Slow Down Now: The almost serious antidote to workaholism

The school was set back from the road behind a barrier of mature trees. It was one of those Victorian somber monstrosities whose only purpose seemed to be to have ghoulish murders committed in them.

I was a week late getting there. I was eight and had been in hospital for a week having my appendix out. I was even late to start my first school day. The headmaster had to have a word with me, as he put it, about what to expect. Little of it made sense.

I was shown into a room of eleven other little boys who didn’t look up from their writing as I slid into my seat at the back of the room. An elderly woman who, as far as I could tell was speaking gibberish, motioned me to write.

I wasn’t quite sure what to write so I practiced writing my name with my new pen. Ballpoint pens were not allowed. The headmaster had made that clear. A nib attached to a wooden holder was dipped in ink from an inkwell on the desk. I made a series of artistic, though unintentional, splodges that any Rorschach tester would have been proud of.

I found out later that my first class had been French dictation. We referred to Mademoiselle Chabrier as Granny. Perhaps not an inventive moniker but we could not imagine how a living person could possibly be so elderly. She wobbled into school on her ancient bicycle.

I never really did get the hang of French at school. In fact, I never really got the hang of very much. My school reports consistently noted my fair progress. I’m not sure that there was anything worse than fair. Fair was a euphemism.

Granny was one of only three females in the school. One was a young student teacher, Miss Spenser. Her hair smelt of new wool, or maybe that was her sweater. She smelled good. At lunchtime she would she read science fiction stories to us in the park across the road. I was fascinated and unnerved by Day of the Triffids, and the Midwich Cookoos.

I would lie in the grass at her feet and imagine children that could kill with just a look. I would focus my thoughts on Mr. Madden, the Latin teacher: how he would squirm, writhe, and grovel for mercy beneath my killer gaze.

But Miss Spenser was only was with us for one term. Could it have been she was dismissed because she actually liked children? Apart from her, Mrs. Robinson, the headmaster’s wife, and Granny, the school was unrelentingly male.

Most of us were dayboys, but a few unlucky souls boarded. Everyone had to stay for lunch; or dinner as it was called. School dinners were cooked by the headmaster’s wife. She was not a good cook and there was much private speculation as to what exactly we were eating.

The school required boys to eat all the slimy or rubbery food-substitute that Mrs. Robinson concocted. We were convinced that she used rat, cat, and dog in her recipes. I had a hard time keeping down Mrs. Robinson’s slippery junket. We learned to eat the worse first, but it is though such adversity that poetic expression is born.

One term, we had a small, florid, pomaded, and round-faced Italian Count come to teach us. He did not wear the customary black bat-like masters' gown. Instead, he wore a light colored suit and a flower in his buttonhole. He would occasionally call us darlings and instead of beating us about the head, he would tousle our hair. His dress was exotic for drab late 1950’s Britain.

Pandemonium would break out when we were left unsupervised in the classroom. This usually took the form of mild violence in the form of wrestling. On occasion someone would drop a stink bomb purchased from the joke shop in town that was strictly out of bounds.

Stink bombers, though revered for their courage, were dealt with harshly if they could be identified. One boy was expelled for such an act. He’s probably a successful mercenary today.

Some boys were keen on pulling each others trousers down (debagging), or grabbing each others genitals, (knobbing). They probably went on to high office in government. Others would be content to flick ink at each other from the inkwells on the desks. But there was always noise.

On such occasions, the Count would burst into the classroom booming, “It’s a bear garden in here!” His powerful voice would rattle the windows. I wondered what a bear garden would be like.

He taught us bullfighting. Not actually how to fight a bull, but how to appreciate the art. In my imagination I was a matador and the crowd adored me. The Count would wave his arms wildly as he explained the finer points. I never have been to a bullfight so it just goes to show how education is wasted on the ignorant.

Our school motto was diligentia opes prosperitas, or diligence means success. Of course we couldn’t have a motto in the vulgar tongue: it had to be in Latin. It’s what the parents were paying for. I wondered later whether parents were really paying to have their children privately beaten up rather than privately educated.

Our black-gowned Latin master looked like a bird of prey. Below his slicked back black hair and high forehead, protruded a hooked nose beneath which a tiny thin-lipped mouth grimaced. Mr. Madden would gratuitously tweak our ears and pull us up by the lapels as he made us stand to decline verbs. If one stuttered or made a mistake he would drop a box of Swan Vestas matches in the sleeve of his gown and use it like a medieval mace to pummel his victim on the head, while hurling insults. He carried a cane which he would bring down on the desk with such violence that I would catch my breath. The cane, like the sword of Damocles, was always a threat hanging over us.

Education by fear had been the status quo for some five hundred years. The British did invent the concentration camp and barbed wire. The school was run like a mini-police state. Perhaps we were being trained to administer an empire, that, unbeknownst to the staff, had already fallen apart. The oldest boys at our school were twelve. Some of them were prefects and wore badges to prove their authoritarian status.

Prefects supposedly knew the byzantine system of school rules; and if they didn’t they were capable of inventing a few. To their utter joy prefects could punish. They were not allowed to cane younger boys as was the fashion at the time in private schools for older boys, but they could give out essays to be handed in the next day, or send one to detention. Detention meant staying in a classroom and working during lunchtime.

As a “new boy” I once made the mistake of misreading the badge. I thought it said perfect. It’s the sort of thing to get you in trouble. It did. A one page essay on the subject of a grain of sand was my punishment for insolence. It might not seem much of a punishment but I was not yet used to the mandatory two hours of nightly homework. It would have been easier had I known about William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence and his reflection on a world in a grain of sand. But I didn’t. If the essay did not appear by morning I would be sent to the headmaster. There’s nothing like power for getting too big for your boots. But I decided not to share this observation with the power-mad prefect. I was learning tact.

By the time I was nine-and-a-half I could draw a map of Europe from memory, and locate the capital cities. However, I have yet to use this knowledge, and some of those countries no longer exist. I knew that Cotta was a Roman consular who was forever writing boring stuff about his soldiers which we were to translate into English. Why we needed to know what Cotta was doing 2000 years ago was perplexing. I do remember that his men had left their spears down by the river. Perhaps it was a lesson that forgetfulness is only human and therefore should be tolerated.

I had a nodding acquaintance with algebra, geometry, and fractions. Fractions made the most sense to me. The headmaster taught us mathematics. He had made it pretty clear about dividing up cakes into halves, quarters, eighths, and so on. I experimented at home with a chocolate cake and scientifically proved that fractions do indeed work.

I couldn’t see the use of algebra though. The subject was more confusing because in one problem b=5, and in another b=7, or mind bogglingly b=x. Why anyone would want to know at what point trains would pass each other when they left different stations at different times was just one more mystery of the adult world.

The headmaster had a very short fuse. He did not suffer fools gladly, and in his opinion most of us were fools. You blithering idiot, and don’t blub boy (meaning don’t cry) were two of his favorite expressions. He was prone to rages, and he was enthusiastic about caning small boys. 

He had a rack of canes in his study. Some were thin and terrifying looking. I was given six-of-the best for hiding a boy’s cap after filling it with water. Rumor had it that if you cried you would get it much worse. Someone had seen me commit this criminal act and reported me. The headmaster had explained how I was being punished for not owning up; and that it would hurt him more than it hurt me. He was wrong.

The headmaster reminded me of a hippopotamus. In the middle of his jowly face was a thick mustache. His stomach was large. When he wasn’t bellowing at us about areas of circles, he was getting us to do hip rolls and jumping jacks in the park. This was called physical training, PT. Although for us small boys it wasn’t much of an effort. However, the headmaster would huff and puff and we would do our best not to laugh.

Have you noticed there is a sort of pressure-cooker effect when you want to laugh but can’t? It was not wise to laugh. I was learning wisdom.

Sports were on the agenda for Monday and Friday afternoon — all afternoon. We played mud-caked rugby in the winter: rain or shine. In summer, we played cricket or swam in the ice cold pool in a park at the other end of town. On one occasion, when the swimming pool had closed for repairs, the whole school, about forty-five boys, all went nude swimming in the river. Even the headmaster was au naturel.  However, most Mondays and Fridays in summer we dressed in mandatory white (the only time long trousers were permitted) and played cricket on the grounds of a nearby school for older boys.

The game of cricket can bring time to a standstill. I believed that I would always be nine-and-a-half–years-old and standing on the boundary of a cricket pitch willing the church clock’s hands to move. But there was something worse than contemplating an afternoon that would last until the planet Earth suffered heat death. It was playing silly mid on.

It’s the name of a fielding position in cricket. Just the name is enough to make the blood run cold. A terrified boy has to stand twenty-five yards or so in line with where the batsman is going to slam that notoriously hard potentially lethal ball right at him. In theory, the boy is supposed to remain alive and catch the ball.

The headmaster didn’t take kindly to anyone willfully not catching the ball. The enraged headmaster pulled out a cricket stump and beat one poor lad for his failure to catch what the headmaster considered to be an easy ball. Cricket, like war, consists of long periods of boredom punctuated by intense periods of terror. 

Only batsmen wore leg protection: the rest of us were vulnerable. I did see a boy knocked unconscious with the ball. They carried him off on a stretcher and we never saw him again. I wasn’t clear about how playing cricket was supposed to make you a gentleman.

Manners, or at least an outward show of them, were of utmost importance. Good behavior meant being courteous, polite, respectful, and most of all, quiet. Later in life, I was obliged to live in New York for three years of street-therapy to counteract my debilitating sense of British politeness.

Politeness for us small boys was especially important when off the school premises. Adults constituted a sort of secret police. Adults were the enemy. They could report bad behavior to the school and there would be consequences. We were easily identified in our purple blazers, caps, ties, short trousers, and long socks.

Continued