The Boy Who Was Afraid of Butterflies - Chapter 17

Chapter 17 Back to School

On arrival at Charterhouse all new boys were assembled in the school music room and had their voices tested for automatic membership of the choir, a goodly body of over a hundred voices to do battle each Sunday with special anthems at compulsory Sunday chapel and learn new hymns for the daily morning assembly. I was warned too late that this meant spending one of our two half day breaks each week in choir rehearsal. In my second year our voices would be retested to see if those of us who were ‘trebles’ were showing signs of our voice beginning to break in which case we would be downgraded to ‘alto’ parts. I now knew the score so I attempted to fail the test by warbling erratically but was admonished and told to hold the note and found myself once more as a boy soprano whilst most of my friends were either altos or had escaped altogether.

It would have been at the beginning of my third year there when I was fifteen that my voice at last began to break and I became an alto, despite the fact that I could not read music and was therefore totally unable to follow the notes I was now meant to sing. I remember in particular every half holiday in the winter term spending dreary afternoons trying to learn my part in Handel’s ‘Hallelujah’ chorus and then being despatched to the school sanatorium with suspected mumps the morning of the performance. And being ejected as a fraud by the doctor the following day when he decided my slight swellings were just gland enlargements from my habitual winter catarrh. I never did catch mumps.

My one pleasurable memory of that choir was the privilege one November Remembrance Day of singing one of Vaughan-Williams’ anthems under the baton of Ralph Vaughan-Williams himself. He was a very old man by then, but it was an experience and I grew to love his music. He had composed special music for the school ‘masque’ which was performed every five years - he had attended the school himself as a pupil.

Less structured was the annual ‘House’ singing competition. Each house choir would have to sing two songs of their choice, one in unison, the other a part-song for all four voices. Each choir would be trained by one of the school music masters. Gownboys was lucky to get the services of Bill Llewellyn, then assistant music teacher and conductor of the Linden Singers, a small choir that performed on the radio, singing madrigals and other mediaeval music. Bill was great fun, unlike some of the other music teachers and enthused the whole house - all ninety of us - to join in, at least with the unison song.

I can remember the astonishment of the adjudicator one year when the combined Gownboy choir swept all before it with a rattling extravagant rendering of the ‘Largo al Factotem’ from the opera ‘Figaro’ which we sang at high speed in Italian and all finished it together without anyone getting one of their calls to ‘Figaro’ in the wrong place. And then a smaller group of us sang in great contrast an ancient madrigal to the conducting of Bill Llewellyn’s little finger, as precise and melodious as the other song had been loud and explosive. I think we won the competition under Bill’s enthusiastic direction four years running.

In contrast to our artistic talents, we were obliged to join the Combined Cadet Force (CCF) and spend each Tuesday afternoon learning the arts of soldiery. I hated this, the coarse uncomfortable material of the uniform in which we sweltered in the summer, the interminable drill, the polishing of our boots and metal work scrutinised each week on parade with punishments for those whose standard was deemed inadequate.

Every term we would have what was called a ‘Field Day’ when we would be bussed into the Surrey heathland around Farnham or Aldershot and made to undertake some sort of manoeuvre. It was always chaotic - just like real warfare I suppose. As I was no good at most things military, I was soon allocated the job of being a signaller and forced to cart a great clumsy old-fashioned wireless set around the countryside attempting to keep my platoon aware of what was happening. They failed to note that technology was not my strength either and we spent most of those days wandering aimlessly around with me trying desperately to get contact with someone - anyone.

The school put great store on physical exercise. Games were compulsory and those afternoons not spent in choir or on CCF parade were usually spent on one of the school playing fields. It was soccer in the autumn, hockey in winter and cricket in summer plus athletics, swimming, fives, and a whole host of other voluntary sporting activities. I became ‘non-playing captain of our ‘2nd Peripatetics B’ football team (the under 16s who were not good enough to make the ‘colts’ house team) - non-playing only in the sense that I was so poor that I was banished to the left wing out of the way of the action. Occasionally I would surprise myself and my team mates by scoring a goal, as no-one ever bothered to mark me and sometimes the ball would come bouncing my way and I would give it a boot in vaguely the right direction.

I was much better at hockey - a stick rather than a foot to hit the ball with was much preferable and I actually made our ‘yearlings’ (13 year olds) house team in the cricket season, where I was a very slow-scoring opening batsman in the Boycott style (though I have to admit, not quite as good). I do remember making my top score of 23 and taking three hours over it (we were playing for a draw against the best yearlings’ team in the school that already had a school 1st team spin bowler in it). I was also valued for my umpiring. It was the practice for a couple of umpires from the batting team to officiate and their bias against giving anyone out was usually balanced by the threats of the fielding side who were much closer to the poor umpire than their own team back beyond the boundary marker. I was assumed to be a pushover as I looked so weedy, and the fielding teams thought they could browbeat me by appealing raucously almost every ball. In my case because I was an obstinate and independent little boy, it had the opposite effect and I would invariably say ‘not out’ unless it was so obvious that even I could not deny it. When my fellow team mates realised my resilience under pressure, they called on me more and more to exercise my skill at denying the opposition and I became our team’s No.1 umpire.

Morning breaks were dreaded. Three times a week between mid morning lessons we had half an hour to change to shorts and singlet, run to one of the playing fields, be exercised by one of the verbally sadistic prefects, run back and change, still sweating profusely (except me, I was always too cold to sweat). It didn’t matter how cold it was, frost and snow could lie on the ground and some of the prefects - or monitors as we called them - were particularly brutal and obviously enjoyed making us suffer, keeping us doing press-ups above the frozen ground until the weaker of us (me first as usual) collapsed face down on the sodden grass.

The one consolation was if it rained. Five minutes before break, if it was raining, a bell would ring out and I’d breathe a sigh of relief for PE was cancelled. Another reason for me to cherish wet days in the future - absence of butterflies and forced PE cast a Pavlovian reaction. Then, in their fetish for our health - they said it was for that and that only - the rumour went round that in the summer term we would only wear ‘jock straps’ to allow the sun’s warmth to bronze our bodies. We already only wore shorts in our summer term exercises. The proposal was only squashed when someone - the rumour said it was the Headmaster’s intervention - decided that we were in danger of becoming the objects of voyeurs from the local village.

Another sport, in which compete nudity was compulsory, was swimming. We had an indoor pool open only in the summer term - it was not heated - and there were regular swimming lessons each week for the first year boys, by the end of which we were all expected to be competent swimmers. I was embarrassed by my nakedness and never admitted to my mother that the swimming trunks she packed in my school luggage each year were superfluous. I held the school record for the slowest completion of two lengths of the baths. If at the end of your first swimming term you were unable to complete five widths of the bath, you lost five points from your house competition leading to one of the innumerable silver cup trophies that adorned our hall display shelf.

After successfully completing that hurdle, one was expected to gain points by swimming two lengths of the baths within specified times - one point for under 50 seconds, two for 45 and so on. I had one effort only at reaching the first target. My timer lost me for a while amidst the melee of other gambolling swimmers and thought I had given up, but eventually I surfaced with a time of 103 seconds. I had learned from that Sunday School relay race of many moons ago not to give up, however hopeless the task.

I had progressed in my second year to the ‘fourth’ form, the dominion of E.A.Malaher, an eccentric, one of several that graced such teaching establishments. He must have been sixty, balding with rimless glasses, and owned a diminutive highly polished Austin 7 which he would drive right up to the classroom door, hunched over the steering wheel, concentrating as though he were in a grand prix battle. Sometimes a group of boys would pick it up and turn it round, on one occasion, placed it neatly between a stone wall and another parked car, so that there was no room for him to exit at the end of the lesson.

And what scary lessons they were! Latin was what he taught us, interminable translations of Caesar’s boring war memoirs. He would start the lesson by requiring the boy at the head of class to begin. If he made a mistake he would go to the bottom of the class, a physical relocation and everyone else would shuffle up one place. The second boy would then restart and so on. If he asked a question of any boy and received the correct answer that boy would be plucked from his seat and move to the top of the class. We would spend the whole hour in perpetual motion. It was useless putting our books or pencil case in our desks - we had to keep everything ready to make our quick removals. I reckon a third of the time of every class was wasted in our musical chair antics.

The trouble was that when the bell went at the end of the lesson, the boy occupying the bottom desk at that very moment would receive a punishment - usually some additional work that meant spending the next half-holiday in the library copying out several pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, or getting a sharp rap with a ruler on one’s knuckles. And he had the most weird handwriting. Very neat but to us boys (and most of our parents) utterly unintelligible as he used the Greek alphabet whenever possible in place of normal vowels and consonants.

I continued in my own sweet way. My family and friends told me later that to their surprise I never changed. I kept my interests whatever others said. I never got enticed into the drinking, gambling or womanising ways that some of the boys professed to live (or said they did - very different). I kept myself to myself, made just one or two close friends who were interested in the same things as me - boys I met in the art studio or in the moribund Railway Club I reinvigorated when I was fourteen, along with another of my own age and three thirteen year olds. The five of us enlarged its membership to over 300 in under a year, by dint of film evenings we arranged for the school in the lecture theatre, obtaining British Transport publicity films free of charge (apart from postage) and charging 3d a night, but only 6d a year club membership which entitled boys free entry to the four or five evening shows we arranged.

The school itself showed two films a term as entertainment - usually a war adventure film or Ealing Comedy - but the theatre could only hold half the school, so our general film evenings were rationed to once per term, hence our railway films were popular as other entertainment was so sparse. Some of those old railway classics are now shown regularly at the National Rail Museum in York - Train Time, The Elizabethan (complete with its terrible doggerel pastiche of the Auden poem, ‘Night Mail’), London to Brighton in Four Minutes, the latter a particular favourite returning again and again by popular demand.

One year we enticed Sir Brian Robertson, then Chairman of the British Transport Commission, to open our tiny exhibition on ‘Old Carthusian Day’ - one of our committee was Jim Evans, later a British Rail manager like me, whose uncle was a friend of the great man and presumably twisted his arm. Another privilege was the friendship of a retired surgeon called Romanis, who lived in a sumptuous house in Hurtmore just half a mile from the school. Each summer term Sunday afternoon, six of us from the Railway Club would be invited to help him clean his magnificent gauge 1 model railway spreading over three large cycle sheds and then operate three fully working signalboxes, running a 60 or 90 minute timetable with his twenty or so trains. Woe betide us if we made a mistake or delayed any train. Reward for an operation competently carried out was a glass of cider in his beautiful lounge where he had a scale model, some six feet in length, of a Cunard liner.

Once a year the school granted everyone a full day off lessons and encouraged society members to have an excursion to some object of their interest. One year, during a ramble round various rural branch lines in Kent and East Sussex, we managed to leave the master theoretically in charge of us, ‘Kipper’ Leask, locked in the toilet of an electric train at Pulborough where we alighted to catch the branch train to Midhurst. The event was self-inflicted. We had no hand in it, although I admit we made no attempt to rap on the door and advise him of the destination.

The following year he took us to Rugby on the Royal Scot and before leading us round the locomotive Depot or taking us to the scientific loco testing station there, announced his aunt lived in Rugby and left us to our own devices. We were not fazed by this, but it drew the ire of the manager of the testing station who’s seen a bunch of boys meandering all over the engine shed. When he found we were now under the supervision of a fifteen year old (me!) he blew his top and must have contacted the school, for the next year we had the popular Bill Llewellyn in charge - a real enthusiast (strange how a love of music and railways often go together).

Most of the time, though, I pursued my interests in a solitary fashion. My grandfather had given me his old bicycle, an ancient 1936 built Raleigh, and I used this to cycle round Surrey country lanes and regularly go through Puttenham and over the ‘Hog’s Back’ and freewheel down the other side to Wanborough, where after lunch I could see two trains passing - locals from Guildford to Reading on what was nicknamed ‘the Rattler’, one hauled always by a venerable four couple machine, one of which now holds pride of place in the main shed or York Railway Museum. The school territorial rules inhibited us from crossing any railway line - thus preventing unauthorised visits to the local towns of Godalming or Guildford - but my forays to Wanborough enabled me to stay just inside the line, a metaphor, I think, for most of my time at Charterhouse.