I had hoped to find the College barber and persuade him to disguise me as an officer and gentleman, but I got Kath in a small and smelly Unisex Salon. She wore her name on a badge pinned between her breasts, which were unusually large and tended to get in the way of her craft.
“Here on business, are you?”
“Sort of. Not exactly.” I could hardly breathe for breast, as Kath soaped and kneaded my skull. Given our intimacy, I felt that this was a lame and dumb reply. Washed, cradled, patted, pummeled, I confided in Kath and tried to tell her what I was doing.
“Oh … travel.”
The air in the salon was hot and chemical. Wriggling free of the breast for a moment, I inhaled a sick-making lungful of acetone, peroxide and synthetic jasmine.
“I’d like to travel.”
To travel. An intransitive verb. A state of being, not a journey to a destination.
“Where to?”
“What, dear?”
“Where would you like to travel to?”
“Oh—you know. Abroad.” She was on to the scissors work now, snipping away behind my ears, her coral slacks a bright splash in the mirror. “You get fed up, don’t you, staying in one place all the time? Specially in Dartmouth. You should be here in the winter—it’s a real dump then.”
“Where have you been so far?”
“Well …” Kath stood back from her handiwork, her big and rather piggy face heavy with thought. “I went to Sheffield in November. I got an uncle and auntie living there. In Sheffield.”
“Yes, I know Sheffield. That must have been a change from Devon. The North’s so different from the South, isn’t it? What did you make of it?”
She snipped and put on her thinking face again. “It were a lot cheaper than here,” she said.
Cuttings of gray hair were falling into the lap of the surplice which Kath had dressed me in. I thought: surely that’s not mine? It struck me that the curious style of babying which goes on in a Unisex Salon is exactly the same treatment that gets meted out to the senile, and perhaps it was my elderliness which had entitled me to the insistent nuzzling of Kath’s breast against my ear.
“Well, meat—things like that—they was cheaper. But fruit—that was round about the same.”
Up on the barbered hill we sat out on the terrace of the Captain’s House, taking tea.
“There’s no romance in the sea,” the Captain was saying. “It’s interesting, of course. Fascinating, even. But it’s not a place for the Walter Mittys of this world.”
We’d been discussing the schoolboys who came to Dartmouth as officers-in-training, but I had the uncomfortable feeling that this talk of romance and Walter Mittyism might, just conceivably, be directed at me.
“Do you get a lot of prospective Walter Mittys, then?”
“Not a lot. Some. Either it gets knocked out of them in their first few weeks here or they don’t stay the course and go off and work in … advertising, or something.”
The Captain’s crisp, open-air, naval voice came straight out of British war movies of the 1950s starring John Gregson and Kenneth More. It suggested unflappable calm in times of peril and boundless common decency and common sense. You could hear it saying things like “Buck up, old girl—we’ll soon have Jerry licked” and “All right, Number One; I’ll take her over now.” Like the rest of the Captain, his voice was perfectly tailored to his job. Fiftyish, grizzling round the temples, tidy-featured, he was a national archetype; the sort of Englishman whom one could sell in Texas or Saudi Arabia as a masterpiece of authenticated provenance. There was just one detail which seemed to be at odds with the rest of him: against the background of his fine-check Viyella shirt, he was wearing a brilliant gold silk tie. Looking at that splendiferous tie, I wondered if perhaps there was a streak of Mittyism in the Captain’s wife.
Of course, the Captain said, the College had changed a great deal since his own days there. It was far more democratic. One saw a lot of chaps nowadays from state-run schools.
“A lot? How many?”
“Oh, I haven’t got the figures offhand. But we get quite a few coming in now.”
Certainly the college was very democratic in its academic standards. A handful of O levels and one scraped pass at A were enough to qualify a boy as an officer-in training. (“We don’t call them ‘cadets’ nowadays.”)
“We’re not after intellectuals. We’re looking for leadership potential.”
Talking to the Captain, I felt that I was being interviewed for a place in the College and was being found wanting on every count. Words went flat in my mouth. I didn’t know how to crack the dry little jokes that would have made things easier between us. When I referred to the Falklands adventure as “a pretty Walter Mittyish sort of exercise,” trying to milk our one common allusion for as much as it was worth, the Captain stared at the sky with a smile of forced politeness.
Below us, the River Dart was landlocked by the hills. Boats which were too small and far away to see were decorating it with feathery wakes. I wished that I were afloat instead of stranded here out of my element, feeling cowed and clumsy in the Captain’s headmasterly presence.
The “chap” who had been detailed to show me around was a uniformed Lieutenant Commander who had, in the service phrase, “risen from the ranks,” as if the process were closely akin to miraculous ascension. “I’m Mike,” he said, and his voice had kept the local coloring of what I took to be Cheshire or the Pottery Towns. I liked his slight stoop, his meat-plate hands, the way his uniform hung on him like someone else’s cast-offs. He made being a naval officer look like a proper job and not something that just happened to you, like being a debutante or a manic depressive.
The empty College smelled of polish and carbolic soap, with a faint residual trace of changing-room; of wet towels, jockstraps and dubbin. Its floors were called “decks,” and its architect had fancifully framed and paneled it like a ship in varnished oak. We marched, out of step, down a corridor tiled in institutional sea-green and inspected the Seamanship and Navigation rooms. I looked, with as much interest as I could muster, at knotted ropes in glass cases, at colored wall charts. I read:
A dredger shows two vertical red lights (balls by day) on her foul side, and two vertical green lights (diamonds by day) on her clear side.
But it was the smells, which no carbolic could mask, that kept me silent and preoccupied. There was the broken soil and bruised grass of the rugger pitch. Blanco, chalk dust, gun oil, licorice, stale flannel, passed gas. The badgery musk of adolescent boys herded into classes, teams, sections was ingrained in the woodwork of the place.
“I’d expected a sort of nautical university,” I said; “but it feels just like a school.”
“They used to come here at thirteen, of course. Now they come in at eighteen or nineteen, and I don’t know … I sometimes think the College hasn’t quite adapted to that—they still tend to get treated as if they were thirteen.”
The walls of the Quarter Deck were hung with royal portraits which had the impressive awfulness of painted effigies of saints in a Maltese Easter procession. We were followed across the parquet floor by the waxwork eyes of Prince Edward, Prince Charles, Princess Anne and Lord Mountbatten. The bold crudity of the paintings was in sharp and significant contrast to the fussy perfectionism of the ship models. They sailed under glass, every hatch coaming and coil of rope fastidiously to scale. Some were tended by manikins two-thirds of an inch high, who were working their anchor winches, scaling their ratlines and furling sails on their yards. Tiny officers on 1:100 bridges squeaked tiny orders to their tiny men. This modeling of life in miniature seemed to me to be of a piece with Dartmouth at large; the College felt as if it had been designed specifically to stop young men from growing up.
“Would you have been happy to come here when you were eighteen?”
“Me?” Mike stood hunched, hands-in-pockets, intransigently life-sized. “I expect I’d have thought it was murder. But they’re used to it. They’ve nearly all be
en to boarding school. It’s the ones who haven’t been who find it a bit tough.”
“I went to boarding school, and I’d have hated it—it would have been everything I wanted to run away from.”
We went upstairs to the Poop Deck, where the dormitories were. The officers-in-training slept twenty to a room in tiers of bunks, their Navy-issue blankets nipped round the mattress ends in regulation “hospital tucks.” No space for private thoughts and feelings here: the bare quarters looked like a place of punishment.
“My worst memory,” I said.
“Oh—it teaches them to live together. Doesn’t do them any harm.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that.”
I stood leaning on a cold radiator under a high window, looking out. The river below was muddled with another river, a hundred miles or so away from here; the Severn, like simmering caramel, spilling over its banks into the water meadows and playing fields on the far side. It yanked up winter trees by their roots, swallowed unwary cats, carried away people’s garden sheds. Frogmen were forever searching it for bodies near the town bridge, a favored suicide resort. From the barred dormitory window, the river looked so wild and free that it was easy to see what made the jumpers do it.
“They share cabins after the first year.”
There was a small locker by each bunk. I opened the door to one of them. A Playboy centerfold was thumbtacked to the inside along with a Polaroid snapshot of a woman of about my own age holding a panting golden Labrador on a chain. Nothing had changed, except that the pin-up had grown a lot skinnier since my day and Mother’s picture was in color. The one missing item was a graph-paper chart on which you could cross out the remaining weeks, days, hours and minutes to go before the end of term. I shut the locker, feeling breathless and tight about the chest.
“It’s a pity that the lads are all away,” Mike said.
No, it wasn’t. The lads were crowding far too thickly round for comfort as it was.
“I’m so sorry—” I made a pantomime of looking at my watch. “I’d completely lost track of the time.”
“The Captain said to show you the beagles and the Royal garden—”
“Tell him I loved them,” I said. “They were wonderful—”
“You’re sure?”
“Certain, thank you. I just have to go—”
On the way downstairs—we must have been on the Orlop Deck—I heard a light, cruel tenor voice baying “Fa—a—ag!,” the scramble of feet on a flight of stone steps, and a feeble asthmatic wheeze in my own lungs. By the time we reached the graveled drive with its memorial cannonry, I wasn’t so much leaving the Britannia Royal Naval College as running away from it in a fit of blind funk.
No secrets were permitted. In stern Protestant tradition, everything was above board and exposed to public view. On the dormitory windows there were bars but no curtains; the long uncarpeted room held twenty-four narrow iron bedsteads spaced, by order, at eighteen-inch intervals. This was just sufficiently close for your neighbor on either side to grab your genitals without polite preliminaries.
You wank me, I’ll wank you. There was no more homosexual affection in the exchange than there was in fives or boxing: it was a compulsory game designed to teach the new boy that his private parts were private no longer. From now on, nothing was private. What else would you expect of a public school?
The doors had been removed from the toilet cubicles. Boys squatted in the row of open stalls, their trousers collapsed around their ankles, showing bald knees and moon faces as they emptied their bowels. At 7:15 each morning they queued in naked lines for the cold showers, while the duty house monitor—another, older boy of seventeen or eighteen—stood by in a dressing gown, on guard.
“Get under it, Pearson! … Reynolds, soap your shitty arse, will you?”
The younger boys were “fags”; fags by name rather than fags by nature, since in England in the 1950s the word had not yet taken on its American meaning. A fag was simply a monitor’s personal servant. He swept the monitor’s study, cleaned his shoes, pressed his trousers, laid out his books, woke him with morning tea, and was permanently on call for chores and errands.
“Fa—a—ag!”
In the Lower Common Room, the fags sprinted for the stairs. The last to arrive in line at the shadowy corridor of monitors’ studies, with their superior scent of Woodbine cigarettes, coffee and old leather, got the job. I had asthma and was a hopeless runner, so the last in line was usually me.
I was no Jeeves. I fetched the wrong cricket pads from the pavilion, the wrong brand of gramophone needles from the music shop in town. I left smears on most of the things I did. When I ironed trousers, their creases turned, despite my best efforts, to a maze of intersecting lines like a railway junction. When I made cocoa for the monitors, the milk foamed in the pan and congealed on the stove in a mess of black gunk. Three or four times every term I was ritually beaten for being “slack.”
“You are a very low person, Raban.”
“Yes, Owen.”
Owen was Head of House, a far more impressive figure, with a far wider range of punishments at his disposal, than any master.
“What are you, Raban?”
“A low person, Owen.”
“You’re so low that I can hardly see you, Raban. You’re a wet squit.”
“Yes, Owen.”
“So take your horrible low wet squit presence out of my sight.”
To begin with, there was an internal blaze of hurt and disbelief, like a bursting appendix. But after a few months the day-to-day terrorism of boarding school settled into an acceptable, at least survivable, normality. I knew well enough that beatings, crushings and physical humiliations were all in the curriculum if you were going to be properly educated as an Englishman. They were an essential part of the privilege for which our parents were making their well-trumpeted financial sacrifices. My own father had been at the school, in the same house, twenty-three years before me. I found his initials, J. P. C. P. R., scratched into the stone window frame of the Lower Common Room. He had regaled me with a memory, curiously cheerful, of being tossed in a laundry basket until his leg had been broken. King’s had made a Man of him, and it was going to make a Man of me.
The school, in the cathedral grounds at Worcester, had started life in the Dark Ages and claimed the Venerable Bede as its founder. But its character was wholly nineteenth-century, a shoestring model of Thomas Arnold’s Rugby. Since the middle of the nineteenth century it had been preparing the sons of clergymen, solicitors and the better sort of tradesman for the tough business of Empire. Wherever the map was still colored red, there were Old Vigornians. They were not grandees but functionaries: adjutants, A.D.Cs, civil servants, schoolteachers, tea planters, shipping agents … the gruff, uncomplaining men in the middle of things who sported an Old School tie that no one who had been to Winchester or Harrow would recognize.
Bulletins of their doings, apparently borne in cleft sticks, reached the school magazine, their tone breezy and facetious. There was the instantly identifiable style of the lonely O. V. keeping his pecker up in foreign parts:
Anyone for Tennis? H. P. B. “Tug” Willson (School House, 1941–46) reports that he is now settling down to his new job as Assistant Manager of Crombie & Prettejohns’ Commerical Bank in Bulawayo, which is not, as he points out, where the nuts come from. “Tug” observes that rugger, Bulawayo style, fails to match Vigornian standards. His tennis, as a result, is rapidly improving, and any O. V. s in the Bulawayo area who would like to try their forehands on the Bank’s well-lit asphalt courts are invited to get in touch.
The O. V. s were all around us. Their names were engraved on the pawnbroker’s hoard of silver cups, which it was the duty of the fags to polish up on Sunday mornings in the interval between cathedral Matins and lunch. The walls of the house refectory were stacked solid with their photographs. They stood, sat and squatted cross-legged in teams, holding rugger balls, cricket bats, oars and hockey sticks. The older O.V. s we
re in sepia—boys already looking as grim as middle-aged men, wearing linen shorts that came down below their knees. Their stares were blank, their faces masks. They were our future. Their tradition of duty, service, knuckling- to and playing the game was being passed intact to us, a millstone inheritance. At evening prayers we sang:
The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended,
The darkness falls at Thy behest …
Owen, a cathedral organ scholar, was at the piano, keeping up a weepy, throbbing, juicy rhythm in the bass. Major MacTurk, our housemaster, late of the Scots Guards, led the singing. His black walrus mustache was going to salt-and-pepper at the tips, and his ears and nostrils sprouted fierce little curlicues of hair.
The sun that bids us rest is waking
Our brethren ’neath the western sky,
And hour by hour fresh lips are making
Thy wondrous tribute heard on high.
Our brethren ’neath the western sky were O. V. s every one. Sunset over Worcester was sunrise in Fiji and the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. On isolated hill stations, in mission schools and trading posts, our brethren were emptying their tin bowls of shaving water and knotting their O.V. ties, assisted on every hand by native fags. The hymn, together with my heroic and somewhat simplified view of the realities of the British Empire, always made my eyes prickle unmanfully, thus disqualifying me from a Vigornian vocation at the very moment when the vocation itself tugged at its strongest.
Like most of the masters, Major MacTurk conspicuously retained his wartime military rank. For the school was staffed by men who were officers by inclination and teachers only by necessity. From Monday to Friday they strode about the school like fugitive crows in their threadbare university gowns. In class, they slogged through Caesar’s Gallic Wars, the Tudor kings and queens and French irregular verbs. No one could accuse them of unseemly enthusiasm. But on Saturday mornings, when the school Corps assembled in uniform, they came out in their true colors. In full battledress, their campaign ribbons glowing on their breasts, they twirled their swagger sticks and grew. Colonel Shepherd added three inches to his height; Captain Thomas turned from a tenor to a baritone in his Saturday Black Watch outfit; Major MacTurk, already frighteningly large in my world, swelled up like some mythical avatar of War, his mustache points freshly waxed, his eyebrows as black and spiky as a hedge of thorns.
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