大象传媒

Playing with the rabbits

Chapter 2

About this time my brother鈥檚 school was evacuated to the country, not far from Southampton, to a place called Broughton. My parents felt that with the increasing hazard of air raids, it would be better if he and I were together, so they decided to send me to the same school. How we arrived at this place I do not know, my memories of modes of transport at that time are very vague. We met the headmaster, a Mr.Bloy, a formidable and rather frightening figure of a man, or at least to a quivering eight year old. He had a military bearing, close cropped hair and a bull neck bulging at the back of his shirt collar. The building was a small country housse, called Broughton House, standing in it鈥檚 own small estate. The owners had sensibly left to spend the rest of the war in the United States, 鈥渂omb dodging鈥� as my mother bitterly remarked. The choice was, should they let it out to a school, or have it requisitioned by the War Office. They chose what they regarded as the lesser of two evils. My brother who was already in residence there, met us and we were shown round the house. The only part I clearly remember was the entrance hall, which had models of ships in glass cases on the wall. Soon the formalities were over and my parents departed and I was left in the care of my brother. I must say he was very good at keeping an eye on me. Every night, after supper, which we ate communally in one of the larger rooms, he would wait to say goodnight to me and ask me if I was alright. I was very grateful for this concern as at first it was very hard to come to terms with being separated from my parents and home, but also to find myself among complete strangers. I think I must have started well into the term as most of the boys already there seemed well settled in. There was one boy who spent the whole time crying with homesickness, he was put in a corner of the classroom and left to get on with it and after a week or two he stopped. I soon settled in with the other little boys. We had small classes, probably not more than ten or twelve pupils and each class had it鈥檚 own dormitory. So we spent a lot of time rather densely together. For the first time I was involved in organised sport and discovered that I played a mean game of football, frequently scoring goals with a combination of aggressiveness and speed. I was not interested in teamwork and discovered that if you charged at people hard enough they would just fall away.

I had an embarassing mishap very early into my time there. After breakfast in the morning,, before classes started, we would have prayers in one of the large rooms presided over by the headmaster and the staff. The headmaster and the staff would face us with their backs to the door which led to the toilets. Each morning, after breakfast, I would have the most urgent desire to pee, so I would make my way to the toilet, sometimes having to wait for whoever was already there. When I had finished I would enter into the room behind the staff and headmaster, who sometimes would have already begun prayers. After this had happened twice the headmaster sternly forbade me to go to the lavatory until after prayers. A few mornings later, whilst standing singing our early morning hymn, I had an uncontrollable urge to pee and to my horror found it running down my leg, as we, the junior boys, were in the front row it was customary for us to file out first, we had almost got out of the door when the headmaster called us back, 鈥淲ho did that鈥� he said, pointing at the offending, crimson with embarassment I raised my hand. I was not punished but had the humiliation of having to clear it up in front of the entire school.

There was a communal room, in the evenings we had recreational activities. This was policed by senior boys who were called prefects. They generally kept order and had the power of corporal punishment in the form of beating on the palms of your extended hands with the sharp edge of a ruler. This could be very painful and on a couple of occasions I was beaten quite savagely in this way by one of the prefects who was in my brother鈥檚 form. My brother did his best to interfere but to no avail, justice had to be seen to be done.

Our parents tried to visit us every other weekend, they would bring picnics with them and we would usually find places in the woods to have them. Once I remember sitting in a small chalk quarry eating egg sandwiches.

Every Sunday we were taken by the school to the local church for the morning service. We must have been quite close to Southampton because some nights we would stand outside and in the distance we could see the searchlights and the glow of fires and a distant sound as of thunder, which I was told was Southampton being bombed. Somehow I did not connect all this with my parents, it never occurred to me that they may be in danger of getting killed.

We came toward the end of term and it seemed that the school could no longer afford to keep us there, we were to pck up and return to Southampton. I became very anxious about how I was going to get back home. Another boy in the dormitory also lived in Shirley and his father had a car, so he said he would ask his father to give me a lift and drop me off in Shirley High Street. I then became even more anxious as to how I was going to get home from there with my suitcase which was too heavy to carry by myself. These anxieties preoccupied me for days before the end of term but it was all nonsense, my parents simply came and collected us. I don鈥檛 remember how we got back, coach, lift in someone鈥檚 car?

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