Blogetty Blog 11: Boarding School.

“Bloggety” has assumed a patchwork quilt form devoid of chronological order so I shall resume the story of my childhood and continue with my education at boarding school.  

My principal problem with Wellington House, my first boarding school, derived of course from my separation from the new delights of Tanfield, the first family home of our own.

Although the strict division between adult and children’s worlds normal at the time in upper class British society continued – Rupert and I had our own daytime living space under the supervision of our governess Monica and only ate in the dining room on special occasions like birthdays and Christmas – life at Tanfield gave us with much more frequent and closer contact with our parents and the loss of this closeness was painful indeed.

As Roald Dahl said, “Unless you have been to boarding school when you are very young, it is absolutely impossible to appreciate the delights of living at home.”

Piecing together the evidence from my photo album I must have gone to Wellington House for the autumn term of 1935 when I was nine and a bit: actually quite an advanced age given the common practice of sending children to ‘prep’ school as young as six years old.  

Instead of a permanent classroom the lowest form was taught on the stage at one end of the gym used for the production of the school’s annual Christmas play. We had to climb a short stairway to reach our desks. I must have had a pleasing unbroken choirboy singing voice – for in my second year I was cast to play the part of Mabel, the young heroine in ‘The Pirates of Penzance’ on this stage in its true function.

As with everything else I had no choice but was simply informed that I was selected. Although nervous at first I enjoyed the break from routine in the rehearsals. I have no recollection whatsoever of the performance: as memory has a nasty habit of recalling disaster I have to assume it went well.

Any fears of teasing about dressing in female attire were compensated by my winning my weight class in the school’s compulsory boxing competition. I was tall for my age and had a long reach. My coach told me to keep jabbing with my left hand. “You’ll score lots of points and keep clear of trouble,” he was entirely correct and his advice secured victory in several bouts virtually unscathed. I probably still have a minute silver cup somewhere among lost treasures.

The first lesson I remember was my introduction to Latin, which I still think was extremely badly taught. I was completely baffled by its new grammar in which prepositions like ‘by’, ‘with’ and ‘from’ are incorporated as different endings to a noun.

 ‘Mensa’, meaning a table, is a standard noun used to teach this principle and we recited ‘mensa, mensam, mensatis, mensant etc’. These variations – ‘to a table’, ‘of a table’, and ‘by, with or from a table’ – are literally senseless and are used merely as an example of the form taken by a female noun in the present tense. Okay, not that easy for the teacher to clarify perhaps but impossible for student comprehension unless carefully explained. Instead we were taught to memorize long declension tables by rote: off-putting to say the least.

In all the years I took Latin I don’t think it ever became familiar enough for me to realize that people actually used to speak to each other in it, as well as record history, such as Julius Caesar’s account of his military campaigns. Unlike French, which our teacher made accessible by giving us ‘parts’ in little playlets and encouraging conversation which provided interest and fun.

To make Latin lessons worse Caesar was a boring writer who made sloppy and confusing continuity disconnections in his narrative. I have to confess I have failed in three attempts to complete – in translation – his ‘The Civil War’ despite my interest in the conflict with his enigmatic enemy Pompey.

I met my favourite Latin teacher at my next boarding school. Always known by his initials, as ‘GAD’ Tait conducted his Eton class to read Virgil’s Aeneid in chorus like an orchestra. “Arma virumque cano …” still echoes down the years as I see him wave his baton above us on his dais. He had the art of good teachers – make lessons interesting and fun.

Parents were permitted to take boys out for the day from Wellington House on specific week-ends. It was always a delight to see my mother and father and a wrenching disappointment when they left. In winter we played Monopoly – a wildly successful novelty – in their Hotel room and in summer went sightseeing to Canterbury Cathedral or somewhere not far distant. I clearly remember enjoying a paper bag of white cherries bought at a roadside farm stand on one such outing as a rare Kentish treat.

Papa must have prospered at this period because he treated himself to a sporty Rolls Royce. I hated it because it always made me feel car-sick. By contrast Mr. Linny, our chauffeur, was over the moon for the prestige it created amongst his colleagues.

By that time Linny had also become my father’s ‘loader’ – the man who replaced spent cartridges with full ones and exchanged the two guns of a pair when the intense action of a big pheasant drive required minimum delay – and he travelled around the country with my father, enjoying his skillful participation in the sport just as much as his master. Up to 500 birds (all reared by hand like poultry) would be shot in a day by the 6 or 8 guns taking part in a top-class ‘shoot’. I stood behind the pair of them one fine October day barely able to restrain our Labrador Sarah’s frantic eagerness to start her role of ‘picking-up’.

It has probably become evident that Shooting and Fishing (US hunting) were my father’s principal interests: more than hobbies they were really the focal centers of his life and he excelled at their practice. Brought up in such a tradition I had no directive but to emulate his example and I did so without compunction, until later in life when killing for sport became distasteful to me in principle.

In truth my engagement in these outdoor pursuits always extended far beyond the sport itself and I enjoyed many memorable days in wonderful natural environments ranging from walking Scottish grouse moors to Norfolk partridge drives over high fall-colored hedges to solo afternoons in a hide among pigeon decoys in a Sussex stubble field, and many more flogging the waters of picturesque rivers – usually without success for the nylon gill net in the open sea was already taking its toll salmon stocks – in Ireland and Wales as well as Scotland.

*****

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