It was a boarding school but I was a day boy and we (the
day boys) were all amassed together in forms one and two. Occasionally there
was a relegation and the hapless victim had to mingle with the less respectable
boys in forms three, four or five (less respectable because the boarders were
mainly wards of the state or recipients of some special dispensation for the
poor).
I feared the boarders, who were said to fight quickly and
some of them had big blocks of fists and mean eyes - but it was all just the
usual prejudice: my parents, typically of their godless generation, had
covertly taught me to fear and despise my 'inferiors' and love and emulate my 'superiors'.
We were more smartly dressed boys who went home to our families every evening
and rarely encountered Chas, our headmaster, whose study was in a garret
accessible from a narrow staircase leading up from a long vaulted corridor in
the centre of the building and who possessed, I was told, a collection of exquisitely painful canes, some of them thick and some thin as a whip.
I suppose it could have been hearsay - I was never called up - but each master
had a cane in his classroom so I suspect it was accurate.
The practice was for the masters to cane a boy's upturned
palm in the classroom (often with wide arcs of descent and considerable force
to produce the maximum possible pain - the unfavoured hand was always assaulted
because the recipient would have little use for it for the rest of the day),
but to send him to Chas for six of the best, to be received on the bare
buttocks (adding a perversely sexual humiliation to the mere administration
of physical torture).
Once, we were in a handicraft class tasked with
constructing a paper mâché giraffe using a hand-formed wire frame, one each. I
was dextrous but not so my friend, who unintentionally managed to produce such
a piece of paste-spattered wireform hilarity bearing not the tiniest
resemblance to a giraffe or any recognisable thing that he had the entire class
in stitches. The master caught us laughing and decided that my friend was
deliberately playing the fool to entertain his classmates, which he was not -
or at least he was not guilty of such callousness during his work, but he did
somewhat revel in the popularity of his ineptitude as it neared its completion
(and why should he not?).
He dragged the poor fellow to the front of the class and
proceeded to thrash him with a cane with extraordinary vigour and rage,
striking him repeatedly in several different parts of the body and seeking out
any exposed flesh. The master seemed to be beside himself and simply didn't
stop but proceeded with the beating for what seemed like several minutes but
was probably only one or less. The class was in shock. It must have been
excruciatingly painful and my friend was too astonished and frightened to even
cry out. To make matters worse (if possible), he was a constitutionally quiet
boy and a diligent scholar and this was one of the few occasions that he had
attracted the slightest attention from the rest of the class.
Thankfully, this sort of practice is now greatly frowned
upon here in the West and attracts all sorts of severe penalties if discovered,
although of course it has seen an even more brutal resurgence in other parts of
the world, where it is meted out by the "authorities" in full
compliance with the law.
It was in this Dickensian setting (although school was not
all bad by any means) that we encountered Tom.
Tom was a replacement master for our English lesson and he
came, to my memory, just once, but that once made a lasting impression.
He entered the classroom unannounced (so we were running around and shouting and
swearing of course), a shock of tousled auburn hair and dreamy eyes, his books
carried over his shoulder tied up with a piece of string (a piece of string!),
and regarded the class, shocked into complete silence by the apparition.
"Hi, I'm Tom" said he, cheerily enough.
We hardly knew what to answer: no master had ever
introduced himself so informally... and with his first name for heaven's sake!
First names were only used between close friends, otherwise it was surnames -
distorted to render them as ridiculous and amusing as possible among the class,
and among some of the teaching staff, clipped and discharged with such distaste
that they sounded worse than a plague of rats.
We stared.
Tom sauntered over to a desk at the side of the room, sat
upon it (on the desk!), pulled up a chair with his foot and placed that and its
neighbour squarely upon the seat, exposing his suede Hush Puppies and mismatched
socks, and invited the still silent class to gather round.
Some chatting ensued. After a while some of the bolder boys
imitated him and sat on a desk without attracting any form of censure.
I cannot
for the life of me remember what the chatting involved.
Poetry may or may not have been mentioned. Adventure might
have made an appearance - certainly romance, possibly sex. It was like having
Donovan in our midst - though I didn't know Donovan yet. I was mesmerised to
see his apparent freedom in such a rigid and formal atmosphere. To hear an
adult chat to the class as though we were equals. Every boy in the room
followed the proceedings with great interest and many with enthusiastic
participation until the end of the lesson and Tom's departure.
I had discovered my first role model, but he was not to
emerge until puberty, several years later, when I started wandering gormlessly
and moodily around the fields wearing a velvet brocaded jerkin and long strings
of wooden beads and, understandably, frightening the livestock.
