William Boyd: Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

It all changed when I was sent to boarding school in Scotland, something that happened to all expatriate children, as inevitable as puberty. However, my routine was turned on its head, everything was reversed: now I flew to Africa in the holidays. My family, my home, my room, my things, my friends were all as they had always been but now I only saw them for two months of the year. But back in Britain I was beginning to understand the place; I was beginning to be assimilated; I had started to fit in.

I was barely four months old when I made that first flight in a Hermes from Africa to England in 1952. My parents took me up to Scotland to present me to my grandmothers and the rest of the family. For some reason my father went back early and my mother and I joined him some weeks later at the end of our leave. By curious chance, as we were waiting in London airport for our plane to be called, there was a photographer from the Evening Standard patrolling the departure lounge looking for a light-hearted filler, I suppose, a bit of human interest for a corner of a page, snapping babes in arms about to go on a long plane journey, still a rarish event in those days, no doubt. My mother has kept the cutting. In the picture one glum and tearful toddler sits morosely on her mother’s knee. Opposite is me, aged six months, fizzing with energy, bald and beefy as a Buddha, beaming hugely, my mother’s arm clamped around my middle trying to stop the thrashing and the squirming. “Why is master William Andrew Murray Boyd so happy?” the caption asks. I could not answer then, but I can now — I was flying home.

1998

I went to boarding school at the age of nine. This was not exceptional: when I arrived at my school in September 1961 I found boys of six and seven. One exceptionally tiny boy — tawny-skinned with crow-black, dead-straight hair (was he half-Chinese?) — was rumoured to be five, though he angrily denied it.

I was not unhappy to be going away to school. In West Africa, where my parents lived, all the children of expatriate Europeans were doing the same at around my age. It was entirely normal and for years we were gently prepared (a form of benign brain-washing, I suppose) for the day when we would be left to fend for ourselves. Neither of my parents had been to public school or boarding school and both were unfamiliar with where or how to introduce me into the system. In the end it was decided that I should go to the same school as had a son of close friends. They had heard good reports of it; it was not horrifically expensive; I had seemed to like the place when I had been interviewed one summer when we were back on leave and, as I was Scottish, it was an advantage that the school was in Scotland, albeit in the remote far north. This northerly aspect provided the school with a not entirely deserved reputation for a Spartan, no-frills style of education, its most obvious manifestation being a proclaimed fondness for cold showers and early morning runs and the odd fact that the boys wore shorts throughout their school career, regardless of the seasons and the weather, until they left, aged eighteen.

The main school was serviced by two prep schools: the junior for boys up to the age of ten and a senior for boys from ten to thirteen who then, if they passed an undemanding entrance exam, were claimed by the parent institution. It was to the junior school that I was driven that September afternoon by my mother, all the way from Edinburgh, to find the field in front of the school house filled with forty or fifty small boys, dressed in navy blue jerseys and shorts, running about, kicking balls, wrestling and generally horsing around. It seemed like fun and I was oblivious to my mother’s brimming tears as she said goodbye. She told me later she had had to stop outside the school gates, had pulled the car in to the side of the road and wept for an hour.

The junior prep school was housed in a former shooting lodge called Wester Elchies (now sadly demolished), a rather magical-looking Scottish baronial building with turrets and castellation set in fair-sized grounds with its own home farm. There were extensive woods, a telescopeless observatory and a curling pond. Over the hill was an orphanage (we were terrified of the orphans — sinister yahoos to our over-privileged eyes) and not far away, in the valley below, the River Spey flowed where salmon were caught by our headmaster, a legendary fly-fisher.

I was introduced to my “minder,” a tall rather glamorous blond boy called Holland. Holland was rich (his father had a Rolls-Royce) and he had an older brother who played in a pop group. This was a stroke of luck for me as, with Holland’s patronage, I was introduced to his “set” and achieved almost instant acceptance into the relatively innocent, tribal world of a prep school.

We were not particularly cruel to each other at this stage of our scholarly life, cruelty (sometimes exceptionally vicious) came later, after puberty, at the main school. For the pre-adolescent there seems to me to be only one requirement for success at prep school and that is popularity. Academic and sporting achievements at that age are so ephemeral and inconsequential that they gain little kudos, and at Wester Elchies the only miserable boys I recall were the unpopular ones. They were unpopular because they looked peculiar: Webster had the aspect of a puppet or cartoon character — with thick, springy carrot-coloured hair and heavy black specs; Sedley had dark, bruised eyes and unusually dun, greasy skin. Sed-ley was genially and routinely persecuted because he cried so easily. All it took was three or four of us to gather round him making quacking duckbill movements with our hands and chanting “Baitey! Baitey! Baitey!” and Sedley would obligingly break down into incoherent and hysterical weeping fits. We found this very amusing and never tired of the game. It was gratuitous but not malevolent. I don’t think life at prep school as I experienced it was ever malign. The school’s regime was good-natured, on the whole, the staff kind and tolerant. Sex and power, the two elements in boarding school life that really corrupt, even to the extent that they can make people evil, were waiting for our older selves up ahead.

Life at an all-boy prep school, though unreal (as all monosexual societies must be, by definition), was still an extension of childhood, and consequently our ambitions and disappointments, our desires and our hatreds retained some quality of childhood innocence. Most of our carnal energies, for example, were expended in trying to see female members of staff in the nude or, second best, to find some way of peering up into the dark recesses of their skirts. I and many others nurtured simultaneous passions for Miss Grey, the art teacher, and Miss Cibber, the music teacher. Miss Grey was tall and languorous with glossy dark hair wound round her head in a loose Bloomsburyesque bun. Her clothes were rich-looking, romantically hued. Miss Cibber too was dark, almost swarthy in fact, with a sturdier more curvaceous figure. For a term she ousted Miss Grey from my fantasies as I found myself allotted to a dormitory outside one of the staff bathrooms which she used. There was an inch-wide crack between the bottom of the door and the floor through which, if you pressed your head to the cold linoleum of the corridor, you could obtain a partial view of the bathroom beyond. Miss Cibber’s strong legs from the thigh down became very familiar. We kept praying she would drop a towel or her toothbrush and have to bend over. She excluded herself from all our affections when she was surprised one day in a passionate kiss with the English master — a dull, weak fellow, to our eyes — called Hearn.

We did not like Hearn and therefore could not like anyone who liked him. Our affections were extremely fickle. Miss Cibber was dropped and I returned my loyalty to Miss Grey.