The headmaster’s wife

Lying awake at night, it’s as though I can draw back a curtain to expose deep alcoves of memory. It takes a little perseverance. Suddenly I recall that “perseverance” was a favourite word of Monty Brummell-Hicks, the scary headmaster of my prep school, that place I was sent for ten or twelve weeks at a time. I only have to ask myself a question about those days, and wait patiently for the answer.

For example I couldn’t remember what we called him and his formidable wife. It’s stuck in my mind that she was Nora and her maiden name was Strudwick, and someone, it must have been my grandfather, remarked that she had been a notable “flapper” in the Twenties. She remained a lady of energy and presence, tall and large, jutting both front and rear, constantly organising, cooking, teaching and making. Yes! We called them Mister and Missis, not just amongst ourselves as boys, for these were their official titles, to distinguish their roles from our own mothers and fathers.

Mrs was an august presence. I used to recall her as ugly and asexual, but what did I know? We were just silly boys who thought that since they had no children of their own Mr and Mrs never had sex. In any case, Mrs was taller, wider, older, more dominant and even more jutting than our notions of a stereotyped “pinup girl”. For his part, Mr liked to dress like a working farmer in breeches and gumboots, and except in one of his rages, his attention was always elsewhere, or so it seemed for his weather eye swivelled all over the place, while his glass eye, its socket usually watering, would stay fixed upon the boy in front of him. Both Mr and Mrs were constantly active: he as groundsman, she as housekeeper. Their attention on the boys wavered on and off like a defective light-bulb. When things were going smoothly, they had better things to do. He’d stride off with a gun under his arm to shoot rabbits, or in the summer months you’d hear for hours at a time the drone of his motor-mower, and occasionally glimpse him on his metal seat behind it, grinning like a skull, pipe clamped between his teeth. She’d be in the pantry hanging muslin bags from the ceiling which dripped into great bowls. Some held curds to make cheese. Others dripped the juice from blackberries, picked by the boys at the beginning of the Autumn term, when we were handed a two-pound jam jar and told not to return until it was filled with good ones for her approval. She made all the jam, whether blackberry and apple, plum, rhubarb, marrow-and-ginger, gooseberry, blackcurrant. She made furniture polish—a congealed brown soup of aromatic chemicals—with which the boys had to shine the oak staircases and floors. Every morning we were awakened at 7am and given five minutes to dress before we hurried to our allotted task: to sweep, to mop, to polish. This way the whole house was kept clean, clattering with our busyness, while Mrs would urge us on with her booming stage voice: “Boys, boys! Not like that, like this!” seizing the mop from a boy’s hand and applying it with vigour. Oh yes! She was an actress too, or at any rate she directed all our plays, tirelessly rehearsing till we spoke our lines with exaggerated feeling. In my first role I was a pirate, running my hands through a pile of doubloons and pieces of eight; a fascinating hoard of genuine old coins. I was a poor actor for I’d lose myself in daydreams inspired by the vibes of my surroundings, rather than attend to the social objectives. Both Mr and Mrs tried to coax me out of absent-mindedness, to little avail.

Today in recalling Mr and Mrs I feel a certain sense of family. They were more vivid than my actual parents, who were locked in destructive rows so that home was a battlefield strewn with wounded. Though I say this, I recall nothing: blessed oblivion. I was ready to gather crumbs of motherly affection from Mrs Brummell-Hicks when they were to be had; or from Matron, but no matron stayed long in the job. These women’s attention was mingled with harsh compulsion, as when I got one of my whitlows, a mass of pus under a fingernail. They would make me stick my finger in scalding water for minutes at a time, once causing me to faint. Mrs was the first person in my life to notice my short-sightedness. Muttering against my mother, she took me to town in her stylish old Morris 8 to see an oculist and an optician. I was prescribed oval glasses like those of Franz Schubert. And that reminds me of her Percussion Orchestra, when I had just joined the school. She would play his Marche Militaire on the piano and I was assigned to strike the triangle at certain points, though I craved the drum or cymbals.

Mrs also complained at the shortfalls of my equipment measured against her mandatory Clothes List, which specified everything a boy must have, every item labelled with his name, from his trunk and his tuckbox down to a dozen handkerchiefs, ten pairs of socks, a brush and comb, and some cash for pocket money to be given to him weekly. According to my mother, she had to beg or steal every penny she spent on me, and this was part of the reason she was going to leave “that man”.

At least twice, when we were alone together, I called Nora Brummell-Hicks “Mummy” and then squirmed in embarrassment. Half a century later, I weigh up the place of Mr and Mrs in my emotional life. It was more fear than love. Their care was intermittent, momentary. They were no more involved with their boys than a ship’s captain with his passengers.

In later recurring dreams, that school house and the rms Rangitata which brought me to England were merged into one: an echoing space of staircases and galleries to get lost and search and yearn.