If, a clockwork orange, lord of the flies...

I watched a documentary about William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies last night. It was a ‘must read’ when I was at school like If and A Clockwork Orange. The book’s about a group of boys shipwrecked on an island. The boys begin by spending their time playing, but as with all boys games they eventually revert to savagery despite the few rational kids' attempts to prevent it. It’s a boy’s book, girls rarely like it - well they just don’t get it - or at least they didn’t back then..

How much like my schooldays that book was, I never realised just what savages small boys could be until I started at Lord Williams’ School. There were all sorts there – sons of film stars, politicians spawn, boarding boys whose parents were away in darkest Africa, even a Kurdish Prince. I was a lowly day boy from a council estate and wasn’t I made to feel it.

Grey suits, white shirts, school ties, black shoes, caps and rugby.

The school was founded in 1559 so there was a tradition for everything, good and bad, formal and informal, light and dark. The good ones included – Founders day, speech day, school plays, the orchestra and choir, chess clubs, croquet on the headmaster’s lawn, matron, female French assistants from Paris and tuck.

I have happy memories of Robert Morley, the actor, declaring a half-day holiday one sunny speech day morning, the principal grabbing the microphone from him and screaming at us boys to stop as we began to walk, one-by-one and cheering, from the hall.

But there were bad traditions also; traditions that had been ordered to stop long ago when a more enlightened headmaster took over. Of course they hadn’t, they’d just gone underground, turned a blind eye to in some cases - the clubs and societies and passing rites of another time, rumbling along just beneath the service.

Fagging was outlawed, but it still went on; the plebs making toast for the prefects and polishing their rugby boots, some even warming their beds at night. The prefects no longer carried canes, but the beatings hadn’t stopped or the lashings to the red-hot radiators, heads down toilets, cold showers, and cutting the croquet lawns with nail scissors.

Prefects still wore waistcoats, no longer brocade though, and a Templar knight still led the procession on Founder’s Day in the local church. But gin was banned in the refectory, beer and opiates forbidden, and ties and jackets would be worn at all times even on the hottest days.

It all still went on though except the opium was now cannabis and the gin had become less noticeable vodka.

Bullying was an accepted part of school life and I’m not just talking mere ragging. The bullying was so bad that one boarding boy tried to kill himself by hanging himself in the showers. It was all hushed up and a new scrumming machine suddenly appeared (a bribe) and the hanging boy was sent off to another school.

There were secret societies and high gambling card schools, drinking clubs, fighting clubs, unguarded fencing clubs whose members wore their scars with pride and sniggering, hateful, cliquey groups who hung around waiting to trip the fat boy over, or throw his homework in the pool. Cigarette burning was common, cutting with blades a rarity but it happened - and only once did I know a shot to be fired on the Army Cadet rifle range with another boy intended as an accidental target.

And all of this from the son’s of the rich and famous – surgeons and bankers, politicians and industrialists - not yobs, like us poor day boys.

Once, on a field trip, a first year was made to stand against a kitchen door while a group of fourth years threw knives at the door surrounding him. He wet himself and was for ever afterwards called Piss-baby.

All the boys from William Golding’s island were there at my school - Ralph, Jack, Simon, Piggy, Roger, Sam, Eric and a host of others. All savages inside, all on the edge - me included. Thank God for the teachers, pretty much all male, twisted and angry and lonely though most of them were, without them anything could have happened.