the start of the summer term, there was not the influx of new boys that arrived in late September at the start of the school year. We were taken by Mrs Fox and Matron to see the lower dormitory. I was shown the bed in which I was going to sleep, and I think an under-matron may have flitted by. Grizel came with us, and kept telling me how much I would enjoy it once I got used to it. I wished I had shared her confidence. There must have been eight or ten beds, a wash stand and a bowl for each of us in a row at the foot of the beds, a po cupboard underneath, and a basket under the bed for the clothes I would take off before jumping into my pyjamas. The longer this introduction to my new quarters went on, the more I felt my enthusiasm draining. Then it was back along the passages, the walls of which were covered with school groups from prehistoric times. One new boy was shown a photograph and told, ‘There’s your father.’ I hope it gave them both encouragement. It was not long after that that Tom and Grizel decided the time had come for them to leave. Tom certainly never specialised in emotional farewells, and Grizel did her best, giving me the briefest of pecks on the cheek, although she will have been alarmed by the thought that I might burst into tears. Then I watched, helpless, as they strode across the gravel to the car, got in, started the engine and disappeared from view. I was well and truly on my own, and I didn’t like the look of it. I managed not to blub which would have been letting the side down.
I was the youngest boy in the school, and, funnily enough, found this to be a good deal more of a liability than I had expected. It seemed to bring in its wake a disdainful hostility rather than the sympathy I had hoped for. The lower dormitory passed off without too much worry, but I had problems a term or two later for as soon as I was promoted to the upper dormitory, I got on the wrong end of some nasty bullying. There was a monitor in each dormitory who slept in a bed by the door. He didn’t come up until about two hours after the rest of us, which left scope for bullying. Next door to him was a little horror who I don’t think I’ve seen since the day he left Sunningdale, although he probably went on to Eton – most of the boys did, but I don’t remember him there. He forced me to do a number of things which went severely against the grain.
The worst was when I was made to go to the stairwell with my tortoiseshell-backed hairbrush, which had a piece of sticking plaster on it proclaiming ‘Blofeld’ in bold ink. Then, as the girl who carried the cocoa and the cups to the library for the older boys before they went to bed walked underneath, I was instructed to drop the hairbrush so that it landed on the tray, or better still, hit her on the head. Mercifully, I didn’t get it right – if I had, it might have finished her off – and the brush fell with a sickening thud on the floor beside her. She was a good girl, because she didn’t drop the tray or swerve or even scream, but carried steadfastly on. However, retribution was swift. I was in appalling trouble, and came head-to-head for the first time with Mr Burrows, who lived in a part study, part bedroom and part torture chamber in which there was a visible array of canes sticking out of a tall basket which he was never reluctant to use. And when he did, he put a good deal more vim into it than Mr Fox. For some strange reason, Mr Burrows did not tell me to bend over on this occasion. I have no idea what I said to him about the incident, but I didn’t sneak, for that would have meant that my life in the upper dormitory and everywhere else would have been hell. Sneaking was the worst of crimes.
I am not sure why I got away with this early misdemeanour so lightly. It may have been that the powers-that-were had a fair idea of why the hairbrush incident had happened. Mr Burrows had an armour-plated exterior, but a streak of kindness underneath, even if, for the most part, he disguised it well. Anyway, if I was still able to recognise the chap who forced me to drop the hairbrush, I would even now be sorely tempted to step across the street and have a word with him. His name was Baring, and he was almost certainly one of the banking lot. I remember thinking all those years later what a splendid chap the wretched Nick Leeson must have been, and how miserably he was treated. He had no greater supporter than me. I mean, to be sent to a Singaporean gaol for performing such a notable public service …
I couldn’t have enjoyed Sunningdale too much at the start of my five years there, because I was terribly homesick, and at the end of the holidays I had to be hauled off back to school. I howled outrageously in the car most of the way. But not everything was bad. I dipped my toes into the waters of cricket for the first time in my first term, and fell for it just like that. There were other good things too. The sausages we had for breakfast once a week – Wednesdays I think – were delicious, although the daily dose of porridge which preceded them was more awful than anything I have ever eaten in my life. We were made to finish it, then or at lunch, and I have never eaten porridge since. Even the unspeakable mincemeat we were given for lunch on Fridays, which gloried in the splendid name of ‘Friday Muck’, was a couple of lengths better than the porridge and I have struck up a more meaningful relationship with the present-day equivalent of Friday Muck. The name was invented by my contemporary at the school Nicholas Howard-Stepney from the family which owned Horlicks. He was also responsible for Wednesday lunch’s ‘Pharaoh’s Bricks’, a cake pudding cut in Eastern European-like rectangular blocks with the merest soupçon of jam on the top, and ‘Thames Mud’, a terrifyingly solid chocolate blancmange which seemed both to wobble and frown at you. I suppose post-war food rationing hardly helped Mrs Fox when it came to creating the menu.
The cast at Sunningdale was nothing if not Wodehousian. Mr Fox, who went by the Christian names of George Dacre (PGW had a housemaster called Dacre in Tales of St Austin’s), had signed up in 1906. Maybe there was something of the Reverend Aubrey Upjohn (Bertie Wooster’s private-school headmaster) in Mr Fox, and I have no doubt that they would have hit it off like a couple of sailors on shore leave. By the time I met Mr Fox his face was inordinately lined, craggy and ancient, and would have made the Gutenberg Bible look to its laurels. To us, Mr Fox seemed older than God, and spoke in a slow, sepulchral tone that did nothing to make me think I was about to make a lifelong friend. He frightened me out of my socks, and beat me in the fourth-form classroom at the top of the stairs on the left whenever I kicked over the traces. A stern lecture would be followed by six relatively mild strokes, after which I would be told to leave. As many of the other boys as possible would have been standing outside the door to count the number of strokes. Six was the usual complement, but for something truly hideous, the count may have reached eight, making the recipient a sore-bottomed hero, but even to receive six did your street cred no harm. Mr Fox was known to us as ‘Foe’, and come to think of it, it was not a bad nickname, for I don’t think I ever felt entirely convinced that he was on my side. He was five foot seven or eight, and his strong head of black hair was combed back and much adorned with Mr Thomas’s finest unction. Mr Thomas was the school haircutter, and he came down from his HQ in Bury Street SW1 twice a term with two or three of his cohorts to cut our hair. Several masters had their hair cut too, including Foe, who was on Christian-name terms with the rotund, avuncular, noisy and highly genial Mr Thomas, who laughed a good deal as he snapped the scissors like the well-seasoned performer he was. I don’t know why, but it went slightly against the grain that Mr Fox was on first-name terms with his barber. When the two of them laughed there was always something slightly conspiratorial in the air, as if they were planning a visit to a particularly shady club.
Mr Fox took the fourth form, and never encouraged jocularity, although there were times when I am sure he felt he was being the star of the party. But he always made teaching seem a solemn business, and was seldom fun and never funny. He had written a well-known green-covered history date book, which was not so much compulsive as compelled reading. It was all there, from Hengist and Horsa and Ethelred the Unready to the present day. Mr Fox was as proud of his date book as if he had made up the dates himself and given the history of this country both order and meaning. He did have another side to him – to keep themselves sane, a good many schoolmasters must lead double lives. The day the term finished at Sunningdale, the sofa in the Foxes’ drawing room was pushed back, and out came the bridge tables, swiftly followed by the packs of cards and scoresheets, and then by those of his neighbours who participated. The stakes were said to be high; I imagine Foe was probably a gambler, but in a guarded rather than a reckless manner. I should think he was a pretty good player who seldom settled for three no trumps when a slam was in the air.
He was a great racing man too, and a number of important trainers sent their boys to Sunningdale. Cecil Boyd-Rochfort’s twin stepsons, David and Henry