William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

I ended my school career as a head of house — we called them “house helpers.” I was not very officious, perhaps lethargic might be more apt, but I don’t ever expect to re-encounter that curious sensation of strolling through the house at night while everyone else was working at prep, master of my own territory, knowing that I could go anywhere, search anywhere, order people to do my bidding. It is, for those inclined to exult in it, a heady experience — perhaps not the sort of thing an eighteen-year-old should indulge in.

The occasion when one’s power, as it were, stared one in the face was over the issue of haircuts. In those days all young males had long hair, and one of the stigmata of being a public schoolboy was the fact that your hair was so short. Consequently, everyone endeavoured to grow their hair as long as possible. The longer your hair, the more “cool” you were. Haircut nights saw the head of house, clipboard in hand, patrolling the studies. His word was law — there was no higher court of appeal. Real dread was in the atmosphere. A local barber visited the house once a fortnight. He had to have heads to cut, a minimum of half a dozen. Who would be chosen? To enter a study was an eerie experience; one might have come to claim hostages or to issue a decimation order. At that moment the power one wielded was palpable.

A side-effect of power was adulation. They were not always concomitant, but one usually went with the other. By the reduced standards that operate within any enclosed or confined community it was possible to reach a level of fame or renown similar to that enjoyed by film actors or pop stars in the wider world. These folk heroes had their own fans, even their own imitators. I am glad to say that at my school prowess at games was not the sole route to celebrityhood. It was the age of student rebellion and we had our own existential heroes. I remember a couple of them vividly. There was Burns, taciturn and poetic. His influence was widespread and was responsible for an improbable Ezra Pound craze that swept the school. Against type, he decided rugby was permissible and secured a place in the First XV. But somehow he managed to play his rugby in a dissident, rebellious manner too — brooding, never shouting, socks always round his ankles — so it did not diminish his réclame. Pat-more’s hero was Oscar Wilde. He always wore his duffel coat like a cloak and parted his hair in the middle. He would saunter around, carrying a daffodil, with half a dozen acolytes at his heels. I do not know what has become of these two, but from time to time I do encounter other erstwhile superheroes and am always astonished at how bland and ordinary they are, and wonder from where they derived their early renown. The sad thing for these people is that adult life can never duplicate the fabulous triumphs of their schooldays — they peak at age seventeen or eighteen and it is all a long slide down from then on. They are the great reminiscers.

At my school promotion did not bring any great increase in privileges. Everyone wore the same uniform and rank was demarcated only by a silk flash on the left-hand side of the regulation school jersey. A house helper usually got a single study bedroom, and the prefects (“colour bearers”) enjoyed a more lax routine. Baths were a great luxury. We had two to serve sixty boys, and a house helper’s privilege was to order any boy out of a bath and take it as his own. There was always a huge waiting list, and because of the time involved the water was never changed. As a junior I would often step into a tepid bath in which the water was absolutely opaque from the grime of its seventeen or so previous occupants. As I grew more senior so my baths grew clearer. My one decadent luxury as head of house was to order the bell-ringer (the boy who woke up the rest of the house) to run me a bath in the morning. It would wait there — unused, steaming, limpid — until I came down to the shower room to claim it.

My own progress to this exalted position was straightforward. I moved up through the various ranks to colour bearer, and there I would have stayed had not the head of my house been promoted to head boy and I was pushed up to fill the vacant role. I do not think, from the official point of view, that I was a very good head of house — I was too lazy to put myself about in the accepted way. My two interests at that stage of my school career were sport and painting, and they, rather than official duties, claimed most of my energies. I was demoted to colour bearer for a term for staying out one night during a tennis tour in Edinburgh. An energetic Canadian took over for the interregnum (I was reinstated the next term) and ran the house far more efficiently than I. Fortunately, I was not obliged to move out of my study, so — apart from a certain notoriety — the punishment affected me not at all.

Our school was in Scotland, was in almost every respect a Scottish public school, and yet a strong Scottish accent was a real stigma. Indeed, any regional accent was parodied mercilessly. When people spoke with a strong Scottish accent we would make harsh retching sounds in the base of our throats or emit loose-jawed idiot burblings. Anyone with a Midlands or north of England accent heard nothing but a barrage of “Eee bah goom” and “Trooble at t’ mill.” We all found the mocking of accents endlessly amusing. This was part snobbery, part self-defence. All public schoolboys have an intensely adversarial relationship with the local population, especially with the local youths. To us the locals were “yobs,” “oiks,” “plebs,” “proles,” “peasants” and “yokels.” It now seems to me astonishing to recall the patrician venom we would express, like aristocrats faced with imminent revolution — a curious mixture of contempt, fear, guilt and jealousy. They lived, after all, in the real world beyond the school grounds, and however superior we congratulated ourselves on being, there was no escaping the fact that they were freer than we were — and that grated. I am sure that we in our turn were looked on as revolting, arrogant, nasty snobs. By no means a harsh judgement.

We longed to get out of school, but the outside world was both a lure and a taunt. It possessed everything that school denied us and at the same time was a constant reminder of the constraints and abnormalities of the society in which we were confined. Strenuous attempts were made to escape to it.

The easiest way to get there was to be selected for a school team. Because the school was situated so far north a considerable amount of travelling was involved in order to find reputable opponents. Rugby and hockey would take you to Inverness or Aberdeen two or three times a term, and often there were matches in Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Edinburgh occupied a place in our imaginations rather as Berlin did for poets in the 1930s. It seemed to our impoverished eyes unfailingly sinful and glamorous. To be selected for a rugby tour to Edinburgh meant happy hours in Thistle Street pubs rather than eager sporting challenges.

For the outside world meant alcohol rather than girls. Our stays were usually far too short and too well chaperoned to meet the opposite sex, but there always seemed to be a chance to get drunk. I remember a match in Dundee. A friend, who had left school a term earlier and had gone to Edinburgh Art School, caught the train to Dundee with two hefty overnight bags clinking with booze. After the match we had about forty minutes to drink the lot. The favourite tipple was neat gin washed down with a tot of Rose’s Lime Cordial.

Once in the outside world, we tended to band together. This was because we were conspicuous in our uniforms (the authorities had introduced blazer and flannels for exeats to spare our blushes over shorts and knee-socks) but also because we were somehow fearful and on edge. The outside world was a welcome source of contraband — pornography, drink, cigarettes — and also, in a sense, fair game. When boys went into towns the shoplifting rate rose alarmingly. In the local Woolworth’s two store detectives used to follow one particular boy around. He was the most accomplished kleptomaniac and used to take orders for his Saturday visits. We exulted in our delinquency and bandied legends of epic thefts: a souvenir shop in the Highlands left almost empty when a busload of boys cleaned it out; a boy who dug up copper wires on a nearby RAF station, at one stage blacking out the control tower when he sank his axe into a crucial cable. We would return gleefully to the safety of school, clutching our booty. And yet within the school itself theft was regarded as the most serious and antisocial of crimes — any thief could expect years of excoriation. Two worlds, two sets of standards.