The happy ending

Three years ago today, on a certain occasion, I received this gift bag

A couple of weeks ago I had a visit from my headmaster. He’s long dead of course, but dreams have something in common with memory and ghosts—which the French call “revenants”—returning ones. With no difficulty, they can span the passage of time. They can bring closure to an unresolved past, through forgiveness and understanding. Until this dream, I probably misjudged a man who I last saw alive sixty-one years ago. In earlier fragments of memoir on this blog, I’m sure I’ve conveyed an erroneous impression of him. When I left his school soon after my twelfth birthday, I’d been there 4½ years a boarder. It is only in the last ten years that I’ve started to appreciate the influence it had upon my life.

He seemed an aloof man, somewhat aristocratic in demeanour, often dressed like a gentleman farmer in tweed, breeches and gumboots, a pipe clamped in his mouth, giving him a skull-like grin, accentuated by receding yellow-white hair, longish at the back. The Great War did not leave him unscarred. His glass eye often tended to water in its socket. When writing he always had to apply great pressure to the pen, struggling to control a shaking hand. But on winter evenings, you might hear him at the grand piano: typically bits of the Moonlight Sonata, slow and sonorous, often with long pauses, as if he was in the process of composing it, or playing distractedly out of some unrelated reverie. I didn’t know then that before he acquired the school he had been a piano teacher, qualified A.R.C.M. & L.R.A.M. People said he was a descendant of Beau Brummell; he didn’t deny it. In the Great War he had been a private soldier, a telegraphist,

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tapping out Morse Code at high speed; and I wonder if his tremor was a combination of that and shell-shock. The only classes I remember him taking were beginners’ Latin (amo, amas, amat . . .), mental arithmetic, dictation, carpentry and Scripture. There were piano lessons but they cost extra, so I never got any. The rest of the time he really was a farmer, mowing the playing fields and lawns, tending the apple orchard, ploughing the potato fields, keeping everything trimmed almost single-handed.

In my dream he appeared as I had never known him: pleased with me and showing it. He approved the tireless efforts I was making on a project, something I’d decided that “somebody ought to do”. He even came over to embrace me. During our hug I saw that his shirt was not fresh, and had an L-shaped tear near one armpit. A group of others entered the room, fellow old-boys of my generation, and he hugged me again to show them (and me) that it was a public accolade, not some secret thing between us. Then I woke up.

To convey the significance of this dream would require the context of my whole life-story, before and after that school, but I shall merely summarize the early part.

Monty (that’s what his wife called him) was the nearest I’d had to a father-figure. By the time I left, I’d spent a third of my life in that school. On this very day, I was born in Australia, and spent my first years in a house of women: my mother, the landlady, and other lodgers. I recall an easy-going life under the sun, making mud-pies in the backyard with neighbouring children. Then my mother took me on to a ship along with nine hundred war brides, sailing from Fremantle to Tilbury in England. To me it wasn’t a voyage but a new life. I took to it and I was rather dismayed when it ended after six weeks.

Then we lived at my grandmother’s in St Leonards-on-sea. I was sent to a nearby school run by severe nuns, where I stayed for a term. I didn’t learn much, as I already knew how to read. The religious indoctrination made no impact. Then another boat took us to Holland, where my mother left me with my so-called aunt and I went to the local school there until I spoke Dutch all the time and adapted well to this new life with no thought of its abrupt end. In those post-Liberation days there was a great sense of safety. It was quite normal for a five-year-old child to walk a mile to school on his own, clutching a little tin of jam sandwiches for lunch, frightened only by a barking dog. Indeed, it had been similar when I went to the convent school in St Leonards.

One day my widowed mother returned from an abortive husband-hunt in Switzerland and brought me back to Granny’s. So I readjusted to that, and to speaking English again. But then a stepfather was found. We lived in a small upstairs flat with a view of the sea beyond the cliffs, where in summer you could hear the distant sound of children playing on the beach. It was a strange lonely time. When I could get out I played with the ragged local children, climbing on the worn cliffs, beset by a misery that I could not understand at first, until it became apparent even to me that my mother’s marriage was foundering almost as soon as it began. This is when I was sent to boarding school. In fact it was only seven miles away, I could have been taken daily or gone by bus; but I think I was better off with the boarding arrangements, even aged 6½. My half-sister was born at that time but I don’t remember her as a baby at all.

After my first term at the school, on a dark January evening after church, I tripped in the street and got a deep glass-cut on my knee. A bone infection developed and I spent months incarcerated with no visitors, due to the hospital’s quarantine restrictions. Prayers, I discovered later, were said for me every week at the church. They hoped their intercession would avert an expected amputation above the knee. Fortunately I had no knowledge of their fears, but it was a grim time. I wasn’t able to adapt to it as with earlier episodes in the patchwork of my life.

So after my spell in hospital, I went back to school, and its Spartan regime. It made more sense than my home life, provided a continuity. In the holidays, I often stayed with my grandmother, when she wasn’t in Kenya, where she hoped the hot weather might alleviate her painful arthritis. My grandfather was unworldly, selfish and remote, commuting between a smoke-filled study and his Club. Perhaps he will appear in a dream one night to show me how I’ve misunderstood him too, who knows.

The dream encounter with Monty has been like a pointing finger, showing past scenes like tableaux in a magic theatre, as in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, or Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf. So I watch, and see that despite an aloof and sometimes harsh exterior, Monty cared. To care is to understand what needs to be done, and take as much ownership of the issue as one can. Caring is fulfilled by action, not emotion or gestures.

Monty’s school was very small. I don’t think it had more than thirty boys at once, in my time there. The prep-school ethos was for the boys to learn leadership through teamwork, cricket, soccer; to pass the Common Entrance examination; to behave as English gentlemen, regardless of background; and to be initiated into the culture and traditions of English life.

The separation and divorce meant that my mother could no longer pay the fees, but Monty awarded me a scholarship, for I shewed promise. (He always spelt “show” as “shew”.) And so I suppose he expected more of me. There were boys he seemed to favour, who could do no wrong. I was not in their number but some kind of mongrel, always top of the class though it embarrassed me to be so, and a bookworm. I found it most comfortable to live my life in a daydream, disconnected from the everyday; lacking all sense of what I needed to learn socially. I suppose it was my way of blotting out the dysfunctional aspects of my situation.

I could write a book on Merrion House School and its headmaster, but a few fond memories will have to do:

---He once locked me in a large outhouse where the central heating boiler was stoked. There was supposed to be a secret passage there. I didn’t find it, but after much trial & error managed to escape through a small window high up, and was proud of my Houdini-like ingenuity, and wanted to tell him. But he never gave me the chance, never mentioned it, as if he’d intended me to stay there until I starved. What he was doing, of course, was forcing me to confront reality.

---He had noted with silent disapproval that I used to wander off over ploughed fields during our breaks between lessons, inventing private pastimes while the other boys played knock-up football or cricket, according to season. He gave me a police whistle and suggested I learn Morse code. We would each wander across the extensive grounds whose various hedgerows and trees made us invisible to the other; calling up one another and sending messages with whistles. It caught on amongst several of the boys and so we were able to keep in touch as if by mobile phone or email. Like any children's craze it died out naturally but kept some of us interested for a couple of weeks.

---On two occasions he asked me, over dinner, what I would like to be when I grew up. The first time I said “a cook”. He treated this with a snort of contempt. I wonder if he would have done the same if I had said “a chef”. The second time I said “a missionary.” without knowing what a missionary did. He laughed and said I’d be so absent-minded I’d call a meeting in the African village and forget to show up myself. This turned out to be almost prophetic, as it so happened, but that would be another tale. Anyway, whatever answer I had given, it’s clear he was intending to show that my absent-minded ways would be a fatal handicap.

I have no doubt now that he cared, and was the nearest thing I had to a father in those days. If only I could reach him, convey my affectionate thanks, across the years, across the grave! But then I realize that he graciously got there first, offered me his congratulations, in a dream—what other way could there be?—and saw that this waif consigned to his care has made it at last, has found the happy ending that he must have wished for me.