Against the Tide

by Noël Browne

  The contrast inevitably muted my other personal deprivations. The shock of my transition from Athlone and Ballinrobe, with conventions, beliefs, and practices so different from those now around me; the trauma of my splintered family life; the loss of my father and my mother; all these experiences brought about an inevitable continuous emotional conflict, with all that that implied for a child of my age. Yet the contrast of life patterns was greatly mitigated by the fact that there were a large number of boys who, for quite other reasons, were feeling just as isolated as I was. It appeared to me that we foreigners dominated the school. We recognised our common links of alienation from English life, and this created in us a spontaneous camaraderie. The school had this remarkable distinction: there was absolutely no bullying of anyone by anyone else, either by teachers or boys.

  One of the teachers I remember best was Mr Tibetts. He had carroty untidy hair, a very red face and a bulbous nose, through which he spoke in short, nasal, and for a long time to me unintelligible bursts of sentences, spattered with spittle. The end of his nose was constricted by his enormous hornrimmed spectacles, which appeared to rest permanently there. Even with the thick-lensed spectacles he was still nearly blind. He was both gentle and patient; rarely exasperated, he would call out a boy, ask him for one of his house shoes and, then having told him to bend over, inexpertly try to find the target and beat it ineffectually. Mr Tibetts gave the impression of hating his job of Latin teacher.

  The French master, M. Talibart, disliked both us and his teaching. He would read the newspaper throughout the class, taking the precaution to prod a hole through the centre with his fat index finger to give us the impression that he was watching us. He tended when exasperated to cuff a boy on the right ear, then on the left, and kick him on the shins, muttering to himself, ‘take dis, and dat, and dose’, ‘those’ being the kicks given under the desk. I also remember Mr Harding, a blindingly handsome black-eyed crinkly-haired teacher who, I suspect, was illiterate. He was an awe-inspiring person, as it was said that he had at one time played cricket for Sussex. Like Brother John in Athlone, his educational concern was limited to just one subject: sport.

  Although we were aged only between ten and fourteen years, Mr Harding took our training with extraordinary enthusiasm and seriousness. All our classes were illustrated with drawings on the blackboard and taken up with discussions about tactical formations in the game of soccer, which he expected us to absorb and practise for the coming Saturday’s football game. We took part in a lot of inter-school games, as there were many other preparatory schools in and around Eastbourne. Luckily I enjoyed games. From Gaelic football I now turned to cricket and soccer. Mr Harding for some reason called me ‘Tishy’, perhaps after the Strube cartoon horse with the funny legs. Being a good athlete is a magic passport to popularity in any English public school.

  Mr Lowndes had grey hair, cropped close, was obsessionally clean and lived with his mother in a fine red-brick house opposite the school. He seemed to be the only serious teacher we had. His manner was somewhat brusque and impatient. He wore a grey Norfolk jacket with peeping white shirt cuffs. His pink hands were carefully manicured, his shoes always shining black, and clever blue eyes shone from his scrubbed face. He always seemed to be at his happiest leaving through the front door of the school; to him, I suspect, we were simply a tiresome collection of morons whose wealthy social origins presaged a life of never-ending decadent entertainment and recreation. There was no purpose in casting any cultural or intellectual pearls before us. I remember him taking the trouble on one occasion to show us how to brush our nails; he did not aspire to anything more testing for our pampered lives.

  There was also Mr Robinson, a big, jolly ex-Naval man with blazing blue eyes. He wore enormous ill-fitting plus-four suits of light grey, and shiny brown leather shoes with great finger-shaped leather flaps to them. We liked to listen when he played rollicking music-hall songs and sea shanties at the piano for us. Because of his ill-fitting false teeth, he spat a lot as he sang, but he must once have given great pleasure to his shipmates, for his voice was soft, pleasant and musical. He made no attempt to teach us anything.

  The wife of the proprietor, known as ‘Maw P’ because her husband’s name was Patton, was a particularly well cared-for, dumpy, knock-kneed lady always dressed as befitted her position, complete with a shining necklace of pearls and a gold wrist watch. She was the sole person of whom all of us went in some fear, though she did not harass or try to interfere with us. She had a strait-laced severe appearance which we found intimidating, but it was said that she was a compulsive gambler on the horses. Her husband, ‘Paw P’, was a charming, self-effacing, equally knock-kneed tubby little man, who appeared to enjoy life uninhibited by his managerial cares. He took his pleasures where he found them; even we young children could see that. I understand that the school no longer exists. Whether this is in any way related to the gambling proclivities of his wife or not, I do not know.

  In the school holidays I would return to Miss Salter’s holiday home in Worthing. A number of the boys whose homes were too distant to justify travelling home during the shorter vacations lived with us there. Life for all of us in the home was very spartan — a bread and margarine existence. Since we were near the sea, I swam continuously and in all weathers. My distracted sister Kitty, whose job it was to mind us at the beach, continually pleaded with me ‘not to go out too far’. The South American boys were unhappy about the food, the crowded dormitory conditions and above all, the winter cold. Julian Romero from Peru even attempted to heat his bed by putting a lighted candle beneath it.

  Kitty and my youngest sister Ruth, aged four, were accepted as boarders in a convent run by the Notre Dame Sisters in Worthing. Kitty was happy there but for the infant Ruth convent life was no substitute for her broken home and the loss of both parents. Ruth stayed there until she was eighteen, then took up a secretarial job in Sussex. When she and I met again, during the Second World War, we had to carry specific newspapers to be sure of recognising one another. Ruth later returned to Ireland to live with us for some years, but is now happily married in Tennessee.

  With the closure of Miss Salter’s home in the late 1920s, following her death, the medical mafia of Irish doctors all over England helped Eileen by taking me to live with them during holiday times. Sometimes I stayed with limitlessly wealthy aristocratic friends in their stately homes and castles in England or in France; at other times Eileen could afford to pay for a home with working-class families, where I was a ‘lodger’ or paying guest. I never knew from one holiday to the next where my next home would be. For a time one of Eileen’s friends, Martin Goughlan from Clare, took me to live where he worked in Whitechapel, near London’s Chinatown. We lived in the workhouse but enjoyed free access to the local cinema and the music halls. My cosmopolitan experience in St Anthony’s was consolidated in the class sense by the wide variations of social surroundings in which from time to time I found myself. I can say that I was never tempted to defect from my own class origins by what I saw within the wealthy and privileged houses I visited. My class instincts are deeply rooted.

  Though brief, my years at St Anthony’s were the most enjoyable of all my school life. The school had a cheerful universal tolerance which developed in me a balanced nonpartisan view of the world. Race, colour or nationality became to me as unimportant as the colour of a boy’s hair or eyes. I had no understanding of the chauvinist, political or religious differences which separate the peoples of the world. My short spell at St. Anthony’s counteracted the introverted neo-racialism of the Ballinrobe Christian Brothers’ vision of Irishness.

  However, the clearly entertaining but academically useless education which I received had its disadvantages. These were shown clearly when I was given to understand that, were I educationally suitable, I might qualify for a scholarship to Beaumont College near Windsor. It was found that the educational process, as far as I was concerned, had virtually ceased when I left Ballinrobe and the Chris
tian Brothers, and there was not much that I had learned there which would be of help to me in being admitted to the intensely chauvinist Jesuit College. Once again I was to be rescued.

  The wife of M. Talibart was a large pleasant French lady, and she heard of the wonderful possibilities which would open up to me were I to pass the scholarship examination into Beaumont. She kindly agreed that if I would co-operate and work hard, she would ‘cram’ me with the subjects needed to pass the examination. I was glad to work hard at academic subjects for a change. I won the scholarship to Beaumont, for which St Anthony’s was one of the recognised preparatory schools.

  Beaumont College was run by the Jesuits, and intended for the education of the small number of middle-and upper-class elite Catholic families who had survived the Reformation and the confiscation of the great estates in Britain, the Howards, the Throgmortons, the Russells, the Cliffords, the Ponsonbys. Many of these families had been associated throughout English history with the defence of the values of the Roman Catholic religion. There were also a few boys from wealthy Irish Catholic families.

  Schooldays at Beaumont were very different from St Anthony’s, but happily they shared one important feature which is common to Catholic schools within the British public school system. There was none of the ugly bullying that is an integral part of the infamous ‘fagging’ system, that is the exploitation of the younger boys of the school in carrying out menial and often humiliating services for the older boys who subject them to arbitrary, unpredictable and often cruel punishment.

  The long-term hopes of the Jesuits for Beaumont were trenchantly expressed in the reply said to have been sent by the Headmaster of Beaumont to Eton College, situated nearby. The occasion was an invitation by Beaumont to play football; the Etonian authorities were said to have queried ‘What is Beaumont?’, in response to which Beaumont’s Father Rector stated his vision for his school. He wrote, ‘Beaumont is what Eton College once was, a Catholic school for the sons of gentlemen’. Whatever the truth of that story, we in fact regularly played games with Eton College, as we did with many other schools in the area.

  It was intended at Beaumont that the sons of English Catholics could receive instruction in their own religion in order to develop informed grounding in the purpose and objectives of their faith. It was the practice for the older students to be sent out to London at week-ends with the Catholic Evidence Guild which held public meetings and discussed the general subject of Catholic apologetics. (I was never to be sent on these sorties.) The majority of our teachers in Beaumont were either professed Jesuits or students of the Order. We were educated to believe that we were quite rightly a privileged class, the generally accepted belief of the English public school system. Because of my education in Ballinrobe, where I was taught another version of the British historical mission, I found myself in some trouble concerning this question. As with so many schools, we held debates on subjects of public interest. There was discussion about the unquestioned ‘right’ of the British armies to ‘civilise’ the Irish just as they had civilised the Indians, the Africans, and a host of other nations in the world. As with the Christian Brother’s defence of his heroes, so did the British teacher preach his own special version of the just war’. We had been taught in Ballinrobe that we might with justice kill violently our British fellow-man so that we could free Ireland. But in Beaumont the Jesuits of the same faith taught me that it was ‘just’ that the Irish had been murdered in the process of the subjugation. It made me question the casuistry of all the great religions, especially my own.

  In the course of the acquisition of their Irish colony the British had also, according to my Christian Brother, continued to suppress and destroy Roman Catholicism in many demonstrably cruel ways. It occurred to me that this fact created a serious dilemma for the English Catholic. I set out to make this point at a subsequent debate, and so disturb their complacency. My simple case was that we Irish were the sole defenders of the one true Roman Catholic faith and that the British Catholic was both a renegade and a coward. The consequences of my use of this debating point were both absurd and serious for me, and for my sister Eileen.

  I was called to the Rector’s room. There was a double door, green baize outside, to be negotiated before gaining entrance for the interview. This proved to be an intimidating experience: on one hand the aristocratic headmaster of a leading English Catholic public school and on the other an unlearned child who was in that same school on sufferance. There was the added fear of the consequences of some misdemeanour of which I was quite unaware. The Rector, a Wellesley, was as always courteous. Sorrowfully he intoned that he had been approached by a young boy named Clifford, now Lord Clifford, a member of the distinguished aristocratic recusant Clifford family which had governed England under Charles II. They had a long and honourable history in British politics and in the defence of Roman Catholic values. It appeared that Hugh, who was, and still is a good friend of mine, had complained to the Rector that during a debate I had been particularly hurtful to him and his family. My case was that they had failed to sacrifice their land, their home, their property, and everything they had, for their faith, as we Irish had done. ‘We Brownes had owned great estates in County Meath before Cromwell came to rob us’.

  Father Weld gently chided me, explaining that the Cliffords had been a source of powerful support to the Catholic Church in British history. I had also questioned such issues as the indissolubility of marriage and the right to divorce, unusual for that time. I appeared to question religious practice generally; it had been noticed that I had declined to join the society known as the Apostleship of Prayer, of which every other boy in the school was a member. Father Weld had written to a distracted Eileen to tell her that I had ‘anarchistic tendencies’. If I could not change them, then I must leave Beaumont. Eileen, shocked at the possibility of my being expelled, could not help being amused by such an absurd conflict between the distinguished Rector and his child pupil. Happily I was not expelled, nor did I change my beliefs about the virtues of Catholicism until much later. I acted for the rest of my stay at Beaumont as an acolyte at all the religious services.

  At the great church feast of Whitsun, in the midsummer sun, the presiding priest wore blindingly white silk vestments, bejewelled with semi-precious stones. While the priest and acolytes recited between them the great drama of the Mass, the choir supported by the congregation of boys sang Gregorian Chant, or one of the many resounding anthems or hymns, swelled by the thunder of the organ, surprisingly played to such effect by the tiny jockey-figured, Cockney-accented choirmaster, Mr Clayton.

  Services were in every way and on all occasions pure theatre. The light splintered on the solid gold chalice. There was the gold monstrance, carrying its snow white host in the centre of the shimmering golden sunray cruciform stand. Great scented clouds of incense rolled upwards towards the ceiling, from the gilded and jewelled thurifers which we swung from side to side, held in our spotlessly white kid-gloved hands. Upwards, languidly, they climbed in multi-coloured amber, scarlet, amethyst, and emerald balloons, of incense, scented fumes, changing colour as they passed before the saintly population of heavenly figures in the stained glass windows over the high altar. The faint dim light was intensified by the soaring banks of dark yellow candles on their heavily ornate, gilt, flower-bedecked candle holders. In total contrast, at Requiem Mass, the overall deep orange yellow, and black and white motif unrelieved by flowers, colour or jewels, in the Mass for the Dead, effected its own profound macabre evocation of loss, mourning and death.

  I was never to extinguish those candles, by means of the long black delicate slim pole on the end of which was the tiny triangular clown’s hat-shaped snuffer, or use the slim lighted taper needed to light them, without the worrying fear that some evening I might inadvertently bring tumbling down the whole great carnival of scents, sounds and colours, and so shatter the dreaming mesmeric quality of their effect on us all.

  We boys depended on one another emotional
ly; the homosexual, as in prisons, greatly enjoyed himself. Each of us had friendships based on our special educational or sporting interests. There was a continuous programme of intellectual and physical activities all through the day, and the educational process was promoted through a competitive dynamic. The classes were evenly divided into two groups; we were marked for achievement and these marks were noted at the end of the week. Classes were interrupted by meals, prayers, and various recreations or training sessions. I started the day with a swim in a cold swimming pool. This saved washing in the equally cold basin and ewer, and splashing my feet in cold water. We played all the usual games, cricket, tennis, football and squash. The playing fields, tennis courts and amenities of every kind were superb. Our rugby fields were on the historic Runnymede where the great British charter of democratic freedom and individual rights, the Magna Carta, was signed. We had the mildly intimidating function of reading to the priests during their meals. I was chosen to read books by Irish authors having, in the view of the priests, a noticeably Irish accent.

  The English public school has its many functions. In Victorian times, it relieved the moderately wealthy parents of the emotional and physical demands of bringing up a succession of children. They believed that it was their function to produce loyal subjects who, if need be, would fight and die for His Majesty’s military adventures and expeditions. Convictions about elitist rights and privileges were indelibly imprinted. As members of a leader class, we were heirs to a code of social and political practice and behaviour which was identical throughout the public school system. The thin veneer of superficial good manners and concern concealed a diamond-hard obsession with the pitilessly efficient accumulation of wealth, regardless of the cost in terms of human suffering.

  We were to man the highest ranks of the Tory party and the civil service. What would the pauper Jesus have said, if he were consulted? English public schoolboys are educated to equate wealth with authority and privilege. These ‘rights’ and privileges are reserved for themselves and for their families. They are taught to believe in and to commit themselves to an uncompromising defence of those rights. They are prepared to defend them against either an equally greedy enemy from abroad or another class within their own society. They are on permanent call to mobilisation for war through the Officers’ Training Corps.