The Boy Who Was Afraid of Butterflies - Chapter 20

Chapter 20 Into the Sixth Form

In the fifth form we were required to specialise – science, classics or modern languages. Other subjects remained compulsory in the curriculum until ‘O’ levels had been completed. My French tutor and form master was Wilfred Noyce, an outwardly meek and shy man who had little idea of how to maintain discipline in his class, unlike, so it was rumoured, his wife who was said to be a veritable dragon at the nearby girls’ private school, Priorsfield. He kept his talents well hidden from us boys at first, although we knew he was passionate about mountaineering – we spent hours ploughing painfully through a French text by Saint-Exupery of a light aircraft flight through the Andes.

At the beginning of the 1953 summer term, he mysteriously disappeared, only for us to learn with astonishment that he was to be a member of Sir John Hunt’s expedition to climb Mount Everest. The school had a great mountaineering tradition. Mallory, who’d mysteriously disappeared high on the mountain in the 1925 Everest expedition had been a Charterhouse master too.

The bashful master, more of a poet and scholar than an athlete, so we’d thought, became a hero when Everest was conquered by Hillary and Tenzing, Wilfred Noyce having played an important role in pioneering the route to the South Col, from which the two successful mountaineers made their final summit bid. I learned later that he was on standby to make a summit bid himself had Hillary and Tenzing failed. On his return to us he was as modest as ever, wrote a book of great literary and poetic merit about his experience and still failed to maintain discipline amongst us unruly pupils. I heard with regret many years later that he was killed whilst climbing in the Karakoram mountain range in northern Pakistan.

My French studies, for this and other reasons, failed to reach the standard that I, and nearly every member of our specialist form, achieved in German through the painstaking efforts of Dr.Gerstenberg, a German Jew who’d been the Head of a highly regarded academic institution in Germany and had been forced to flee from the Nazis in the early 1930s. His concern for our achievements was phenomenal and it was said that no boy studying for German language ‘O’ levels in the twenty years he’d been in position had ever failed to gain their certificate. This put us all under a huge pressure, as no-one wished to be the first. I think if any of us had failed, he’d have burst into tears.

He would get extremely agitated if things were not going according to plan and I remember his distress when he’d been delayed in reaching us for our scheduled lesson. It was the norm that if a master failed to start his class within ten minutes of the booked time, the class was allowed to disperse and the boys return to their houses for private study. Most unusually the good doctor had not appeared and the countdown had begun, with everyone poised at the door to make our get-away. Just as the classroom clock secondhand reached the critical point and someone yelled ‘Go’, Dr Gerstenberg was seen running towards us waving his arms frantically. But we pretended not to see and ran the other way.

If he got particularly worked up – as he did in the next lesson after this calamity for him – he would take off and put back on his reading glasses with remarkable frequency. One boy calculated he’d removed his spectacles and replaced them 73 times in that one 45 minute period and that was deemed to be the record.

The boys could be extremely cruel at times – I’d like to think they were thoughtless rather than deliberately sadistic. One day as Dr Gerstenberg came into the room a class apparently stood to attention and gave the Nazi salute, every single one of them. The poor man was distraught and we heard that the whole class had been hauled before the Headmaster, beaten one by one and forced individually to apologise to the brilliant teacher. Those of us who heard this became very protective of him and more determined than ever not to let him down at our ‘O’ levels. Later, in the Sixth Form, he helped me to an ‘A’ and ‘S’ level distinction, which offset my more mediocre French results and enabled me to be accepted for a German language and literature honours degree course at London University.

In my final year my studiousness was rewarded by being appointed as a School Library Monitor. For many years I’d spent afternoons when others were on the sports fields browsing through books. They had a complete collection of Railway Magazines, monthly tomes going right back to 1897. This particular role accumulated no special kudos, most boys seeing it a boring labour stuck for hours indoors watching over younger kids, most of whom were probably writing out punishment lines from the encyclopedias.

However, as I was staying on for my last Autumn term in a (vain) attempt to get a scholarship to Oxford (Charterhouse masters only seemed to think Oxford or Cambridge degrees counted), I was also appointed for the term as a sort of consolation prize as a House Monitor. Apart from looking good on my CV, it had no real advantage as far as I was concerned. It required me to maintain discipline at evening homework (‘banco’) sessions and take morning break PE which otherwise Sixth Formers could miss. I had a personal ‘fag’ to clean my study, but as I was a very neat person (then), I had to manufacture things for him to do and was expected to give him a tip of ten shillings for the term, a sum I could ill afford.

I was very conscious that some younger boys would play up any Monitor they thought was vulnerable and I was constantly nervous of being found wanting and therefore, I guess, tended to over-react in the opposite direction. I was taking the ‘banco’ session for the Gownboys ‘underschool’ (13-15 year olds) one evening, when one boy called Nares, a skinny imp, decided to test me out, so I thought, by claiming he’d completed his homework a full half hour before supper and prayers and wanted to read comics or some other worthless reading matter.

I decided to string him along and call his bluff and test his knowledge of French irregular verbs he’d been required to learn. I was a hard taskmaster and wouldn’t let him get away with even one hesitation, and when after three attempts at satisfying me, he expressed some irritation, I awarded him a ‘black mark’ (I forget what they were called but their import was that getting three in one term would earn a prefect beating). I ought to have known that this black mark was his third and that his offence that evening did not warrant such a severe punishment, but I’m ashamed to say when I found out, I was secretly rather pleased with myself. Not only would that send a message to other juniors not to mess with me, but it would satisfy a curiosity I’d nurtured since that day that I’d earned a beating for forgetting my midweek bath and had somehow managed to escape that penalty.

Prefect beatings were frequent and the subject of much banter and even sexual curiosity. Some boys showed evidence of a recent caning in the swimming baths and occasionally some brazen soul would show off his bruises with a certain sense of bravado. Victims were said to have to report before their punishment in their night attire and be inspected by the most junior Monitor to ensure they had not placed any padding or underwear to protect their buttocks underneath their pyjama bottoms. Having escaped such a punishment myself and hearing so many florid tales from those who’d suffered or witnessed such beatings, I was not averse to being the cause of one that I would be required to witness.

The punishment, I discovered, was carried out in a ritual that seemed to be part of a deliberate intent to humiliate. The Monitors marched in and took their places in a line beside one of the long rough dining tables. The Head Monitor stood holding a thick cane in his hand while the junior Monitor wheeled in the miscreant. Nares stumbled in looking pale and apprehensive, as well he might be. I couldn’t look him in the face as I became conscious of the reality of my part in this. He was bent across the table and told to grasp the further edge, then the Head Monitor retreated three or four paces and took a run up, just as if he were bowling in the house cricket team. The blow was applied with considerable force causing the body of the young boy to shudder as the loud retort was heard. I was impressed that no more than a gasp escaped his lips.

I was relieved that no more than four strokes were imparted, the minimum corporal punishment, but in my view the force used was excessive and young Nares had done well not to scream or cry as I’m told some boys did, causing them shame when their humiliation became the subject of rumour and gossip. He was helped up from the table and escorted to the passage and accompanied, limping, to his dormitory to ensure that he was not waylaid by other curious bystanders.

In the end, but not until several years later, such beatings, handed out by prefects bolstered by their own self-importance and lack of sensitivity, were banned. I cringe now to think I was party to such barbarity and campaign against such physical violence in my current role as a children’s rights adviser to an international human rights organisation. Such abuse may thankfully no longer be common here, but in many parts of the world such regular physical violence in homes and schools is still rife.

Earlier that year I’d been one of six of our modern language students who’d enrolled for a three week language course at the Sorbonne University in Paris. At Victoria I discovered there were a thousand of us herded into two special trains and then occupants of a specially chartered channel ferry, a seemingly flat bottomed boat named the ‘Lisieux’ which listed to starboard all the way from Newhaven to Dieppe under a strong easterly gale. Most of us were standing on deck, there being little room left below, taking evasive action when someone on the windward side of us succumbed to sudden sea-sickness. We were garrisoned at a ‘lycee’ near Montparnasse, the main characteristic of which was the awfulness of the meals – tough horsemeat with garlic was the norm leaving me with a lifelong loathing of garlic on any dish.

A Railway Club friend of mine, Martyn Probyn, was similarly dissatisfied and we sated our hunger with chocolate bars from the machines at the Gare du Nord. Martyn and I learned more French there than at the Sorbonne lectures – some vocabulary not so useful in best society, acquired when we mistakenly thought we were allowed to cross the tracks at the throat of the station instead of going back to the main concourse or using the overbridge.

I got into more hot water on our return at Newhaven. Being impecunious, I had little luggage with me, but one of my classmates and fellow students, David Dimbleby, was festooned with presents and asked me, as I was travelling so light, to carry a box for him from the ship to the train. We got separated and I found myself having to explain to an incredulous customs officer that the box I carried did indeed hold a bust of Beethoven, but I knew neither its composition nor value and had mislaid its owner. In the end I was permitted to go through without further challenge or charge as if I’d anything to hide, I’d have concocted a better story. David still owes me one for that.