CUPBOARD TIME

ABRIDGED FROM A CHAPTER IN MY BOOK 'SOUR MOUTH SWEET BOTTOM', FROM AMAZON AND ANYWHERE ELSE THAT SELLS BOOKS

In 1952, age 13, after two years at grammar school, my parents told me I was going to be sent to a public school instead - Bryanston, a boarding school in Blandford, Dorset.

It was meant to be a sacrifice by them to give me a better chance in life but I didn’t see it that way. To put me on a train full of boys I didn’t know to go off to imprisonment in the countryside could only be seen as a punishment. For what, I wasn’t sure.

I was fitted out with a dark blue suit for the train journey to Dorset and grey shorts and shirts for everyday school wear. There was a trunk for my clothes and a strange thing called a tuck box, which I didn’t understand.

When I arrived at Waterloo station, all the other boys had identical trunks and tuck boxes and dark blue suits. I realised at once my grammar school accent was wrong and if I opened my mouth to speak I was scorned.

At Blandford we were herded from the railway station into a bus that drove us through impressive school gates and up an endless driveway, through woods and fields, to a vast red-brick building once lived in by Lord Portman. This was the last great stately home to be built in England. Its marble floors and staircases had been subjected to sixty years of scrubbing and mopping and reeked of soap and mould, the permanent smell of the next five years.

As new boys we were sent to a junior house in a village three miles away from the main school. It meant we had to start our day an hour earlier than the other boys, first with a cold shower, then with a breakfast of lumpy porridge, and finally with a forty-minute walk down a long straight road that ran through woods before reaching the school. When it rained we got wet, when it was cold we shivered, and when it was both we were reduced to sodden misery. But we were assured it was good for us.

At eight in the evening we had to walk back to our junior house, which for six months of the year meant the pitch blackness of the countryside at night, and for some absurd reason only one torch was allowed for each group of pupils. If you fell out of the crocodile of laughing, taunting boys to find yourself alone in the pitch-blackness of a moonless windy night, with hooting owls and woodland animals, it wasn’t fun.

Another disadvantage of this dreadful junior house was its vile housemaster, Mr Hoare.

Mr Hoare was ancient and deteriorating fast. He walked with his two feet stuck out at right angles, like a penguin and his shoulders hunched over. He wore the same thick ginger-coloured tweed suit every single day, with big round-toed shoes, like a policeman’s, but brown. And like the school floors, he smelled of mildew.

He was about a hundred, and on top of that he took us for gym. But the real problem came from him being the overseer of our domestic life. He took an instant, huge, inexplicable dislike to me. And I returned the compliment, though in my case it was perfectly understandable.

Probably because my accent was still a bit wrong, I fooled around a lot, making the other boys laugh, breaking the rules, telling sexy jokes after lights-out.

In due course, Mr Hoare heard I’d been caught talking dirty - ears at the keyhole, miserable stuff, spying on children).

'You’re a vile and horrible child,’ he told me with great fervour. ‘I only wish I could rid my house of your pestilence but the headmaster says you have to stay. However, from now you’ll sleep alone in a room downstairs, next door to matron.’

Matron was the Stalag overseer, the one who’d listened at the keyhole and heard me talking after lights-out. And the room I was sent to sleep in wasn’t actually a room, it was a cupboard,filled with brushes, brooms, buckets and ladders. Some of these were cleared away and the smallest of camp beds put in their place.

My punishment didn’t stop there. When pupils got back to the house after their day at school, there was a common-room to relax in where they could listen to the radio or read magazines. I was banned from it.

When I arrived back from the main school building I had to go straight to my cupboard. I was in solitary confinement, only let out to go to classes.

At the end of term, at home for Christmas, I didn’t tell my parents much of what had happened. Having never been to boarding school before I presumed it was probably par for the course. Nevertheless, I went to sleep every night wishing Mr Hoare would die.

Back at school for the start of the following term, the headmaster called the school together on the first day and announced in hushed tones that over the New Year break Mr Hoare had indeed passed away.

Having just spent three weeks wishing nonstop for that very thing to happen, I wondered if I might be responsible. I hoped I was but thought it more likely I wasn’t. And because I’ve never tried it on anyone else I’m still not sure.

Sometimes I think It would be fun to have another go. But I can't think of anyone worth making the effort for.

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