The school bully born to be king
Vividly recalls the casual cruelty of the future ruler of Thailand when they were boys at Millfield
Boarding schools are such comfortable places nowadays – duvets on soft mattresses, psychotherapists on call, choice of desserts. But it certainly wasn’t like that in the late Sixties, even at Millfield, notorious then as the most expensive educational establishment in Britain and a mecca for sporting prodigies and the offspring of plutocrats who couldn’t pass legitimately into Eton or Roedean.
The truth about the place, located in the Somerset town of Street, was rather different. The maverick founder and headmaster R J O Meyer, universally known as Boss, had a genuinely comprehensive and internationalist vision that in some respects was admirably progressive.
Co-education (a rarity at the time) prevailed throughout, there was no uniform or daily assembly, and bespoke timetables allowed every individual to follow their particular talent, on a pupil-teacher ratio of about seven to one. Dyslexics were as patiently nurtured as the brainboxes and stars of track, field and pitch; 20 different languages were taught, it was claimed, and 40 sports played.
But for all these radical elements, life in Millfield’s boarding houses was in those days conventionally hierarchical, authoritarian and unreformed in its ethos, especially for the boys. A system of fagging was in place, and prefects could (and did) cane the juniors. There were no curtains or carpets in the unheated dormitories, the food was revolting and the lavatory paper hard. The regime was not so much spartan as brutal, and in some respects I remain scarred by the experience.
Perhaps the most positive aspect of the school, however, was its genuinely broad social mix. Boss – later exposed as a compulsive gambler – managed the finances on a mad but inspired Robin Hood principle. Basically, the rich paid through the nose to subsidise the poor: you could buy your way in, but that money was siphoned towards the needy, with particular emphasis on local children. As the offspring of a divorced working mother, I was offered an amazingly generous scholarship of £30 a term, fixed throughout my school career and representing only 10 per cent of the standard fee.
Others paid way over that level, and I often wonder who balanced me up. Was it Elizabeth Taylor, whose son Christopher sat next to me in Biology? Or Omar Sharif, whose son Tarek was as duff at cricket as I was? Or a scion of the Goulandris shipping dynasty? Or perhaps King Bhumibol of Thailand, whose son, my dormitory mate, Mahidol Vajiralongkorn, succeeded his father to the throne on Thursday, trailing tales of caprices and extravagance that have made him a figure hated, despised and feared.
Millfield made something of a speciality of educating foreign royalty. They received no special treatment. Some seemed perfectly normal (I particularly remember the enchanting Princess Alia of Jordan, who shared my enthusiasm for Jane Austen) and were happy to take their place in an egalitarian atmosphere that was pretty much free of snobbery or racial prejudice.
Yet there was something of the pathetic outsider about Mahidol (as he was unceremoniously known), in the year above me. Tubby and clumsy, he suffered from one of the most violent twitches I have ever seen – one side of his face would seize up once every 30 seconds or so, as if electrocuted. At one level, he seemed to want to join in: he wore unassertive tweedy clothes, kept to the rules and played our games, even to the point of taking part in the house play – something classical, I forget what, where his brief appearance in a ludicrously revealing toga caused much snickering. But nobody really wanted him as their friend, and at every meal he sat himself next to the matron, the gaunt and censorious Miss Wilkins, who clearly found him a bore and stared blankly into the middle distance as he prattled on. Eating was his comfort: he guzzled compulsively, supplementing the ghastly institutional cuisine with Thai specialities and sweetmeats stored in a trunk kept under his bed. If he was in a good mood, you might be offered something, too.
He wasn’t clever, he wasn’t in any teams and despite a previous sojourn at a prep school in Seaford, his English remained idiosyncratic. But what marked him most was his enthusiasm for the Combined Cadet Force, a Friday afternoon misery that everyone else loathed. Here, he so excelled in the meticulous wearing of kit, the parade-ground drills, the shouting and saluting that he was promoted to some sort of officer status, allowing him to lord it over the rest of us rotten longhaired pacifist slackers.
Like others whose sense of superior status is toxically combined with insecurity and isolation, Mahidol could suddenly drop his pretence of amiable normality and become a vile bully: indeed, his behaviour might now be described as bipolar. His joviality could quickly boil to manic pitch, and the dormitory would often be rudely awoken in the small hours by his sudden melodramatic cackling, as though he had just dreamt up a scheme of bloody revenge and mayhem on those who had crossed Mahidol was weirdly mesmerised by Crickmore – patting him on the back and chortling at his fatuous attempts at jokes before savagely mocking, punching and pinching him.
A standard schoolboy tactic, one might say, but magnified here to the point of sadism. Crickmore was baffled and petrified by these attentions and would beg for mercy when the tide turned against him. Nobody dared come to his aid.
The more he whimpered, the more Mahidol taunted and sneered, giving his victim the occasional breathing space and claiming it was all mere joshing before piling it on again with more intense viciousness. This wasn’t standard schoolboy stuff at all, but a revelation of the psychopathology of human cruelty – the methods of the torture chamber – that I have never forgotten.
Mahidol quite liked me, I think: I made no trouble for him. “Chrishashern! Chrishashern!” he would whisper after lights out, in a tone combining menace with bonhomie, “when I am king, you must come visit me in Bangkok. I will give you very good time, a very good time.” I fear, however, that given the Thais’ draconian laws of his idea of a very good time would not be mine, so I shan’t be taking him up on the invitation.