Sunday 18 March 2012

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.

13 comments:

  1. Lindsey Messenger on facebook:
    wow i had no idea this had gone on....never remember you saying about it!!

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    1. Before your time. The first three years at Lord Bill's were so different. Back then it was basically a public school with a few days boys who were bullied and laughed at. Boys were expelled for drugs, 2 sixth formers were caught in bed with a French woman tutor, the attempted suicide took place. The boarding hose was like something out of Tom Brown's school days. The army and RAF cadet thing was all very weird, one guy nicked a hand grenade. One assembly a group of fifth formers lit a fire under the stage and smoked out the masters above whilst singing the red flag. The teachers were bullies, half of them gay - it really was a school from the past in transition. I once saw a boy lose his ear in a rugby scrum, bitten off by the opposing hooker. It was wild - but fun. When girls arrived all of that changed though.

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    2. Thinking about it - no I didn't talk about it. It all seemed so awful and ordinary and special at the same time. It did change almost overnight. How odd.

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  2. Lindsey Messenger on facebook: yes i guess it was very different before the schools joined together....it does sound awful and am glad it did change.

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    1. I really must write about the flick knives and shoplifting.

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    2. Lindsey - although it was a hard place - I never really liked it when it changed. It lost something special.

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    3. It wasn't awful at all - it was a world of boys doing what boys do to each other - like the army used to be.

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  3. Kevin Parrott on faceebook:
    What years were you there andy?

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    1. Most of the seventies Kevin - but really in the early years it felt like the fifties it really did. Some of it was down to the masters, a group of ex-servicemen with all sorts of issues, the rest was down to the boarders whose parents were rarely around - and then there was the age of the school and the traditions that we lived by. I loved must of it, hated some of it. All houses and points, detentions and beatings.

      Andrew Height

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  4. I spent 1979-84 in the boarding house. It destroyed my psychological self. 37 years of hell. Still ongoing.

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  5. Thank you. The torture that went on was internal to the boarding house also. The prefects and others picked on the vulnerable. It was totally ignored by the staff. I've been in and out of psychiatric care the last 20 years. It never goes away and suicidal thoughts are ever present. It was a truly horrific environment for some.

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  6. I was there in the early to mid seventies when it was all boys. I wasn't a boarder but there was a culture of bullying across the board. Some of the masters were complete and utter bastards and there was an 'elite' among the sixth form prefects who were allowed to do pretty much what they wanted. You didn't have to be very much different to become a target. As a result I have hated authority all my life and can easily find myself slipping into an aggressive defence mode when cornered.

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