In his cups last night, young Daniel asked me what was my experience of being 17 years old, which piqued my interest.
In many ways, I'm the same. I read a lot then, I read a lot now. I didn't go out much, or have a girlfriend. I was, on the other hand, a lot thinner and had a good deal more hair.
That year was weird. I was in the sixth-form of my third - and worst - high school, a boarding establishment called
Belmont Abbey in Hereford, a small and unpleasant city in beautiful countryside near the Welsh border. This particular establishment was attached to a Benedictine monastery, and several of the monks still 'taught' there, using the time-honoured methods of sarcasm, occasional violence and a determination never to engage in debate - I began to think that my forename was Shutup.
The architecture was proof that planning laws are wide open to corruption. The fairly decent church and monastery buildings (late Victorian) were surrounded by ugly, badly-built 1970s blocks, all leaking windows, varnished dark wood and concrete. Sound travelled, and decoration was kept to a minimum.
We were divided into houses named after various Catholic attention-seekers, each one ruled by the kind of man who thinks that dominating small boys is the pinnacle of success. Some of these monks were alcoholic, some bullies, some social climbers - a few were even contemplative, kind individuals, though these latter were usually kept well away from us (amongst the latter, the pottery teacher, Brother Peter and the former Abbot, Dom Alan, who was too kind to keep his job as headteacher, and who killed himself a few years later).
My housemaster, who had formerly had some kind of attachment to the SAS, had a spectacular alcohol-related public breakdown in the dining hall and was led away, not to be seen again for several years - the place attracted the frightened, lost and weak, such as the lovely RE teacher whom we regularly carried back to his lodgings, prising the empty whisky bottles from his hands. He was replaced by the headmaster, an unreasonable bigot who truly thought that outwitting teenagers proved that he was some kind of intellectual. One of the many problems with these people (most of whom should never have been teachers and could never have gained jobs in the state sector), was that they were so unpredictable: pleasant one day, violent or capricious the next. They played favourites, picked scapegoats, humiliated in public those who didn't fit in.
The house system was meant to instil respect for hierarchy and team spirit - half the sixth-form had minor authority, which in reality encouraged the boys to engage in the kind of bullying they saw from the staff. Badges, ties and accommodation became currency or marks of achievement. For no reason at all, other than my preference for reading over standing in the rain watching rugby and my conversion to vegetarianism, I was expelled from my study and sent to share a dormitory with the 12-year olds (dubious in child protection terms but that was never one of their concerns). Concomitant with that demotion came earlier rises, back to cleaning duties, eating with the kids, manual labour at the command of my classmates and a host of petty humiliations.
What other vignettes spring to mind? A boy biting another's penis when his shorts fell down during a rugby scrum. Rumours of homosexuality and constant, relentless baiting of the only person I knew who might actually be homosexual. Racialised hostility between the various groups. Petty theft. The awareness that we were different, alien to those on the streets. A school which sold its library books (a clerical ally 'dropped' the keys near me on the night before the buyers came and so I 'acquired' a couple of barrowloads of decent books). The constant boredom and discomfort. Suspicion of anybody who thought differently. I was attacked in a class by the headmaster for being a 'bloody Guardian reader'. I'd never heard of the Guardian, and promptly bought a copy: it changed my life to know that outside those walls were people who believed in humanity's essential goodness. Religious fervour, or the signs of it. I sang in the choir and served on the altar, simply, I think, to break the monotony. A forced haircut delivered by two prefects on the orders of the headmaster because I had an interview at a university the next day and he wanted me to look my worst (his 'reference' described me as a troublemaker who would fail his A-levels and didn't deserve a place at all, as the kind man at Derby University told me, having expressed his surprise).
The school bore an air of exhaustion and decay. Every year, it grew smaller and shabbier. With the exception of one fencer and a brilliant rowing team, Belmont excelled at nothing. It became a haven for the unwanted, or for the dimmer sons of dubious businessmen and politicians in the more unsafe countries - there were a lot of Colombians, and in the years before China reclaimed it, many boys from Hong Kong. We rattled around and busied ourselves with small rivalries and arguments magnified by isolation. Of the outside world we learned little other than the prejudices of our families and teachers.
And yet - there was salvation. Each Saturday, I would climb out of a window and walk into the city to play in a youth orchestra, much to the school's revulsion. I wasn't any good, but those Saturdays were liquid gold to me and I would eke them out as much as possible - talking to other players; wandering round the cathedral; even sometimes trying to get served in one of the pubs not frequented by my classmates. In school, I was the mute, sullen one. I did whatever I wanted, but furtively, and accepted justice and injustice with the same silence.
Most importantly, two teachers nurtured and protected me. Michael Caswell was a caricature of the intellectual English gentleman. Dressed in shabby tweeds and a bow tie topped with a nicotine-stained goatee, he lived in a semi-derelict house in which only his books were cared for. The door was literally always open, even when he was away, and the fridge was always stocked with lager. Only the vilest bullies weren't welcome, and so it became neutral ground - many boys would sneak down there for a smoke, a drink and a chat. A few of us, of which I became the permanent member, would wander in, open a can and talk about books, art, religion, anything. The joy of Caswell is that he took everybody seriously, and yet had an infectious, enormous laugh, which would be deployed whenever we took ourselves too seriously. Each laugh would be followed by a thunderstorm of coughing as the tar of 50+ daily cigarettes took their toll. Caswell's love was 19th-century fiction, and his classes were evangelical in the sense that he cared little about rote learning: what he sought was enthusiasm. If you displayed it, he would protect, challenge and inspire you. If not, he got you through. His approach to marking was idiosyncratic, to say the least - comments on my essays ranged from 'oh for God's sake' to 'bloody brilliant' or merely huge lines of asterisks.
The other teacher who inspired me was Mike Elkin, who taught French. I was a lost cause for most of high school, partly through laziness and partly through bad teaching and boredom. He predicted a D grade for my GCSE, and I laughingly threatened to choose French for A-level should I get an A - we all fell about holding our sides. Yet, so it came to pass, and thus I entered the world of riots, sex, cigarettes and style (in books and French films, of course). He'd had a cool, chaotic life with a deal of tragedy, and saw a minor, Catholic boarding school as some kind of oasis. He had a passel of beautiful, wild children and a fiercely kind wife, and they all lived on a series of derelict farms with a menagerie of odd pets (a Vietnamese pig which would batter doors down if it wanted a fuss, a cockatoo and all sorts of other beasts). Mike had spent a year in France in 68 and wistfully recalled his time on the barricades. In many ways he was the very opposite of Caswell. Where Cas read Dickens, Mike passed me all the alternative classics - novels in French,
Mervyn Peake,
John Cowper Powys, and before me opened up visions of other ways of life. I had few friends at that place - alliances were preferred - but these two gave me confidence to arrive at my own beliefs, the strength to resist the petty tyrannies of this washed-up piece of the 1950s, and space to go my own way. They didn't see education as the acquisition of facts: they wanted to inspire questioning, thought and independence.
My school was, inevitably, closed down. This was announced on Radio 4's Sunday morning religious programme sometime during my first year at university. My immediate reaction was joy, followed by relief, followed by disappointment that it hadn't been sooner. (What's more emblematic of the kind of people Belmont churned out than this: a
site where nostalgic old boys can buy tatty old school ties and cufflinks in memory of a circumscribed world in which they were, for the only time in their lives, important?)
Caswell went off to London to do a law degree, which he enjoyed enormously. He fell in with a bunch of East London Muslims: they tried to convert him and he tried to convert them to cigarettes and beer - and they loved him. I would visit him for wildly stimulating weekends in which we'd plan to do cultural stuff in the big city but just end up arguing joyously for hours. He then began a PhD in international child protection, but didn't attend a meeting one Monday morning - he was found in his bathroom, having had a heart attack while shaving.
His funeral was a brief, joyless affair organised by his family and attended by a bunch of former pupils present only to compare business cards and mobile phones. The wake was a gothic monstrosity - held in the house of the campest Anglo-Catholic priest you could imagine - like something from a Waugh novel. Much more to my (and his) taste, was the quiet committal. Stealing over the fence at Birkbeck College, where he'd done his law degree, we stood in the rain and poured his ashes into a hole under a tree. We toasted him with champagne, poured some over him, I said a few useless, inadequate words, and we went off to get drunk and share his books. Of him, I possess a giant cartoon of a rhinoceros head, some books packed with his indecipherable notes and stained with his good cooking, and a couple of cards.
Mike left teaching and Britain, heading to New Zealand to be a social worker, but found the divide between his Maori charges and the institutions he worked for to be insuperable and returned to the UK. Where he is now, I can't say, though I wish I knew.
What were the lasting effects of this horrific place? Ignorance, bloody-mindedness, crippling shyness, determination, an idiosyncratic (because self-taught) socialism, a 7-stone frame, probably a slight otherness, a lot of books and a very few friends with whom I lost touch fairly quickly - none of us, I suspect, wished to be reminded of that place. I had no sense of what ordinary people wore, listened to, watched or talked about. I did, though, come out determined to live a completely different life - to try things, talk to people, to learn. The effects linger, however. I'm ashamed to say that I felt nothing other than pleasure when I learned of my former headmaster's death, and that kind of bitterness helps nobody.
I can still smell the place (sweat, urine, incense, cabbage and disinfectant), envisage the gleam of weak sunlight on cheap polished wood, still hear the clock chime, every fifteen minutes. Don't send your kids to boarding school.
