Boy

But what interests me most of all about these two brothers, Harald and Oscar, is this. Although they came from a simple unsophisticated small-town family, both of them, quite independently of one another, developed a powerful interest in beautiful things.

[Mama’s] husband had always stated most emphatically that he wished all his children to be educated in English schools. They were the best in the world, he used to say. Better by far than the Norwegian ones. Better even than the Welsh ones, despite the fact that he lived in Wales and had his business there. He maintained that there was some kind of magic about English schooling and that the education it provided had caused the inhabitants of a small island to become a great nation and a great Empire and to produce the world’s greatest literature.

It was my first term and I was walking home alone across the village green after school when suddenly one of the senior twelve-year-old boys came riding full speed down the road on his bicycle […] At the same time, he took his hands off the handlebars and folded them casually across his chest. I stopped dead and stared after him. How wonderful he was! […] One day, I told myself, one glorious day I will have a bike like that and I will wear long trousers with bicycle-clips and my school cap will sit jaunty on my head and I will go whizzing down the hill pedalling backwards with no hands on the handlebars!

Mr. Coombes stood back and took up a firm stance with his legs well apart. I thought how small Thwaites’s bottom looked and how very tight it was. Mr. Coombes had his eyes focused squarely upon it. He raised his cane high above his shoulder, and as he brought it down, it made a loud swishing sound, and then there was a crack like a pistol shot as it struck Thwaites’s bottom.

About an hour later, my mother returned and came upstairs to kiss us all goodnight.

‘I wish you hadn’t done that,’ I said to her. ‘It makes me look silly.’

‘They don’t beat small children like that where I come from,’ she said. ‘I won’t allow it.’

‘What did Mr. Coombes say to you, Mama?’

‘He told me that I was a foreigner and I didn’t understand how British schools were run,’ she said.

‘Did he get ratty with you?’

‘Very ratty,’ she said. ‘He told me that if I didn’t like his methods I could take you away.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said I would, as soon as the school year is finished. I shall find you an English school this time,’ she said. ‘Your father was right. English schools are the best in the world.’

All my summer holidays, from when I was four years old to when I was seventeen (1920-1932), were totally idyllic. This, I am certain, is because we always went to the same idyllic place and that place was Norway.

Except for my ancient half-sister and my not-quite-so-ancient half-brother, the rest of us were all pure Norwegian by blood. We all spoke Norwegian and all our relations lived over there. So in a way, going to Norway every summer was like going home.

The Matron was a large fair-haired woman with a bosom. Her age was probably no more than twenty-eight but it made no difference whether she was twenty-eight or sixty-eight because to us a grown-up was a grown-up and all grown-ups were dangerous creatures at this school.

Once you had climbed to the top of the stairs and set foot on the dormitory floor, you were in Matron’s power, and the source of this power was the unseen but frightening figure of the Headmaster lurking down in the depths of his study below. At any time she liked, the Matron could send you down in your pyjamas and dressing-gown to report to this merciless giant, and whenever this happened you got caned on the spot. The Matron knew this and she relished the whole business.

And the Matron, as we all knew, would follow after him and stand at the top of the stairs listening with a funny look on her face for the crack… crack… crack of the cane that would soon be coming up from below. To me that noise always sounded as though the Headmaster was firing a pistol at the ceiling of his study.

If I looked out of the dormitory window I could see the Channel itself, and the big city of Cardiff with Llandaff alongside it lay almost directly across the water but slightly to the north. Therefore, if I turned towards the window I would be facing home. I wriggled round in my bed and faced my home and my family.

From then on, during all the time I was at St. Peter’s, I never went to sleep with back to my family. Different beds in different dormitories required the working out of new directions, but the Bristol Channel was always my guide and I was always able to draw an imaginary line from my bed to our house over in Wales. Never once did I go to sleep looking away from my family. It was a great comfort to do this.

Behind [Captain Hardcastle’s] moustache there lived an inflamed and savage face with a deeply corrugated brow that indicated a very limited intelligence. ‘Life is a puzzlement,’ the corrugated brow seemed to be saying, ‘and the world is a dangerous place. All men are enemies and small boys are insects that will turn and bite you if you don’t get them first and squash them hard.’

‘You could ask Dobson, sir,’ I whispered.

‘Ask Dobson?’ he cried. ‘Why should I ask Dobson?’

‘He could tell you what I said, sir.’

‘Captain Hardcastle is an officer and a gentleman,’ the Headmaster said. ‘He has told me what happened. I hardly think I want to go round asking some silly little boy if Captain Hardcastle is speaking the truth.’

I was frightened of that cane. There is no small boy in the world who wouldn’t be. It wasn’t simply an instrument for beating you. It was a weapon for wounding. It lacerated the skin. It caused severe black and scarlet bruising that took three weeks to disappear, and all the time during those three weeks, you could feel your heart beating along the wounds.

Directly across the hall from the Headmaster’s study was the assistant masters’ Common Room. They were all in there now waiting to spread out to their respective classrooms, but what I couldn’t help noticing, even in my agony, was that this door was open.

Why was it open?

Had it been left that way on purpose so that they could all hear more clearly the sound of the cane from across the hall?

Of course it had. And I felt quite sure that it was Captain Hardcastle who had opened it.

By now I am sure you will be wondering why I lay so much emphasis upon school beatings in these pages. The answer is that I cannot help it. All through my school life I was appalled by the fact that masters and senior boys were allowed literally to wound other boys, and sometimes quite severely. I couldn’t get over it. I never have got over it. […] Even today, whenever I have to sit for any length of time on a hard bench or chair, I begin to feel my heart beating along the lines that the cane made on my bottom some fifty-five years ago.

Do you wonder then that [the Repton Headmaster’s] behavior used to puzzle me tremendously? He was an ordinary clergyman at that time as well as being a Headmaster, and I would sit in the dim light of the school chapel and listen to him preaching about the Lamb of God and about Mercy and Forgiveness and all the rest of it and my young mind would become totally confused. I knew very well that only the night before this preacher had shown neither Forgiveness nor Mercy in flogging some small boy who had broken the rules.

So what was it all about? I used to ask myself.

Did they preach one thing and practise another, these men of God?

And if someone had told me at the time that this flogging clergyman was one day to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, I would never have believed it.

It was all this, I think, that made me begin to have doubts about religion and even about God. If this person, I kept telling myself, was one of God’s chosen salesmen on earth, then there must be something very wrong about the whole business.

It was more or less taken for granted that a Captain would be made a Boazer in recognition of his talents—if not a School Boazer then certainly a House Boazer. But the authorities did not like me. I was not to be trusted. I did not like rules. I was unpredictable. I was therefore not Boazer material. […] Some people are born to wield power and to exercise authority. I was not one of them. I was in full agreement with my Housemaster when he explained this to me. I would have made a rotten Boazer. I would have let down the whole principle of Boazerdom by refusing to beat the Fags.

I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do. […] A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.

‘May I ask why you do not wish to go to Egypt?’ [the Shell Director] said.

I knew perfectly well why, but I didn’t know how to put it. What I wanted was jungles and lions and elephants and tall coconut palms swaying on silvery beaches, and Egypt had none of that. Egypt was a desert country. It was bare and sandy and full of tombs and relics and Egyptians and I didn’t fancy it at all.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was sailing away for a good deal longer than three years because the Second World War was to come along in the middle of it all. But before that happened, I got my African adventure all right.