An Appetite for Wonder Page 9
While Sunday morning service was in St Mark’s, every weekday morning and every evening we had prayers in the school chapel. Gallows was extremely religious. I mean really religious, not token-religious: he truly believed all that stuff, unlike many educators (and even clergymen) who pretend to do so out of duty, and politicians who pretend to do so because they are under the (I suspect exaggerated) impression that it wins votes. Gallows usually referred to God as ‘the King’ (he pronounced it ‘Keeng’, surprisingly because his speech was otherwise standard English ‘received pronunciation’). I think that, when I was very young, this led to a certain confusion in my mind. I must have been aware that King George VI was not really God, but there was a certain almost synaesthetic confusion in my mind between royalty and godhead. This persisted after George VI’s death into the coronation of his daughter, when Gallows instilled in us a deep reverence for ceremonial nonsense such as anointing with holy oil. I can still conjure an echo of the same reverence when I see a 1953 coronation mug, or hear Handel’s magnificent anthem ‘Zadok the Priest’, or Walton’s ‘Orb and Sceptre’ march, or Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’.
Every Sunday evening we had a sermon. Gallows and Slush took turns to preach it, Gallows in his Cambridge MA gown with white hood, Slush in his Oxford MA gown with red hood. One extraordinary sermon sticks in my memory. I can’t remember who preached it. Whoever it was told the story of a squad of soldiers drilling by a railway line. At one point the drill sergeant’s attention was distracted and he failed to shout ‘About turn!’ So the soldiers continued to march on – right into the path of an oncoming train. The story can’t have been true, and I now think it also can’t be true that – as I seem to remember from the sermon – we were supposed to admire the soldiers for their unquestioning obedience to military authority. Perhaps it is a failure of my memory. I certainly hope it is. Psychologists such as Elizabeth Loftus have shown that false memories can be indistinguishable from true ones, even when deliberately planted by unscrupulous therapists seeking, for example, to persuade distressed people that they must have been sexually abused as children.
One Sunday a junior master, a nice young man called Tom Stedman, was cajoled, obviously with the utmost reluctance, to do the preaching. He clearly hated it. I remember his frequent repetition of ‘What’s a heaven for?’ It would have made more sense if I had realized – at the time, instead of years later – that it was a quotation from Browning. Another popular young master, Mr Jackson, had a fine tenor voice. He was persuaded one day to sing Handel’s ‘The Trumpet Shall Sound’, which he also did with extreme reluctance, evidently realizing – correctly – that his art was wasted on us.
Also wasted on us were the occasional visiting lecturers and performers, although I suppose the fact that I have remembered them must say something. The ones that stick in my memory are R. Keith Jopp on ‘It’s there still’ (archeology), Lady Hull playing the upright piano in the dining hall (Schumann’s Faschingsschwank), somebody talking about Shackleton’s Antarctic expeditions, somebody else showing flickering black and white films of athletes of the 1920s and 1930s, including Sydney Wooderson, and a trio of Irish troubadours who set up a little stage for themselves and sang ‘I bought my fiddle for ninepence, and that is Irish too’. One lecturer talked about explosives. He fished out what he claimed was a stick of dynamite. Casually saying that if he dropped it the whole school would go sky high, he threw it up and caught it. Of course we believed him, gullible little naïfs that we were. How could we not believe him? He was an adult, and we were brought up to believe what we were told.
We didn’t believe only adults. We were gullible too in the dormitory, where the resident yarn-spinner fooled us nightly. He told us King George VI was his uncle. The unfortunate king was held a prisoner in Buckingham Palace, from where he smuggled out desperate messages in code with a searchlight to our dormitory raconteur, his nephew. This young fantasist terrified us with stories of a horrible insect that would leap sideways from the wall onto your head, dig a neat round hole the size of a marble in your temple and bury a bag of poison in the hole to kill you. He told us, during a violent thunderstorm, that if you were struck by lightning you would be completely unaware of the fact for fifteen minutes. Your first inkling would be when blood started trickling out of both ears. Shortly after that you would be dead. We believed him and waited on tenterhooks after each lightning flash. Why? What reason did we have to think that he knew any more than we did? Was it even remotely plausible that you would feel nothing when you were struck by lightning, until fifteen minutes later? Once again, that sad lack of critical thinking. Shouldn’t children be taught critical, sceptical thinking from an early age? Shouldn’t we all be taught to doubt, to weigh up plausibility, to demand evidence?
Well, perhaps we should, but we weren’t. On the contrary: if anything, gullibility was positively encouraged. Gallows was extremely keen that we should all be confirmed into the Church of England before we left the school, and almost all of us were. The only exceptions I can remember were the one boy who came from a Roman Catholic family (and went to a different church every Sunday in the envied company of the pretty Catholic under-matron), and the one precocious boy who struck awe into us by claiming to be an atheist – he called the Bible the Holy Drivel and we expected thunderbolts daily (his iconoclasm, if not his logic, carried over into his style of geometric proof: ‘Triangle ABC looks isosceles, therefore . . .’).
I signed up for confirmation with the rest of my cohort; and the vicar of St Mark’s, Mr Higham, came to give us weekly confirmation classes in the school chapel. He was a handsome, silver-haired, avuncular figure and we went along with what he said. We didn’t understand it, it didn’t seem to make sense, and we thought this was because we were too young to understand. It is only with hindsight that I realize that it didn’t make sense because, quite simply, there was no sense to make. It was all invented nonsense. I still have, and frequently have occasion to refer to, the bible I was given on my confirmation. This time it was the real thing, the King James translation, and I have some of the best bits in my head to this day, especially Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs (not of Solomon, needless to say).
My mother has recently told me that Mr Galloway telephoned the parents individually to say how keen he was to have us confirmed. He said that thirteen was an impressionable age, and it was a good idea for children to be confirmed early, in order to give them a steady base in religion before they had to confront counter-influences at their public schools. Well, you can’t say he wasn’t honest in his designs on naive young minds.
I became intensely religious around the time I was confirmed. I priggishly upbraided my mother for not going to church. She took it very well and didn’t tell me, as she should have, to take a running jump. I prayed every night, not kneeling at the bed but curled up in a foetal position inside it, in what I confided to myself was ‘my own little corner with God’. I wanted (but never dared) to steal down into the chapel in the middle of the night and kneel at the altar where, I believed, an angel might appear to me in a vision. If I prayed hard enough, of course.
In my final term, when I was thirteen, Gallows made me a prefect. I don’t know why this pleased me so much, but I walked on air for the whole term. Later in my life, when the head of my department at Oxford was knighted by the Queen, I attended his celebratory party. I asked a colleague whether our professor was pleased by the honour and received the memorable reply: ‘Like a dog with three pricks, old boy.’ That’s pretty much how I felt on being made a prefect. Also on being accepted into the Railway Club.
The Railway Club was the main reason I had been pleased by my parents’ decision to send me to Chafyn Grove. It was run by Mr K. O. Chetwood Aiken, not really a teacher except on the rare occasions when a boy would opt to learn German. A melancholy man with a long, sad face, his real love and apparently sole pastime was his Railway Room (although I recently learned, on Googling him, that he had been a known Cornish artist)
. One room in the school was set aside for him and he built there a magical simulacrum of the Great Western Railway, 0-gauge electric, with two terminuses called Paddington and Penzance and one station halfway between called Exeter. Each engine had a name, Susan or George for example, and the two dear little shunting engines were both called Boanerges (Bo One and Bo Two). Each station had a bank of switches, each switch activating its own portion of track, red switches for the Up line and blue for the Down. When a train arrived at Paddington, you had to uncouple it from the big engine that had pulled it, then drive one of the little shunting engines from its siding to move the train from the Up line to the Down, then send the engine to the turntable to turn it around, then couple it to the new front of the train and send it back along the Down line to Penzance, where the whole process would be reciprocated. I loved the smell of ozone that came from the electric sparks, and I adored working out which was the right combination of switches to flick on and off for each operation. I think the pleasure I got from it was similar to that which I later derived from programming computers, and also from soldering the connections in my one-valve radio set. Everybody wanted to get into the Railway Club, and all who did so doted on Mr Chetwood Aiken despite his lugubrious mien. With hindsight I think he may already have been very ill, for he died of cancer not long after I left. I don’t know whether the Railway Room survived his death, but I think the school would have been mad to let it go.
Much as I enjoyed the Railway Club and being allowed to sashay uninvited through the door of the prefects’ study, the time came when I had to move on to another school and start at the bottom again. When I was only three months old my father had put my name down for Marlborough, his old school, but was told that he was too late: I should have been put down at birth (how long before that sentence is quoted out of context?). Marlborough’s snooty letter was quite hurtful to him as an old boy, but he put my name on the waiting list anyway, and when the time came I could have gone to Marlborough. Meanwhile, however, my father’s thoughts had turned in another direction. He was impressed by the technical skills of the next-door gentleman farmer, Major Campbell, who had a well-equipped workshop and was an expert welder. My father naturally thought that I might become a farmer, and workshop skills give great advantages in that career (as I have recently learned from one of the most successful and certainly the most unconventionally enterprising of farmers I have ever met, the redoubtable and heroic George Scales).38
Major Campbell had acquired his expertise at his old school, Oundle in Northamptonshire. Oundle had the finest workshops of any school in the country, and its great headmaster from 1901 to 1922, F. W. Sanderson, had initiated a system whereby every boy spent one whole week of every term in the workshops, all normal school work suspended. Neither Marlborough nor any other school could boast anything like that. My parents therefore put my name down for Oundle, and I took the scholarship exam in my last term at Chafyn Grove. I didn’t get a scholarship, but I did well enough to get a place, and Oundle was where I went, in 1954, aged thirteen.
I don’t know, by the way, how much else Major Campbell had picked up during his time at Oundle. I presume his robust approach to recalcitrant underlings came rather from his days in the army. He caught one of his workers in petty theft, I think of a tool from his workshop, and fired him in somewhat literalistic terms: ‘I’ll give you fifty yards’ start before you get both barrels.’ Of course he wouldn’t have carried out the threat, but it makes a good story and another fine illustration of the shifting moral Zeitgeist.
‘AND YOUR ENGLISH SUMMER’S DONE’
OF COURSE, there was life beyond school. At Chafyn Grove, we longed for the end of every term, and our favourite hymn was the one we sang on the last day: ‘God be with you till we meet again’. It ranked even higher than the stirringly martial missionary hymn that we also loved:
Ho, my comrades! See the signal waving in the sky
Reinforcements now appearing, victory is nigh.
‘Hold the fort, for I am coming,’ Jesus signals still.
Wave the answer back to Heaven, ‘By thy grace we will.’
We all went joyfully home for the holidays, some on the school train to London, some fetched by parents in their cars – in my case a battered old Land Rover which never caused me the embarrassment that snobbish boarding-school children are alleged to feel when their parents show up in anything less expensive than a Jaguar. I was proud of the ragged leaky-roofed old war-horse, in which my father had driven us crashing through the undergrowth on a dead straight compass course, on the child-delighting theory that there must have been a Roman road connecting two colinear stretches of dead straight highway on the well-thumbed Ordnance Survey map.
Very typical of my father, that kind of thing. Like his own father, he loved maps; and both loved keeping records. Weather records, for instance. Year after year my father filled notebooks with meticulously dated measurements of the daily maximum and minimum temperatures, and of rainfall – his enthusiasm only slightly dampened when we caught the dog peeing into the rain gauge. We had no way of knowing how many times dear Bunch had done this before and how many past rainfall records were similarly augmented.
My father always had an obsessive hobby on the go. It was usually one that would exercise his practical ingenuity, which was considerable, although he was of the scrap metal and red binder-twine rather than the Major Campbell lathe and welding-kit school of thought. The Royal Photographic Society elected him a Fellow for his beautiful ‘dissolving’ productions. These were carefully crafted sequences of colour slides, displayed by twin projectors working side by side in alternation, each slide artistically fading into the next, with musical and spoken accompaniment. Today it would all be done by computer, but in those days the fading in and fading out had to be achieved by iris diaphragms, inversely linked so that each opened as the other closed. My father fashioned cardboard iris diaphragms for the two projectors, coupled to each other by a fiendishly ingenious system of rubber bands and red string, activated by a wooden lever.
Family tradition changed ‘dissolving’ to ‘drivelling’, because that is how it had once been misread in a hastily scribbled note. We all became so used to calling his art-form ‘drivelling’ that we never thought of calling it anything else and the word lost its original meaning. On one occasion my father was giving a public presentation (one of many around that time) to a photographic club. It happened that this particular presentation was largely put together from earlier photographs, taken before he had begun his ‘dissolving’ hobby, and he began by explaining this to the audience. He had an endearingly halting and rambling style of delivery, and the audience warmed, in a somewhat bemused way, to his opening sentence: ‘Er, I actually, I actually, er, these photographs mostly date, er, mostly date from before I started drivelling . . .’
His less than fluently accomplished style of speaking had earlier shown itself during his courtship of my mother, when he lovingly looked deep into her eyes and murmured, ‘Your eyes are like . . . spongebags.’ Bizarre as this sounds, I think I can make some sort of sense of it and it again has something to do with iris diaphragms. When seen end-on, a spongebag’s drawstrings look a bit like the radiating lines which are an attractive feature of an eye’s iris.
Another year, his hobby was making pendants for all his female relations, each one a sea-smoothed Cornish serpentine pebble bound with a leather thong. At yet another time in his life, his obsession was to design and build his own automated pasteurizer for the dairy, with flashing coloured signal lights and an overhead conveyance system for the churns, which provoked a lovely verse from one of his employees, Richard Adams (not the famous rabbit man), who managed the pigs:
With clouds of steam and lights that flash, the scheme is most giganto,
While churns take wings on nylon slings like fairies at the panto.
My father had a ceaselessly creative mind. While cultivating a field on his little grey Ferguson tractor, wearing his battered old
KAR hat and singing psalms at the top of his voice (‘Moab was my washpot’: by the way, the fact that he sang psalms emphatically didn’t mean he was religious), he had plenty of time to think. He calculated that all the time spent doubling back at the end of each row was wasted. So he devised an ingenious scheme for zigzagging diagonally across and along the field with shallow turning angles, such that the whole field could be covered twice, in little more than the time it would normally take to cover it once.
Ingenious on the tractor he may have been, but always sensible he was not. On one occasion the clutch on the tractor stuck down. Unable to get it out of gear, he lay down on the ground beneath the clutch to see why it was stuck, and eventually succeeded in freeing it. Now, if you lie down under the clutch of a tractor you’ll find that you are also lying directly in front of the large left rear wheel. The tractor enthusiastically leapt into action and ran him over, and all I can say is it was a good thing it was a Ferguson and not one of today’s giant tractors. The little Fergie went bowling triumphantly across the field, and Norman, my father’s employee who was standing there, was too dumbstruck with horror to do anything about it. My father had to sit up and tell him to chase after the tractor to stop it. Poor Norman was also too shaken to drive him to hospital, so my father had to do that himself. He spent some time in hospital with his leg in traction, but apparently suffered no lasting damage. His stay in hospital had the beneficial side-effect of prompting him to give up smoking his pipe. He never went back to it, and its only legacy was hundreds of empty baccy tins bearing the slogan ‘And assuredly this is a grand old rich tobacco’ which he was still using decades later for keeping assorted screws, nuts and washers and the miscellaneous dirty old metal scraps in which he took such delight.