Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

The Hothouse

I have known few large buildings as intimately as I knew my house at school; after all, I lived there, day in, day out, for five years. All public schoolboys can claim a similar familiarity, but in almost every case you will find there is no nostalgia for the building itself. Apart from my parental home I have never lived in any one house for longer than three years, but I remember the shabbiest and most transient student bedsits with more affection. It is not all that surprising: the living quarters of your average public schoolboy are at best functional and soulless, and at worst utterly disgusting. If Borstals or remand homes were maintained in similar conditions, there would be a public outcry. I recently visited several famous public schools, and nothing I saw there made me so depressed as the dormitories and the thought that for so many years I had slept so many nights in such dismal and depressing circumstances.

It is, I think, a retrospective revulsion. Adolescent boys are not much preoccupied with personal hygiene, let alone the care and maintenance of their living quarters. But now, when I recall the concrete and tile washrooms and lavatories, the pale-green dormitories with their crude wooden beds, I form a new respect for the resilience and fortitude of the adolescent spirit.

Not that the conditions we experienced at school were the worst I have seen. At one school that I visited in Scotland some of the studies were in a converted greenhouse, which the boys had lined with egg boxes in an attempt to provide some insulation. Older buildings in older schools give rise to prospects of damp and decay that are almost Dickensian in their extravagance; the dormitories look like wards in some Crimean war hospital.

Anyway, we were fortunate, if that is the right word, in that our house was newish and made of wood. It looked rather like an army barracks, a large, single-storey frame building, creosoted brown, with a tar-paper roof, constructed around a square, grassy courtyard. There were four very long terraced corridors with rooms off each side. One edge of the square expanded to contain a large locker room, towel and shower room and lavatories; one corner contained the housemaster’s flat. We ate in a dining room a mile away in the main school, an old, rather attractive, stone manor house whose fine architectural proportions had suffered when a Second World War fire destroyed its mansard roof.

When I arrived at the school, aged thirteen, in 1965, everything about the house was functional and anonymous. The floor, throughout, was brown linoleum; the lampshades were white plastic. Curtains at dorm windows were made from the same drab material. Only in the studies was individual decoration permitted, but as this consisted almost entirely of pictures of women scissored from lingerie and swimwear advertisements, they too had a homogeneous air.

Prospective parents being shown round the house often found the unrelieved wallpapering of brassière and corset ads (interspersed with the odd film star or motor car) something of a shock, and from time to time the housemaster or the headmaster would initiate a clean-up campaign. Shortly after I arrived new regulations were issued. (1) Nudity was banned. Even the most decorous and coy picture from a girlie magazine (or nude mags, nude books, skin mags, as we called them) was not permitted: the pin-up must be clothed. (2) Only three pin-ups were allowed on the wall per person. (3) As a special concession, a fourth pinup could be kept concealed in a drawer for furtive, private consultation. This is true.

It was vain legislation and constantly had to be reinforced. But as years went by attitudes relaxed, and by the time I left every boy’s study looked like a Soho bookshop or soft-porn emporium. Indeed, in terms of fixtures and fittings the history of my house, and of all the other six houses in the school, was one of prettification and improvement. Carpets were introduced; studies were subdivided into cubicles or converted to study-dormitories; painting and wallpapering were encouraged. Taste, as might be expected, was execrable. I remember that in one of my studies we lowered the ceiling by two feet by tacking string to and fro from one wall to another and laying brightly coloured crêpe paper on top of the resulting web. In the five years I lived there the character of the house altered by stages from that of some sort of penal institution to that of a moderately prosperous South American shanty town.

Much of this home decorating was subsidized by profits from the house shop. This sold nothing apart from sweets, soft drinks and ice cream and did a roaring trade. It was considered completely normal, in the hour of free time between end of prep and lights out, for one person to consume, say, a litre of Coca-Cola, a packet of Jaffa Cakes and a packet of digestive biscuits, a Mars bar, a slab of chocolate, some packets of crisps, some strips of liquorice and a couple of dozen aniseed balls. Everybody, while his money lasted, seemed to eat constantly. As one rose through the ranks kettles were permitted and, along with them, “brewing” privileges. By the end of my school career I was allowed a toaster. During an average day I might drink between twenty and thirty mugs of instant coffee and eat two large white sliced loaves of bread.

Apart from eating and drinking, the other memory I retain of living in the house was the noise. Certain periods of the day were radio hours. As if on command, dozens of radios and record players would start up. Very little classical music was played. In my era the sophisticated public schoolboy listened to Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead and Cream.

We had a television (black-and-white) in the house common room. Its use was very restricted. Far and away the most popular programme was Top of the Pops. I am sure its producers have no idea of the profound influence and effect this programme had on a generation of public schoolboys. I do not know if it commands the same allegiance today, but I would wager that during the last five years of the 1960s 99 percent of public schoolboys religiously watched the programme every week during term time. Everything stopped for Top of the Pops. In the entire school nothing moved. In our house sixty boys would somehow cram themselves into the common room to watch it on Thursday nights. And, pathetic as it may seem today, we didn’t watch it so much for the music but for the girls in the studio audience. The programme was accompanied throughout by the grunts and groans, the whoops and sighs, of group passion. It was, I believe, in every public school in the land, a spontaneous, countrywide expression of terrible lust.

The house was large, but it felt curiously constricted. In the summer one could get outside, but during the winter there was nowhere else to go. Curiously, there was not much traffic between houses, except at senior level. Going into another house in the school was like going into another country, but with the added disadvantage that its inhabitants constantly drew attention to your strangeness. Few events were more unsettling than, as a junior boy, to have to deliver a message to a boy in another house. To be jeered at as an alien was the best you could expect; more often you would be set upon. We were members not so much of different houses as of different tribes. The houses all had different atmospheres, almost different ideologies. One house was corrupt, full of villains; one was full of eccentrics; one house was obsessively self-interested. My house, at least when I first joined it, was very hard.

We had had a succession of popular and ineffectual housemasters. There was no discipline. A new housemaster was strenuously trying to impose his authority. But when he retired to his flat at the end of the day the old regime established itself. The source of the problem was a group of boys in the sixteen-to-seventeen age bracket. They were “bad” in the sense that they had no interest in promotion. In the evenings they terrorized juniors with a kind of candid ruthlessness that I still find chilling to recall. They would roam the junior studies, four or five of these roughs, and beat people up at random, extort money or food, rifle letters and lockers in search of diversion. One felt in a way rather like a medieval peasant during the Hundred Years War: one never knew when another marauding army might march by, randomly distributing death and destruction. It was comparatively short-lived, this period of capricious thuggery, but it provided me with a full catalogue of the resourceful cruelties of the adolescent mind. Later the attitude of the house changed to something altogether more genial, but I will always remember my years as a junior, even though I was relatively unscathed. W. H. Auden said he detested fascism because at public school he lived in a fascist state. It is rarely a constant state of affairs, but it is not difficult for private life in a boarding school temporarily to take on certain fascist characteristics. It is the sense of being a victim, or potential victim, that lingers on: the way a house can become at certain moments a place of genuine terror and fear; the way you sacrifice all principles in order to save your skin; the ease with which the ideology of the dominant group seduces you. This is, of course, the private, unadministered life of a boarding house, but in a crucial sense it is the reality of being a boarder in a boys’ public school. Its opposite is what I call “the prison governor’s view of the prison.” That has a reality too, but it is for public and official consumption. The inmates experience something entirely different, vital and basic.

If you are lucky, everything changes at school as you grow older, stronger and more senior. Those few to whom this transformation and relaxation does not apply are the saddest products of the system. But for the majority the tenor of the daily round eventually establishes itself as tolerable. However, the last year or two at school, although the most privileged, can also be the most irritating. Most people experience this, and no doubt most people have their own reasons. On reflection, I wonder if my own vague disquiet was not to do with a subconscious reaction against the unrelenting absence of privacy that one experiences as the norm in a boarding school. Looking back at it now, years later, I realize that of my nine years at boarding school I actually spent three years on holiday and a full six at school. So for those six years, for example, I usually bathed and showered in the company of eight or a dozen other people; I relieved myself in what was effectively a public lavatory; I dressed and undressed, to order, in a crowded locker room; and, except for my final year, I slept in a room that never had fewer than four people in it and on occasions had fourteen. As a way of life — I am trying to be objective about it — this seems to me to be positively bizarre, not to say noisome and rebarbative. Five years in the same house is not only five years of crowding personalities; it is also five years of enforced proximity to the bodies that accommodate those personalities. The house was not a place for the fastidious.

Few people ever wield power as absolute as that possessed by a public-school prefect. Perhaps if you are an officer in the army, it may be similar, but really I feel it is more akin to something you might encounter in a feudal or totalitarian society, in so far as your power is subject to your whim. Boys may not be allowed to administer corporal punishment, but apart from that the head of house at a public school can — or certainly could — exercise a degree of control over the sixty boys in his charge that, day by day, could be said to be greater even than that of the housemaster.

The power operates on two basic levels. First, you can order people to do things: to shave, to repolish their shoes, to comb their hair, to have their hair cut, to run instead of walk and so on. On the second level you can deprive them of things: their freedom (by enforcing detention), their pleasures (you can forbid them to watch TV or ride a bicycle, reduce their pocket money, confiscate their possessions). A prefect may not be able to beat anybody, but if he works at it, and if the transgressions persist, he could probably have a boy beaten. Conceivably, if the circumstances were right, he could get a boy expelled. It is perhaps sufficient to say that, if he feels like it, a head of house can make the life of anybody in his house absolute hell.

I ended my school career as a head of house — we called them “house helpers.” I was not very officious, perhaps lethargic might be more apt, but I don’t ever expect to re-encounter that curious sensation of strolling through the house at night while everyone else was working at prep, master of my own territory, knowing that I could go anywhere, search anywhere, order people to do my bidding. It is, for those inclined to exult in it, a heady experience — perhaps not the sort of thing an eighteen-year-old should indulge in.

The occasion when one’s power, as it were, stared one in the face was over the issue of haircuts. In those days all young males had long hair, and one of the stigmata of being a public schoolboy was the fact that your hair was so short. Consequently, everyone endeavoured to grow their hair as long as possible. The longer your hair, the more “cool” you were. Haircut nights saw the head of house, clipboard in hand, patrolling the studies. His word was law — there was no higher court of appeal. Real dread was in the atmosphere. A local barber visited the house once a fortnight. He had to have heads to cut, a minimum of half a dozen. Who would be chosen? To enter a study was an eerie experience; one might have come to claim hostages or to issue a decimation order. At that moment the power one wielded was palpable.

A side-effect of power was adulation. They were not always concomitant, but one usually went with the other. By the reduced standards that operate within any enclosed or confined community it was possible to reach a level of fame or renown similar to that enjoyed by film actors or pop stars in the wider world. These folk heroes had their own fans, even their own imitators. I am glad to say that at my school prowess at games was not the sole route to celebrityhood. It was the age of student rebellion and we had our own existential heroes. I remember a couple of them vividly. There was Burns, taciturn and poetic. His influence was widespread and was responsible for an improbable Ezra Pound craze that swept the school. Against type, he decided rugby was permissible and secured a place in the First XV. But somehow he managed to play his rugby in a dissident, rebellious manner too — brooding, never shouting, socks always round his ankles — so it did not diminish his réclame. Pat-more’s hero was Oscar Wilde. He always wore his duffel coat like a cloak and parted his hair in the middle. He would saunter around, carrying a daffodil, with half a dozen acolytes at his heels. I do not know what has become of these two, but from time to time I do encounter other erstwhile superheroes and am always astonished at how bland and ordinary they are, and wonder from where they derived their early renown. The sad thing for these people is that adult life can never duplicate the fabulous triumphs of their schooldays — they peak at age seventeen or eighteen and it is all a long slide down from then on. They are the great reminiscers.

At my school promotion did not bring any great increase in privileges. Everyone wore the same uniform and rank was demarcated only by a silk flash on the left-hand side of the regulation school jersey. A house helper usually got a single study bedroom, and the prefects (“colour bearers”) enjoyed a more lax routine. Baths were a great luxury. We had two to serve sixty boys, and a house helper’s privilege was to order any boy out of a bath and take it as his own. There was always a huge waiting list, and because of the time involved the water was never changed. As a junior I would often step into a tepid bath in which the water was absolutely opaque from the grime of its seventeen or so previous occupants. As I grew more senior so my baths grew clearer. My one decadent luxury as head of house was to order the bell-ringer (the boy who woke up the rest of the house) to run me a bath in the morning. It would wait there — unused, steaming, limpid — until I came down to the shower room to claim it.

My own progress to this exalted position was straightforward. I moved up through the various ranks to colour bearer, and there I would have stayed had not the head of my house been promoted to head boy and I was pushed up to fill the vacant role. I do not think, from the official point of view, that I was a very good head of house — I was too lazy to put myself about in the accepted way. My two interests at that stage of my school career were sport and painting, and they, rather than official duties, claimed most of my energies. I was demoted to colour bearer for a term for staying out one night during a tennis tour in Edinburgh. An energetic Canadian took over for the interregnum (I was reinstated the next term) and ran the house far more efficiently than I. Fortunately, I was not obliged to move out of my study, so — apart from a certain notoriety — the punishment affected me not at all.

Our school was in Scotland, was in almost every respect a Scottish public school, and yet a strong Scottish accent was a real stigma. Indeed, any regional accent was parodied mercilessly. When people spoke with a strong Scottish accent we would make harsh retching sounds in the base of our throats or emit loose-jawed idiot burblings. Anyone with a Midlands or north of England accent heard nothing but a barrage of “Eee bah goom” and “Trooble at t’ mill.” We all found the mocking of accents endlessly amusing. This was part snobbery, part self-defence. All public schoolboys have an intensely adversarial relationship with the local population, especially with the local youths. To us the locals were “yobs,” “oiks,” “plebs,” “proles,” “peasants” and “yokels.” It now seems to me astonishing to recall the patrician venom we would express, like aristocrats faced with imminent revolution — a curious mixture of contempt, fear, guilt and jealousy. They lived, after all, in the real world beyond the school grounds, and however superior we congratulated ourselves on being, there was no escaping the fact that they were freer than we were — and that grated. I am sure that we in our turn were looked on as revolting, arrogant, nasty snobs. By no means a harsh judgement.

We longed to get out of school, but the outside world was both a lure and a taunt. It possessed everything that school denied us and at the same time was a constant reminder of the constraints and abnormalities of the society in which we were confined. Strenuous attempts were made to escape to it.

The easiest way to get there was to be selected for a school team. Because the school was situated so far north a considerable amount of travelling was involved in order to find reputable opponents. Rugby and hockey would take you to Inverness or Aberdeen two or three times a term, and often there were matches in Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Edinburgh occupied a place in our imaginations rather as Berlin did for poets in the 1930s. It seemed to our impoverished eyes unfailingly sinful and glamorous. To be selected for a rugby tour to Edinburgh meant happy hours in Thistle Street pubs rather than eager sporting challenges.

For the outside world meant alcohol rather than girls. Our stays were usually far too short and too well chaperoned to meet the opposite sex, but there always seemed to be a chance to get drunk. I remember a match in Dundee. A friend, who had left school a term earlier and had gone to Edinburgh Art School, caught the train to Dundee with two hefty overnight bags clinking with booze. After the match we had about forty minutes to drink the lot. The favourite tipple was neat gin washed down with a tot of Rose’s Lime Cordial.

Once in the outside world, we tended to band together. This was because we were conspicuous in our uniforms (the authorities had introduced blazer and flannels for exeats to spare our blushes over shorts and knee-socks) but also because we were somehow fearful and on edge. The outside world was a welcome source of contraband — pornography, drink, cigarettes — and also, in a sense, fair game. When boys went into towns the shoplifting rate rose alarmingly. In the local Woolworth’s two store detectives used to follow one particular boy around. He was the most accomplished kleptomaniac and used to take orders for his Saturday visits. We exulted in our delinquency and bandied legends of epic thefts: a souvenir shop in the Highlands left almost empty when a busload of boys cleaned it out; a boy who dug up copper wires on a nearby RAF station, at one stage blacking out the control tower when he sank his axe into a crucial cable. We would return gleefully to the safety of school, clutching our booty. And yet within the school itself theft was regarded as the most serious and antisocial of crimes — any thief could expect years of excoriation. Two worlds, two sets of standards.

Because of the isolation of the school we did not participate in the life of the local community in any significant way. We were too far away from most boys’ homes to make any half-term break practicable. It was not difficult to pass an entire three-month term without ever leaving the school grounds. As one grew older this unnatural segregation became more irksome. My abiding memory of my final two or three years is of a sense of life going on elsewhere. I felt as if I were experiencing a form of internal exile. A few away matches with teams only seemed to sharpen the sensation of missing out, of being bypassed.

The school grounds were capacious, the houses scattered randomly about the estate. I had a friend in a house so far away — over two miles — that I could rarely be bothered to visit him. The scale made it logistically difficult to creep out at night. I believe this is something that happens in most public schools. Here, escape is indulged in for its own sake, not as a means to some illicit end. In our case, and to reduce the risk of discovery, the nearest safe town was eight miles away. To drop from a dormitory window, change into civilian clothes, cycle the eight miles in order to snatch a pint of beer before closing time, then cycle back, was too arduous to make it worth while.

The summer was always better. We were very near the coast, and it was not difficult to spend a fragrant afternoon hidden among the gorse on the endless sand dunes, replenished with food and drink bought from stores at nearby caravan sites. Summer meant tennis too. The school tennis team was a member of a league that operated among tennis clubs in that area of the north-east. We would play against clubs in places like Inverness, Forres and Fochabers. The great advantage was that these games were played mid-week, in the evening. There was something unreal about these matches. The six of us in the team would get into a minibus at about half-past five on a Wednesday or Thursday evening and be driven to a small county town. There we would be dropped at the local tennis club. The matches were so regular that often no master accompanied us. For some reason — perhaps it was to do with the nature of the league — we often played against mixed doubles, sometimes against women’s teams. Here, at last, was life as most people led it. I have the most idyllic recollections of these warm summer evenings: long shadows cast across the red clay courts, the sonorous “pock, pock” of the balls in the air, the punctilious courtesy of our game (“I’m not sure if that was out — play a let!”), a few idle spectators — two girls, a dog, a ruddy man with a pipe. And then, afterwards, in the small clubhouse, with the glowing, perspiring wives of dentists and solicitors, all of us still in our dusty tennis whites, drinking half-pints of ginger-beer shandy, chatting, laughing in the palpitating dusk. There was, at least to us boys, a tender, bourgeois eroticism about these encounters, which was much analysed on the bus ride back to school. We often got back late, well after ten, with the school in bed, all curtains drawn vainly against the sunny northern evenings. We felt immensely proud of our exclusivity and were the source of great envy. Although I was a very keen sportsman at school, I find it quite easy to understand why tennis is the only game I play today.

The two main vices were drinking and smoking. Drugs were taken too, mainly marijuana, but were not anything like as prevalent as they are today. Smoking was completely banned, drinking almost so. A senior boy might get a glass of sweet sherry or a half-pint of beer off his housemaster if he was very lucky. These drinking restrictions must seem positively antediluvian to today’s public schoolboy. I recently sat down to dinner with a housemaster at one of our grandest schools, and the three boys who were invited seemed to drink as much wine as they wanted.

The underworld life of the school, then, was concerned almost exclusively with trying to procure and consume alcohol and tobacco without getting caught. Smoking was the most common. I would say that 95 percent of boys smoked at some stage of their school career, regardless of rank and position. Like any law that is consistently broken by a majority, it became impossible to enforce. Most colour bearers — who probably smoked themselves — turned a blind eye. All they asked for was a degree of discretion. I remember my study overlooked a road that led to a nearby wood. Every night after prep I could see the hardened smokers, in all weathers, in all seasons, trudging off for a “drag in the woods.” From time to time I’d ask them where they were going, to get the reply, “For a walk.” There was nothing illegal about going for a walk. You could always tell the smokers because they chewed gum and reeked of Brut aftershave — a brand unanimously endorsed by schoolboys of my era for its wholly effective smoke-obliterating pungency.

Smoking was cheap, fast and easy to hide. Drinking, possessing none of these attributes, was consequently less frequently indulged in. Usually it took place outside the school grounds. Journeys to and from school at the beginning and end of term were drunken binges. Dances, school celebrations, open days and the like were also opportunities for excess. We tended to prefer neat spirits for speed of effect. I remember after one school dance a friend of mine drank half a bottle of gin. Apart from a euphoric light in his eye he seemed fine when he sneaked back to his dormitory. He was caught the next morning when he woke up in a rank and befouled bed to discover that at some time in the night, without his realizing it, he had not only pissed and shat himself but had also vomited all over his pillow.

There was a certain illicit trade in sex magazines. Scandinavian magazines that showed pubic hair were particularly prized and could be sold for high prices. One enterprising boy who ran the school film society for a term was sent blurry but lurid catalogues from blue-film makers which, as far as we were concerned, were the last word in shocking explicitness. Certain novels were censored: Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Ginger Man, Last Exit to Brooklyn. But what was permitted varied from house to house. As a fifteen-year-old I once got into fearful trouble with my housemaster because he discovered me reading Harold Robbins’s The Adventurers. It was confiscated on the spot. When I boldly asked for it to be returned on the last day of term I was told it had been destroyed.

Apart from thieving, the only genuinely illegal act that occurred with any regularity was joyriding. In my house two boys used frequently to take the assistant housemaster’s car out late at night. They would disconnect the mileometer and drive through the dark countryside for an hour or two. The owner of the car never noticed. This was an act of real daring, not to say foolhardiness; the consequences of being caught or of having an accident would have reverberated beyond the school — and yet it was not a rare event. All manner of cars were parked around the school buildings overnight. People would use them. The penalty for this crime would have been instant expulsion, but the staff, I am sure, never suspected that it went on. People could be expelled for theft, sex (homo or hetero) and consistent smoking or drinking or the taking of drugs. Few boys were expelled while I was at school: two went for having sex with school maids (the maids were sacked too); a small clique of drug-takers departed and a few heavy smokers. Boys often left of their own accord. Occasionally there would be “scandals” that made the newspapers — boys vandalized a girl’s flat on a rugby tour once, I recall — and also demanded the ultimate penalty. The boy who blacked out the RAF station also made the local newspapers. He was a simple, pale, gangly soul called Clough. He had made hundreds of pounds selling copper and lead pilfered from the air base to local scrap-metal merchants. The school, although properly outraged, had, I think, a sneaking regard for his entrepreneurial drive. His father, who did not want him at home, came up to plead for leniency with the headmaster. Clough’s punishment was to dig up all the tree stumps on the estate, a task that occupied all his free time for about two terms.

Swearing was a minor crime too, naturally. It is perhaps worth emphasizing, for anyone who doubts it, that the language of a public school is as bad as that of any army barracks. We employed all the usual four-letter oaths with unreflecting abandon. There were not many nonce words or neologisms in our private language at school for some reason. Perhaps because the school had been founded only some decades before, traditions had yet to establish themselves. At prep school it was pure Jennings and Darbishire—“Vanes,” “Quis?” “Ego!” “Stale news,” “Cave,” etc., etc. One exchange that I have never encountered elsewhere I record here for those interested in the folkloric side of public-school life. If you farted (“buffed”), everyone was allowed to punch you. However, if you said, “Safeties,” before you were discovered, you could foul the air unpunished.

We were obsessed with sex. I know this is true of all adolescent experience, but when I think now of the energy and relentless focus of our interminable discussions about the subject a sort of retrospective lassitude descends upon me, as well as a retrospective anger. Of course we talked about sex — we lived in a freakish, monosexual society. There was a parallel world out there in which the two sexes mingled and interacted and to which entry was denied us. No wonder our curiosity was so febrile and intense — and so destructive. The sexual apartheid to which we were subjected all those years utterly warped our attitudes and precluded us from thinking about girls and women in any way but the most prurient and lubricious. The female sex was judged by one criterion — fanciable or non-fanciable, to put it rather more delicately than we did.

Endless conversation, speculation, fantasizing, poring over sex magazines, fervid masturbation … there is something soul-destroyingly monotonous about that facet of public-school life, and one looks back with genuine sadness and weariness at the thought of so much wasted time. But there it was, and at the time it was the favourite hobby. We made the best of our opportunities. Every girl and woman who set foot on the school grounds was subject to the most probing scrutiny — housemasters’ wives, innocent secretaries, fond mothers and guileless sisters visiting the school were evaluated with ruthless purpose.

However, the people who bore the brunt of our lewd interest were the maids. These were local girls, I think, and were hired — so public-school rumour famously has it — solely on the grounds of their ugliness. It made little difference. Their encounters with the boys, three times a day at meals, were characterized by a one-sided traffic of sexual banter of the vilest and coarsest sort. Given the opportunity, more daring boys actually molested them — squeezing, pinching, feeling. The girls were remarkably tolerant. I never heard of any boy disciplined as a result of a complaint made by one of them. I think our attitudes to them brought out the very worst in our natures: it was male lust at its most dog-like and contemptuous, tarnished further by a brand of wilful class disdain and mockery that was almost dehumanizing. I dare say any male sodality — rugby team, army platoon, group of Pall Mall clubmen — can descend to this level for a while, but what is depressing and degrading about the male boarding school is the unrelieved constancy of the tone, year in, year out, for at least five years. It must have some effect.

There was also, it is true, a brand of passionate romanticism about our sexual curiosity that was slightly more amusing. Nobody ever admitted to being a virgin. By tacit consent conversation about the great day was always rather vague and woolly — it was just taken as read that everybody was, well, pretty experienced. There was one boy who made the mistake of confessing, at the age of seventeen, that he had still to lose his virginity. He became a laughing stock in the house. Little boys of fourteen would howl, “Virgin! Virgin!” at him. He came back the next term claiming to have lost it in the holidays, but it was too late. His greatest mistake was to have admitted it — the only honest man among shameless liars. And it was easy to lie — no one could prove that you were not the satyr you claimed to be, come the holidays. It was quite important, however, to live up to your reputation on the rare occasion when the company was mixed. Many a self-appointed stud came to grief at school dances, for example.

There was also the problem of letters. If you boasted of having a girlfriend, some evidence needed to be furnished: a photograph at the very least or passionate letters. We liked our letters from our girlfriends to be as conspicuously feminine as possible — coloured paper and envelopes with deckle edges and illustrations and drenched in scent. Post was distributed after lunch in the common room. A letter was inhaled, fondled, groaned and swooned over — exhibit “A” in the defence of your virility.

One boy, a jolly, rowdy person called Dunbar, used to exchange clippings of pubic hair with his girlfriend. In the dormitory the little tufts would be passed round like holy relics. We begged him to go further — the girl was French after all. At our crass prompting he finally did what we required. Together we composed a touching letter requesting a photograph in the nude. The girl was deeply offended, and the relationship shortly fizzled out.

Some boys, though, had exceptional good fortune. A friend of mine “got off” with the headmaster’s au pair, a pleasant Norwegian girl called Ingrid — a fabulously exotic creature to us. Another had an affair with his housemaster’s daughter, provoking fraught dilemmas of divided loyalty. The rest of us had to rely on rare opportunities provided by school dances or the biennial Gilbert and Sullivan, when the girls were bussed in to play the female chorus.

The school dance was little more than a meat market. By the time the girls arrived all the boys were well-fortified with alcohol. At the first slow number they pounced. The occasion degraded everybody. The Gilbert and Sullivans were more fun and more decorum reigned. We were meant to be rehearsing, and we saw the girls quite regularly over a period of a month. Courtship rituals were rather primly observed, and the alliances that were struck up remained for a good while on a rather chaste level — one was often invited to the girl’s house for tea on Sunday afternoons to meet her parents, for example. This more sustained contact usually provoked the dormant, romantic side of our nature, and many of us fell deeply in love as a consolation for being denied any physical release. That came, eventually, usually as the dates of the performances approached, a sense of time running out — as with soldiers due to return to the front — affecting both boy and girl. These wistful encounters were not so shaming. They were like any adolescent affair — cute, thrilling, melancholic — a brief foray into real life. They ended after the show as the barriers of the single-sex boarding school were reimposed. The only real victim was the Gilbert and Sullivan, in my memory always appalling, for the simple reason that none of the chorus had joined for the singing.

Every boy who leaves his boarding school has been shaped and formed, like it or not, by his years in that hothouse society. Of course, each individual will be affected to a different degree, but the only effective way of resisting the legacy is to get out early. My generation of schoolboys (class of 1970) was entirely typical not only of every other school but also of the generations that preceded us. We left school as unreflecting snobs — we had a very acute perception of “us” and of “them.” “They” were all the yobs, oiks, lefties and deviants who hadn’t been to public school. We were also racist, in a robust, cheery, easy-going manner, as the blacks and Arabs at school could testify. “Wog” was the commonest of nicknames and, to us, devoid of pejorative intent. We thought of women quite simply as sexual objects. We were politically naive — which is to say, knee-jerk Tories of the old squirearchical model. We had our moody rebels, true, but they were influenced by Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac rather than by any political faith. I knew only one boy at school who claimed to vote Labour — we thought him a ludicrous poseur at best, a patent moron at worst. Although most of us had done “A” levels, and the more successful were trying to get into university, we were afflicted with a brand of philistinism that manifested itself as a grave suspicion of “pseuds” or anyone who was too intellectual by half. Also many years of group loyalty, to the school, the house, the team, the power elite, had engendered a mistrust of the individual — indeed, “individualist” was often employed as a term of abuse. The maverick, the odd one out, the not easily assimilable, were to be regarded with caution. Not the best set of values with which to rejoin the world in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

So what happened? I think that, usually, the shock of encountering real life stimulated a hasty course of unlearning. Most public schoolboys have to start a stringent programme of re-education almost as soon as the school gates close behind them. This assumes, of course, that the society in which you are compelled to mix operates under different codes. There are still many walks of life in contemporary Britain where the transition from schoolboy to adult is imperceptible — the attitudes that served you well at eighteen will see you nicely through to retirement.

When I left school I went to live on my own in France for a year. The signal inadequacies of my education swiftly presented themselves to me, and I suppose it was then that I began to look back on the strange institution in which I had spent half my life and to wonder at it.

I often found the focus of my thoughts coming round to one boy, a little younger than me, who had been in my house. This person, a sallow, weak boy called Gibbon, had been hated by everybody, myself included. I have no idea why; he was just very unpopular. He was never really persecuted, just spurned. Sometimes a gang would descend on him, demolish his desk, push him around, but most of the time the punishment was verbal. He was a whipping-boy for the house. He appeared to take it in reasonable spirit, was not abjectly miserable, and so there seemed no real cause to change attitudes. He had no friends and walked everywhere by himself. He was so disdained that even other unpopular boys in the house would not associate with him in case the taint was contagious.

My own school career was, in a banal way, a successful one, comparatively untroubled and orthodox, but I kept wondering what it had been like for Gibbon during his five years. When he went home in the holidays and his parents asked him how he was getting on at school, what did he say? And, more important, what effect would those five years have on him as an adult? Would he shrug them off? Struggle on regardless? Carry them like a yoke? When I looked at my contemporaries, boys who had had a far easier time, and saw them, years later, still living in the heavy shadow of their school days, still wrestling with aspects of their personalities that were somehow corrupted, undeveloped or warped, I doubted, somehow, that old Gibbon would be the breeziest and most carefree of fellows.

1985