Extracts from the memoirs of Peter Townsend, recalling English boarding schools in the 1920s
The late Peter Townsend was a wartime RAF officer and later equerry to King George VI who achieved a brief fame in the early 1950s during his love affair with the young Princess Margaret
Wychwood
Every little bird must leave the nest; but not all little birds, nor, for that matter, little boys, are pushed out of it at such an early age as English boys who are sent to preparatory boarding schools. I was eight when I was weaned from my family and sent to swell the bevy of boys who formed the stock-in-trade of Mr Insley, headmaster of Wychwood School. To be honest, I would say of most of my teachers that they gave us more of themselves than they ever got out of us in terms of income. I still owe much to Wychwood; it was a sort of nursery garden where the seeds of manhood were planted in us.
Our own headmaster, Mr Insley, was kind but severe. We feared him. A massive man, he had a rubbery nose and invariably wore rubber-soled shoes. So when, after lights-out, Mr Insley came striding down the corridor, we were warned of his approach by the squeaking of his soles on the linoleum. I suspect now that he purposely wore rubber soles to warn us of the approach of Nemesis.
They saved me from a hiding one night. While school rules were imposed from on high, we ourselves were a tight little society with unwritten rules of our own. Lucas, the boy who slept next to me, had been found guilty of infringing them. I was appointed to execute the sentence - four strokes on Lucas's bottom.
It was some time after 'lights out', but summer, so all could see. We crept out of bed; I, the executioner, and Lucas, my submissive victim. As I stood poised to deliver the first stroke with my own red slipper, I heard the unmistakable squeak of rubber on linoleum. My reflexes were quicker than those of Lucas. As Mr Insley strode into the dormitory demanding: 'Lucas, what are you doing out of bed?' I was already back in my own, my heart thumping so loudly that I was afraid the headmaster would hear it. 'Bend over', he commanded Lucas and, replacing me as executioner, administered justice, with my own red slipper, on the unfortunate boy.
Haileybury
Wychwood had moulded me, rather than knocked me, into shape and filled me with ardent dreams for the future. Haileybury was to provide the toughening process, the technique of survival. It was a hard school. I was still only twelve when I passed the entrance exam, taking second place. This put me in a class with boys much older than myself. They adopted me as a kind of mascot and were kind to me - which was not the case with my housemates in Lawrence, my father's old house.
With his hand gently clasping the nape of my neck, my father propelled me towards the dormitory where he, in his time, and my brother Philip, in his, had slept for five years. My own five-year spell was beginning. I was a 'new guv'nor' and wore the prescribed dress: a blue suit and bowler hat. My rather bid me goodbye - it would be three months before I saw him and my family again. I felt no desire to cry, only to steel myself for worse times which, I knew from Philip, were yet to come.
Lawrence was one of eleven houses, each of fifty boys, who slept in one long dormitory. My pied-a-terre for the next five years would be a cubicle separated from the next one by a low, white partition. In half of this narrow space a modicum of privacy was possible when we dressed or undressed and the surrounding red curtains were drawn. The other half contained a bed covered with a red blanket. At seven o'clock each morning the school bell tolled, a dreadful, compelling sound which dragged us out of our sleep and sent us leaping out of bed to undress and run, half asleep and totally naked, at top speed, to the bathroom. Any hesitation or loitering on the way, and you were punished.I was beaten for trivial offences on six occasions. Once, realising my number was up, and to minimise the pain, I slipped a silk handkerchief - the recognised specific - into the seat of my trousers. After an interview with the head of the house, which ended with the command: 'Prepare the D.C.' (dormitory classroom) I had to run down the length of the dormitory to do so. As I ran, I noticed my silk handkerchief fluttering like a pennant from the bottom of one of my trouser-legs. That earned me an extra stroke of the cane.
The condemned always prepared the D.C. It was like digging your own grave. You cleared all the furniture to one side - except two wooden chairs which you placed back to back, so as to allow your executioners a clear run at you of three or four paces. For the victim, a caning from the prefects was a test of behaviour. You awaited your executioners; when they arrived and you received the command 'Bend over', you climbed the scaffold, in the noble tradition of the courageous host of martyrs, kneeling on one chair and bending over, so that your head touched the seat of the other. You gripped that seat with your hands and waited for the first of the executioners to come running in, then the second, the third and the fourth - the maximum allowed for a house prefects' beating. Then came the command: 'You may go', and you rose with all the dignity you could summon and, head held high, left the room - with the certainty, if you had not flinched, that you had successfully accomplished yet another exercise in survival.
At Haileybury, where life for us young ones was hard and sometimes cruel, there was no one to help us but ourselves. Yet, for all the cruelty, the callousness and the unloveliness, it did no good to cry out for pity. On the contrary, the grim conditions made me clench my teeth; I felt within me a growing determination to resist. Without knowing it I was being inoculated with the serum of survival. Survive your first two years at Haileybury and you could survive anything.