Every boy who leaves his boarding school has been shaped and formed, like it or not, by his years in that hothouse society. Of course, each individual will be affected to a different degree, but the only effective way of resisting the legacy is to get out early. My generation of schoolboys (class of 1970) was entirely typical not only of every other school but also of the generations that preceded us. We left school as unreflecting snobs — we had a very acute perception of “us” and of “them.” “They” were all the yobs, oiks, lefties and deviants who hadn’t been to public school. We were also racist, in a robust, cheery, easy-going manner, as the blacks and Arabs at school could testify. “Wog” was the commonest of nicknames and, to us, devoid of pejorative intent. We thought of women quite simply as sexual objects. We were politically naive — which is to say, knee-jerk Tories of the old squirearchical model. We had our moody rebels, true, but they were influenced by Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac rather than by any political faith. I knew only one boy at school who claimed to vote Labour — we thought him a ludicrous poseur at best, a patent moron at worst. Although most of us had done “A” levels, and the more successful were trying to get into university, we were afflicted with a brand of philistinism that manifested itself as a grave suspicion of “pseuds” or anyone who was too intellectual by half. Also many years of group loyalty, to the school, the house, the team, the power elite, had engendered a mistrust of the individual — indeed, “individualist” was often employed as a term of abuse. The maverick, the odd one out, the not easily assimilable, were to be regarded with caution. Not the best set of values with which to rejoin the world in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
So what happened? I think that, usually, the shock of encountering real life stimulated a hasty course of unlearning. Most public schoolboys have to start a stringent programme of re-education almost as soon as the school gates close behind them. This assumes, of course, that the society in which you are compelled to mix operates under different codes. There are still many walks of life in contemporary Britain where the transition from schoolboy to adult is imperceptible — the attitudes that served you well at eighteen will see you nicely through to retirement.
When I left school I went to live on my own in France for a year. The signal inadequacies of my education swiftly presented themselves to me, and I suppose it was then that I began to look back on the strange institution in which I had spent half my life and to wonder at it.
I often found the focus of my thoughts coming round to one boy, a little younger than me, who had been in my house. This person, a sallow, weak boy called Gibbon, had been hated by everybody, myself included. I have no idea why; he was just very unpopular. He was never really persecuted, just spurned. Sometimes a gang would descend on him, demolish his desk, push him around, but most of the time the punishment was verbal. He was a whipping-boy for the house. He appeared to take it in reasonable spirit, was not abjectly miserable, and so there seemed no real cause to change attitudes. He had no friends and walked everywhere by himself. He was so disdained that even other unpopular boys in the house would not associate with him in case the taint was contagious.
My own school career was, in a banal way, a successful one, comparatively untroubled and orthodox, but I kept wondering what it had been like for Gibbon during his five years. When he went home in the holidays and his parents asked him how he was getting on at school, what did he say? And, more important, what effect would those five years have on him as an adult? Would he shrug them off? Struggle on regardless? Carry them like a yoke? When I looked at my contemporaries, boys who had had a far easier time, and saw them, years later, still living in the heavy shadow of their school days, still wrestling with aspects of their personalities that were somehow corrupted, undeveloped or warped, I doubted, somehow, that old Gibbon would be the breeziest and most carefree of fellows.
1985
The First World War
It was a piece of metal, dark grey, about three inches by one inch, with curious scalloped edges which resembled the crude working of a stone-age tool. In fact it was a chunk of German shell casing which, one night in October 1917, in no man’s land, during the third Battle of Ypres, hit my grandfather — William Boyd — full in the back.
I have held that piece of shrapnel in my hand but I never had the chance to ask my grandfather — who survived this incident and the war — what it was like, because he died in 1952 when I was a week old. I never had the chance to ask him what was going through his mind during that wiring party (he was a sergeant in the Royal Engineers) as he unspooled fresh rolls of barbed wire in front of the British trenches, freezing motionless as the starshells came over from the German lines. Perhaps he heard the unmistakable noise of incoming artillery — he had been two years on the Western Front by 1917—and wondered, as everybody must have done, if this time his number might be up.
When he came to, when he realized he was only wounded — not about to die, not hideously maimed — perhaps he thought of his brother, Sandy, who had also been wounded, a year previously, in August 1916, during the Battle of the Somme. The Boyd brothers were both sergeants, but Sandy was in the Australian Army — the Australian Imperial Force — having emigrated to Australia in 1914, only to be sent back to Europe two years later to fight for the Empire. Sandy’s wounds earned him a medal — the DCM — as he had received them rallying his company in the face of a German counterattack at Mouquet Farm, organizing the remains of the company (all the officers were killed and wounded) and leading them out of harm’s way. Sandy was shipped back to Australia to convalesce and was duly presented with his medal by the Governor General at a parade in a park in Melbourne. The two brothers never saw each other again — Sandy died of a heart attack in 1940.
What united them, and what united huge numbers of their generation, was the unique and terrible experience of the Great War. It wasn’t actually very long ago, the First World War, just over eighty years, yet it seems to be preserved in our contemporary memories — as the twentieth century slips into the twenty-first — as something almost ancient, a mythic tale of bygone times. Those monochrome or sepia images still have the power to haunt and move, but I think we forget just how proximate they are and how the events they reflect have shaped and still shape our own times.