Noisy at the Wrong Times

by Michael Volpe

  Some of us had begun an uneasy acquaintance. Of the ten first formers in Halls House, there were at least three of us who obviously fancied ourselves as year leaders, but we had sense enough to just accommodate the competing egos. I had instantly warmed towards Rob Smith, who was seemingly prepared to indulge in rule breaking. Then there was Seaton, who by coincidence lived near to me in Fulham and whose estate used to regularly get into fights with ours. The second formers, who shared a dorm with us, were keen to assert their newfound authority, having been the recipients of the standard bullying the year before. I was soon to learn that Serge’s year had given them quite a hard time and they were looking for revenge. Big Dez, who had an afro the size of a small bay tree, was worrying me a great deal, and we first formers quickly learned the art of quiet submission. Even my instinct to retaliate for the most minor affront had to be curbed – there were ten of them in a largely unsupervised dorm, and even I didn’t think I could take them all on at once. So cuffs, shoves and name-calling were the order of the day for all of us. I was being singled out for an extra bit of verbal attention because Serge had obviously been a bit of a bastard to them in the previous year. But it remained verbal precisely because Serge had been a bit of a bastard in the previous year.

  Those early days were characterised by the uncomfortable feeling of being out of our normal element. It was discombobulating.

  A wonderful word, that.

  Discombobulate.

  The comforts and certainties of home and familiar surroundings were torn from under our feet, and the exigencies of our new world of rules, which smothered us like cling film – with beady eyes on our every move and no end of people ready to correct our behaviour – pulled many of us up short. Every day a new protocol would present itself: don’t use that door, use the one ten feet away; don’t stack your shoes like that, stack them with the heels showing outwards; only hang towels in the drying room, not in the dormitory; fold the corners of the bed sheet thus. I list but a few of the orders we were obliged to obey on a daily basis.

  “It’s like a prison in this shithole,” I would mutter under my breath almost every time I received a command. It got to the point where I would want to dig a hole whenever I saw a sixth former or a master approaching, to hide in dirt and muck, if only to avoid the next piffling irrelevance or needless errand.

  I simply found it difficult to obey orders without a bit of a fight. I’m still like that. I knew these boys were bigger and older than me and had the ‘right’ to tell me what to do, but I found most of them unworthy of the role. Some were moderately cool, sixth formers with long hair who played guitar or were top rugby players, but too many were obviously relishing their power over us; and almost without exception, they would be the nerdy ones, those who from time to time you would hear being mocked by their peers. It was an early lesson in insecurity. So, when an order came, I wouldn’t disobey, but there would be a momentary pause, a glance, a look away and then a quizzical look back, a question perhaps. I would then comply with a wry smile. Sixth formers would rarely beat up the smaller boys, so I had worked out that I was in little physical danger. They must have hated me.

  “Volpe! What the fucking hell are you doing using that door?”

  “I’m going into the house.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s cold.”

  “What fucking door is it?”

  “The door to the house, where it’s warm.”

  “Is that the junior’s door? Is it?”

  “Errm, I’m not sure to be honest.”

  “No, it isn’t, you little shit!”

  “Oh, OK.”

  “The one next to it painted blue, use it. You are in prefect’s detention for two weeks, one for using the wrong door and one for being a cheeky little fucker”.

  “Oh fucking hell!”

  “Make that three weeks for swearing.”

  The power always resided with the sixth former despite my notions of rebellion, but if I could exasperate them, delay them or just simply annoy them to a point south of a punch in the head, I was satisfied.

  It wasn’t just the outlandish idea of rules and regulations, or order and command, duty, responsibility and deferment that challenged us – or, more specifically, me. Our environment was unspeakably taxing too. Even the good stuff like rolling hills, trees and grass carried a threat of a kind. The sky was enormous, the night was as black as ink and the air could be so cold it would burn your nose. Where was the light and roar of traffic I was so used to? Noise accompanied my every waking and sleeping moment in Fulham; with a fire station to our left, a police station opposite and a railway line to our right, we were surrounded by sirens, clatter and din. At Woolverstone, if you sat on the grass and listened, you could just about hear the pulse of your own blood over the squeaks, tweets and squawks coming from the shrubs and bushes. If Fulham was the dissonant croak of a punk band, Woolverstone was Sibelius as played by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Furtwängler. And I hated it. I couldn’t cope with the silence at night. Or the darkness that might conceal a prank or devious bully who could, unseen, pelt you with spiked horse chestnut husks as you ran corrective perimeters of the school road for using, yet again, that wrong bloody door. On a clear night, the purity of the darkness meant I could see so much more of the cosmic ceiling; I had only to go seventy five miles to render twice as beautiful, things that were millions of miles away.

  I had never imagined a life in the countryside, and here I was, about to face at least five years slap bang in the middle of it. I couldn’t see myself ever adapting to the mud, the cold, the wetness, the wildlife or the distance between everything. There were fields all around us, cattle in the paddock next to the cricket pitch and there were warnings about the foreshore, the irrigation ponds and about keeping off farmland. I had no idea what an irrigation pond was but was assured it was deep and exceptionally deadly if you fell into one, and we had three at the bottom of an adjacent field. Wherever you were, there was always an adjacent field. There was a field to cross before you could do anything. Usually there were several fields, and you were never sure if you were permitted to cross them, in which case you might have to walk around them and that doubled or trebled the distance. If you risked it, you invited the possibility that a gravel-voiced farmer with a dog that doubled at Pinewood as the Hound of the Baskervilles would chase you away. The farmers hated Woolverstone boys because we always damaged crops, as far as they were concerned; we all belonged back in the city with the rest of the scum. Their dogs, which were frequently more intelligent and erudite than their masters, hated us even more than their primped, subsidised owners did. They could happily walk past a hundred people, waddling and snuffling cutely at small children and rolling onto their backs for a tickle, but the slightest sniff or sighting of a Woolverstone boy and they would turn rabid.

  But there was no escaping the truth that Woolverstone was a fine-looking place, even if it did at first feel as though I had landed on Mars. When gazing from the back of the main house down to the Orwell river, you saw a patchwork of early autumn colour and mile after mile of trees cladding the rolling hills of the river valley. The foreshore of the wide Orwell was fringed by a substantial open marsh dotted with boggy pools, and it gave off a smell that drifted up on the crisp air. Before that was another seam of thick verdant ferns in summer, golden bracken in autumn and flat frosty saw grass in winter. Large cargo ships would chug up the river to Ipswich through the forest of small bobbing yachts and fishing boats that cowered in the enormous wake. Seagulls and their distinctive cry filled the air, crows cawed endlessly in the morning mists, and when it shone, the sun was bright and sharp on the eyes. And there was quaintness aplenty: in the chocolate box prettiness of St Michael’s church up beside the First XV playing field; in the tiny picture postcard villages of Woolverstone itself, Chelmondiston, Shotley and Pin Mill. We even had archetypal groundsmen whose local brogue meant I couldn’t understand a word any of them said. I don’t think they
truly qualified as ‘quaint’ per se, especially not with their grizzled syllables and big, gnarly hands. There were four of them, led by Dickey Mayes, a former Kent cricketer and creator of a wonderful first class wicket on Berners’ field. Digging beds, driving tractors, pulling small carts of plants, mowing lawns or the playing fields, the groundsmen were wizened, weather-beaten and Suffolk residents through and through. One always had a pipe in his mouth and carried with him a happy demeanour. That is to say, that once you realised he wasn’t growling at you, it was easier to see his happy demeanour.

  “Yaargh roit, g’daaay boy. Naarh be waaarg’n on thart there graaas wool yaarh?”

  He didn’t as much speak as vocalise. After a while, you could determine when he wasn’t telling you off and could make out a few words from the inflection he used or the look in his eye. The groundsmen never moved very fast. If you passed one on the way to a lesson, he might be replanting a flowerbed at a speed where movement was barely perceptible. However, when you came back, the previously empty wasteland of the bedding plot would look like a Gold Medal display at Chelsea.

  Paradoxically, despite considering myself to be in a surreal place, I do remember feeling smug when I thought how jealous my friends would be if they could see me, although I agree this sounds peculiar since boarding school filled them with dread. At primary school, we had twice gone to a farm in Beaconsfield (a mere hop, skip and jump from west London) and the journey out to the farm was always suffused with glee on account of our passing fields full of cattle and sheep. The farm itself was little more than a shed with a pair of Friesians in it, but the ground was muddy and the aroma was that of dung – fruity, herbivore dung as opposed to the effluent on London’s streets. I think we associated the countryside with wealth and posh people, and believed everyone had a car in the country. And a house. Usually a large house. I’m not entirely sure what was so exotic and exciting about the green spaces around London, but we would be beside ourselves with the exhilaration of it all. Now, my entire playground was a hundred times better than that, I would awaken to the mooing of cattle, and their smell would hang in the air permanently. Only to an urban child could the type and smell of shit be a status symbol.

  It seems to me that my education – in a more global sense – began in those first few days of life at Woolverstone. If the environment was part of the plan when the brave and brilliant individuals who created Woolverstone first drew up their ideas then they chose well the crucible for our instruction. A child’s environment has a huge part to play in his development, and it’s not just the social influences. If heightened aspiration was the driving engine powering the school, both the sculpted lawns and uncontrolled wildness of the land upon which it sat was the exquisite bodywork. Our school offered us space and wide horizons; I am not so trite as to make the obvious correlation here, but education needed to provide us with more than the vocational or merely prosaic. It was not immediately obvious to me that the Suffolk countryside was more than a geographical location, but it is certainly clear to me now that I had a great deal to adapt to when I arrived at that place, and coming to terms with this beautiful but nevertheless shockingly new and unfamiliar world was all part of the learning. This forced emergence from our personal little castles extended to everything, including the ability to share our worlds with those around us.

  I had been used to sharing sleeping space at home, but it was a very novel experience having to do so with nineteen others. They all had their habits or did annoying things; I would roar internally at the variety of irritating bedtime rituals. Some of them farted a lot, had rancid feet, talked in their sleep or just plain got on your nerves. One boy even slept with his eyes wide open, which is unsettling if you happen to glance at him as you returned from the toilet in the middle of the night. If you were in a bottom bunk and the person on top fidgeted a lot, the creaking and squeaking of the metal netting above would drive you to despair. We shared everything; sleeping space, toilets and showers, mealtimes and duties, so our new world was certainly going to test us all.

  The anticipation of being at the school was mixed with the inevitable homesickness many were feeling, but soon, chatter replaced sobbing in the dorm after lights out, despite our knowing it was verboten. Conversations were laced with ninety percent untruths as boys sought to establish their credentials. Brothers would become gangsters, sisters would be beauty queens and, for those of us who had them, Dads would be businessmen or spies. Many of us had been champion-something-or-others at primary school, and all of us knew what it felt like to touch a girl’s bits. Slowly but surely, a pecking order was forming among the first formers, based on who was the loudest, had the best stories or who claimed to have won all the fights he’d ever had. It wasn’t entirely surprising that we saw our physicality as the passport to status, and it is something Woolverstone would come to harness and channel very effectively, but it was also a measure of where our priorities lay.

  Later, we would discover many boys in the school had commendably glamorous parents who, strangely, we all took some sort of credit for in our growing camaraderie and solidarity. There was the boy whose father led the Red Arrows and the boy with a Dad who was props master on the James Bond movies. We had a friend whose mother was a model, known to all for her part in a famous Levi advert and her best friend was married to Eric Clapton, which meant the boy spent Christmases playing snooker with superstars of the rock world. The boy himself went on to fame and stardom for a time as a pop star. Another had a famous disc jockey for a dad, and several boys had about them the demeanour of laid-back hippies, a mood absorbed from liberal parents who smoked lots of weed. We were a diverse bunch for sure and I was quite often struck by the ordinariness of my own family when compared to this alluringly bohemian, Arts and Crafts menagerie. My plain background didn’t stop me basking in the reflected glow of these colourful lives, but the truth was that there were many who knew the caustic dangers of inner city London as well as I did. In time, we would come to know more of the lives of our school friends, and all too frequently it was easy to discern crushing difficulties. In my memory, most of us had fractured families and those who didn’t were usually among the small intake from military families. Conversely, of course, there were boys who had stories they never wanted to tell, or felt unable to, for fear that they could not measure up to the elevated bloodline of the heroes and hard-nuts who now surrounded them. We must have appeared absurd, terrifying or both, but these boys would nevertheless remain quiet and probably frightened.

  I haven’t until now thought much about my own homesickness in those first few weeks. I don’t recall it, although I must have felt it somewhere along the line. I was quite an independent child; my mother always recalled the time she took me into hospital at five years’ old to have my tonsils out, but getting me settled in was cut short by my excited invitation for her to leave and let me get on with the adventure. But whilst I don’t recall ever crying down the phone to Mum (no doubt helped by having an older brother there), I did miss bits of my life at home, and I also believe I was already feeling the weight of expectation. The fear of failing was getting to all of us because we were surrounded by those who were just so bloody good at stuff. You couldn’t escape them: the rugby players, the musicians, the real eggheads who were talked about in hushed tones. We had a lot to live up to, and it took some time to work out which behaviour was appropriate in order to step onto the track whose destination was ‘success’. It would normally begin as silliness and bravado, but the crucible for building self-image was at first the dormitory or the house, not the classroom, and the first seam that male adolescence usually mines is machismo.

  Small boys, when they first encounter other small boys act in a way that is the human equivalent of a peacock showing his feathers. In a normal day school, there are often mums and dads to add character and status to an individual, along with the size of car or house. There are the reassuring comforts of home, and an evening in the bosom of family can revive the flagging sp
irit of a child who has had a bad day among his peers. In a boarding school – or, more specifically, in a closed, darkened dormitory – it is, even in a benign form, a case of kill or be killed. There is no comforting hug from mother to soothe a furrowed brow, nor is there is any escape from a bully or a tormentor in a hall of residence. There is just the daily grind of the effort to get up the pecking order and to achieve, at the very least, a position no less than halfway up it. I fought my way through force of personality to what I believed was somewhere near the top, and in truth I was more force than personality, but I felt as though I was making progress.

  Many did not relish the post-lights out humdrum, but it was certainly a time when we could get to know each other and for friendships, such as they were, to emerge (Rob and I formed an alliance that lasts to this day.) It was also a time for the second form to have their fun, forcing juniors to run ‘dares’ or ordering one of us to ‘run the gauntlet’, when everybody waited at the foot of their bed with a pillow as the chosen one ran between them, taking blow after blow. Dares were often exciting, but none of us wanted to have to do them, and we dreaded the nights when the second formers decided it was to be such an evening.