To the Chapel
I must have been twelve when I slept with the platypus for the first time – a social misfit and a freak of nature sharing a bed. One of us fell into a linguistically anomalous category: a mammal that lays eggs. The other fell into a socially anomalous category: a sensitive, pubescent boy financially and physically unsuited to the rough and tumble of a male only English Public boarding school. We made good bedfellows.
I didn’t see the school buildings for the first week. My parents and I arrived in fog. Coming down the drive to the gloom of the Victorian pile was a bit like birth, birth into an institution which would prepare me for life, give me an opportunity to form life-long relationships and provide me access to doors closed to those who didn’t wear the same school tie. Just parking the car marked us out as misfits. The Austin amongst the Bentleys. The audacity of the unwashed to mix with the perfumed. Largesse had brought me here. A bursary handed out to the gifted but impoverished to provide hoi polloi exposure to the privileged. A vision as to what life was like on the other side of the tracks. Beyond the car park the mismatch continued. There was a choice of two jackets as a uniform and sixth sense had prompted my Mother to select the one worn by only one other boy out of the intake of a hundred defied belief but then my parents stood out too – isolated at the fringes of the welcome tea, differentiated not just by the cheap clothes but also, it seemed, by their very genes. Parents leave and the new boys are further stratified into their houses. Somehow the machine selects the athletic to promote the fortunes of Bronton, Middlemiss gets the hard specimens, Otter the scholars and Cotleigh – the only house outside the main building – the unusual specimens, boys who somehow don’t fit called, as I find out that evening, The Lepers.
Tears in the dormitory that night, some kids so upset that cocoa with the Matron in her quarters seemed the only comfort. Fewer tears from me so no such consolation. I was to have cocoa later but with a different host.
Cotleigh was in the gate house, a mile away up that birth-canal of a fog-bound drive. A large gate house having an after-thought of a dowager house added to it about a century later, subsequently used for housing the country’s largest collection of stuffed birds after the dowager had shuffled off her coil. Every bird that had ever landed in the British Isles and in one glass case, on its own, a strange companion to so many birds, an ectopic, the stuffed platypus.
This venerable institution, founded in 1315 by tutor-monks had, it seemed, one lesson to impart: You get shat on by those above, and you in your turn heap excrement on those beneath. The function of society is to help you understand your place in this mire-passing structure. The top strata appeared the next morning with boys chosen as personal fags. Scope for rewarding favours or slights cascading down the school generations. After the boys with pedigree had gone the pretty boys went next. Plenty of these in the leper colony and plenty of takers too. Then the dregs, new boys assigned to fag for whole common rooms. Slavery with multiple masters, each determined to outdo his peer to show how hard he was and how much he deserved to move up a strata in the excrement shovelling heap. Only prefects were allowed a cane. Be-gowned man-boys so far up into the heavens that they were barely seen by the likes of us. So our fag-masters were not allowed to cane, not allowed to mark a face but a hockey stick yields a useful amount of corporal punishment when applied to back, buttocks and thighs and a boy could always be sentenced to be a standard lamp for an evening or two with the fear of cleaning out the latrines with a toothbrush if the lamp dropped before evening prayers.
I forget how long it took Ralph, Jack and Piggy to become brutes on Golding’s island but it took us less than a week. By the time the fog had lifted child milksops had accepted the layered-excrement-heap as the rightful structure in the world and sought to define which layer they were on and who, if any, were below. Nothing in nature can challenge the cruelty that man can show to man and child to child. By night the tortured became the torturers, picking on any deviation from the norm as an armour-chink to be levered painstakingly open so that knives could be thrust in. If the variation in physical characteristics did not provide enough scope for layering the structure – if there were not enough fat boys, thin boys, boys not well enough hung to prance with pride in the showers, boys with big ears, thick lips, or dark-skin then the House had ways of delineating them. Before School I had thought cock-fights involved poultry. Nights in the dorm with rings formed by the older boys and two naked new-boys grappling for each other’s privates educated me. Trials for the house foals rugby team sorted out the rest of the layers and still I found myself at the bottom of the heap. Night time became a Hell, excrement left under the pillow and for the misfit not fitting into the pile a stuffed platypus under the sheets.
It seemed that to be a school master here you had to sign up for partial blindness. An ability to sport blinkers to hide the brutality of the adolescents and children to each other. Blindness to the tears – only the Matron, mother to two hundred, was allowed to see the tears, hear the stumbled tales and then advise to take it on one cheek and turn the other. The school masters had their own heap to concentrate on, hoods and gowns defining Cantab and Oxon able to squat on Redbrick, Redbrick able to squat on Plate Glass and all of it able to look down on Atkinson.
Atkinson taught Maths, a subject with which I had demonstrated a rudimentary ability during the entrance exams, enough ability to get me into the ‘A’ set. Ten boys selected to fast track to ‘O’ level in their second year and then ‘A’ level in the next so that something more exotic could occupy them for the sixth form terms. Atkinson didn’t fit. He didn’t play rugby or cricket. He didn’t run. He didn’t even show a passion for his subject – turning the handle of the mathematics teaching sausage machine competently enough but without passion. Passion, it seemed, was reserved for music, but passion did not go with ability, his playing of the French horn workmanlike at best and so his performance was limited to filling in at the school band – providing some weight at the back. That and the occasional playing of the chapel organ and of course the Gramophone Club.
It seems to me now that every system has a sump. Somewhere for the dregs to drain to, a cess-pit at the bottom of society, somewhere where the crap gathers when it can fall no more. “Give me your tired, your poor…. Send your tempest-tossed” - to the Gramophone Club.
Thursday afternoons would provide two hours of respite, of safety plied with tea and cakes during which Atkinson would extol the music of Tchaikovsky, Britten or Penderecki whilst the higher layers of the heap practised shooting for Bisley. Atkinson had smiling eyes, kindness in every move he made and nick-names based on some fancy about our surnames – some juxtaposition of image and name which no-one could flinch from, not a needle probing a physical flaw which you were ashamed of, instead a simple, friendly hook on which to hang a phrase. In the Gramophone Club I became Aurelius. Sanctuary on Thursday afternoons increased alienation the rest of the time. A kindness in Maths resulted in a beating, existence descended to levels of pain and distress that no boy should have to bear. It was a Thursday night I lost my front teeth to a hockey stick for an overly smoky fire I had set as my fag-duty in the lower sixth common room. I suppose it was shock as much as anything else which had set me to running in the corridor away from the dorm. The dead-bird lined corridor. Shock as to the scar I would carry now for the rest of my life. Shock as tear-blinded I ran into Mr. Atkinson, coming to the Leper House it seemed to offer extra maths tuition to some feeble mind who would struggle to make CSE let alone an O level. Concern, care, taken first to Brightman the House Master with stammered explanations of falling down a staircase and then to the sanatorium. Isolation, doctors and dentists, and the next day more respite from those higher up on the heap. Then back to the dorm to a Hell that I could never have imagined. Investigations by seniors as to who wielded the stick with promises of broken bones never mind teeth if the name should come out and threats of hourly reports for the rest of the term if it did not. Praise like a balm from Atkinson in Maths, Flamenco from Atkinson at the Gramophone Club, Cocoa from Atkinson after prep in his room. More kindness, a look, a word, a touch. More retreat from the norm – an opportunity to skip serving breakfast on Sundays and Wednesdays if I acted instead as a server at communion, another respite, another hiding hole. Before Michaelmas an invitation to help with the organ rehearsals on Tuesday evenings and it was then that Atkinson kissed me.
As kisses go I suppose it was relatively ordinary. I had turned my back to pick up a pile of hymn books when he placed his hands on my shoulders. Slowly he turned me round to his kind, smiling eyes and then he kissed me. Marking me now as the ultimate outcast – someone never to climb the heap. The level of rage I experienced is difficult to describe – I raged at it all: at the system, the pain, the mechanisms for dealing with misfits but most of all I raged at his action putting me beyond the heap – I had nobody below me and now never would have. The need to hurt consumed. I hurt so I needed to hurt – I needed something, someone to hurt so much that it was like the need to draw breath.
The blood was easy to come by. I had never understood why every boy needs a pair of compasses. They were never used, so the needles were sharp and a jab or two into my arm provided an adequate amount. Daubed between the buttocks and staining my underwear it provided satisfactory evidence for more detailed investigation. Tears to the Matron with the concern that I would bleed onto the sheets and then be beaten by the monitor in charge of the dorm provided a route for the complaint just before bed. Too late for out-of-school investigation, not too late for Atkinson to be confronted by the Headmaster. Plenty of time in the watches of the night for Atkinson to find a rope and for me to climb up the heap just a little.
