Then there was ‘Jimmy B’, an ancient history teacher who began every lesson with a headcount and then said, ‘Who no come?’ and was always digressing into tales of British wars with ‘the Portugoosey’. ‘Zombie’ Nicholls moved with great deliberation around the chemistry labs, played the tuba, and was said to have been responsible at his previous school for allowing the main bridge over the Grand Union Canal in Berkhamsted to have been blown up by one of his pupils. The remedial maths set, of which I was inevitably part, was taken by ‘Groisy’ Shaw, the nickname an acknowledgement of his obvious devotion to Brylcreem, though his main responsibility was not maths but the woodwork workshop.
We were all barbarians, of course, so inevitably called the oenophile English master ‘Sluice’. Mr Kennedy, who taught Latin, was reputed to belong to the clan of the Victorian author of the immensely tedious Kennedy’s Latin Primer which we all used (the cover invariably doctored to read Kennedy’s Eating Primer). Once a term Mr Kennedy supplied his classes with copies of Acta Diurna, a spoof Latin newspaper packed with terrible cartoons. As with many Latin teachers, his folly was to assume that he spoke like an ancient Roman, his main gag being to ask, ‘When is a yoke not a yoke, boy?’ To which the only permitted answer was, ‘When it’s in Acta Diurna, sir.’ The music department was the domain of Leonard Blake, who rejoiced in the name ‘Charlie Crap’, after the way he sat at the upright piano during choir practice. When the school tried to rein back the use of this nickname it was changed to ‘Charlie half-past-eight’, on the grounds that ‘That’s what you do at 8.30.’
But the majority of the staff were a huge improvement on the deadbeats I had lived with at prep school. It wasn’t until my last year that I had matured enough to appreciate the particular charm of ‘Jeezbeez’, George Sydney Benedict Sayer, the head of English, who had a habit of turning up to lessons apologising for the fact that one’s essay was covered in marmalade, or that ‘the cat seems to have walked all over it’. He had been a close friend of both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
Other teachers who did their civilising best in the otherwise rather brutal environment included the thoughtful history master, Ralph Blumenau – of whom it was rumoured that the governing body had only allowed him to teach at the school on condition he didn’t try to infect the boys with his liberal prejudices – and my housemaster, Tony Leng. We all knew that he had served in the Royal Indian Navy, and had won a DSC (Distinguished Service Cross) in the war. He joked to his fellow masters that he’d been decorated for ‘dropping prostitutes with VD behind the Japanese lines’. There may have been a couple of Burmese hookers dropped on the beaches of the Arakan coast, but most of the passengers on his night missions were actually Special Forces soldiers.
Most of life at Malvern revolved around sport, which occurred every afternoon. The high corridor through the main school building was lined with oak-framed noticeboards to which were pinned small sheets of cream-coloured notepaper emblazoned with the school crest and motto (‘Sapiens Qui Prospicit’ – wise is he who looks ahead, which could be a very depressing thought indeed to an unsporty thirteen-year-old) on which were the handwritten names of those who had made it into the teams for forthcoming matches. These were the gilded ones. Anyone who had won a school ‘cap’ or ‘colours’ was a sort of demigod.
Apart from a brief interlude in the cross-country team, where determination counted as much as talent, I did not feature on any of these lists. But no one was immune from the general ethos, for the principles upon which the great nineteenth-century schools were run included much chasing of balls around sports fields, in all weathers. My dominant sensory memory of those days is of chafed skin as the afternoon rain made our long woollen shorts grow heavier and heavier, until our thighs were a brilliant scarlet. Housemasters and other members of staff might occasionally turn out to cheer on their team – few of them to quite the effect of Mr Rambridge, who when required to referee a football match in the rain would drive down to the side of the pitch, opening his window occasionally to blow a whistle if he imagined he’d seen a foul.
Initiation into the world of sport came soon after arrival. I was a tall thirteen-year-old, with no spare flesh anywhere. Unfortunately, my weight and age put me into the one under-14 category in the inter-house boxing competition for which there were no other candidates in the house. I had, in theory, learned to box at prep school, under the unblinking supervision of Mr Thomas’s glass eye, and reckoned I might just about survive a round or two, owing to the fact that I had long enough arms to keep most opponents at bay. Defeat on points in an early round would be sufficient to see honour satisfied.
To my great anxiety, I got a bye into the final. This must have been because the boxers from other houses had seen the fighter from Number Seven house. I stepped into the ring to find myself facing an enormous human tortoise. My adversary was barely five feet tall, and almost as wide. He looked as if he had been shaving since leaving the womb, and wore a creepy smile, which I have only ever seen replicated in horror films as vampires prepare to sink their teeth into a virgin’s neck.
For most of round one I danced around the ring like a badly handled marionette, a blizzard of naked arms and legs, not much caring if I ever connected with the pile of bricks facing me. That didn’t happen very often. The human tortoise emerged for round two having obviously been told what to do, or – less likely – worked it out for himself. As I deployed my spindly jab again, a very odd thing happened. My opponent somehow popped up between my arms. Then he proceeded to hit me repeatedly in the stomach. When I doubled up he turned his attention to my face, upon which he rained a torrent of blows. I felt my lip split, and heard my nose crunch. I soon had no idea what the hell was happening, and failed to hear the bell for the end of the round. My opponent broke off hostilities and started to waddle back to his corner. Suddenly aware that the beating had stopped, I pulled back my right arm and let fly. My one punch landed squarely between his kidneys.
The impact didn’t seem to register too heavily with him – he just turned and glared at me from beneath his low brows. The referee, however, definitely noticed, grabbed me and pushed me towards my corner, where my seconds did their best to wipe the blood off my face. The referee came over, took one look at the mess, and walked to the enemy corner, where he raised my opponent’s arm and declared the ‘fight’ over. It had not been a glorious exit. But I had at least left the ring properly knocked about. I should like to say that it led to a new respect from my classmates, but if so, I didn’t notice it.
Needless to say, being battered in the boxing ring was not the sort of thing you were expected to complain about to your parents. Had I done so, I have no doubt at all that I would have been told it was part of my education, and that I’d just have to put up with it. Because by now the family was in full mimicry of what were presumed to be our betters. Belonging – or appearing to belong – to some period before the Industrial Revolution is one of the very odd ambitions of the British upper-middle class. We were not upper-middle class, as was demonstrated by the listing of High Lea’s location at 262 Old Birmingham Road in the termly ‘Red Book’, which contained the school calendar, the credentials of the staff and the home addresses of all the pupils. Dad had had a pretty swift rise through the management of his steel company, and was now in charge of factories all over the West Midlands and South Wales. High Lea was sold, and we moved well away from anything as urban-sounding as Birmingham Road, to a place in the proper country which had nothing as déclassé as a street number.
In fact, Stonebow House, Peopleton, was not especially grand and not especially old. It had been built in the Vale of Evesham by Fred Allsopp, the jockey who had ridden the 40–1 outsider Sir Hugo to victory in the 1892 Derby. He had chosen a curious style which married Victorianism with mock-Tudor. Not surprisingly, there were lots of stables, numerous outbuildings, and a yard. I seem to recall that the asking price was £13,000, but the depth of the previous owner’s financial troubles became clear when Dad visited the house during the negotiations to buy and had to step around a pig farrowing in the sitting room.*