Cherry (5 page)

For Laddie the anxieties of the playground were exacerbated by his short sight, and his discomfiture at not being able to see fuelled his innate shyness and nervous disposition. But the Grange wasn’t too bad: Hussey, still the headmaster, was popular with the boys. They called him Old Buzz. After classes they collected worms from the dark laurel boscage at the end of the playing field, and when it was warm high-collared masters marched them purposefully down to the harbour to bathe in the bitter English Channel. In July 1896 Laddie wrote home:

Dear Mother,

Could you send me a new toothbrush as the one I have now has a lot of the brisels coming out. I have just been sitting out in the pavilion.

It is only two weeks from the holidays.

I am looking forward to the time when we wake up in the morning and find that we are going home.

I am your very loving son

Apsley.

No doubt his mother found time to send the toothbrush.

For most of Laddie’s childhood Evelyn was either pregnant, or nursing, or both. Margaret, to be known as Peggy, made her appearance on 21 September 1896, when her brother was ten. He was now outnumbered four to one, and left alone in the school holidays to nurse his finches by the kitchen range, build crow’s-nests in the trees and ride his pony. In the summer he corralled as many of the male staff as he could for games of cricket. Tom Hobbs, the coachman’s son, was a mainstay of the team, and his niece recounts an episode that entered the lore of her own family:

The young master did not much like being bowled or caught out, and once in a fit of temper threw a ball which hit the coachman’s daughter on the head. For his bad-tempered action he was rebuked by Mrs Hobbs who had witnessed the outburst, the more so because he denied the act and tried to frame the footman. ‘Fie, Fie, Master Apsley!’ Mother said. ‘That is not the way for a gentleman to behave.’

That year, after term ended in December Laddie went on holiday to Devonshire with his father while his mother was with her family in Bedford. They took the train, and stayed at the Torbay Hotel on the seafront at Torquay. ‘Dear Mother,’ Laddie wrote two days after their arrival, Father and I went to church this morning and after church we went to try and get ourselves warm but it came on to rain so we had to retreat to the hotel. You can’t imagine how nice it is here especially when it does not rain and how I am enjoying myself. There was a collier in yesterday at least it has been in for a good time I should think as it was here when we came unloading the coal, it went out this morning early, we have got a very nice room facing the sea and not too big and not too small just ripping. Father and I went for a walk yesterday afternoon down by a place called Daddy’s Hole, it was very nice and so pretty. I am going to try if we get some decent weather to get some shells for my collection. I hope the baby is all right and kicking I shall expect to have some very pretty music from her when I come back to Lamer. It was an awfully nice journey down here, and having our dinner in the train . . . mind you tell the baby when I come to Lamer to celebrate my arrival with a tune. With much love to all I am your very loving son Apsley.

In June 1897 Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was celebrated from Zanzibar to Simla. The British Empire covered a quarter of the earth’s land surface, Lord Salisbury was back at the helm of the nation, and there were still plenty of reasons for landowners to celebrate. The forebodings of Kipling, the adult Laddie’s favourite author (‘Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh, and Tyre!’), were hardly representative of the national mood. In Wheathampstead the Jubilee was marked by a feast in Parson’s Field next to the rectory lawn. The servants were given the day off. Dressed in their best clothes, they gathered for freckled cylinders of tongue, beer and rolled jam puddings. In the regrettable absence of the monarch herself, Evelyn glided between the tables doling out gifts while the village band played and the children raced donkeys. But Laddie was imprisoned at Folkestone. At the end of May he had written to his parents:

Lots of boys are going up to the Jubilee, they are going up one day before and coming back one day after. I do not no what Mr Hussey is going to do about it but I think very likely we shall have 2 or 3 days holidays. My wrist is nearly all right we are having very changeable weather here. But it is not cold. I hope you are quite all right. The map we had on past Sunday was Spain and Portugal we have got to finish it today.

I am your very loving son

Apsley.

In the end they had boiled mutton and tapioca pudding and walked to the end of the road to watch the Jubilee bonfires.

In the summer of 1899, Laddie left the Grange for the last time. There was nothing to regret as he leant out of the train window and watched the columns of steam dissolve above Radnor Park station. He rather suspected that there might be worse to come at his next school, and he was right; but now he had the summer to enjoy at Lamer where, as ever, little had changed. The River Lea was still teeming with trout and crayfish, and his cricket pads were still in the back hall. He knew very little about the enormous world beyond the trouty river and the mighty chestnuts. It was to be a savage dawning.

That September Apsley submitted to his first weeks at Winchester College, a procedure likened by one old boy to the initiation rites of the Australian Aboriginal. Founded in 1382, Winchester was one of the top three public schools in Britain. The year Apsley was admitted, it came first in the league table of Higher Certificate passes, beating Rugby and Eton into joint second place. It was famed for producing an intellectual élite, and at Oxford and Cambridge, Wykehamists
⁵
were noted for their ambition, singlemindedness and self-reliance. The General chose the school in the touching belief that it was not like Harrow, which he had hated so intensely. The trunk and wooden playbox were handed over to the station-master and despatched to school in the guard’s van. Shortly afterwards a white-faced Apsley was enrolled as a commoner at Culver House, nicknamed ‘Kenny’s’ after the housemaster, Theodore Kensington. During the first two weeks of that term – ‘Short Half ’, in Winchester parlance – new pupils were indoctrinated into school culture under the tutelage of an older boy called a ‘Father’, and, after this fortnight was up, fagging began.

Kenny’s was a red-brick, flat-fronted Victorian building in a quiet street to the west of the ancient part of the school. Inside, forty boys (eight were admitted each year) slept in a bare-floored, practically unheated dormitory. Every morning at 6.15 they were obliged to jump into a metal tub full of cold water, one after the other. There was so little privacy that the lavatories did not have doors. The boys dressed like miniature men, in stiff collars, ties and buttoned-up jackets, and at seven in the morning, after a spartan breakfast, they sat down to Morning Lines and Henry’s Latin Primer in its mulberry cloth binding, each boy working in a cubicle in the ground-floor hall. They were all hungry all the time, and constipation was compulsory, as John Betjeman wrote later of his own public school.

The rigid respect for tradition at Winchester extended to a private tribal language which each boy had to learn. The canings doled out by prefects were called
tundings
, the cubicles were
toys
and boys were not allowed to use the word ‘think’ until they had been at the school for two years. Arnold Toynbee, later a famed historian and sage, was a prize-winning scholar close behind Apsley. (As a scholarship boy he lived in the fourteenth-century College buildings, not in one of the boarding houses.) ‘For five years at Winchester,’ Toynbee was to recall, ‘I . . . tasted what life had been like for Primitive Man. One found oneself suddenly plunged into a world of arbitrary prohibitions and commandments (chiefly prohibitions).’ A boy was not allowed to wear brown boots until his third year, Christian names were outlawed, and you had to refer to your parents as ‘Mater’ and ‘Pater’. It was a gigantic exercise in control, which perhaps worked for confident boys. But it didn’t do much for those of a more subtle plumage, especially if they had short sight.

The curriculum was embedded in the classical tradition, though it had been reformed, to a limited degree, in the decade before Apsley arrived. Mathematics, science and modern languages had been introduced, though the extent to which these subjects were taken seriously varied: French and German were taught by the maths masters. The thirteen-year-old Apsley embarked on a staple course of Latin, maths, English, history, divinity and some science. ‘Except in the Army Class,’ wrote Toynbee, ‘education in Winchester was nine-tenths classical. The reverse side of the excellence of the teaching of Latin and Greek was that other subjects were starved.’ In the mental world of Winchester, Toynbee went on, ‘we were hardly aware that science and technology were on the march; that they had joined hands with each other; and that mathematics had stooped to lend efficacious services to them both’. Apsley’s attitude to science on his Antarctic expedition six years after he left school reveals the absence of any real education outside the humanities. He displayed the frenzied enthusiasm of the convert, almost giving his life for a little knowledge of the life cycle of the Emperor penguin.

Games were more than important; they were a cult. The most prestigious sports were cricket and a peculiar form of either six- or fifteena-side football. While Apsley was at Winchester one Richard Stafford Cripps starred in the Houses VI football team. He was to come within inches of 10 Downing Street.
⁶
The boys also went swimming under the lime trees at Gunner’s Hole, a hundred-yard-long stretch of the River Itchen dredged of mud, took two long runs each week, and endured regular sessions in the gym. A boy called George Mallory was a star in this last department. He was a year behind Apsley and, as a mathematical scholar, a member of the Parnassian élite of Collegemen. But not all Apsley’s peers came off the top shelf. The future Socialist MP and lawyer D. N. Pritt was the son of a Harlesden metal merchant. (‘Under the system then still prevailing,’ Pritt remembered, ‘some 95 per cent of my work consisted of translating Latin and Greek into English, and English into those languages, in prose and in verse.’)

The Boer War broke out during Apsley’s first term at Winchester. Down at the bottom of Africa the Dutch settlers of the two Boer republics and their British neighbours in Cape Colony and Natal were still locked in bitter dispute, twenty years after the General buried his men on the plains of the Transvaal. In the second week of October 1899 the pent-up bitterness and violence exploded into full-scale war. The Boers were challenging British hegemony, and millions of imperial hearts quickened. The mood among the British was confident: few had any doubts about their right to dominate southern Africa or indeed anywhere else. Cecil Rhodes, colonial statesman, financier and until recently Prime Minister of Cape Colony, still expressed the hope that the British might win the United States back for the Empire. The school was gripped with a febrile elation that put a stop to the rather wearisome talk of the new century. Patriotic fervour swept through the cloisters, masters pored over the morning newspapers and the school magazine – the
Wykehamist
– carried a proud list of alumni on their way to the front. Apsley had been weaned on stories exalting the defence of the Empire, and his experience at Winchester endorsed his father’s attitudes. The ethos of the public schools at the end of the nineteenth century was imbued with the ideals of imperial glory, a ruling class and chivalry. The boys were indoctrinated with noble notions of honour, patriotism and leadership, so when a war came along they were gasping for it: war was the authenticating forge of nationhood. For the whole of that academic year, the ‘School News’ section in the
Wykehamist
teemed with war data – including a report of an Old Wykehamist dinner held in Pretoria during a pause in the fighting – and captains on leave hurried back to their alma mater to address boys longing to march off to wars of their own. The honour of the school and the glory of war were tightly entwined, and tangled in with it was an idealisation of death stoked by the Greek tragedians. Even as the Mentioned-in-Despatches lists melted into obituaries and some boys vanished from school to reappear wearing black armbands, there was still a sense that the pupils filing into the chapel lamented their ill luck at being born too late.

As for the reality of the war – the concentration camps where Boers were starved, the living skeletons of ‘natives’ crawling across the veldt by the hundred, the disease that killed thousands of proud young officers, the swooning military incompetence – of these things, the boys heard nothing.

On 22 January 1901 Queen Victoria died at Osborne, the royal residence on the Isle of Wight. She was eighty-one, and had been on the throne for sixty-three years. Two days later the entire school was summoned to the flint-faced Chamber Court. There the boys were marshalled into order and marched, in the rain, to Winchester Guildhall, where they listened to the formal announcement of the accession of Edward VII being read from the steps.

Wars and royal deaths notwithstanding, the school year unfurled in a succession of unchanging internal rituals interspersed with the meetings of a bewildering variety of clubs, the most prestigious of which was the Debating Society. Apsley was not one of the young bloods who stood up and declaimed in their best Ciceronian English about the moral necessity of war or the benefits of free trade, nor did he hold office in the Golf Club, the Shakespeare Society or the Orchestral Society. His school record was unblemished by achievement either in the classroom or on the sports field. He showed no particular gift for turning Burke’s speeches into Greek, and there were no early glimmerings of the limpid prose that characterised his mature writing. He won no prizes and did not bat for the 1st XI. Throughout his Winchester career he was a boy in the background, peeping shyly round a flint pillar or awkwardly relacing his football boots on a spongy touchline. It was impossible to foresee, in this introverted boy, the team player who would blossom in the Antarctic a decade later.