Drawing by Sally Faye
Boarding school* for all its rigours was a respite from the neglect and loneliness of home. I find it difficult to speak of either, but our goal—yours and mine—is to be entertained and edified in the catharsis called human life.
Merrion House School was a red-brick house once owned by Sir Philip Sidney, he who dying on the battlefield had refused water, pointing to a common soldier less gravely wounded lying nearby: “His need is greater than mine.” It had extensive grounds needing constant upkeep: two ponds, an overgrown formal garden, a decaying orchard with twenty varieties of apples, a courtyard and ruined stables; playing-fields and ploughed-fields too. Monty Brummell-Hicks, our headmaster, spent more time mowing and ploughing than he did teaching and frightening us with his presence. Like so many others he had been “shell-shocked” in the Great War and there was a mad gleam in his eye. The other one was glass and he would take it out and dry it on a handkerchief when the socket watered too much. His hand shook so that his writing—he used a steel pen with extraordinary pressure—was jerky, as was often his speech.
Separating the formal gardens from the first of the playing fields was a magnificent laurel hedge. It had grown high and one term we were given the pleasant task of pruning it to the proper height of five feet, just right we were told for a sportsman to take cover and shoot from over the top. The headmaster strode around in gumboots with a shotgun and we’d hear distant bangs: mostly rabbits.
Our pruning mission was simple enough to be managed by the senior boys and it was some time before I was allowed to climb on a step-ladder and actually do the sawing. My first task was to drag branches twenty yards to a clearing in the orchard where we put them on a bonfire. The wood had an almond-like aroma when newly cut. The leaves were large and shiny: you could stand on top of a heap of fresh branches while the fire blazed fiercely below. I saw another boy do this once and then I found excuses for doing it too. I’d stand on top of the pyre like an effigy of Guy Fawkes, or an Indian widow committing suttee. We learned in history how the kindly British Raj stamped out such cruel native customs.
Scene: the next school holidays. I’m walking along the esplanade on a frosty evening at dusk with both parents on our way to church. I take refuge in a secret fantasy. I’ll astound my school companions with my bravery. I will die like Joan of Arc in a blazing fire, pitied by all who observe. My parents will be shocked and full of remorse. Unknown to everyone, I have the secret of being consumed by fire without pain, as witness my exploits on top of the laurel-branch bonfire last term. I will die in comfortable glory and my parents will revere my memory and their incessant quarrelling will cease. In a martyr’s fervour I seal a pact with God and his angels for such an outcome.
We came out of the church and passed behind a large hotel where the kitchens were. It was beyond the range of streetlamps and profoundly dark. I fell and cut my knee: a big gash, it must have been a broken bottle. A passing couple from the church offer us a lift home: their kindness adding a warmth that was otherwise absent. My parents offer blame for my clumsiness instead of pity. A piece of flesh hangs off my knee almost severed, exposing a hole down to the bone. My bravery at least is confirmed.
I was shocked but strangely thrilled the next morning to find the sheets soaked in blood. At that time—I still feel shame to tell this—I had no room of my own for the school holidays. I’d been assigned a folding camp bed in the bathroom, a scary place where the wind whistled through the flue, and I would be awakened mornings by my stepfather coming for his bath. The camp bed was creaky and uneven, wedged next to a little Victorian fireplace which dropped soot sometimes.
The doctor who’d dressed my wound was a bumbling old fool who drank: his stitches had come out overnight. Strange things started happening to my leg. Another doctor came, used tweezers to remove glass fragments. Still I didn’t get better, or was I just exploiting the situation and making too much fuss? When the infection had reached the bone I was rushed to hospital.
* Merrion House, Sedlescombe
a wayfarer’s notes 
your best so far!
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Your memory is amazing, Vincent. The only thing that I remember from one of those big, stone, ivy-walled schools was sneaking out over the balcony of a night for a quick fag .. and frequent “six of the bests” because of it. [oh how times, and location alter meanings. A “fag” was a cigarette.]
Apparently the thin, flexible length of cane had little effect .. I still smoke .. heh.
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Thanks guys. On the topic of fags and its American meaning, and the cane, I might one day tell the story about that headmaster's obsession with ensuring we did not become homosexual, and how this involved canings and unfair punishments in my case. But in my case his ministering of that thin flexible length of cane (grown and selected from his own cane plantation) did have the desired outcome. I am not a homosexual. I think I might have reached this point more naturally without those beatings which were surely more about his demons than mine.
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Hullo! A heady camphor, this one, unloosing so many resonances and similar experiences … I wait for the next.
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Vincent,
I was anxious to see what I missed of your story in the last several days.
I went to my 30th High School reunion. I also visited the places where my parents grew up, and many of my relatives still live.
I am flooded with memories, my own, and those told by my mother as we toured her home town.
I will try to capture some of them soon on my Blog.
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Great writing and telling Vincent.
Really makes me take the journey with you, I enjoy that, would like to know you for real.
Just a few comments, I, in play about 8 or 9 years old, knelt down in the grass suddenly, on a vertical razor blade someone had thrown there apparently, slashed my leg above the knee near to the bones.
I once built a teepee of logs in a city forest, then set fire to it, went back a ways to watch it burn and burn it did, plus half the forest before the firemen arrived and outed it, I watched amazed at the whole turn of events, don't know what I expected to begin with.
My parents never spoke of or taught 'sex' in any way whatsoever, a hush hush thing in my family, but all were weird beneath their covers, I myself have done many experiments for the learning.
The nearest thing to this headmaster that I had around, was a man who was around me a lot in my early years and teens, he was something of a pedaphile and a disillusioned protestant minister would-have-been. He turned against God at the end of his doctrinal studies at the Theological Seminary, due to the acquired conviction (from their teachings), that God was totally a made up thing. BTW, in the USA, the greatest percentage of Theological students have NO belief in God whatsoever, they become preachers and priests for the money, prestige and power, plus the easy job once hired by a church. Rarely do they even have an interest in things spiritual. This is from surveys done officially.
Thanks for the reminders, great writing, I enjoy the trips. Also thanks for your comments at my blog, much appreciated Vincent.
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Each post that I visit makes me feel that I witnessing a story unfold. Please dont stop.
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I've just been reading my father's letters home from Merrion House between 1937 and 39 when he was aged between 7 and 10. Sad little missives, although in each he assures his parents that he is 'having a lovely time'.
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Yes, it was the invariable custom on Sunday afternoons to sit in our classrooms under supervision to write those letters, and the supervisor's role to ensure that it was (a) long enough – we must manage somehow to get at least halfway down the second side of the page; and (b) that we did not inadvertently give concern to our parent or guardian, e.g. by suggesting that we were having a not-so-lovely time. Thus was the stiff upper lip inculcated at a tender age, anticipating a boy's future in the far-flung outposts of Empire, like some parents indeed.
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