Cherry by Sara Wheeler Read Free Book Online Page A

son
    Apsley.
    In the end they had boiled mutton and tapioca pudding and walked to the end of the road to watch the Jubilee bonfires.
    In the summer of 1899, Laddie left the Grange for the last time. There was nothing to regret as he leant out of the train window and watched the columns of steam dissolve above Radnor Park station. He rather suspected that there might be worse to come at his next school, and he was right; but now he had the summer to enjoy at Lamer where, as ever, little had changed. The River Lea was still teeming with trout and crayfish, and his cricket pads were still in the back hall. He knew very little about the enormous world beyond the trouty river and the mighty chestnuts. It was to be a savage dawning.
    That September Apsley submitted to his first weeks at Winchester College, a procedure likened by one old boy to the initiation rites of the Australian Aboriginal. Founded in 1382, Winchester was one of the top three public schools in Britain. The year Apsley was admitted, it came first in the league table of Higher Certificate passes, beating Rugby and Eton into joint second place. It was famed for producing an intellectual élite, and at Oxford and Cambridge, Wykehamists 5 were noted for their ambition, singlemindedness and self-reliance. The General chose the school in the touching belief that it was not like Harrow, which he had hated so intensely. The trunk and wooden playbox were handed over to the station-master and despatched to school in the guard’s van. Shortly afterwards a white-faced Apsley was enrolled as a commoner at Culver House, nicknamed ‘Kenny’s’ after the housemaster, Theodore Kensington. During the first two weeks of that term – ‘Short Half ’, in Winchester parlance – new pupils were indoctrinated into school culture under the tutelage of an older boy called a ‘Father’, and, after this fortnight was up, fagging began.
    Kenny’s was a red-brick, flat-fronted Victorian building in a quiet street to the west of the ancient part of the school. Inside, forty boys (eight were admitted each year) slept in a bare-floored, practically unheated dormitory. Every morning at 6.15 they were obliged to jump into a metal tub full of cold water, one after the other. There was so little privacy that the lavatories did not have doors. The boys dressed like miniature men, in stiff collars, ties and buttoned-up jackets, and at seven in the morning, after a spartan breakfast, they sat down to Morning Lines and Henry’s Latin Primer in its mulberry cloth binding, each boy working in a cubicle in the ground-floor hall. They were all hungry all the time, and constipation was compulsory, as John Betjeman wrote later of his own public school.
    The rigid respect for tradition at Winchester extended to a private tribal language which each boy had to learn. The canings doled out by prefects were called
tundings
, the cubicles were
toys
and boys were not allowed to use the word ‘think’ until they had been at the school for two years. Arnold Toynbee, later a famed historian and sage, was a prize-winning scholar close behind Apsley. (As a scholarship boy he lived in the fourteenth-century College buildings, not in one of the boarding houses.) ‘For five years at Winchester,’ Toynbee was to recall, ‘I . . . tasted what life had been like for Primitive Man. One found oneself suddenly plunged into a world of arbitrary prohibitions and commandments (chiefly prohibitions).’ A boy was not allowed to wear brown boots until his third year, Christian names were outlawed, and you had to refer to your parents as ‘Mater’ and ‘Pater’. It was a gigantic exercise in control, which perhaps worked for confident boys. But it didn’t do much for those of a more subtle plumage, especially if they had short sight.
    The curriculum was embedded in the classical tradition, though it had been reformed, to a limited degree, in the decade before Apsley arrived. Mathematics, science and modern