William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

Ah, Miss Grey, Miss Catriona Grey! Strange how passionate the pre-pubertal crush can be. She must have been very young, in her early twenties, I suppose, and, as I recall her face, I realize she was very pretty too. I was good at art and saw a lot of her and became something of a favourite. Because I was close to her it is with Miss Grey that I associate my first adult feelings of envy — a pure, elemental, resentment-driven emotion. Miss Grey’s beauty was not just apparent to her acolytes in the art room: the headmaster, Mr Vaughan, was also susceptible.

I was impressed by Mr Vaughan: he was the first person whom I recognized — unconsciously — as “sophisticated.” He drove an MG roadster with leather straps holding down the bonnet. He wore suede shoes, he smoked a lot, Player’s Navy Cut, and had a deep, raspy smoker’s voice. I can recall his flat in the school house with real clarity. A dark blue carpet, loose cream lineny covers on the sofas, good pictures on the walls. He was, I now realize, genuinely urbane, a confirmed bachelor, a throwback figure from John Buchan or Sapper who had taken up schoolmastering before the war in the way that young men did coming down from Varsity with a poor degree (think of Waugh and Auden) and had been too lazy, or found the life too congenial, ever to move on. He was white-haired — in his fifties — and being headmaster of a small prep school in Banffshire was to be the pinnacle of his professional life. But he seemed perfectly content and he used regularly to invite Miss Grey (a fellow smoker) to share a cigarette with him at his table at the end of the midday meal.

I can conjure up the tableau now, and the green fog of envious bile through which I viewed it, as we filed out to go to our dormitories for the obligatory postprandial rest. Mr Vaughan would push his chair back so he could cross his legs and dangle one brown suede shoe. He smoked with a small flourish, his hand describing a generous arc, a flexing, cuff-shooting movement, as he brought the cigarette to his lips. Inhaling avidly, laughing, leaning forward to share a throaty smoky confidence with Miss Grey who, her body language tells me in hindsight, was not wholly at ease with Mr Vaughan’s raffish innuendoes. Miss Grey stiffly upright, an arm crossed below her breasts, a palm supporting the elbow of the smoking hand, the cigarette more demurely, more delicately, puffed at — a social smoker, then, not with Mr Vaughan’s nicotine craving. I can hear Mr Vaughan’s barking laugh crossing the emptying dining room as we troop out, degenerating into a barking lung-tearing cough. I look back, hating him, wanting to kill him, to see Miss Grey leaning forward, helping him to a consoling glass of water.

What kind of person was I then, in my pre-teens? Memories are vivid and precise but I cannot summon up a retrospective self-consciousness. The world is a simpler more straightforward place when you are ten, eleven, twelve. It is adolescence, the burgeoning hormone-swarm in the body, that brings home real intimations of character and personality. I look at pictures of the fair-haired lad I was and gain no real access to the persona. The alternately carefree and moody fifteen-year-old, say — both precocious and deeply lazy — is far more familiar. And yet the pre-teen places and the people, the events and the adventures lurk in the memory bank pristine and available.

I was popular, thanks partly to Holland and his cronies, and I was tall and a fast runner — did not let the side down at rugby and cricket — but I realize I never made it into the first rank because I did not have a nickname. The real stars were called “Ducky” or “Fitzy” or plain “Johnnie.” Once for a week or so a few boys took to calling me a Latinate “Boydus” but it never caught on and soon died away, never to be resurrected. What made these boys so liked, what was the secret of their charm, so evident that even the staff addressed them by their nicknames? The answer, I think, is that they were unrelentingly cheerful. As they became teenagers they seemed almost visibly to fade away, without exception, puberty robbing them of their unfailingly sunny demeanours. But somehow at the age of ten or eleven an initial personality had developed, sufficient to make them the life and soul of the party, and this was enough to make them everybody’s favourites. These boys were loved, admired and cherished, I am sure, by all of us without any jealousy. I remember when Johnnie’s mother suddenly died the sense of collective grief in Elchies was palpable: his loss affected us all in a profound way that can only be explained by the role he played in our midst. Johnnie’s loss was, of course, our loss too.

Indeed, within the small community of the prep school a kind of covert favouritism operates, rather as I imagine it does in a large family, with no real resentment being expressed by those excluded. For a while I was the beneficiary of such advancement when I became the favourite of the matron — I think as a result of having suffered a very bad dose of chickenpox — Mrs Herrick, a pallid but no-nonsense, vivacious woman, married to the Latin teacher (we called him “Shirley” for some forgotten reason). Mrs Herrick was not the most powerful patron among the staff, but her benevolence did pay dividends.

Every morning — part of our Scottish heritage — we had porridge for breakfast. The school would gather in the assembly room before filing through to the dining room (a pre-fab wooden hall tacked on to the rear of the house). Mr Vaughan would declaim a prayer, read the day’s notices and then Mrs Herrick would appear to select the sugar-server. This was one of the most coveted jobs in the school (our sweet ration was one Quality Street per day). The sugar-server’s job was to place one dessertspoonful of brown Demerara sugar in the middle of each bowl of porridge. The key perk of the job was that one was permitted to sugar one’s own bowl of porridge with boundless liberality. And, naturally, friends of the sugar-server benefited also. During my reign as Mrs Herrick’s chosen one she would come into the assembly room each morning, scan the eager pleading faces of the boys and then, as if the result of spontaneous whim, select me. This went on for many weeks and nobody ever appeared to express surprise or complain at this manifest unfairness. I became rather smug and developed a sweet tooth that I have never really managed to neutralize.

My move to prep school from my school in Africa meant the first of several progressive steps that shifted me away from being an “African” child to becoming a British one. The winter of 1961 was the first time I saw snow. As I remember it there had been a heavy fall in the night, some six inches or so, and we woke to the refulgent, muffled, eerie landscape that dense snowfall brings. For two of us — me and another boy who had been born and raised in Jamaica — this was a surreal lifetime first. Amazed, astonished, we stepped outside and picked the stuff up, tasted it, felt its cold numb our fingers, heard its crump beneath our feet. Other boys and staff, amused, looked out at us from the big library windows — two aborigines out of their element — as we struggled to come to terms with this new natural phenomenon that we had heard and read so much about but never experienced — stamping our feet, throwing handfuls into the air — before we were gently summoned back inside for breakfast.

Quite a number of us lived abroad and made the long plane journey home at holidays — to India, West and East Africa, Singapore, the Caribbean — to a world of sun and humidity, ocean beaches and palm trees. On our return we wore our exclusivity proudly in the shower room, our deep tans contrasting strongly with the pale pink bodies of our coevals, quite unconcerned to be known to the others as “wogs.” This sort of cheery racism was quite common, even at prep school, but, as with many of the less admirable aspects of boarding school life, our prejudices and bigotries tended to become more extreme as we grew older. Any deviation from our self-ordained norms was more mercilessly pilloried — accents, deformities, perceived ugliness — anything strange or out of the ordinary was grist to the intolerance mill.