the masters and boys cheered and Mr. Parke called out “Well done!”—every problem, sorrow, or set-back evaporated.

  29

  Great Walstead School sat at the end of a long, oak-lined driveway. The grounds covered 294 acres of fields, woods, ponds, a small river, playing fields, and lawns set in gently hilly landscape, midway between London and Brighton, about an hour train ride from each. You passed the school’s small farm while on your way up the drive. Next to the farm—it consisted of two tumbledown cow barns—sat Walstead House, the cottage the older boys lived in, which I moved to after my first year at school.

  Walstead House was an Elizabethan farmhouse built of brick and crooked oak ship’s timbers. The boys said it was haunted. And we thought that several stains on the ancient oak floors looked like blood. The low oak doors, string-pull latches, and steep creaking stairs had not changed since Elizabeth was waiting for news of the Spanish Armada. The place smelled of shoe polish.

  After passing Walstead House and a massive half-acre cluster of rhododendrons, the main school building appeared on the edge of a close-cropped lawn. It was made of brick, with ornate white trim around the roofline. It was four stories high, topped by many tall chimneys and a steeply gabled slate roof. It had been built as a manor sometime in the 1800s and turned into a school in 1925. Wings had been added, jutting in several directions behind the original building.

  The main house had fifteen- to twenty-foot ceilings, a wide and stately staircase descending to a marble-floored front entrance hall, large common rooms, a library, an oak-paneled headm
aster’s study, and many dormitories on the upper floors. Behind the main house was a series of decaying huts linked by rickety half-covered passages. The huts had been bought from a nearby Royal Air Force base at the end of World War II. These served as our classrooms, as cold in winter as they were hot in summer. In winter, the huts were heated by portable kerosene stoves. The windows had to be opened when the eye-watering fumes got too intense.

  The huts were always dusty and almost impossible to sweep clean, no matter how hard the boys assigned to sweeping duty worked. The good news was that most of the hut classrooms, propped on cinderblocks a few feet off the ground, had loose floorboards. We would pry one up and just sweep everything through the hole.

  There was a large dining room that had been added just a couple of years before, in 1960. It smelled powerfully of some sort of tar-based disinfectant, a smell that sometimes overpowered the taste of the food. The dining hall provided an object lesson in the postwar decline of the Empire. Its doors were made of hollow plywood, its walls of flimsy sheetrock, and the floors were covered with thin linoleum. The shabby new wing included the tuck room. That was where we kept our all-important tuck boxes, miniature trunks about the size of a case of wine. Our tuck boxes were filled with “tuck”—jams, potted meats, squash (bottles of concentrated fruit syrup), and any other little treats from home that we’d bring out at tea time.