Apart from thieving, the only genuinely illegal act that occurred with any regularity was joyriding. In my house two boys used frequently to take the assistant housemaster’s car out late at night. They would disconnect the mileometer and drive through the dark countryside for an hour or two. The owner of the car never noticed. This was an act of real daring, not to say foolhardiness; the consequences of being caught or of having an accident would have reverberated beyond the school — and yet it was not a rare event. All manner of cars were parked around the school buildings overnight. People would use them. The penalty for this crime would have been instant expulsion, but the staff, I am sure, never suspected that it went on. People could be expelled for theft, sex (homo or hetero) and consistent smoking or drinking or the taking of drugs. Few boys were expelled while I was at schooclass="underline" two went for having sex with school maids (the maids were sacked too); a small clique of drug-takers departed and a few heavy smokers. Boys often left of their own accord. Occasionally there would be “scandals” that made the newspapers — boys vandalized a girl’s flat on a rugby tour once, I recall — and also demanded the ultimate penalty. The boy who blacked out the RAF station also made the local newspapers. He was a simple, pale, gangly soul called Clough. He had made hundreds of pounds selling copper and lead pilfered from the air base to local scrap-metal merchants. The school, although properly outraged, had, I think, a sneaking regard for his entrepreneurial drive. His father, who did not want him at home, came up to plead for leniency with the headmaster. Clough’s punishment was to dig up all the tree stumps on the estate, a task that occupied all his free time for about two terms.
Swearing was a minor crime too, naturally. It is perhaps worth emphasizing, for anyone who doubts it, that the language of a public school is as bad as that of any army barracks. We employed all the usual four-letter oaths with unreflecting abandon. There were not many nonce words or neologisms in our private language at school for some reason. Perhaps because the school had been founded only some decades before, traditions had yet to establish themselves. At prep school it was pure Jennings and Darbishire—“Vanes,” “Quis?” “Ego!” “Stale news,” “Cave,” etc., etc. One exchange that I have never encountered elsewhere I record here for those interested in the folkloric side of public-school life. If you farted (“buffed”), everyone was allowed to punch you. However, if you said, “Safeties,” before you were discovered, you could foul the air unpunished.
We were obsessed with sex. I know this is true of all adolescent experience, but when I think now of the energy and relentless focus of our interminable discussions about the subject a sort of retrospective lassitude descends upon me, as well as a retrospective anger. Of course we talked about sex — we lived in a freakish, monosexual society. There was a parallel world out there in which the two sexes mingled and interacted and to which entry was denied us. No wonder our curiosity was so febrile and intense — and so destructive. The sexual apartheid to which we were subjected all those years utterly warped our attitudes and precluded us from thinking about girls and women in any way but the most prurient and lubricious. The female sex was judged by one criterion — fanciable or non-fanciable, to put it rather more delicately than we did.
Endless conversation, speculation, fantasizing, poring over sex magazines, fervid masturbation … there is something soul-destroyingly monotonous about that facet of public-school life, and one looks back with genuine sadness and weariness at the thought of so much wasted time. But there it was, and at the time it was the favourite hobby. We made the best of our opportunities. Every girl and woman who set foot on the school grounds was subject to the most probing scrutiny — housemasters’ wives, innocent secretaries, fond mothers and guileless sisters visiting the school were evaluated with ruthless purpose.
However, the people who bore the brunt of our lewd interest were the maids. These were local girls, I think, and were hired — so public-school rumour famously has it — solely on the grounds of their ugliness. It made little difference. Their encounters with the boys, three times a day at meals, were characterized by a one-sided traffic of sexual banter of the vilest and coarsest sort. Given the opportunity, more daring boys actually molested them — squeezing, pinching, feeling. The girls were remarkably tolerant. I never heard of any boy disciplined as a result of a complaint made by one of them. I think our attitudes to them brought out the very worst in our natures: it was male lust at its most dog-like and contemptuous, tarnished further by a brand of wilful class disdain and mockery that was almost dehumanizing. I dare say any male sodality — rugby team, army platoon, group of Pall Mall clubmen — can descend to this level for a while, but what is depressing and degrading about the male boarding school is the unrelieved constancy of the tone, year in, year out, for at least five years. It must have some effect.
There was also, it is true, a brand of passionate romanticism about our sexual curiosity that was slightly more amusing. Nobody ever admitted to being a virgin. By tacit consent conversation about the great day was always rather vague and woolly — it was just taken as read that everybody was, well, pretty experienced. There was one boy who made the mistake of confessing, at the age of seventeen, that he had still to lose his virginity. He became a laughing stock in the house. Little boys of fourteen would howl, “Virgin! Virgin!” at him. He came back the next term claiming to have lost it in the holidays, but it was too late. His greatest mistake was to have admitted it — the only honest man among shameless liars. And it was easy to lie — no one could prove that you were not the satyr you claimed to be, come the holidays. It was quite important, however, to live up to your reputation on the rare occasion when the company was mixed. Many a self-appointed stud came to grief at school dances, for example.
There was also the problem of letters. If you boasted of having a girlfriend, some evidence needed to be furnished: a photograph at the very least or passionate letters. We liked our letters from our girlfriends to be as conspicuously feminine as possible — coloured paper and envelopes with deckle edges and illustrations and drenched in scent. Post was distributed after lunch in the common room. A letter was inhaled, fondled, groaned and swooned over — exhibit “A” in the defence of your virility.
One boy, a jolly, rowdy person called Dunbar, used to exchange clippings of pubic hair with his girlfriend. In the dormitory the little tufts would be passed round like holy relics. We begged him to go further — the girl was French after all. At our crass prompting he finally did what we required. Together we composed a touching letter requesting a photograph in the nude. The girl was deeply offended, and the relationship shortly fizzled out.
Some boys, though, had exceptional good fortune. A friend of mine “got off” with the headmaster’s au pair, a pleasant Norwegian girl called Ingrid — a fabulously exotic creature to us. Another had an affair with his housemaster’s daughter, provoking fraught dilemmas of divided loyalty. The rest of us had to rely on rare opportunities provided by school dances or the biennial Gilbert and Sullivan, when the girls were bussed in to play the female chorus.
The school dance was little more than a meat market. By the time the girls arrived all the boys were well-fortified with alcohol. At the first slow number they pounced. The occasion degraded everybody. The Gilbert and Sullivans were more fun and more decorum reigned. We were meant to be rehearsing, and we saw the girls quite regularly over a period of a month. Courtship rituals were rather primly observed, and the alliances that were struck up remained for a good while on a rather chaste level — one was often invited to the girl’s house for tea on Sunday afternoons to meet her parents, for example. This more sustained contact usually provoked the dormant, romantic side of our nature, and many of us fell deeply in love as a consolation for being denied any physical release. That came, eventually, usually as the dates of the performances approached, a sense of time running out — as with soldiers due to return to the front — affecting both boy and girl. These wistful encounters were not so shaming. They were like any adolescent affair — cute, thrilling, melancholic — a brief foray into real life. They ended after the show as the barriers of the single-sex boarding school were reimposed. The only real victim was the Gilbert and Sullivan, in my memory always appalling, for the simple reason that none of the chorus had joined for the singing.