h, it’s you, Robinson! Come on in, then!”
The voice made my heart leap almost through my throat. An intense, overwhelming fear gripped me and I felt suddenly weak all over, a body shiver that washed up and down me several times in a row. Halfway through the window, I slowly extended my right knee onto the sill and carefully edged into the room, bright and warm after the chill of the winter night outside.
Thirty-seven faces looked at me, expectantly. Some were sitting, some had been wandering around and had stopped in mid-step to watch.
I stood stiffly and unconsciously straightened my coat flaps. Stagg stood three feet away from me, leering with his typical grin. “Come here,” he said, and I did. He pulled my face to his and inhaled.
“Smoking!” he smirked as he let me go. “All right, let’s have you in my study, then.” He strode out of the room.
Donald Stagg was the Housemaster of Daviesites, one of twelve “houses” that comprised Charterhouse School for Boys.
Charterhouse was an old institution with beginnings in the year 1611 in London on the site of a monastery that had been populated by an order of monks who called themselves Carthusians. It was one of the original nine English public schools as defined by the Public Schools Act of 1868, which included the hallowed halls of Eton, Harrow, Rugby and Westminster, among others.
The school had long since moved to a small town called Godalming, in Surrey, a county about 40 minutes’ drive south of London.
I was standing in the Hall, a room that was reserved for evening homework for all the boys of Daviesites. The Hall was a long, wide room with one long desk that ran on three sides of it, which was where we all sat, in order of seniority with the most junior boys near the door and the upper forms on the other end of the “U”.
I had just returned, through one of the windows nearest the door, from a small place we called “The Patch,” for lack of a more original name, because that’s what it was: a patch of ground underneath “The Tree.” Everyone knew what “The Tree” meant, even students who didn’t smoke.
I had nipped out during Hall, which was what the hour of homework was called, to meet with my best friend, a boy from a house across the way called Bodeites, for the last smoke of the day.
Stagg almost never came into the Hall. For some reason, he had had some business there, and I had been unlucky. He had come in, obviously noticed me missing, and, knowing which window we used, patiently waited for me to return from my smoke.
Smoking was a very, very bad thing to do. It was up there with being caught with alcohol, an expellable offense, but in this regard, I was lucky. Stagg himself was a heavy chain smoker, almost never to be seen without a cigarette in his hand. So he secretly harbored a soft spot for us small band of smokers; there were possibly only five of us in the whole house, one of them being my older brother, Geoff, who often was at the patch with his friends when I turned up with my friends. We all got along famously, older and younger boys, and handed out cigarettes when others were “light,” and generally had great conversations and a nice break from the grind of public school.
So I knew Stagg would only give me a slap on the wrist, which is pretty much what he did. “Nicky,” he said in his heavy nasal almost-sneer that was his hallmark, “Nicky, you KNOW you shouldn’t be smoking, don’t you?” He sat behind his large oak-and-leather desk, smoking a cigarette, the smoke drifting lazily in the light of his banker’s lamp. Stagg was a man of few words.
I shuffled my feet, looked at the ground and said nothing. “Yes, well, I’d like you to clean up after lunch until next Tuesday,” he intoned with a smile. That meant that for a week I would have to clear the entire dining room of all the glasses, plates, cutlery and other dining clutter after lunch, a job that would take me at least half an hour, eating into my one hour after-lunch break before afternoon classes and preventing me from having my after-lunch cigarette. Stagg knew that denying me the cigarette bore the most painful sting. That’s why he had chosen that particular punishment.
I sighed. “Thank you, sir,” I said, and he escorted me to the door with an avuncular hand on my back. “Oh, and Robinson,” he said, as he paused at the door, “stop smoking, will you?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied, knowing I wouldn’t and knowing that he knew that I wouldn’t, and shambled off into the dark hall.
I was fourteen years old, and boarding school was not new to me. In the British school system in the early 1970s, there were basically two parallel educational structures: there was the public school system, or what north Americans are familiar with as free kindergarten, high school and community colleges. These were called things like secondary school, grammar school, and polytechnics.
There was (and still is) another school system which was a fee-based, private school system, which were at the time usually boys-only and girls-only. Prep school, as it was called, began at about age 8 and ended at age 13, at which point one would take a test called the Common Entrance Exam, or CE. At this point you moved on to another fee-based school that was perversely called “Public school.” although these were the upper crust of the education system, with some schools like Charterhouse having several-hundred-year-old pedigrees. Each had its own deeply ingrained customs, structures, vocabulary and slang, much of which would have been incomprehensible to anyone not intimately familiar with the school.
I had gone to a prep school not far from Charterhouse, also in Surrey, called Feltonfleet School for Boys, from age nine to thirteen. I had taken the Common Entrance exam and had been enrolled at Charterhouse, where my brother Geoff, two years my senior, was also enrolled. I was placed in the same house as he, though we actually rarely interacted, had our own sets of friends, and basically existed at mutually incompatible levels.
In Public school, one year’s difference in age meant vast differences in social standing, privileges and status. While resembling the military only very superficially, nonetheless a rigid hierarchy prevailed from the smallest to the largest aspect of school life. There were rules, many rules that had to be obeyed without question. There were obligations that had to be performed, also unquestioningly, and hallowed traditions that had to be adhered to; traditions that, it was made plain, had existed long before you had been born and would exist long after you had ceased to be.
At the time Charterhouse was a boarding school only; there were no “day” pupils, in other words, boys who went home every night. There were approximately 650 students divided among the eleven houses. Of the eleven, there were four “old” houses that were considered to be slightly higher in status that the other seven; Daviesites was among those houses which were generally more thought of as populated by rabble, rather than the more distinguished old houses. To be a Gownboy or a Saunderite was to be an elite; to be a Robinite or a Lockite was to be a peasant. Daviesites were peasants.
This was partly because all four Old houses formed the core of the school and occupied the oldest parts. They had been constructed centuries before and they looked it: ornate columns and stone corridors, visibly and physically worn smooth into pathways eroded by generations of students’ feet, stone steps with curving indented middles that had been carved out over centuries. The very walls of these buildings spoke of history, of wars fought, won and lost, of kings and parliaments and crusades and battles, of legions of the boys and men who had walked between them, of the hushed tranquilities of hundreds of winters, summers and autumns gone by.
The other seven houses were established in a rough circle around the main school, separated by small roads and lanes and pathways and hills and playing fields. These houses were themselves old, centuries old, but were not made of stone but wood, with many a drafty corridor and creaking floorboards and small, poorly-lit rooms lined with musty carpets that were fraying at the edges and smelled of tuck shop Crunchie bars and spilled sugar-and-fizz drinks.
I hated boarding school. Not this particular one, but the idea in general. Our souls were traded in by our parents to be treated as the wind and whims of circumstance would whisk us, for months on end in an emotion-free gulag of dashed hopes and pitiless soul-crushing solitude among masses that was impossible to escape. Even at age thirteen on the first night of “term” I would weep silently in my bed, hot tears on my cheeks as I remembered the blessed freedom I had just surrendered and then gradually grow quiet as the weeping was replaced by a kind of hard and cruel edge that would replace it. That was a mindset devoid of feeling that would scab over any memories of home and family until such time as I returned to that world, at which point the wound would reopen. It was always this way. I knew that most of the other boys were probably also crying in their beds, although most of them had far less to cry about.
After all, my left-behind life was thousands of miles away, across oceans and deserts and jungles, while theirs were sometimes within bicycling distance. When I entered this world, by necessity I had to discard all thoughts of a life beyond its walls; I had to immerse myself wholly into the juggernaut that was to be my prison for the next few months, to become the cog I had to be in order to keep the machine functioning smoothly, to remove the rags of my other life and literally replace it with the uniform of this one.
After a week, I no longer wept. I no longer thought of weeping, was no longer capable of conceiving of weeping and had thrown aside the memory of ever having wept. Instead I was more likely concerned with what might be on the menu for lunch the next day.
Our days were strictly ordered, although Charterhouse was a veritable paradise compared to the school I had attended previously. At Feltonfleet, we woke up at dawn, and even on winter mornings we would be forced to trudge down to the locker rooms, where we would gather under the showers and be doused by a regulation sixty seconds of cold water. If we didn’t get our hair wet we would be forced to go back in again. The water was the temperature of the air outside, which was frequently near freezing. Screams of shock were frequently heard, and I danced around like a madman possessed as I tried to simultaneously avoid the freezing stream yet get convincingly wet at the same time.
Questioning this daily torture was inconceivable. Questioning anything at all at Feltonfleet was inconceivable. Transgressions were instantly recorded by masters on little cards that you had to carry with you at all times, to be surrendered at the end of each month. Enough demerits on the card — and mine was frequently covered with them — meant at the least a lecture by the headmaster in front of the entire school at the end of lunch, or at the worst a lecture by the headmaster at the end of lunch followed by a terse “ . . . and Robinson, now I’ll see you in my study.” At which point the headmaster would calmly order you to take down your pants and would beat you with either a slipper or a leather strap, usually with six to ten strong wallops. The bruises would be visible for two weeks.
This sort of thing never occurred at Charterhouse, although there had occasionally been whispers of someone getting “six of the best” by the headmaster. But Charterhouse was almost ten times larger than Feltonfleet had been, thus chances were very good that you would hardly ever see the headmaster, let alone actually have to interact with him. And you certainly never wanted any reason at all to have to interact with him.
At Charterhouse even the youngest boy was never treated as subhuman, either by his peers or his elders, and the staff usually had the decency to treat you as the young adult you were becoming instead of the small, noisy animal you had been treated as at prep school.
Indeed, at Charterhouse the oldest boys were eighteen years old, young men who could conceivably enter the armed forces or get actual jobs, and from a younger boy’s perspective they were rarely people to be feared. Indeed, since all the boys old or young were all in the same boat, most of the time everyone treated everyone else with respect regardless of seniority. There were, of course, exceptions. There are always exceptions.
