Shooting History: A Personal Journey - Jon Snow

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Even if not sitting there, the royal bottoms must by now be sitting on some of the cushions that I knew and loved so well.

      Soon the Queen was gone, and I was on the train back to Winchester. Mr Salway treated me briefly like a conquering hero. At breakfast the next day I was allowed to sit next to his wife Lorna, a warm and affectionate woman who let me eat her fresh toast and marmalade instead of the usual soggy white bread and spread. But very soon normal sadistic services were resumed by her husband. This was, after all, term time.

      Yet once the holidays dawned and the ‘ordinary” boys went home it would be all smiles, and we sixteen who constituted the choir were never tyrannised or beaten. We were cast loose upon the town to spin out our tiny five-shilling budgets. We had absolute freedom in those days, and gained absolute sympathy too. We were spoilt rotten, people in both school and town taking pity upon us for our enforced separation from our families as we lingered on to service Christmas, Easter, Ascension and the rest. These days sowed a love of music and of the cathedral, and if not of religion, certainly of peace and contemplation in a great building. But they were also central to the destruction of our family lives. Holidays amounted to only four or five weeks a year for the five years of my time at Winchester. My father was so rarely encountered, I called him ‘sir’ by mistake.

      From this familial wreckage emerged a confident, independent child of thirteen – primed for adolescence, or so I was indirectly told. For Humphrey Salway’s parting shot was an obscure account of the ‘facts of life’. These centred on the ‘golden seed’, which at some point I was going to wake up and find in my bed. Beyond rust spots inflicted by the mattress springs beneath, though I searched, I grew up minus ‘golden seed’. Indeed, I left the choir school with my voice still unbroken.

      The letter to my father from Number Ten Downing Street arrived at Ardingly just before I returned there from my last day at Pilgrim’s: ‘The Queen has been graciously pleased to appoint you Bishop Suffragan of Whitby.’ The signature at the bottom read ‘Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister’. The new Archbishop of York, in whose domain my father’s territory lay, was to be his friend Donald Coggan. All my father’s ducks were in a row, and the longed-for preferment had come on the very eve of his retirement from Ardingly. The Church, political, militant, ecclesiastical and old-boy network, had done its stuff, and we were all thrilled. We now had a new status in life, and after Ardingly a grand new home in darkest North Yorkshire.

      The Old Rectory in South Kilvington, with its own little Saxon church in the garden, was as near paradise as the Brontës would have dared imagine. My new bedroom looked south and west over the garden. I was not to pass much time there, but I spent enough in that first summer to talk hungrily with the remarkable octogenarian who tended the garden. Joe Clarke had only ever left Kilvington once in his life, and that was to go to Egypt in the First World War to dig pit latrines for victory. Joe was conscripted into the First City of London Sanitary Corps. Wherever Allied man had to do his duty, Joe was there to facilitate the needs of the lower bowel. He served for five years. ‘I tell you, master Jon, I had to give up on digging the waste to bury the dead, there was that many.’ Joe, who had dug his way through Europe after Egypt, burying the war dead, now dug his way through the Old Rectory’s rhododendrons. The carnage of the Great War was fifty years before, but Joe’s memories were as vivid as if it were yesterday.

      I wanted nothing more than to garden and learn with Joe, but I had a music exhibition to St Edward’s, a minor fee-paying school in Oxford. The headmaster, Frank Fisher, was the son of yet another prelate, Geoffrey, Archbishop of Canterbury. He took pity on my father’s high-born impecuniousness and secured me an ill-deserved cut in fees in the form of a choral exhibition. So on the one hand here was Joe giving me the side of war from the ranks, of which my family knew nothing, while through my father I was able to observe the insidious methods of the upper classes in securing hegemony in matters military, educational, ecclesiastical, even episcopal.

      Three Bishops were ‘done’ on the day my father was consecrated in York Minster, and a grand affair it was. Eight feet tall in his mitre, my father was every inch a Bishop. The Whitby nuns had toiled through the nights to spin and embroider his voluminous cope. The silversmiths had beaten his pectoral cross and crosier out of some dead Bishop’s leftover silverware. Fully adorned, my father was some spectacle; and the minster bounced with sound and colour.

      It was as an innocent abroad that I arrived at St Edward’s, a seriously Victorian environment. The first three weeks were spent mugging up for an initiation test, essentially a compendium of names and concepts that were peculiar to the school: ‘chaggers’ for changing rooms, ‘beaks’ for masters, ‘boguls’ for bicycles, and some ludicrous piece of ironwork on the chapel roof was ‘the boot scraper’. Sixteen years after the Second World War, here was an institution still ordered around the ball and the gun. Games were everything, and when we weren’t playing rugby, we were square-bashing in full uniform on the parade ground.

      I didn’t mind playing games, although my gangling form meant that my brain seemed to be too far from the extremity of my limbs. Messages as to when to kick the ball failed to connect adequately with the foot in question. In short, my hand–eye co-ordination was abominable. Watching games left me both physically and mentally cold. Yet the pseudo-military hierarchy of the place depended on hero-worshipping those who excelled in games. Because I failed to watch, or worse failed to concentrate when I was watching, I failed hopelessly at the hero-worshipping. When matches were being played I preferred to hide in the art room and paint, or strum on the piano in a practice room.

      One day after a rugby match, still only fourteen years old, I returned to the day room, where perhaps twenty ‘horseboxes’ were arranged around the walls. The ‘horsebox’ was your own personal space – a small contained area with a seat, a desk, shelves, and somewhere to stick up pictures of Mummy, Daddy and the dog. On this particular day I made towards my horsebox, only to find that it was completely naked – the curtain, the photos, books, cushions, possessions, all gone. Suddenly I was jumped on from behind by half a dozen of the other horsebox-dwellers. Grabbed by the hair, I was shoved into the large wastebin in the corner. In the bin already were Mummy, Daddy and the dog, all ripped to shreds, while Quink ink and the Blanco used for greening our military webbing had been smeared on what remained of my precious possessions.

      The bullying was institutionalised. The housemaster, a shy, dysfunctional bachelor, lived next door to our day room, and must surely have heard all the noise. Sexual activity between the boys was also commonplace. Boys were talked about as sexual objects. Blond, blue-eyed newcomers – as I had been – were trouble from the outset, importuned by bigger boys for mutual masturbation. I remember how a prefect in the neighbouring boarding house, who was building a canoe in the basement, lured me down to see it. Before I realised it, he had his hand down my trousers, and demanded mine down his. Fagging, or acting as unpaid servant, was almost as exploitative as the sex. I fagged for a diminutive seventeen-year-old prefect who demanded that the insteps of his shoes be polished so they would glisten when he knelt for communion. It was a rocky and wretched introduction to adolescence, so far from Nanny and the backlit fields of stooks that I still dreamt of from childhood. Yet it also made me political, and made me yearn, if only subconsciously, for change, and later to campaign for it. Some of us went under. I remember one boy called Prythurch – I never knew his first name – who was teased mercilessly for his pink National Health spectacles. One term he simply never came back.

      Academically, I was a failure. In a sense, the teaching mirrored the sport. If the school decided you were bright, you secured the best teachers, and were pushed. If you were deemed ‘thick’, you got either the rugby coaches who had to fulfil their teaching quota, or the straightforwardly unemployable. One of these was Stan Tackley. Stan was perhaps the most boring and uninterested teacher of Latin, English and French of his generation, and I had him for all three subjects. He taught with an elderly, flatulent golden Labrador at his feet.

      My year with Stan and his dog Brandy delivered me bottom in Latin, bottom in English, and bottom in French. I was in the bottom fifth form, 5f; my brother Nick, two years my junior, was already ahead of me in 5b. Things were looking bad, and my father took me into his study when I returned home. ‘Sonny,’ he said, causing me to wonder if he used the word because he couldn’t tell which of us was which, as

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