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.
But at the junior prep school our energies and animosities revolved instead around the forts we built in the woods. This was a form of peer-group creation, joining a gang combined with war-gaming, a kind of obsessive militaristic territoriality that dominated our free time. Who was in, who was out, whose loyalties had been transferred and so on. In the dense woods around the house we would build elaborate shacks, lean-tos and tree houses, erect earthworks and construct trip wires and booby traps. Membership of the most splendid forts was eagerly striven for. Certain substantial forts of the recent past had assumed almost legendary proportions. There had been one called “Laramie”—but somehow Laramie had fallen into disrepair and all that remained of it was a jumble of roped-together logs in a clearing. Old hands would take new boys to the site and reminisce about its Ozymandian splendours.
One was elected into a fort either by patronage (Holland helped me into his) or by the possession of tools. In this way feeble or unpopular boys could gain admission into elites by offering the use of a hammer or drill or, in one enterprising case, by having his father send up supplies of six-inch nails at weekly intervals. The six-inch nail was the key currency — you could buy your way anywhere.
The move to the senior prep school, a few miles away on the other side of the Spey, marked an end to the Edenic pleasures of the Wester Elchies. The new house was grander and larger, with a great pillared portico, a stable block and generous formal terraces leading down to playing fields. It represented a larger society, too, and within it were played out early and inchoate strategies of power and responsibility, and with that development came a corresponding loss of innocence. Here were thirteen-year-olds in the first hot flush of adolescence, voices breaking, pimples sprouting, the first snouty stirrings of pubertal lust. The easy egalitarian-ism of the junior school ebbed away, the sense of being part of a large, unruly but essentially loving family was replaced by the divisions familiar to all closed societies. There was the public face of the school — sporty, academic, disciplined — and there was the inevitable private face, one that was created and shaped by the boys and ran like a cold, unseen, dangerous current beneath the placid surface.
At a prep school, however, the tacit acknowledgement of this fact — that the two distinct worlds coexist, one overt, one hidden — is never really established. The real world (the world of the boys, the hothouse society) never gets full purchase because there remain old elements of that unspoilt innocence of childhood in place — we were still children, after all, even though, at the end of our prep school careers, the embryo adult in each of us could be perceived taking shape.
I developed a curious relationship with one of the matrons. I can’t remember her name but she was attractive, energetic and a little plump with reddish blonde hair and a nicely cynical, gently mocking way with her charges. I can see her face in my mind’s eye, see her in her white coat serving spoonfuls of malt to the needy and malnourished, dispensing aspirins for imagined headaches. In our pre-teens the female members of staff played a far more important part in our lives than the males did. I can bring all these young women to mind instantly, have them fixed in my memory far more vividly than all but a few of the men. It was as if we unconsciously realized that here was the only likely source of any vaguely maternal affection — a smile, a pat on the back, a literal shoulder to cry on — which we all, even the most rambunctious and independent spirits, separated from our real mothers three months at a time, periodically craved.
Thinking back, I suppose that what happened was that this matron and I must have become friends, an odd state of affairs to arise between a thirteen-year-old boy and a young woman in her twenties, especially given the institutional roles imposed on us. Perhaps, quite simply, she was lonely. There is another side to prep school life which the schoolboy seldom considers, if at all — that of the solitary teacher in his or her room, little more than a bedsit, whiling away their off-duty hours. What did you do if you weren’t married? I suppose there were occasional visits to a pub or a local restaurant (though the junior staff must have been paid a pittance); or you could hopefully attempt to find a soulmate amongst your colleagues … And the social life of a staff common room need not necessarily be congenial, populated — as all common rooms are — by its share of bores and petty martinets, third-raters and sadsacks. This matron, however, seemed a more feisty and worldly character and, inevitably, she did not stay long with us, no more than a term or two. I never thought anything particular about her announced departure: she was popular with the boys and we were collectively sorry to see her go but, most unusually, before she left she came into my dormitory late at night to say goodbye and sat on my bed and talked for an hour or so. The other boys fell asleep or tried to eavesdrop but she sat close to me and we chatted in low voices. Chatted about what? I can’t remember exactly — where she was going, I suppose. I recall something about her telling me she was sitting more exams, better qualifications leading to a better job. Did she kiss me farewell, squeeze my hand? I hope so. I never saw or heard from her again.
Otherwise the relations between staff and boys were by and large cordial and run-of-the-mill. With one exception. There was one young master, popular with the boys, who distinguished himself in our eyes by demonstrating a clear sense of his own sartorial style — a worn leather greatcoat, knitted ties, Chelsea boots — and who, we guessed, possessed a source of income separate from his school salary. He had his own car, something sporty, went abroad in the summer — there was generally a debonair and confident manner about him that we responded to. Then, one evening in my dormitory a junior boy returned from a late-night punishment lesson (malefactors copying out lines in a classroom) in tears. When quizzed by the dormitory leader he confessed that this particular master had “fiddled” with him. The boys had been in dressing gowns and pyjamas; when this fellow approached the master — the invigilator of the punishment period — with his completed lines the man had slid his hand into the fly of the boy’s pyjamas. The seniors of us in the dormitory — I was probably thirteen by then — consulted. We reported the matter to the head boy who decided he would have to tell the headmaster. We watched him go downstairs and knock on the door of the headmaster’s study. In the morning the young master had gone, not a sign, not a trace of him left. A brief, bland announcement was made about his sudden departure, “a family crisis” had called him away, and it was never spoken of further. We, as I recall, were not so much outraged by the molestation as by the breaching of convention: it was not so much the act itself but the collapse of general principles it betokened — principles of decorum and staff-pupil relationships rather than anything more highly moral — this sort of thing really wouldn’t do. We were pompously pleased that he had been sent packing and no more fuss was made.