My younger brother, Tim, played what many men might consider to be a blinder by keeping a succession of girlfriends at arm’s length until he was past fifty, then marrying a sparky and good-looking French-speaking Algerian, Nadjoua (now shortened to Najwa to assist the English!). She is young enough to be his daughter. Even this and the further distraction of having to control two young children when some of us were becoming grandfathers did not seem greatly to alter his lifestyle, certainly not when it came to golf.
Tim missed a golf Blue at Cambridge but got better and better with age and determined application so that, in his sixties, he considers it unexceptional to nip round the Royal and Ancient at St. Andrews in the seventies, not to mention others in the large handful of clubs to which he belongs. Winning the foursomes with him at West Sussex Golf Club was one of the happiest of my recent memories and we almost achieved a reprise the following year only to chuck away the final after leading all the way to the 17th. If I could meld his consistency to the flair of my son James (who did get a Blue and still plays off four despite being a dedicated father and breadwinner) I should be a decent player. I love the game almost as much as I do cricket but so far I appear to have fooled myself that semi-retirement would bring an instant plummet in my handicap.
Tim followed me to an MA at Cambridge and progressed to an MBA at Harvard. The latter has always seemed to me to be a licence to print money and he duly made plenty, relatively speaking at least, not to mention making a multitude of friends and contacts during his years as a shrewd, industrious businessman, based in Hong Kong. His last great task was to manage the creation of a new town on the Gold Coast of Queensland, the centre-piece of which, to no one’s surprise, was a smart golf course, Robina Woods. He has used his rewards with immense generosity, not least when, summer after summer, he rented a house at Thurlestone in the South Hams of Devon, and played host to family and friends.
I have been as happy playing the magical first six holes of Thurlestone golf course on a summer’s evening as anywhere else at any time of my life. Aiming a three iron at the flag into a stiff breeze blowing straight off a glistening sea, knowing that an over-hit would send the ball straight over the grassy, flower-encrusted cliff top behind, was an invigorating, irresistible challenge. Invariably my shot would drift short into a bunker. Once in a silvery moon it would hover above the pin and drop to within a foot before being tapped, in a re-enactment of John Betjeman at St. Enedoc, ‘oh most securely in’.
Anyone who has played links golf will understand the joy our late Poet Laureate felt after that ‘quite unprecedented three’ one glorious evening at his home course in Cornwall:
Ah seaweed smells from sunny cliffs
And thyme and mist in whiffs
Incoming tide, Atlantic waves,
Slapping the sunny cliffs.
Lark song and sea sounds in the air
And splendour, splendour everywhere.
4
EASTBOURNE
The main school building, ivy clad with mock Tudor timbers on white stuccoed walls, is so tall that it sways as I lie awake in one of the top-floor dormitories, with a particularly high wind howling in off the English Channel. It is set high on the western tip of Eastbourne, at the very foot of the Downs, looking out on one side through a gap at the end of the playing field beyond which the sea is almost always visible, either a grey blur or a shimmering blue.
Life in a boarding school in the 1950s meant being isolated from one’s parents for large chunks of the year. Until the age of about fifteen I could never leave home and face the prospect of school food, Maths prep and all the other rigours of boarding school life without crying inconsolably on the last day of every holiday. Yet from my very first day at St. Bede’s School, still going strong as a prep school and now the junior partner to an extremely successful senior school on the Sussex Downs, I always forgot my misery the moment that a term started and I was with my friends again.
Nothing much has changed here since I first played cricket and football on the playing field that separates the imposing school building from the sea. To my adult eyes it is a pocket handkerchief but on my first day, as a nervous eight-year-old in the April of 1953, it seemed vast. My brother David introduced me to his cricketing friends on the first warm evening after our arrival and my morale got an immediate boost when I impressed them with what I could do with bat and ball. A few words of praise sent me to bed happy. Twenty-four hours earlier I had been blubbing like a baby.
We were sufficiently elevated to see the dirty British coasters butting through the Channel in the mad March days and close enough to walk to the pebbly beach on summer days and to take gingerly steps into the ice cold, crystal clear water in air pungent with ozone. I loved ships and there was seldom a shortage of them, heaving east or west through the waves, smoke emerging from their chimneys in a black curl, as if in a child’s drawing. When it was foggy, as in the memory it often seemed to be, you heard rather than saw the vessels, their fog-horns blasting into the thick atmosphere like cows in labour.
The old and generally elegant holiday town stretched down the hill to the east. It was, proclaimed the posters on the walls of the station to which I would travel every term from Victoria on the special school train, the Sun Trap of the South. Perhaps so, but it was viciously cold in winter when snow had stopped games and restricted the afternoon’s compulsory exercise to a walk along the sea-front, crocodile, the boys paired two by two, dressed in shorts, with a single grey pullover, long socks, thin black shoes and a navy blue macintosh as the only bulwarks against the biting sea wind. I can feel now the agonising tingle of chilblained fingers and feet, exposed to hot water or a radiator after one of those freezing winter walks.
The school was named after the venerable monk whose monastery at Jarrow was rather closer to Lancashire than Sussex, but his eighth-century ‘Eccelesiastical History of the English People’ was written at a time when some of the familiar features of the Sussex landscape were being formed. Windmills and coastal defences like the Martello towers and Second World War ‘pill boxes’ came later; so, even, did the village churches; but, long before Bede, Celtic farmers were forming here the first genuine village communities in England.
The rare visits by my parents to take me ‘out’ consisted usually of picnics on the Downs in the summer and in winter visits to one of the piers at Eastbourne or, better still, Brighton. The old Palace pier there used to have little cars that one could drive round a circuit, like dodgems without the collisions, and they gave me such a thrill that it is a little surprising that I did not develop into a Lewis Hamilton. Not that I would have had the required daring: I just liked driving, and to some extent still do, be it a car or a ride-on mower.
We were a close family but in the 1950s home was home and school was school. When David and I were at prep school, he was M-JI and I was M-JII. Tim was briefly M-JIII before David moved on to Marlborough and I was elevated to M-JI.
Looking back it was quite a tough place for little boys to learn the disciplines of life. The food, on the whole, was basic. The best meal of the week was toad-in-the-hole and boiled vegetables, followed by ‘squashed flies’ – currant tart – and custard. The rest of the menu was littered with dishes that I loathed, amongst them horse-meat, tinned spaghetti (the dreaded, slimy ‘worms’), tinned sardines, boiled eggs that often seemed to be bad, rice pudding and, equal first with the worms as the most inedible of them all, tapioca.
I forget which of these it was that I was unable to start, let alone finish, when one of the three joint headmasters, Rex Lord, seized my shoulders and ordered me with risen voice to finish it up immediately. ‘Good Lord, boy’, he added, ‘soldiers in the war had to live on GRASS.’
I was probably a terrible weed when it came to eating things that I did not like and I dare say that I lacked resolution generally. Academic work to me was more or less an unequal struggle until it came to History and English. Maths remained a foreign country for most of my academic years;
I struggled with Latin; and Science was not even taught at prep schools then. Yet I opened a new Science wing at the flourishing modern St. Bede’s not long ago. It enabled me to risk a public airing of the definition of a metallurgist as a man who, looking into the eyes of a platinum blonde, can tell at once whether she is virgin metal or just a common ore, but I have to admit to shameful ignorance whenever a question on the sciences is fired by Jeremy Paxman on University Challenge.
That is more my fault than that of any of the teachers. In any case huge dollops of consolation for the more trying aspects of life in Eastbourne came on the playing field. There was cricket in the summer, soccer in the Michaelmas term, rugger played on a hollow in the Downs until half-term after Christmas, then hockey at All Saints in the second half.
That Lent term was almost the best time of the year for me. Cricket beckoned, the weather was getting less freezing, Easter and the joys of spring were round the corner. I could kick a rugger ball further than most and was just about elusive enough to keep out of the reach of heavier youths, so I played at fly-half. Later on my extreme reluctance to tackle anyone who was not much smaller than me found me out but at prep school I got away with it, especially given a scrum-half, David Englefield, who was both quicker and braver. Hockey was even more fun. Passing and running into space seemed to come fairly naturally.
All first-team games, and all teaching of History and Latin, were the preserve of the Old Marlburian Mr. Lord, who was an exemplary schoolmaster, with a smile that creased his face like ripples in the sand. His dark hair was neat even in a wind and except on Sundays when a dark suit was de rigueur, he dressed always in a tie and a navy blue blazer, usually flecked with blackboard chalk-dust. The kind of irritation displayed at my reluctance to eat perfectly good food was rare but when his equable temperament was seriously disturbed it made his very occasional bursts of anger all the more chilling. There was a particularly naughty Anglo-Greek boy called Christopher Hourmouzious – alias ‘Mouzie’ – who was always getting into trouble and I can still hear the rising volume of Rex’s voice as it rang out one afternoon in the school gym: ‘Mouzie, Mouzie, DON’T DO THAT.’ Instantly the mischief ceased.
It was Rex who took me and other keen young cricketers to see our first county cricket at The Saffrons. Jim Parks and Robin Marlar, both future presidents of Sussex (and in Marlar’s case of MCC too) made an immediate impression, as did two from the opposing team, big Jim Stewart of Warwickshire and Peter Richardson of Worcestershire, whose white batting gloves I coveted and who smiled at us as we sat on the grass by the boundary rope.
Rex Lord’s apparently effortless authority and the respect he commanded were not, alas, shared by the more prominent of his partners, Jack Keeling, who instilled little else but fear in all the boys under his command. Bespectacled, chain-smoking and volatile, the sight of his slightly dishevelled figure in the day, or by night the smell and simultaneous red glow of his cigarette, were enough to terrify me, and most of my friends, especially if we were guilty of the heinous crime of speaking after lights had been turned off in the dormitory.
Jack’s weapon of vengeance was the slipper or, just occasionally and considerably more painfully, the cane. Because I was frightened of him his attempts to teach me the rudiments of Maths were largely in vain and in an effort to avoid punishment for bad marks I would often resort to charming brighter arithmetical brains to do all or most of my sums for me. That, of course, is fatal because no one will ever make progress until he understands the problem or how to solve it. One day I was caught by Jack colluding in a Maths class with an amiable boy called David Boumphrey. Both of us were told to ‘get down to the lower changing-room’ which always meant that you were to be ‘whacked’ with the slipper. There was no time for the insertion of blotting paper into the pants to soften the dreaded blows but on this occasion Boumphrey’s punishment, whilst I waited outside the changing-room with cold insects apparently creeping across my stomach, seemed to go on much longer than usual, most unjustly since he had only been trying to help me. The reason became apparent when Jack’s harsh voice roared through the closed changing-room door: ‘WILL YOU KEEP YOUR BOTTOM STILL, BOUMPHREY!’
Once upstairs the question always asked by other boys was ‘four or six?’. In poor Boumphrey’s case it had been at least twelve.
I was probably beaten half a dozen times in all during my five years at the school, never savagely and always when I deserved it. The only occasions that Jack used the cane on me, however, were both for imitating members of staff and making fools of them for the amusement of other boys. There was a harmless but rather unpredictable old buffer called Mr. Wells who looked like Mr. Pastry, and an eccentric old lady called Miss Hobjoy who used to supervise bath nights. Clearly Mr. Keeling felt that he should defend the dignity of his staff but in the case of Mr. Wells there was, for once, a nod and a wink that suggested that he rather agreed that my victim was a figure of fun and the cane was wielded less vigorously than sometimes. That is not to say that it did not sting, but there was no mutual grudge between Mr. Wells and me afterwards and I was delighted for him when he surprised everyone by playing a mighty innings in the staff match, getting so excited in the process of becoming suddenly a hero that I feared he might have a heart attack. I believe that he did, eventually.
Miss Hobjoy, all rosy cheeks and bony elbows, soon forgave me too, but I was less fortunate with the other matrons. A certain Mrs Ashton took a profound dislike to me – I never discovered why, but perhaps because I talked too much – and victimised me to the extent that she is the only person in my life whom I think I have truly hated. I may not have been alone because she was not at the school for more than a year or two. The senior matron, Mrs. Walford, was efficient, consistent in temperament and usually caring. The unfortunate exception came when, halfway through one Michaelmas term at the age of ten, the sharp tummy pains that I had occasionally been suffering in uncharacteristic silence (I can remember pressing the end of a compass into the right hand side of my stomach during lessons to ease the pain), suddenly became vicious. I was sick several times during the night but Mrs. Walford, having to clear up my first unpleasant expulsion, had no sympathy. She was convinced that I had had too much of someone’s pink birthday cake for tea the evening before, and said so several times. It was therefore a small triumph for me when the following morning the school’s visiting medic, Dr. Wilson-Hall, diagnosed acute appendicitis. I was taken out on a stretcher before a contrite Mrs. Walford and a silent cast of boys, thence by ambulance for an emergency operation at Princess Alexandra’s hospital.
There were exceptions to these female harridans. Miss Collard was another matron, very young and very beautiful. Alas, she soon got married. Gladys Candlin, wife of the senior headmaster, Hugh – whom I hardly knew as a teacher because his main interests were playing the organ in chapel and teaching Greek to the sixth form – was very sweet. Her fame lay in having taught ballet in Shanghai to the future prima ballerina, Margot Fonteyn, although where and for how long I never learned. Occasionally one was asked to sit beside her at breakfast before Chapel on Sunday morning, while Hugh, a large man with a fringe moustache and a certain similarity to Oliver Hardy, warmed up for choir practice by consuming at least eight pieces of toast. I disgraced myself once by having a nervous twitch (of the sort to which I have always been prone when on edge, not least on the putting green) and knocking a jug of milk all over the table-cloth and into Mrs Candlin’s lap.
Rex Lord’s wife was, like some in BBC soaps, never seen, although he was happily married with a daughter and a son who, like his father, was a fine cricketer. David Lord bowled me first ball in the old boys’ match, a potential disaster for the school team since I was supposed to be its star, but Rex was equal to the situation, uttering a stentorian ‘No Ball’ the instant after my stumps had been shattered.
The third spouse, Valerie Keeling, would do her best to smooth out her husband’s rough edges whenever she, too, invited one to sit at her table. H
er staple question was always: ‘Are your people coming down this weekend?’ When they did it made Saturday even more emphatically the best day of the week. An outing with the parents or not, Saturday meant a free afternoon and evening and a strictly rationed hand-out of sweets after morning lessons. Even now the first day of the weekend seems special to me.
Halfway through my five years a Miss McLean arrived from Scotland to teach Maths. Her stock expression when trying to drum something into me was ‘Has the penny dropped?’. Foolishly I always said yes to please her, but it seldom had. Exam results told the truth: Maths hopeless, Languages mediocre, History and English good. How early the die is cast!
Perhaps the most important source of a basic education was my first female teacher at St. Bede’s, the delightful round-figured Miss Barnard, who had also taught my father. A motherly but firm old dear who used to take the first form, she had a face like an owl’s and taught me many things by heart that have proved useful since, such as French pronunciation, tables up to twelve, major dates of British history and the invaluable thirty days hath September, April, June and November; all the rest have 31 except for February alone, which has but 28 days clear and 29 in each leap year.
As at all independent schools in those days, religion played a big part in the daily curriculum, let alone on Sundays. St. Bede’s had a small, simple and very intimate chapel with an organ and a stained-glass east window, extending from the main form room. We had a short service every morning, with hymns. I was soon in the choir, able to sing in tune if never very beautifully. ‘Away in a Manger’ remained my only solo performance, other than in many a bath and shower, but carol services at the nearby All Saints Church were an annual highlight.
CMJ Page 4