LITMIR.BIZ

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with wonderfully-named villages – Drakes Broughton, Elmley Castle, Flyford Flavell, White Ladies Aston and Wyre Piddle among them. Stonebow House stood imposingly on a corner from which a lane led up to the village of Peopleton, surrounded by paddocks and orchards filled with plum and apple trees. Our grounds ran down to a brook lined with elms, and in summer the air was heavy with pollen: Mother complained it made her perpetually drowsy. By the standards of the area, Stonebow was not an especially grand house – in the heart of the village was a Georgian mansion which, local legend had it, had once been the home of Barbara Cartland’s mother.

      Father still wore his horrible brass-buttoned blazers, but following the move his voice seemed to undergo a noticeable change. His accent was posher than it had been previously, and the wardroom humour was more evident. Because he now had a much longer journey to and from work, during the holidays when we were at home we saw less of him – he left for the office before we had breakfasted, and when he returned in the evening poured himself a pink gin and retired to his wood-panelled study with the newspaper.

      For a couple of years we lived the life of an ersatz country family. My sister Jenny had a succession of ponies, there was a bad-tempered donkey in one of the paddocks, and dogs and cats in the house. The local hunt would meet occasionally outside our house, and both Mother and Jenny rode to hounds. The moment I passed my driving test most weekends were spent towing a horse trailer around for my sister to compete at some gymkhana or other. For a while Dad even joined an organisation called the Country Landowners’ Association, and sometimes, to our utter embarrassment, wore a monocle or plus fours. Once or twice he even borrowed an enormous horse and turned out at a meet of the hunt. He was not a natural horseman.

      ‘Knowing your place’ was a vital component of life in the fifties and sixties, and while institutions like Malvern offered the opportunity to jump a few steps in the gradations of class, the school itself was run as a rigorous hierarchy. At the top were the tailcoated school prefects, and below them the house prefects, whose authority extended only over the sixty or so boys in their house. Below them in each house were the ‘inferiors’, the longest-serving of whom rejoiced in the title of ‘Senior Inferior’, or ‘SI’. This was a post with no privileges whatsoever, but which had, I felt, a certain cachet. On the two occasions I was promoted to house prefect I never made it to the end of term without being ‘de-pre’d’ for some offence or other – usually to do with smoking, drinking or meeting girls illicitly – and returned to the ranks of the inferiors. At the bottom of the heap were the ‘fags’, who would spend most of their first year slaving for their fag-master house prefect.

      There was no job too demeaning for a fag to be given. They were expected to keep their fag-master’s study tidy, to spit-and-polish his shoes and brush his coat, to make him toast during the break between morning lessons, to blanco the belt and shine the brass fastenings he wore when playing soldiers on Wednesday afternoons. On winter mornings there was the ever-present risk of being sent to the freezing lavatory block with orders to warm up a seat before your boss sat down to empty his bowels.

      In addition to this drudgery, all junior boys lived in terror of the shout down the corridor of the single word ‘Fag!’ This was the equivalent of shouting ‘Taxi!’ on a London street, and the moment it was heard every junior boy in the house would drop whatever he was doing and tear down the corridor in a flailing mass of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old arms and elbows, in a desperate attempt not to be the last outside the prefects’ common room. The last arrival was given whatever task was at hand – often to run over to one of the other houses, perhaps half a mile away, carrying a note, usually about some upcoming interhouse sports match. A friend who had been given a note to deliver to a named prefect in another house once opened it. It read, in its entirety, ‘Wait five minutes, and then send a note back with this fag.’

      After two years of this skivvying you escaped fagging and won the right – assuming you could ever get to the kettle – to make yourself a cup of tea or coffee in the house. By now, aged fifteen, the tricky subject of girls was beginning to raise its head. Contrary to many stories about these institutions, the school was not a hotbed of sodomy. After dark, every house thrummed to the rhythm of the solitary vice, but the obscure objects of our desire tended to be pupils attending one of the six girls’ schools in the area.

      There was no universally shared pin-up, but in the minds of a very large proportion of the school there was a small shrine devoted to Amanda Stobbs, the daughter of the housemaster of Number Nine house. Like most of the nineteenth-century public schools Malvern had a Latin anthem, sung at the beginning and end of term by the entire complement of six hundred teenage boys. I sometimes wondered whether, in the Holy of Holies of her bedroom, she could hear all those ignorantly lustful male voices belting out the special emphasis of the chorus:

       Age frater, iuxta, fratrem.

       Celebremus Almam Matrem.

      And then the crashing final lines:

       Quae nos ornat, haec ornanda

       Quae nos amat, ad AMANDA.

      The truth was that if she, or any of the other local beauties, had given any one of us the slightest indication of interest we would probably have run a mile: the sexual revolution of the 1960s took many years to creep into our benighted corridors.

      I had learned the facts of life with no thanks to my father or mother. The closest my father ever got to explaining anything like that was his warning when I was well into my teens and about to spend the summer staying with a French family on the Île de Ré that ‘They’re different to us, you know. If you spend the evening on the beach with a girl, they’ll assume the worst.’ I could scarcely contain my eagerness to cross the Channel. As for Malvern’s contribution to sex education, the headmaster, a short, bald man known as ‘the Dome’, gathered the eighteen-year-old boys who were moving on to work or university and warned us that if we found ourselves in an intimate situation with a girl we should be very careful, because females found it ‘much harder to stop’ than we would. Eighteen was a bit late for a sex talk, and his caution made girls even more mysteriously attractive.

      The Church of England had by then played an invaluable role in educating us about sex. The assistant chaplain, a former padre in the Royal Navy who spoke in a strange elongated drawl, had one day and with no warning broken off from exegesis of the Book of Zechariah to warn us that ‘If you get a boyyyyllll the size of a pea on your penis, you have ghonnoray-ah. If it is the size of a kidney beeeean, you have syphilis.’

      More comforting was the sermon given by a visiting Canon of Coventry Cathedral. The cathedral had been flattened by German bombs during the war, and recently rebuilt to a visionary design by Basil Spence. The clergy liked to think that their pastoral and theological work was just as modern in idiom, and when the time came for the visiting Canon’s sermon he ascended the chancel steps in the school chapel and, instead of going to the pulpit or lectern, stood in plain view and opened his mouth. Already, six hundred boys had consigned the forthcoming fifteen minutes to the bottomless chasm wherein lay the endless hours spent listening to irrelevancies, freezing on sports pitches or attempting to keep step on some fatuous marching exercise.

      ‘Now boys,’ began the Canon, ‘I don’t know what you’ve been told about …’ he paused for moment ‘… masturbation.’ The rustling, fidgeting and whispering stopped at once. Suddenly, you could hear a pin drop.

      We had probably been told we would grow out of it, he said. Well, he could tell us from personal experience that we would not. And secondly, and most importantly, there was nothing to be ashamed of – masturbation was a gift from God, and there to be enjoyed. We looked at each other in delighted astonishment. (Not so either the masters attending the service, nor the forty or fifty parents waiting to take their sons out to Sunday lunch. The Dome spent the rest of the morning receiving one after another of them in his study, as they complained that this was not the sort of filth for which they paid the school’s hefty fees.)

      Chapel attendance was compulsory every day, but of all the many sermons delivered during my five years at the school, this was the only one of which I have the slightest recollection. After lights out that night the familiar rustlings

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