It was vain legislation and constantly had to be reinforced. But as years went by attitudes relaxed, and by the time I left every boy’s study looked like a Soho bookshop or soft-porn emporium. Indeed, in terms of fixtures and fittings the history of my house, and of all the other six houses in the school, was one of prettification and improvement. Carpets were introduced; studies were subdivided into cubicles or converted to study-dormitories; painting and wallpapering were encouraged. Taste, as might be expected, was execrable. I remember that in one of my studies we lowered the ceiling by two feet by tacking string to and fro from one wall to another and laying brightly coloured crêpe paper on top of the resulting web. In the five years I lived there the character of the house altered by stages from that of some sort of penal institution to that of a moderately prosperous South American shanty town.
Much of this home decorating was subsidized by profits from the house shop. This sold nothing apart from sweets, soft drinks and ice cream and did a roaring trade. It was considered completely normal, in the hour of free time between end of prep and lights out, for one person to consume, say, a litre of Coca-Cola, a packet of Jaffa Cakes and a packet of digestive biscuits, a Mars bar, a slab of chocolate, some packets of crisps, some strips of liquorice and a couple of dozen aniseed balls. Everybody, while his money lasted, seemed to eat constantly. As one rose through the ranks kettles were permitted and, along with them, “brewing” privileges. By the end of my school career I was allowed a toaster. During an average day I might drink between twenty and thirty mugs of instant coffee and eat two large white sliced loaves of bread.
Apart from eating and drinking, the other memory I retain of living in the house was the noise. Certain periods of the day were radio hours. As if on command, dozens of radios and record players would start up. Very little classical music was played. In my era the sophisticated public schoolboy listened to Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead and Cream.
We had a television (black-and-white) in the house common room. Its use was very restricted. Far and away the most popular programme was Top of the Pops. I am sure its producers have no idea of the profound influence and effect this programme had on a generation of public schoolboys. I do not know if it commands the same allegiance today, but I would wager that during the last five years of the 1960s 99 percent of public schoolboys religiously watched the programme every week during term time. Everything stopped for Top of the Pops. In the entire school nothing moved. In our house sixty boys would somehow cram themselves into the common room to watch it on Thursday nights. And, pathetic as it may seem today, we didn’t watch it so much for the music but for the girls in the studio audience. The programme was accompanied throughout by the grunts and groans, the whoops and sighs, of group passion. It was, I believe, in every public school in the land, a spontaneous, countrywide expression of terrible lust.
The house was large, but it felt curiously constricted. In the summer one could get outside, but during the winter there was nowhere else to go. Curiously, there was not much traffic between houses, except at senior level. Going into another house in the school was like going into another country, but with the added disadvantage that its inhabitants constantly drew attention to your strangeness. Few events were more unsettling than, as a junior boy, to have to deliver a message to a boy in another house. To be jeered at as an alien was the best you could expect; more often you would be set upon. We were members not so much of different houses as of different tribes. The houses all had different atmospheres, almost different ideologies. One house was corrupt, full of villains; one was full of eccentrics; one house was obsessively self-interested. My house, at least when I first joined it, was very hard.
We had had a succession of popular and ineffectual housemasters. There was no discipline. A new housemaster was strenuously trying to impose his authority. But when he retired to his flat at the end of the day the old regime established itself. The source of the problem was a group of boys in the sixteen-to-seventeen age bracket. They were “bad” in the sense that they had no interest in promotion. In the evenings they terrorized juniors with a kind of candid ruthlessness that I still find chilling to recall. They would roam the junior studies, four or five of these roughs, and beat people up at random, extort money or food, rifle letters and lockers in search of diversion. One felt in a way rather like a medieval peasant during the Hundred Years War: one never knew when another marauding army might march by, randomly distributing death and destruction. It was comparatively short-lived, this period of capricious thuggery, but it provided me with a full catalogue of the resourceful cruelties of the adolescent mind. Later the attitude of the house changed to something altogether more genial, but I will always remember my years as a junior, even though I was relatively unscathed. W. H. Auden said he detested fascism because at public school he lived in a fascist state. It is rarely a constant state of affairs, but it is not difficult for private life in a boarding school temporarily to take on certain fascist characteristics. It is the sense of being a victim, or potential victim, that lingers on: the way a house can become at certain moments a place of genuine terror and fear; the way you sacrifice all principles in order to save your skin; the ease with which the ideology of the dominant group seduces you. This is, of course, the private, unadministered life of a boarding house, but in a crucial sense it is the reality of being a boarder in a boys’ public school. Its opposite is what I call “the prison governor’s view of the prison.” That has a reality too, but it is for public and official consumption. The inmates experience something entirely different, vital and basic.
If you are lucky, everything changes at school as you grow older, stronger and more senior. Those few to whom this transformation and relaxation does not apply are the saddest products of the system. But for the majority the tenor of the daily round eventually establishes itself as tolerable. However, the last year or two at school, although the most privileged, can also be the most irritating. Most people experience this, and no doubt most people have their own reasons. On reflection, I wonder if my own vague disquiet was not to do with a subconscious reaction against the unrelenting absence of privacy that one experiences as the norm in a boarding school. Looking back at it now, years later, I realize that of my nine years at boarding school I actually spent three years on holiday and a full six at school. So for those six years, for example, I usually bathed and showered in the company of eight or a dozen other people; I relieved myself in what was effectively a public lavatory; I dressed and undressed, to order, in a crowded locker room; and, except for my final year, I slept in a room that never had fewer than four people in it and on occasions had fourteen. As a way of life — I am trying to be objective about it — this seems to me to be positively bizarre, not to say noisome and rebarbative. Five years in the same house is not only five years of crowding personalities; it is also five years of enforced proximity to the bodies that accommodate those personalities. The house was not a place for the fastidious.