THE PREP SCHOOL

- Berkhamsted School -

 

It is 41 years since I left behind a near-idyllic childhood, spent in the countryside with a huge garden and the total security of a loving home, and arrived as an eight-year-old boarder at Berkhamsted Prep School.

My parents had been told that as I was not on a waiting-list, they could only offer me a place as a boarder, even though they lived less than a mile away from the school.

Trying to remember now - which is an effort because for years I tried to forget - what I am left with is a series of images and incidents, the fragmented memories of youth... and the blanks beyond which the images cut out and I simply can't penetrate.

In particular, the dark corridor from my dormitory to the headmaster's house which served as well as a banal masonic lodge... and a darkness, beyond which all is forlorn hope and lost childhood. Trauma? Certainly. Abuse? I honestly can't tell you that because I just can't remember. Only, as I have mentioned, I will be watching a film to this day, and something triggers, and I have this flashback to panic and in that restored present of long ago, my tears just flow, and I am violated - unfairly, despondently.

Prep School life during the day was filled with normal childhood memories - conkers and milk bottles and football and my cousin (who was a day boy) chatting to me in the play ground with news from home.

There was Mr Jones and Major Marsh, a balding moon-faced man with a fetish for hand-writing and standing people in the corner. I was stood in the corner day after day to improve my writing.

And there was Giovanni - the Italian handiman and cleaner - all smiles and goodwill, ready to talk, and laugh merrily, until he was told to get on with his work. In the end he was fired (probably for being too happy) but I learned that (for me) there was no distinction between teachers (what you might call the "officer class") and ancillaries. I loved humanity and naturalness, and the interface between "workmen" and "staff" was often fabulous entertainment.

But at night, I was in a different world, up there in the boarding house : a place of shadows and homesickness and unpredictable irrational events. Food in a Prep School in 1961 still seemed to be heavily influenced by wartime austerity. Bread and dripping sandwiches, soup so clear that it was only distinguishable from water by a drop or two of gravy and the fat that floated on the surface.

There was "The Toilet Book" in which you had to fill in the exact nature of your toilet visits, when you went, whether you were able to go - all, no doubt, for perfectly sound medical reasons. Then bed.

The long distant mournful sound of the trains haunted me each evening. All through my childhood, my father had taken me to watch the trains, but now they spoke - even though I was only eight - of distance and separation.

Of course, the repeated unwelcomed assaults happened at night. Perhaps they simply weren't regarded as assaults in those days : corporal punishment was part of a culture of toughness and discipline, and you can't judge people retrospectively if they were just living by the parameters of their own time.

What I do know, because even as a child - and perhaps particularly as a child - there was this intuitive awareness of the "alright" and the "not alright", was that the punishments were arbitrary and irrational.

Night after night we would be placed at the end of our beds in the dark, for no reason at all, and made to drop our pyjamas, and beaten. Sometimes it was with a slipper, more often with bare hands, and you just hoped that was the end.

It was if I was told, "Come with me" that I knew I was being punished more - and I would be led out of the room and into the dark.

This was not a rational regime. To start with, as a healthy young child with my own emotional security, I resisted. I ran away three times. Mr Jones almost got fired because he didn't notice I was gone for half a day. The second time I ran away to my aunt. The third time was more desperate and I hid in the woods, and in my garden at home, until the police came and I turned myself in.

I was beaten soundly of course and broken. I came to accept that I deserved to be punished. I came to accept the abnormal as normal, in that dulling of emotions and traumatic cutting off from myself, so that the process became something impersonal that happened to another me... and my joyful childhood self was locked far, far away to keep me safe.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will never put it out.

I was not sorry when the time came to leave that ghetto of grim sadistic punishment, and I joined Berkhamsted Junior School as a day boy, and began living again and laughing, fostered by some wonderful teachers who lived joyfully and exuded goodness.

I have to end this section on Berkhamsted Prep School with a proviso. I suspect I was singled out. But I can't explain why. And I owe it to any relatives of the master involved to state, honestly, that I have no memory at all of events and actions down the corridor. All I have are the flashback emotions.

It is possible that I was traumatised by circumstances and not by a person's actions. The very nature of being "exiled" from an idyllic childhood home to a gaunt and alien regime could have done that.

I just don't know. I simply moved on, and a new life awaited, a world where I felt safe and where adults were (usually) more predictable. The past was locked away - is locked away still, except when it spills out - and for the most part I never again knew the loss of all hope.

Far from it : it has made beauty and hope seem like a key to life. Along with kindness. The sanity of human kindness you might call it.

The Headmaster of Berkhamsted Junior School was a benign man called Bertie Owen who was profoundly sane. He and his lovely wife Esme were part of a backdrop of sunshine in my youth : decent, kind and safe... encouraging... rational... with an integrity that engendered trust.

So much of benefit and value began when I moved on to their regime.