Unabused: the alternative ‘survivors’

JAMES REEVE recalls the pain, at his prep school in the Forties, of failing to captivate his eccentric and predatory headmaster

THE TORMENTING of poor Cliff Richard, as of Leon Brittan to the grave, and Edward Heath already in it, moved me to wonder why I and the editor of this magazine (and both of the same age as Sir Cliff ) might not claim substantial damages from the Berkshire prep school where we were friends and pupils in the late Forties. Years later we discovered, reminiscing the eccentricities of that school, so typical of those post-war years (now, with the inclusion of girls, a beacon of rectitude) that we are both in fact ‘victims’, ‘survivors’ (and who knows whether irreparably damaged!) and liable for huge claims for not having been approached by Mr W, the headmaster. He was a reincarnation of Proust’s Baron de Charlus … and how we longed to be cuddled, as his chosen Ganymedes, on his nightly rounds through the dormitories (bucolically named after lonely moorland hollows … Laughter … Fernworthy … Cherrybrook … Merrypit). How I longed to be as sexy as Newman minor, as seductive as Macloin major, or as all-powerful as Mickleweed, who with the authority of a grand vizier, chose that day’s tie for him every morning.

As for running to ground the other masters of like persuasion, hard to know where to begin: to be chosen for the first XI, you must acquiesce to the blandishments of Mr G of the luscious gigolo looks … to succeed at the violin, to succumb to the sinister overtures of the aptly named Mr Dark … And I was befriended by a gentle, hideous old person, a Mr Crottie, with a great passion for, and knowledge of, wild flowers. From him, I learned to distinguish between Lady’s Smock and Lady’s Bedstraw, and to me he bequeathed great, and would now be most valuable, scrapbooks of beautifully pressed and classified wild flowers.

But when he started to write to me in the holidays, I imagine my father must have complained, for Mr Crottie mysteriously disappeared, and the scrapbooks were disgracefully burned.

During Bible class in the assembly room, when boys were called up to stand beside the headmaster to elucidate some holy passage, that pale and awful hand, freckled and upholstered with foxy hairs, redolent as was all his person, of a reptilian macassar, crept up the thigh, beneath the grey flannel shorts, within full view of the class, all blithely unconcerned.

The astonishment is that no parents seemed ever to wonder or complain, although perfectly aware of his propensities: from the glide of his mincing gait, to the curious way he held his hand like a restoration popinjay, elbow pressed to the side, palm open as if to receive some divine benison. Indeed, he was known among them as ‘the Regency Pansy’.

I well remember the lovely Lady M and the exotic Lady V (titled parents were allowed carte-blanche) paying a goodnight visit to their sons, evidently oblivious to Mr W already ensconced nearby on the bed of a beloved.

And certainly the formidable matron, Nurse J, vast-bosomed and vaguely bearded, like a Hogarth invention of monstrous low-life, was aware of the summer performance, when he sat beside the swimming pool, a copy of the Times laid over his lap to keep him dry, and would summon from among the naked boys besporting in the water a special favourite to sit upon that lap.

Nurse J kept a pig in the stable yard, and come autumn would slit its throat to drain the blood, from which she made a ghastly semi-coagulated medicine forced upon recalcitrant boys (myself foremost among them) who hung back from the horror of those muddy, bloody games fields. Oh, the joy of a ‘flu’ or a temperature, when it was replaced by a spoonful of the delicious Kepler cod liver oil and malt! Sometimes, oh bliss, cherry-flavoured.

And then Mrs K, the part-indian maths mistress, who powdered her face with talcum but could never eliminate the fascinating line of dark skin between her throat and the chiffon scarf. She never missed a trick, and must have been aware of many an illicit rendezvous.

The one who evidently did smell a rat was HM the Queen, who (after our day) visited the school when prospecting for Prince Charles. Despite the panoply and fanfare Mr W would certainly have laid on – the flinging down of cloaks over puddles, the scattering of rose-petals – her Majesty must have considered the effete flamboyance unsuitable for the heir. In fact, he would have loved it, as theatre, and the putting on in a grim village hall of Shakespeare, was one of Mr W’s passions. And wonderfully he did it, too; but with the actors, be it Brutus or Catherine of Aragon, all equally rehearsed to hold an arm in the same strange Regency position, lips painted vivid scarlet and eyes mascaraed like an Egyptian queen…