Prep School Days

 Prep School Days

I suppose it was around 1930 that my ideal childhood in the Hampshire/Berkshire countryside was interrupted by my schooling at a prep school situated at Barton-on-Sea in Hampshire.

The ethos of the school had always been to prepare boys to go on to public schools and thence to run the Empire. So that’s where the toughening-up process began and continued - and it was sometimes rather painful.

We boys slept in dormatories. Some of us still wetted our beds and were punished for it. In fact, punishment was meeted out for the most minor of reasons because our head master was a pretty evil sadist/paedophile.

First thing each morning the itinerary was to strip off and run to a bathroom of baths filled with cold water. In these we had to emerse ourselves, and in doing so were able to displace quite a biit of water on to the drained floor, enabling those who came later to dip rather than emerse.

That done, dried and dressed, and bed made, we had to run a “circuit” of the school’s driveways adding up to about a mile. Then came the first class of the day.

Breakfast was served after that class and then the day’s tuition could continue.

Some of us, like myself, were still fascinated by one’s bodily functions - sometimes deserving a beating. I could, for instance, pee into the cistern that flushed the urinal wall - a considerable feat. 

And, for a reason that I am unable to recall, defecated beneath the stage where the school performed Gilbert and Sullivan operettas at the end of this auditorium. The large hall was used for roler skating, dancing lessons from a lady with terrible BO, and lectures (sometimes with slides by a visiting adventurer).

Once, as a prefect and confined to sick quarters wirh measles or something, I saw two of my fellow pupils move into a lavatory together, hearing “it’s my turn next”. Just what this all meant I did not know, but reported it as a prefect should. It was at an early stage in life when I believed that babies were born when the contents of chamber pots were poured between a girl’s legs. So the activity between those boys must have been homosexual ones and I was still in my infancy to understand such things. 

There was bullying of course but I was athletic and strong and pretty well able to care for myself. 

Being athletic and trained in sporting matters by my golfing, tennis and cricketing father, enabled me to win most of the school’s sporting competitions with prizes of equipment.  So my parents were spared that expense. 

When school and schooling got the better of me I had a pine tree to climb and into which to build a sort of crow’s nest at its top. From there I could isolate myself away from it all, and with a fine view over fields to the Solent, the Isle of Wight and the Needles. 

Beatings were inevitable. The Head Master, being a perfectionist at these matters, could deliver three or six of the best. It was a case of shorts down, bend over, and swish, swish, swish. 

The welts produced by these beatings were evenly spaced apart and were swollen ridges of red and blue. They healed of course, but bearing them made sitting at one’s desk uncomfortable, but not a little proud.

One thing I dreaded were the swimming lessons. We had to learn to swim - naked.

These water lessons took place with the boy (me for one) put into a cold, wet collar at the end of a rope tied to the end of a pole. When thought not to drown, we were thrown in at the deep end. I have never liked the water since. 

The other masters, and a mistress who looked like a master, were clearly, in retrospect, mainly perverts. One owned a movie camera and would photograph the naked boys in the pool. I’m sure that the masters all enjoyed the results in their communal quarters.

 Exams were to get us into public schools.  Not being at all academic I feared for the worst, but on taking the maths paper on a second year around, I found that the questions were exactly the same as the previous year’s. So I got into Wellington, where  I was saved from exams by the war. (I can barely add two and two and certainly hardly recall the result.)

Then I sailed to America as a refugee. So one way or another I ended up having obtained virtually no education. 

Since when I have written hundreds of articles and many books, so I wonder if traditional schooling would really have done much good for people like me.

Hitchhiking - Australia

“That’s as bad as back of Bourke. That’s as bad as back of Bourke”, the diseased fellow passenger murmured as he beat his head on the cabin table en route for Australia in a small pacific merchantman/coaster. 

It transpired that he considered Bourke to be the back of beyond - outback at its worst. So I decided that’s where I wanted to go when ashore. 

On a sheet of cardboard I wrote Bourke in large letters and, having landed in Brisbane stood at the roadside with my sign. No road signs mentioned Bourke and no-one stopped to pick me up. At least I knew that I was pointing west.

So I walked west to a dirt road and was given a lift by a youth who had failed to find work in Brisbane and was on his way home in a car that had no brakes or reverse gear. I was the reverse gear after we bumped into something. We didn’t go far before he left the road, thank goodness.

The countryside was bleak yet in many ways interesting. Practically no-one failed to stop for me (there were very few cars). The people in them were full of character, interest and friendliness. A doctor stopped with some special medicine on his way to meet another doctor. A farmer with thousands of acres stopped and took me some distance. He generated all his own power for air conditioning and deep freezing and created a lake to be filled in the rainy season. Masses of birds were attracted to it and I would have loved to have accepted his invitation to stay. But funds were getting low and there was a certain anxiety in the back of my mind. A gambler stopped. He ran a brothel in Brisbane and was on his way to Goondiwindi to take money from its inhabitants in various ways. 

He had stopped once in “nowhere” where two tramplike-men were brewing tea in a billy can. He owed money to the older of the two but knew it would be refused as the younger one would have stolen it. 

All helped me westwards, though no-one understood why I wanted to go to Bourke.

Some nights I had only the kookaburra’s call for company, but the weather was comfortably mild. Had it rained, all vehicles on the dirt road would have sunk into the mud axel deep and drivers would have to find accomodation and wait for the surface to solidify before proceeding. 

I had yet to see a kangeroo and told two building workers so. When we saw one they stopped and found a gun among their tools and did their best to shoot the animal dead so that I could see it. 

After a spell with sheep-shearers, where the aboriginals were the best, I continued toward my target. (no-one could grasp how I managed to draw moving figures).

Bourke was worth the hitchhike, being once a far inland port now on a dry river that was once deep enough for the transportation of sheep and wool to the coast. 

Ghostly, old, and deralict ships displayed its past. Now it was a rather delightful outback relic. 

The fellow passenger on that coaster to Brisbane was I’m sure quite right. Back of Bourke was their “beyond”, but I now had to travel south to Sydney and home. 

I was on my way again (much easier as there was some motor traffic on a tarmac road).

I met up with people in Sydney to whom I had introductions (they were smart and I was scruffy), and now with my hitchhiking over, I boarded a liner, the Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (later to sink), in which I headed across the Pacific, via New Zealand and Tahiti, the Panama canal and thence to Fort Lauderdale in the State of Florida, USA. 

Then, with minimal residual funds, and a Greyhound bus trip north, I was flown back to England in a Bristol Britannia prop-jet. The new jet (707), being much quicker, then commanded a premium fare.

This travelling by hitchhiking had made a fine contribution to my book: “Harbours, Girls and a Slumbering World” (ISBN 0 9530517 4 9) and had also contributed much to my one-man exhibition of the drawings in London’s Cork Street and Osaka, Japan. 

In roughly a year away I had experienced and drawn far more than I had ever expected to, and at a time when international travel was far easier in a world at peace.