Outrageous Fortune: Growing Up at Leeds Castle (17 page)

Being in the choir was useful because just before chapel on Sunday, when the rest of the school were in their pews, I was able to listen to the last few tunes of Alan Freeman’s
Pick of the Pops
top-twenty show on the tiny pocket radio which had been in one of my previous Christmas stockings. It was essential to listen quietly, of course, because such behaviour was strictly
verboten
. But the radio’s size allowed it to be quickly stuffed away under my robes when the vicar arrived with Mr. Gervis for the warm-up prayers.

I often wrote to Nanny about my near misses, and she would respond by telling me to take good care of myself and stay out of trouble, which generally wasn’t that hard to do. On the rare occasion that Mr. Gervis did require my presence in his study to rebuke me for a committed transgression, there was no brutality in his administration of the stick.

When at home, during school holidays, the castle way’s operating system returned to its hard-wired dominance, there being no framework to counteract the slings and arrows of outrageous grown-ups who controlled the keyboard. In other words, no one paid any attention to the fact that at St Aubyns I’d become “somebody.” Why would they?

Triumphs on the sports field, such as they were, were witnessed and applauded by a limited audience—the school and the visiting opposition. David, ever the sports fan, graciously took an interest in my cricket adventures, particularly one that occurred on a euphoric sunny day in June 1964. I was opening bowler for the first XI cricket team, and that day was able to achieve what few bowlers do—take the wickets of the entire opposing team with the exception of a run-out. In cricket-speak, nine wickets for twenty-seven runs. We won the match with five minutes left on the clock.

Leaving the field amidst cheers, handclapping, and backslapping galore, the first person to make a beeline for me was the deputy headmaster, Mr. E. A. K. Webber, a wavy-white-haired, walrus-moustached, gravel-voiced old man with a twinkle in his eye and aptitude for tearing his tweed jackets and forgetting to do up his fly. Holding out his hand, a broad smile extending to the many corners of his craggy face, he said, “Congratulations! You’ll never do that again in your entire life!” It was intended as a compliment, of course. But after all the furore had died down, it dawned on me that it could just as easily have been a warning. Such heights are rarely scaled, and seldom matched.

*   *   *

Mr. Gervis wrote in the school magazine of October 1965: “A. J. M. Russell goes to Stowe. His two elder brothers, David and James, were here and we feel sad that there are no more brothers to come. But his mother is godmother to several future boys and we shall, therefore, hope to keep in touch with the family. He was captain of cricket, in the soccer XI and shooting VIII, and played for the rugger XV. He was in the choir until his voice broke and he then carried the Cross. In the band he was silver bugler longer than any boy; nine times in all, eight times in succession. He won the lawn tennis cup, was captain of hockey and a Section Commander.”

After five years of making my way from small fry to the top, it was now time to go back down to the bottom and start the process all over again at Stowe School for boys, crucially without the companionship of my close friends Soames and Steel. Like a large number of St Aubyns pupils at that time, they were going on to Eton.

In a peculiar twist of fate that shed a light not just on the way things were then done in the upper echelons of private education but also on the incomprehensible workings of my family, I was offered a place at Eton two weeks before I sat my Common Entrance exams (the all-important examinations for gaining entrance to a top public school). Because I was captain of cricket I’d been invited by a friend of the headmaster to accompany him up to London to watch the England v. New Zealand Test Match from the comfort of a private box at Lord’s. It was quite a thrill watching the game from such an exalted position. The grown-ups present, mostly men, a couple of ladies, were thoroughly agreeable from the outset.

“How do you do?”

“How do you do?”

“How do you do?”

“How do you do?”

“Hello, how are you?”

“Isn’t it simply glorious?”

“I’d say!”

Everyone drank copious amounts of champagne or red wine from the moment we arrived until teatime. At lunch I was placed between Mr. Gervis and a rotund, jovial man dressed in a three-piece tweed suit, and we discussed cricket and school at some length. On the train back to Brighton, Mr. Gervis informed me that this particular gentleman was a housemaster at Eton and he had offered me a place in his house. What did I think?

I didn’t know what to think. I was unable to fathom that something as important and difficult to come by as a place at the world’s most famous school could be attained by sitting demurely with an unfamiliar bunch of grown-ups watching cricket for five hours, with a one-hour break for lunch. My father had been sent to Stowe by his mother—Eton had indicated it wished to distance itself from the “Russell baby” association—and, as a result, David and I went there too.

In 1965 the difference between going to Eton and going to Stowe was the difference between flying First Class Pan American, and Aeroflot. The one had a well-established (founded in 1440 by King Henry VI) aura of distinction and a high success rate in achieving the goals of its customers. The other was suffering from low self-esteem, diminished public regard, and providing an indeterminate outcome for its clients.

When my father arrived at Stowe in September 1935, the headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh, had already won the twelve-year-old public school an extraordinary reputation. Michael Bevington (head of the Classics Department) writes for the Stowe School Web site: His aim was to produce a modern public school concentrating on the individual, without the unpleasantness of fagging [a system by which younger boys act as servant-cum-dogsbody to older ones] or arcane names then common in other schools. Instead he sought to instil a new ethos enthused with the beauty of Stowe’s unique environment where the best of traditional education would be tempered by liberal learning and every pupil would “know beauty when he sees it all his life” (Roxburgh’s words). Pupils and staff would relate in a civilized and open way, showing confidence and respect based on Christian values. Such was Roxburgh’s success in developing this vision that he was recognized as a formative figure in 20th Century English education, “greater than Arnold” (the nineteenth-century headmaster of Rugby) in Gavin Maxwell’s (the author of
Ring of Bright Water
, among other books, was a Stowe alumnus) words.

Essentially, in a few short years Roxburgh turned Stowe into a contender for inclusion in England’s elite hierarchy of private boarding schools such as Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster, Rugby, and Shrewsbury. But after World War II, which claimed the lives of many old Stoics, the school went into decline. It wasn’t until forty years later that the restoration came, both in education and for the glorious eighteenth-century buildings themselves. The school got its mojo back under Jeremy Nichols (a former Eton housemaster) in the 1990s, and then, expanding and improving as never before, under the current headmaster, Dr. Anthony Wallersteiner.

Stowe has now regained, perhaps surpassed, the old Roxburgh heights, becoming not just a contender but a leading member of the elite group. In the mid-1960s, however, there was clearly no contest between the distinction and expected outcome of going to Eton or going to Stowe.

“Look, Anthony,” Mr. Gervis said kindly. “This is an important and very difficult decision. It needs to be studied carefully, but unfortunately there isn’t much time. Leave it with me, and I’ll find out what your parents think.” I had a feeling this was going to be awkward, and I was soon proved right. Days went by, and I never heard another word. I tried to summon up the nerve to ask Mr. Gervis, or to write to my parents to ask what was going on, but my inhibitions froze all action. I said nothing to anybody about my dilemma.

It’s hard to fathom how—having displayed over five years some healthy determination both on the sports field and in the classroom—I could have left unanswered the question of the Eton offer. I think what lay behind the confluence of silence might have been associated with my father having gone to Stowe after being turned down by Eton, and what was good for him must be good for me. No further discussion needed. But did he ask Mr. Gervis, a kind man and superb headmaster, not to discuss the affair with me as the case was most assuredly closed? Carrying my reserve to optimum negative levels, I felt unable to confront Mr. Gervis and did not write a letter home about it. What I did do was stay a long time inside my shell, feeling outraged that the principals had failed to involve me in their deliberations.

I will never know what benefits, if any, going to Eton might have given me. If, however, there was one school that might have been able to combat the effects of the castle way once and for all, Eton could well have been the place. Its ancient rules and harsh discipline, not to mention high academic requirements and reams of boys from backgrounds equally, if not vastly more, privileged, than mine, might have been the medicine I least wanted but most needed. Perhaps foolishly, perhaps selfishly, my father must have thought otherwise.

11.

R
ECORD
R
OUNDABOUT

During the period when St Aubyns was beginning, valiantly and moderately successfully, to conduct my education, my burgeoning love of music and its hold on my psyche led to significant new events on the home front. Chief amongst them was a second barnstorming of the grown-ups’ tea citadel, as well as the development of a profound new connection, close to Egerton Terrace, called Record Roundabout, where I made, and almost lost, a new best friend.

I was not meant to be like this. I was not, by nature, inclined to cause a rumpus: I did not stir the pot, tie Nanny’s shoelaces together, go out of my way to frighten my mother’s poodle or defy castle way mores. I was eight and a half years old and had just completed my second, the winter term, at St Aubyns, during which we had all played a lot of football and kept up the now familiar tight schedule of lessons, meals, prep, and bed. A film was shown in the gym most Saturday and Sunday evenings, which was very good news. I could have done without the less than stellar comedies by the popular actor Norman Wisdom, but the World War II tales of heroics
Reach for the Sky
and
The Dam Busters
appealed to my advanced patriotic sensibilities. There had been the odd encounter with intimidation in far-flung windy corridors, but generally the speeding-cricket-ball-fallback excuse worked well, and the eleven weeks had sailed smoothly by.

Now, almost eleven months after my introduction to the full-blown tea ceremony, in which Lady Huntley, Guysy-Wee, and I had made toast as if our lives depended on it and I had been invited to Nassau, I was, once more, preparing to enter the lion’s den. This time I was armed not with my trusty “Glute” but with a copy of “Only the Lonely,” a pop song of breathtaking sweep and grandeur sung by an American called Roy Orbison, who had to have the most beautiful pop-singing voice ever. I had not received a formal invitation, so I considered my plan to be a bold one, akin to storming the beaches armed with a 45 rpm disc.

“Look sharp,” Nanny said. “If you’re going to go, it’s five minutes past five.”

Was my uninvited appearance at tea a gesture of defiance or my first real attempt at self-expression? All I knew was that I was fixated on a high-level meeting with both the grandees in the drawing room and the highly polished mahogany radiogram perched in the far corner, next to the Louis XV desk and opposite the Chinese screen. Entering through the double doors, I received the customary welcome of polite indifference and not the looks of surprise I had anticipated. I let this minor affront go, not wishing to stall my momentum.

“Hello, darling, how nice of you to pay us a visit,” my mother said.

“Darling, come and give me a kiss,” Granny said, “and have a piece of cake.”

I crossed the room for kisses, pleased that I had remembered to wear my St Aubyns long grey flannel trousers, which at least made me feel less of a chump around the grown-ups. The drawing room was as warm and toasty as before, log fire crackling and burning, and guests, court, and family dotted around the room with subtly orchestrated informality.

“What is that you have with you, darling?” Granny asked as I munched on chocolate cake with as much decorum as I could muster.

“It is the best new record, Granny, and I want to play it for you, if I may.”

I spotted the Duchess of Roxburghe looking at me from the sofa as if I had just let one go, and even Morg, sitting as usual on Granny’s right, wore a quizzical expression. My mother appeared intrigued by the situation, as did Johnny G and Guysy-Wee. Lady Huntley, Woody, Bottle, and my father remained neutral but cast furtive glances about the room, while the Wiltons stayed stolidly aloof, he seemingly asleep. Granny, though, was thankfully alert to the needs of the moment and said without hesitation, “Let’s hear it, darling. I don’t know anything about this Mr. Orbison, but if you say he’s good I’m sure he’s simply marvellous.”

The assembled company cleared their throats and focused their attention upon me as I made my way over to the radiogram, all the while suppressing an urge to turn tail and run. Fortunately my mother had previously shown me, when no one was around, how to operate the machine (playing Perry Como tunes endlessly), so at least I knew what to do. I turned the player on with one of the big buttons on the front and opened the lid. I placed Roy on the upright middle prong and brought the lever over to rest on top. I moved the play switch to the right and waited for the clicks. By now the drawing room had been silent for a minute. One click, two, down went the disc, over came the arm, down went the needle; first, a soft scratchy sound and then—“Dum-dum-dum-dummy-doo-waa”—we were off; intimate back-up singers, gentle beat, tinkling piano, and lastly, Roy’s startlingly pure voice: “Only the lonely…” I stood back from the record player to better appreciate the music and watch the reaction. My mother and Johnny G were clearly enjoying the tune, in fact Johnny G gave me the impression he was quite familiar with it already. He tapped his feet and twirled one of the sleeves of the navy cashmere sweater which was draped over his shoulders and loosely tied in well-established
beau monde
style. The rest of the audience looked as though they were sitting in a dentist’s waiting room, which I found discouraging as the tune was only halfway through. I caught Morg’s eye, and he was kind enough to wink, which helped.