SCHOOL DAYS

The prize for passing my 11 plus exam was to get a crack at King Alfred’s Grammar School for Boys. The good news was that it was only half as far to walk from my home in West Hill, Wantage, as it had been to get to the boy’s Church of England primary school which was pretty much on the other side of town. I can’t recall ever being walked to primary school. This is fair enough. My mother had recently been widowed and was out earning a crust most of the time. Besides, she didn’t have a Range Rover to park outside the school gates.

But the grammar school was something else. Other-worldly. When I think about it now, I realise that I was given a damn good education there. I know things, as fact, that others seem never to have heard of. And it’s clear to me now that if I had applied myself in the manner expected, I could really have made something of myself. But I didn’t, so I didn’t. That’s not the school’s fault. It gave me every opportunity, in its own way.

My memories of the place, certainly the ones I want to share with you now, will make it sound more like Hogwarts than a regular school. Certainly, it regarded itself as a minor public school – and this wasn’t a surprise as the buildings designed by Victorian architect G.E. Street took on a rather gothic appearance, and the masters always swept around them, bat-like, in their black academic gowns. There were modern concessions. A two-storied science block and library, and a single-story house block. But the rest of the place looked pretty much as it would have done a hundred years or more before. I was there from 1966 to 1973.

I was initially in the third form which, because of the large intake, was split into Ⅲy and Ⅲz. Years later, I would be at an Old Boys lunch; I didn’t go to many of these, but I was at this one. Most of the people there had been in the forces and were now retired majors and colonels. I was sitting next to one who misremembered that Ⅲy was for the thick kids whilst Ⅲz housed the fledgling literati and erudite. I was in Ⅲy.

I said that I thought the division was merely alphabetic. After all, the register included Giles, Gregory and Groves. And, in any case, the school would not be able to grade its pupils before it had met them. No, said my erstwhile colleague, Ⅲy was for the thick kids. Maybe this sort of thing passes for a joke in the forces. I came third in the exams at the end of that first year. But I suppose that “in the realm of the blind, the one-eyed is king.”

Progression through the school was Ⅲ form, lower Ⅳ, upper Ⅳ, lower Ⅴ, and upper Ⅴ which is when you took your O-levels (now called GCSEs). Then, as long as you weren’t in the thick form, you did your A-levels in the lower sixth and upper sixth. This progression was more than evident every morning in the school assembly held in the ancient school hall. Pupils would be arranged with the youngest and shortest year at the front and rising steadily to the sixth formers at the back of the hall, next to the organ. In my eyes, as a mere ‘tick’ at the front, the sixth formers looked like men. More than that, only the men at the back of the hall were permitted to sing the refrain in ‘Guide me O thou great redeemer’. I wanted to sing that refrain. “Be thou still my strength and shield” was sung in our weedy little tick voices, but the bass “Strength and shield” would follow from the back of the hall.

The assembly always began with the arrival of the masters, their brogue shoes creaking on the boards of the stage, taking their places in a wide semi-circle behind the headmaster, Cedric Bowers. Each would arrange their gown for sitting; some of them would have ratty little bits of ermine at the collar but all would be wearing a mortar board.

It was at the end of the morning assembly when the headmaster would deliver his doomsday announcements. Specific pupils would be invited to his office to explain themselves, or it would be reported that somebody was being referred for psychiatric help after dreadful misdeeds outside of school. That sort of stuff. I always smugly comforted myself that I would never be part of this nonsense, until one day in the sixth form when I was publicly invited to the office along with my co-conspirator. We had run out of a senseless technical drawing class, run by a senseless teacher, and had just about had enough. But as we were halfway down the stairs, the wind had banged the door shut, making it sound as though we’d slammed it. My colleague threw me under the bus by denying that any of it had happened, so we were to be caned. And I was to have six of the best because the headmaster also needed to exact retribution for my being late every day for six years. He wasn’t wrong in this. It was more humiliating than painful. Years later, when I reflect on being attacked with a stick by a grown man, it occurs to me that I should have offered to shake hands with him afterwards. And the Pyrrhic victory would have been complete if he had refused.

Caning was quite a feature at the school. If you’ve read any Enid Blyton then you might be reminded of Dame Slap’s school. When I arrived as an eleven-year-old tick, I was told that this was the first year when sixth-formers had lost the right to cane their juniors in the line of corrective encouragement. One of my good friends was rather poor at Latin, understandably. Other kids took to it like a duck to water, however. I remember one head-boy-to-be, even as a tick, consulting the Latin teacher, “Excuse me, sir, but my reading of this text suggests that Romulus et Remus, the founders of Rome, were raised by wolves.” But to my mate, everything was as clear as mud. He just didn’t get it. At our very first form meeting (we had one every other Saturday morning. Yes, we went to school on Saturday mornings) we were introduced to assessments. Every subject teacher had graded each of the boys on their performance during the preceding fortnight. If you got an A or a B, no problem. But a C or a D led to the recipient being issued with a satis card. Latin again. My pal got a D in Latin. The satis card was given to the teacher after each lesson, and he would fill in an assessment of the pupil’s performance on the day. If the pupil had another C or D then they would be caned. The friend was actually caned in his first month at school for not understanding Latin!

This is redolent of my favourite ever Simpsons episode. Homer was incarcerated in some southern jail. The governor was having a party and, of course, Homer had been told to play the piano for it. Homer began plinky-plonking in a haphazard manner, prompting a guard to whip him. Immediately, he began playing Chopin.

You can’t punish people as a form of encouragement.

I think the name of the game was keeping the historic language relevant. At the beginning of Latin lessons the master would say, “Sedate,” (sit down) and “Claudi fenestram,” (close the window). Even during school dinners, we were not free of Latin’s clutches. We sat at tables of eight. Two ticks, four middle schoolers, and two sixth formers. These latter two were like the parents at the table. If any second helpings came round, they would say, “Quis?” (who?), and if you wanted some then you would reply, “Ego,” (I). Was this really the way things went on in Roman times?

Although prefects (almost always in the upper sixth) were no longer permitted to dole out corporal punishment, they could still wield a fairly stiff penalty for insubordination, or for nothing at all if they were nasty enough. They could give you a “drill” – not the boring instrument, but twenty minutes hard labour in the school gym at lunchtime. Usually climbing up and down ropes or running a circuit of vaulting boxes or pummel horses. A “double drill” was reserved for particularly egregious acts, or nothing at all. It was a normal drill but with ten extra minutes of penal servitude.

I never got to be a prefect, probably for the same reason I was always overlooked for management positions in the world of commerce. Square peg, round hole.

The school PE master ran the gym. We called him “Lads” because that’s what he called us. He could only speak to you through a megaphone. “What are you lads doing at the bottom of the field?”

“Smoking, sir.”

“Oh.”

Back in the day, the government was eager to see that younger children got a proper supply of calcium in their diet. So, they allocated a third of a pint of milk to each child. This doesn’t happen now so, presumably, strong bones and teeth aren’t an issue these days. Delivery was made in crates of miniature milk bottles. Made of glass, of course. Each house had a rota of ticks to collect the crate and carry it round to the house room. I was always late, de rigeur, so, one day, Kenny Frazer and I were running with our crate. We tripped and dropped it. This sort of thing does not go unnoticed.

Our house was Lloyd, which meant that we had red braiding on our caps. Lloyd had been a former Lord Wantage. The other two day-houses were Butler, a former vicar of Wantage (blue braid), and Bailey (green braid) – presumably named after a brand of Irish whiskey. Yellow braid was reserved for School House – the boarders. They lived in the old part of the school, overlooking the quad. Many of them had parents in the Forces and who could spend extended periods overseas. I think, also, that the Forces would cover the boarding costs. Maybe this is why so many of my erstwhile colleagues had military careers.

Sixth formers didn’t wear caps. They had boaters and carried an umbrella. I quite liked the look of that, but the fashion had evaporated by the time I reached the sixth form.

The other parts of the school in the old building style were the headmaster’s private house, and the senior common room where the masters went for a fag during school breaks. This latter was known as “The Gods”, an epithet no doubt dreamed up by some former Latin scholar.

On Wednesday afternoons we were all in the CCF (Combined Cadet Forces). This was no joking matter. The whole school dressed up as soldiers and marched about. We had guns and everything. Lee-Enfield 2.2 rifles with real bullets, to be fired in the shooting range – a hollow at the edge of the playing fields. I hated it. All of it.

A secure, stone building at the entrance to the playing fields was the armoury. You went there to be issued with boots, caps, khaki trousers, shirts and jumpers. It was also where the rifles and bullets were stored. When I went there, jumpers in my size had just run out. They put some more on order and just told me to make do. These jumpers were machine knits in a light green, such that you wouldn’t mind crawling around in a ditch whilst wearing it. In fact, that’s what we often did.

Now it just so happened that my mother had knitted a green jumper for my grandfather. We’d use that. The green was too dark, and the style was cable-stitch, but it would see me through. I received general ridicule, of course, but the physics master, who pretended to be a captain of some sort on Wednesdays, told me that it reminded him of the Tank Regiment. So, it couldn’t have been too outrageous.

Mostly, what we did on Wednesdays was drill practice – marching about to order on the quad. I was in number three platoon. Our drill sergeant had a minor speech impediment which meant that we had to interpret his meaning. “Number flea platoon. Ten-shun!”

One day we had a bloke from the real army to parade us around the quad. Not a very big man, but he had a stick expertly placed under his arm, and very noisy boots on the parade ground. I’m pretty sure my mind must have drifted off somewhere during this exercise and I will have been made conspicuous by still being at-ease when I should have been standing to attention, or something similar. But I suddenly found the drill sergeant’s face placed about one inch from my own. “Did your mummy knit that for you?” he sneered, in the most unpleasant voice I could have imaged. “Funnily enough, yes sir, she did,” I managed to blurt out.

“I’m DISGUSTED,” he shouted, turned on his heels, and clip-clopped back to a position where he could more easily berate all of us.

Once a year, the Wednesday CCF would be expanded to encompass the whole day. A coach would arrive and transport all the soldiers to locations in the Berkshire downs. We had orders to map-read our way to some other location and if we saw another unit, to capture it. This was the Field Day. All captured neatly in the 1968 film, “If”. In the film, while the boys are setting off on their army antics, the school matron wanders naked around the dormitories. A fantasy scene exploring the fantasies of the boys themselves, and the sole reason why real schoolboys flocked to Wantage cinema to see the film. The rest of the story pointed to something much more familiar to them. “If” can still be viewed in full, and for free, on YouTube. It’s an extreme portrayal of a school which King Alfred’s set out to palely emulate.

The school padre (another reference to militarism) was Welsh; of course a man of God, but given to a Welsh temper. I once saw him hit a boy with a hockey stick. He was supervising a session down at the firing range one day and was in a particularly black mood. My bullet hadn’t quite gone into the breach properly, and I recalled once being told that this might result in the thing exploding in my face. Nevertheless, I calculated that I would prefer this result to telling him that I had a problem with the gun.

I think the masters wore their gowns to intimidate. Nevertheless, many had a sense of humour. I think I might have been daydreaming again one day in a history class. Gus Keen, the history master, brogues crackling on the concrete floor, suddenly addressed me specifically and asked a question I couldn’t properly comprehend. A lengthy silence ensued. “What’s the matter Gregory? Aren’t you dead certain?”

“No sir.”

“Aren’t you even certain then?”

“No sir.”

“Then you must be dead.”

The logic certainly didn’t fit, but he must have felt the need for a humorous outlet.

Two of the boarders were identical twins. I think, at birth, there was only enough material for one Boocock – yet two were born. They were diminutive and so they still presented as boys whilst the rest of us were getting beefier. I recall one particularly exasperated master imploring of one of them, “When are you going to be a man, Boocock, when are you going to be a man?”

On another occasion, one of the Boococks came into a lesson improbably late. When asked for a reason, he said that he’d got lost. “But you’re a boarder, Boocock. You live here!”

My guess is that the masters had quite a lot to put up with. My best schoolmate, Philip Chandler, and I had a particular routine we quite enjoyed. One would grab the lapels of the other’s jacket and seemingly lift the other off the floor. Of course, it was a coordinated jump, but it looked quite impressive. Seeing us do this one day, the house master said, “All right, Gregory and Chandler, we’re not at the zoo now.” I must have been feeling ebullient or on a sugar rush because I couldn’t help asking, “Oh. They do that at the zoo, do they sir?”

The masters all had nicknames, and I’m pretty sure that they knew what we were calling them behind their backs. Sometimes the monicker was as prosaic as their initials. J. D. Wilson, for example, was known as “J.D.” Others were known by their first names. There was a Fred, and a Harry. But a few nicknames were derivations of what they did or resembled. As a new boy I was once accosted by a sixth former running down the path as I loitered outside the Chemistry lab. “Hey tick. What’s Bomber’s real name?” He had clearly been summoned for an interview.

One master was rather unkindly known as “Crap”, I think on account of his being a wheelchair user. He was the Art teacher and on one occasion engineered the funniest thing I ever saw at school. We had been asked to produce a painting of something from the natural world and Brian Cissell had chosen to badly draw some kind of millipede, and had labelled and signed it before we all stood in a circle for Crap to admire our handiwork. But Brian’s effort seemed to stand apart from the rest.

“What the hell is a Cissell B Insect?” the master was forced to ask.

Without a doubt, the bravest thing I ever witnessed was in an O-level Biology lesson. The master was introducing his topic. “Those of you with girlfriends will have noticed a monthly downturn in their mood, which works out to be hormonal…,” he began. Suddenly, from the back of the room, one of my pals shouted out, “Oh. Shut up!”

The joke was brilliant but, misunderstood, was likely to result in expulsion, canings, or both. He got away with it, much to everybody’s relief.

Girls became an important topic as time went on. At a boys’ school they could only be pursued in your own time, of course. I have a vivid recollection of a small group of us lying on the school field one hot afternoon and staring up at the blue sky. One of my colleagues decided to pose a question. “Do you think we’re all latent homosexuals?” he asked.

Nobody was really sure how we were ever going to put this right. There were tales of one of our cohort who didn’t seem particularly interested by girls. Yet, when he went down to the Swan of an evening, lit up a cigarette, and effectively said nothing – he was battling off hordes of interested females.

I managed to find a girl, quite by accident.

Playing table tennis in the Lloyd house sixth form room one day, I was asked who I was currently seeing. “Ann Smith,” I said.

“Ho, ho, ho,” said my friend, “that’s an uncommon name. Still, at least it isn’t Mary Smith.”

“Actually, it’s Ann Mary Smith.” I had to admit.

She went to the girls’ grammar school in nearby Faringdon, and I would meet her from the bus in Wantage town centre. The first time I did this, I managed to walk straight past her, not recognizing the love of my life. But it was OK. One of my sisters emerged from her look-out position down a side lane, told me of my error, and how to put it right.

As I write this, Ann and I celebrate our fiftieth wedding anniversary tomorrow.

The things you do at school are prosaic and pointless, it seemed then. But they lay the groundwork for years to come.