The school’s expansive grounds lay in the lee of the Malvern Hills, replete with a beautifully situated cricket pitch, an enormous stone-clad chapel and a library intended as a memorial to the hundreds of pupils who had died in the First World War. The six hundred teenage boys slept and ate in a series of ten rambling Victorian houses scattered about the grounds, each run by a separate housemaster. Every house had a distinct reputation: boys in Number Eight house were all sex maniacs, those in Number Seven unnaturally athletic, and those in Number Three compulsorily gay. Most of the classrooms were housed in the three-sided neo-Gothic main building, which surrounded a courtyard dominated by a statue of St George, though science lessons tended to be held in a purpose-built modern block beyond the Memorial Library. There was an elaborate cricket pavilion, fives, squash and racket courts, a purpose-built gym, which also housed a shop selling jockstraps and thick woollen games shorts, and a grim swimming-pool building where we were made to practise rescuing victims of drowning while fully dressed. In the tuckshop (‘the Grub’) Mr Davies, a short, grey-haired Welshman in a white overall, dispensed tea and cheese-and-pickle rolls all day. There were many obscure rules about how many buttons on your jacket you were allowed to have undone at various levels of seniority in the school.
That sort of pettifogging tyranny – another unwritten rule specified the grade of seniority necessary to be permitted to have one hand or two in your trouser pockets – was deemed vital if the school was to achieve its goal of transforming the children of successful Midlands manufacturers into something approximating to gentlemen. I hated the place, though I have to admit that it was very effective in taking boys whose parents had made things or provided services, and turning them into the sort of chaps who would be decent District Officers somewhere in the fast-vanishing Empire, or members of some profession or another. There was much sport, a compulsory afternoon each week in the Combined Cadet Corps, for which we were required to dress up in army, navy or air force uniform (I chose the navy, on the grounds that Malvern is getting on for being as far from the sea as is possible in England), and straw boaters were worn when leaving the school grounds. Our uniform was pinstripe trousers, black jackets, and detachable stiff collars on Sunday. We looked like spotty clerks scurrying to our ledgers in a Victorian counting house, apart from the school prefects, who wore tailcoats, carried silver-topped black canes and affected an ascendancy swagger.
C.S. Lewis had lasted a year as a pupil at the school before the First World War, and described the place (not affectionately) in his account of the spiritual journey he made from atheism to Christianity, Surprised by Joy. ‘Wyvern’, he recounts, was essentially run by the senior boys, or ‘Bloods’, and characterised by homosexuality, of which, for his time, he took a rather tolerant view. He thought it the least spontaneous, least boyish society he had ever known, in which ‘everything was calculated to the great end of advancement. For this games were played; for this clothes, friends, amusements and vices were chosen.’
Unlike the works of old boys who had become generals or county cricketers, Lewis’s memoir was constantly being banned from the school library, which only made it all the more alluring. The school had obviously improved a bit since Lewis’s day, but the influence of the Bloods – sporty oafs happiest on the games field – was still profound. When I recall these days, I am astonished that they occurred in my lifetime. Can it really be true that only fifty years ago junior boys were expected to act as ‘fags’ – effectively slaves – to senior boys, and that the eighteen-year-old who had been appointed head of house had the formal right – frequently exercised – to beat boys? I had been beaten by the headmaster of my prep school. Now I was beaten by his son.
The ritual on these occasions was always the same. A few minutes after lights-out at 10.30, the junior prefect would be sent to fetch you from the dormitory where we slept in groups of around a dozen. The form of words was unchanging.
‘Put on your dressing gown and come with me downstairs.’
You followed this much larger figure down the cold, dark stairwell and along the corridor to the prefects’ common room, where ten or so other eighteen-year-olds sat in a circle, with a single chair in the middle. You were told to stand inside the circle.
‘Why did you refuse to get into bed when you were told to do so by Robinson [the prefect on dormitory patrol that night]?’ demanded the head of house.
‘Because I didn’t want to.’
‘But you had been told to do so.’ He spoke with all the authority of an army subaltern, which within a month or so he might have become.
‘But I don’t respect Robinson,’ I replied.
‘The purpose of a public-school education, Paxman, is to teach you to respect people you don’t respect. Take off your dressing gown and bend over the chair.’
It hurt like hell.
The post-match analysis after these beatings was always the same. You went back to your bed under cover of darkness, trying not to reveal that you were crying. The whole of the rest of the dormitory was lying awake in the darkness, of course. Finally, a voice would whisper, ‘How many did you get?’
And then the bragging began. It hadn’t hurt much.
Where, you might wonder, were the staff while all this was going on? The answer is that they were always somewhere else. The housemaster lived with his family on the other side of a green baize door. Each house generally had a house tutor, a bachelor who slept somewhere on site, but rarely emerged from his room during daylight. And there was Matron, a woman of about fifty, I suppose, sturdy and ample-bosomed, who wore her hair as I imagined she had worn it ever since she was a teenager. Oddly enough, like Mr Thomas, my old boxing teacher, Matron also had a glass eye.
I don’t know whether there was any formal qualification required to become a matron, though I imagine not, since anything more serious than bruises and sprains from the playing fields was referred to the school doctor. Indeed, when I passed out one day Matron seemed to have very little idea what to do, apart from shouting at me. As at my prep school, our house matron supervised the doling out of tonic and a gooey ‘malt’ to boys who were held to be a bit weedy. But her main role was to bring a little femininity to the testosterone-charged atmosphere in which the boys lived, as a mother substitute. She had a flat in the basement where she would sometimes provide cups of tea to particularly homesick boys, but most of the time, apart from the sessions when she dispensed her malt and witch-hazel, she was to be found in the great linen cupboard, where it was her unhappy job to sort the horrible laundry of sixty boys.
In my last year, Matron conceived a tremendous passion for the house tutor, a bachelor with a wheedling tone of voice and the only natural Mohican hairstyle I have ever seen. Because he had once talked of the nobility of the clerical profession, we called him ‘Scribe’. One night Matron took me into her basement flat and wept her eye out as she told me how Scribe seemed to fail to notice her. Unrequited middle-aged love was not the sort of predicament a teenage boy was well suited to give advice upon.
For the rest, with one or two noble exceptions, the staff were largely absent from our lives. Several seemed to have been recruited solely because they had won sporting blues at Oxford or Cambridge. This seemed to be particularly true of the geography department, where George Chesterton, who had played cricket for both Oxford and Worcestershire, taught the subject unspectacularly, but was widely seen as an amiable Mr Chips figure. (Though not by me, after the day he interrupted my reading of Ludovic Kennedy’s brilliant investigation into the Christie