Against the Tide

by Noël Browne

  This unique apparatus of compulsory military training involves children in serious manoeuvres by day and by night, frightened beyond belief by the lonely darkness and the sense of an ‘enemy’ out there attacking their ‘lines’. We were trained as a battle reserve in annual summer camp on Salisbury Plain. Drilling, marching manoeuvres, machine gun, rifle and bayonet practice were all inculcated with considerable efficiency.

  No conscientious objectors were tolerated. We were subjected to a curriculum of military training throughout our school lives, from recruit through the ranks to the small handful of officer class. The sole virtue of the officer class to me was that they wore a pleasantly smooth uniform, unlike that of privates which was made from a particularly irritating barbed wire-like cloth known as ‘bull’s wool’. Most of us wore our pyjamas under our trousers to protect our legs.

  With the tight, high-collared uniform we wore First World War-style puttees. To a new recruit, these were the most infernal arrangement, thick, long, very irritating woollen bandages, about five inches wide. They were either too long or too short, depending on how the recruit had misjudged the process of winding them around his legs; they were intended to fit perfectly, reaching from the ankle to the knee. After much trial, it was not too difficult to achieve the ideal distribution of the puttee over the leg, but there was then the problem of keeping it in place. Since I had long thin legs, I always had the dread feel that during marching and counter-marching exercises the puttees might begin to slip until down and down they came so that, like great inert snakes, the long khaki bandages trailed out behind. They then became a danger both to oneself and to those in the pursuing ranks of child soldiers. There followed the pitying, scathing voice of sergeant-major Percy Martin, Irish First World War veteran, bellowing at you, with the whole world looking on, ‘Corporal Browne, fall out and dress yourself!’

  There was no mistaking the seriousness of our training with full service-size 303 rifles. In order to accustom us to the sound of battle and rifle fire as we sought to kill the enemy — Germans today, Soviet citizens tomorrow, unfortunate African or Irish wog anytime — we would fire noisy blank bullets. The machine-gun fire was simulated by enormous wooden rattles. They omitted to simulate the screams of men in their death agonies. We were also taught how to fix foot-long lethal steel knives to the end of our rifles. This knife was, we understood, to be dug into the enemy’s body. Sometimes, we were told, the long knife might go right through your enemy and come out on the other side, perhaps becoming stuck in the body when you tried to withdraw it. In these circumstances it would be necessary to put a foot on the dying man’s chest to lever out that great long knife and prepare to stick it into another human being. No one reminded us that French or German or Russian boys were being taught at the same time the same brutal techniques.

  On a cleverly-arranged rifle practice range an apparatus created, as realistically as possible, a succession of moving targets, pictures of a man standing, a man running, and a man lying down. It was quite clear that we were not forbidden to kill a man, even if he was trying to run away from us. So much for our public school code of honour: ‘Never hit a man when he’s down’. We competed with one another in scoring the highest number of men killed. For the squeamish, this was described as ‘bull’s eyes’. The riflemen who were not so successful were the ones who left the enemy painfully maimed, wounded or disfigured for life. We were not reminded that other inept marksmen would take mutilating pot-shots at us.

  Doctored versions of the recent history of colonial wars were used to rationalise to us child soldiers our killer role. Boys with whom I had stood before the fine Giles Gilbert Scott War Memorial on Remembrance Day could read the names of their own fathers who had died in the ‘war to end all wars’. In time, many were to have their own names inscribed on the ‘scroll of honour’ — the Mackenzie Bells, the Dixies, and many others whom I remember with deep affection.

  Few of us understood that we were destined to become well-cut gilded names on a granite war memorial. Yet the adults knew. The men and the women, the parents who bred us, remained silent about it. Only the fact that I developed tuberculosis was to save me from that fate.

  How could the parents justify the metamorphosis of the child into the soldier-to-be within the OTC? Was it lack of imagination, callousness, indifference, moral cowardice, or the fear of protest or dissent in public, especially the mothers? Regrettably, there were no Greenham women then, no peace movement.

  I do not believe that there has ever been a woman, a mother, a sister, known to call out against the obscenity of children, rifle- and bayonet-carrying, marching, and countermarching, being made ready for war. Many of them, even then, had already lost their husbands, the fathers of their children, their brothers, in the First World War. How did these mothers tolerate the convention that their boy children must, in their turn, be trained to kill, or be killed or maimed, in defence of their forcibly-acquired colonial Empire abroad, or their social or financial position in society on the home front? It is something of which we may be proud that ours is the first generation which has at last provided the first powerful peace movement, ‘Women for Peace’.

  I would like to think that I made my own simple protest against it all. At the conclusion of the period of OTC training in the ‘art’ of war we would sit for an examination known as Certificate A, which automatically qualified the holder to become a commissioned Officer in the regular British army on the country’s mobilisation in time of war. The questions were simple intelligence tests: ‘What is to be done by an officer whose platoon had just received a consignment of two hundred left-footed only army boots from CQMS?’ There were also practical military tactical problems: where would you site your machine guns so as to kill and maim the most men possible in an enemy force approaching your position through an area of hilly countryside?

  In spite of its simplicity, and the fact that I was never to have any trouble with academic or medical examinations, I succeeded in failing Certificate A a record twelve times. On my thirteenth time, in mercy no doubt, I was finally graded as officer, leader and gentleman material, and was awarded my certificate.

  I was considered to be a good athlete. This unfailing prerequisite to acceptance in an English school assured me of a largely untroubled life. I progressed up the ladder to become one of the school’s captains. The underlying dynamic of life at Beaumont was simply competition — at games, in the OTC, and in the classroom. Classes were divided into teams, each given the name of respected Jesuit churchmen. We began all our tasks with the words ‘Ad majorem Dei gloriam’ (to the greater glory of God), at the corner of the page, and concluded the work with ‘Laus Deo Semper’ (praise God always).

  Weekly assessment was made mainly by the religious teachers; lay teachers did not participate. There was an annual Shakespearian school play, and a variety show in which, to my family’s disbelief, I was once encouraged to sing, face blackened, ‘My ole black mammy’. While classes in art were available, there was little or no evidence of interest in music. I recall only one boy who played the piano. Neither was there great interest in the theatre. But there was a well-stocked library in a large, comfortable, warm room, in which it was possible to find peace from the gramophone, billiard ball and ‘ping-pong’ noises and chatter of a boys’ school. I became quite an authority on the New Testament.

  All of the teachers were conscientious educators, and the level of formal education was high. We passed our outside examinations with case. There was a branch of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley’s organisation, in the school, but it is only fair to say that there was a succession of other organisations and societies, including the intensely chauvinist Tudor Rose League Society, with its colourful red rose emblem, which many of us found particularly attractive.

  I was most impressed of all by the fundamental principle of Jesuit life, which they made no attempt whatever to inculcate in us, and which was the direct antithesis to the elitist beliefs which we were encou
raged by them to hold. This was the pattern of personal self-imposed discipline observed by the Jesuit fathers, the novices, and the brothers of the Society.

  I watched this way of life and was moved by it. Their lives exemplified the capacity for self-discipline, the qualities of humility and self-abnegation, the impressive ability to submerge themselves ‘ad majorem Dei gloriam’ for the welfare of the Order and the success of their life’s mission, i.e. the final triumph of Roman Catholicism and the perpetuation of their own power under the ‘Black Pope’ (the Jesuit Superior).

  The Jesuits appeared to accept honours and demotion unemotionally, without question or complaint. They showed all the discipline of their soldier founder, St Ignatius of Loyola. Each pursued his vocation, whether at the aristocratic Farm Street Church, the London house of the Jesuits, or as simple storekeeper in a provincial school. A solitary rootless life was implicit in unexpected moves and transfers from one institution to another. There was also real poverty — pittance tobacco money, threadbare clothes, frayed cuffs. We had one priest who had forsaken great estates and a peerage for his vocation. We saw the bare tables within the linoleum-covered and uncurtained rooms, the breviary with a few books, the simple crucifix above the priedieu. They owned no personal possessions; comfort was a small fire and a ration of tobacco or cigarettes.

  I found these features of the Jesuit life easily the most impressive part of my education at Beaumont. On many occasions throughout my troubled life of illness, humiliation, disappointment, and occasional success, I like to believe that to some extent I was prepared for it while watching them, though not necessarily by what I heard in formal classes. It has puzzled me that the great institution of the Society of Jesus would appear to have concluded that only a very few are fitted to adopt the values and practices of selfless self-denial in relationships which they choose for themselves, and within whose boundaries they live out their austere lives.

  At Beaumont I was subjected, for the only time in the whole of my school life, to corporal punishment. The system adopted by the Jesuits eliminated the possibility that the person angered by the pupil’s behaviour could indulge his personal anger on a child. A specially-designated priest executed the strokes on the palm of the hand, using a whalebone-lined stiff leather contraption. My punishment had been awarded for some trivial offence. At a specified time, I went to the room of Father Furness, a member of an old aristocratic Irish family. He read the piece of paper which I presented to him, in which was recorded by the teacher the sentence which was to be carried out. Proceedings were completed briskly and without comment by Father Furness. My memories of this occasion are a mixture of surprise and shame that a grown man could demean himself by assaulting another human being, especially one who was smaller, weaker, and totally defenceless.

  The effect of my beating was possibly the very opposite to that which was expected. There was no question of my being intimidated into obeying laws which I might have chosen to ignore. I simply resolved that there would be no ‘next time’, since I would take extra care that they should not come to know what I had done. Nor was there: the capacity to create superficially conforming little humbugs is to my mind the most disagreeable feature of corporal punishment. The child-adult relationship ceases to be one of respect, mutual trust and love. It becomes infused with fear, and alienation must form and develop in what is in effect a deceitful and lying relationship.

  The public school encapsulates a safe, blinkered microcosmic inner world, remote from life and the wider world outside. While we read the Illustrated London News, Country Life, and Punch, I do not recollect ever reading a daily paper or a Sunday paper except occasionally to consult the Club Rugby results and to find out how our ‘old boys’ team did on their weekend match. Within our society, there was a non-elected governing authority, with its nominated officers, which devised the code of behaviour and rules. We were not exposed to any experience of the electoral process. The Notice Board was used to inform us about everything, from membership of the school football team to the names of the new school captains. It is not surprising that the disciplines of army life came readily to those who chose to enter Woolwich or Sandhurst from Beaumont.

  There was a general lack of interest in elections. Change depended on the need to replace those who had graduated elsewhere, just as in the great world those who grow old, fall ill, or die help us to realise our ambitions by their replacement. We were not encouraged to believe that we could be in any way masters of our own environment. The public school creates a two-dimensional stereotype member of a mutually supportive freemasonry designed to protect and perpetuate a privileged position in society at whatever cost. A remarkable feature of the moulding process is the mutual acceptance by both adult and child of the nearly total absence of family life. This becomes a normal facet of their lives. The child has no choice but to rationalise the implicit parental rejection with an assumption of unwantedness: an ideal recipe for the well-known public school psychopath.

  My education could not have more unfitted me for my prospective role in life. The protection provided by the public school system was dependent on a moderately wealthy home background to facilitate an easy transition from public school to business, to industry, the services, to the university. I listened with a sense of irony to our pre-graduation talk by Father Rector, who told us of our good fortune on entering the glittering world outside where we must take care to guard the good name of Jesuit education and the Catholic Church. He concluded, ‘Do not forget that, in a turbulent world, you belong to the leader class in society’. Unlike the rest of them, I was both penniless and homeless.

  Because of lack of vocations Beaumont has since been compelled to close. It is no longer the ‘Catholic school for Catholic gentlemen’ for which it was intended; its garish ornamentation, gilt and gilding, has given way to a computer factory.

  4

  Student Days

  WHEN I left Beaumont in 1934,1 had no money, no home, and nowhere to go. Eileen was seriously ill with tuberculosis and completely incapacitated. She realised more fully than I did the hopelessness of my position. I had nothing whatever except the clothes that I had on me. There was talk of a job in the bank, or the desperate last resort of the penniless public school youngster, the army. Luckily for the bank, the army, and above all, myself, none of these desperate remedies was needed.

  Father Weld had once asked me to befriend a new boy coming from Ireland, Neville Chance, and help him in any way that I could. He confided in me that while the boy came from Clongowes Wood College, ‘the ways of Irish public schools are not our ways’, implying that they tended to be somewhat rough and uncouth. It would be up to ‘us’ to help young Chance unlearn his ways — he hesitated here — and though he naturally did not use the word he clearly meant ‘culchie’ ways. I readily agreed to do whatever I could, but he did not need my help.

  Neville was very good company, and readily settled into school life. It transpired that my friendship with him was to change the whole direction and purpose of my life. Possibly appreciating my home and financial dilemma, Neville now asked me to spend the summer holidays with his family in Dublin.

  Neville’s mother was Lady Eileen Chance, widow of a distinguished Dublin surgeon at the Mater Hospital, Sir Arthur Chance. She had been his second wife. I spent a wonderfully happy summer in Dublin with Neville and his brothers and sisters and at the end of the summer I returned to Worthing to stay with two elderly ladies, the Misses Stephenson. They had spent much of their lives in India, where their brother had been a provincial governor. I went with them in their antique Trojan car to the bazaars, tea parties, and Morris dancing in which they were interested. On my arrival in my new ‘home’, I sat down and wrote a conventional but deeply felt ‘thank you’ letter to Lady Chance for her many kindnesses to me during the holidays. This turned out to be probably the most important letter I have ever written in my life.

  The three unmarried members of the first Chance family, Percy, Arthur and
Norman, and their sister Alice, had felt sympathy for me because of my bleak future. Now, in a gesture of great generosity, they together agreed to finance my education at Trinity College medical school so that I could become a doctor. Lady Chance and her remarkable family agreed that I should live with them at their home, Nullamore, just outside Dublin, until my qualification as a doctor. It was an extraordinarily selfless decision to take. There was only one difficulty in carrying through their proposal; since I was literally ‘of no fixed abode’ they did not know where I was. Luckily my ‘thank-you’ letter arrived soon afterwards. Immediately a letter was sent inviting me to travel to London to meet Percy Chance at the United Services Club where, in the course of lunch, he outlined the proposal.

  It was completely unexpected. I had never presumed to aspire to a university education, let alone become a doctor. It was difficult to assimilate the incredible news and all its implications at once, but I agreed gratefully to return to Dublin to begin a new life, I had passed the School Certificate matriculation examinations with many credits, so I was unafraid of the new challenge on that point.

  The ephemeral, roller-coaster existence of continually appearing and then disappearing people, landmarks, and relationships had dismantled my relatively stable old world, with its constant warm and loving mother ‘whistling us home’. While very young, I had had to learn to form instantaneous, superficially warm relationships with total strangers, and a succession of friendships in different families. My own identity as a member of the Browne family merged into all of these sensations and was no more.