House Husbandry

Giles Wood

Public schools are character-building – at least they used to be when muscular Christianity was the order of the day and before they introduced carpets. Splinters never did me any harm but I expect they are now a thing of the past.

As with a Japanese endurance-style reality TV show, in my day (the Sixties and Seventies) the trick was to aim for nothing more than to survive the experience intact.

The film if.... by Lindsay Anderson sums it up for me although Malcolm Mcdowell seemed to be one of the few public schoolboys, along with my chum David Marrian, who even knew there was an opposite sex. But the friendships forged under these trying and brutal regimes were intense and often life-lasting.

At the funeral in July of Peregrine St Germans, an account was supplied by his Eton contemporary Heathcote Williams, to illustrate the requisite stoicism of boys in their days at School.

‘I was in my room one evening when two members of the library walked past. One, who was called Buchanan, said, “We haven’t beaten Eliot much this half”. “No”, said the other . “And he’s still incredibly bumptious. Needs taking down.” ’

Then, sure enough, later that evening a squad of sadistic older boys emerged from the library walking towards Perry’s room. The ritual was that they ran down the corridors rattling their canes against the corridor’s wooden cladding and then they would stop and slap their canes against some hapless boy’s door, again and again shouting, ‘So-and-so, you’re wanted outside the library!’ You entered and after a minimal show-trial you were invited to put your head under the library table in order to receive a series of lashes administered by each member of this lawless authority.

I defy any public schoolboy over the age of 55 not to have experienced similar blood-curdling episodes at one of these so-called charitable institutions.

Boys soon divided into art school/ drama school rebel drop-outs versus regular sporting heroes known in modern parlance as ‘jocks’. The roll-call of phobias and intolerances learned at these establishments including antiSemitism, homophobia and xenophobia,

notably sinophobia, added another burdensome legacy to a lifetime’s task of ‘unlearning’, as well as a reluctance in my own case to either join in or get ‘roped into’ communal activities.

A distinct lack of house spirit infected my school years, so much so that when in later life I was asked to read the lesson at our local church my instinct was to ask ‘What’s in it for me?’

But at the eleventh hour (i.e. in his sixth form), I realised time was running out for me to make a show of supporting my godson and nephew Aubrey Wood by appearing at his school in an encouraging capacity. The offer was to watch him perform in an end-of-term musical. Better snooze through one of those than have to cheer from the touchline of a rugby field, I calculated.

Expecting a cacophony of squeaky clarinets from malodorous acne-ridden teenagers I had packed some earplugs but what I actually heard was a deeply moving and committed performance of Titanic The Musical by an angelic host of young people, boys and girls from local schools, acting and singing and dancing their hearts out. Accompanied by a superbly honed orchestra, with an extraordinary range of dynamics, it was transporting. Only the most stony-hearted cynic would remain unmoved.

Outstanding performances were too many to mention but dear nephew Aubrey’s song-and-dance routine was worthy of a West End stage.

‘Bucking the trend of public schools feeding the banking and commerce sector,’ I quipped to a music master.

‘But who would pay the fees then?’ he quipped back.

My lifelong phobia of public schools, to say nothing of a lifelong phobia of musicals, is over. There was no sign of stiff upper lips or stoicism being even necessary as I witnessed mass after-show bear-hugging of both parents and fellow-students.

Change and improvement in all around I saw. And the most striking change? Not a glimpse of acne or even a whiff of BO.