The Tall Girl from Somerset 8

HENRY  
School days at Waterbury remembered.

It was right, that old school book.  I can’t remember the name of it now, but it had a dark blue hardback cover.  All the school books were hardback then and they were always a dark colour.  Dark red, dark blue, dark green.  And the part in between the hard covers was dark too!

Yet in spite of page after page of solid text there were still some writers who could inspire.  There always are.  I remember the first lines of a chapter in a history book  about Egypt.  I still remember it though  I was in the Junior School then. I read it when I was 8 and over 70 years later it’s still as clear as clear.  It began:

“The time has come,”  the Walrus said

“To talk of many things:

Of shoes and ships and sealing wax

Of cabbages and kings.”

And then it went on. 
'We are not going to talk about cabbages in this chapter but we will have something to say about all the other things that the Walrus mentions.'    

What a great way to start a history lesson!  Of course, we  all looked through the chapter to find sealing wax, ships and shoes just to check the book hadn’t made a mistake.  That’s good teaching isn’t it?  Getting them hooked! This writer, bless him or her, had planted a little flower by the dusty highway of education. It’s a pity that cabbages didn't get a mention, though.  Did they have cabbages in Ancient Egypt?  Surely they did. I suppose I will never know.

Going back to the blue book, chapter two was ‘The Seven Ages of Man’.  There was the text from 'As You Like It', you know, ‘All the world’s a stage’ and so on, but the pictures on the other page showed each of the seven ages with little drawings.  How boring the text books were in those days.  ‘Text’ was the right word!  Normally they were text and nothing but text from start to finish.  And it was heavy stuff, not the lively prose of Bryson.  Far from it, I’m afraid!  Not many illustrations at all, so you appreciated the few that there were.  And no colour.  Definitely no colour.  That came later.  It was page after page of black text.  Now, where was I?  Ah yes, this time there were some illustrations!  The seven ages of man. There was the schoolboy, then the lover and so on. And the pictures went in a circle.  The poor old chap sans teeth, sans eyes and sans everything at the end was right next to the mewling, puking baby at the start.  Full circle, you see.  We end up where we begin.

Well, we do if we’re lucky.  What’s sad is when the thread is cut half way.  A road accident or something.  Half the road untravelled.  That’s what’s sad. Life should be circular, you see.

I was at school at Waterbury.  It’s a small city with a big cathedral.  The cathedral brooded over the rest of the houses like a mother hen over her chicks.  The city was so small that not much of it was outside the sphere or even beyond the shadow of the great cathedral.

Ah yes, school.  Rugby on Monday afternoons, Thursday afternoons,

Friday evenings and Saturday afternoons.  Even then, at school,  Friday was the best

day of the week.  I don’t know why, because the weekend, looking back,

was hardly two days of freedom.  School on Saturday morning, rugby on

Saturday afternoon and then more prep.  Anyway, where was I? Ah yes,

rugby on Monday.  Down on the rugby field, a furlong of level meadow,

near the edge of the city by Mount Woods.  The city was very small.  We could

walk from the school, which was by the cathedral, to the rugby field in 10

minutes, and the rugby field was more or less in the country.  November evenings, and

in a pause in the game, when the scrum was down and we in the backs had

a second to ourselves to think about life in general, you could see through the late 

afternoon mists St Aidan’s with its tower.  The tower had windows and turrets, 

and looked like a grey owl. The two windows were the eyes

and the turrets were the ears.   That’s what it looked like in the November

evenings. An owl looking across over the low red roofs of the houses to where

we were playing.  The ball’s out now, concentrate, scrum half, fly half, me,

look for the gap, always look for the gap, go for it, through it, now there’s

only the full back, on with the game!

The school was in many different buildings, and these old buildings were scattered 

around the liberties which were the streets close to the cathedral.  Each building was a 

young bird’s flutter, as Keats would  have said,  from the cathedral, and the cathedral 

dominated the life of the school.   How many times did we walk up and down the 

Liberty!  Even between classes we walked those streets. 

Everything at school changed with the seasons.  In the December evenings as the term 

led up to Christmas, the air was crisp and cold and at 4 o’clock it began to get dark.   

The day was closing down and the evening was saying, ‘Go inside now.  Go home!’   

The lights of the houses all said, ‘Come in!’  The

fields, the hedges and the lanes were all shutting up for the night.  The

birds had given up and turned in long ago.  All life had moved inside. 

The houses were turning on their lights, making the rooms as cheerful and

cosy as possible.  Well, I’m wrong there.  The houses of the good folk of

Waterbury may have been cosy but our dormitories had no heating all the

winter through.  They were enormous fridges with beds in.  You went to bed and 

waited for what seemed to be hours, and was probably twenty minutes or so, for

your feet to warm up.  They were long minutes though, very long. 

Rugby finished at half past four.  Then back, shower, change.  Always in a rush.  There was no time to hang around.  No time for melancholy.  Ten to five.  Ten to five in the afternoon.  We would be in the passage by the kitchen queuing for tea. Ten to five in the afternoon. Stands the cathedral clock at 10 to 5?  We would join the queue in the corridor and shuffle forward to the hatch that gave into the big high kitchen. At the hatch we collected a mug of tea, six slices of bread with a small cube of butter and a little jam and, on Sundays only, a slice of cake.  On Sundays only, remember.  Then up the stone steps and left into the dining room.  After tea it was prep, chapel, supper, prep and then a few minutes of free time before bed. And that was the evening, week in week out, term after term.   

That was the Waterbury day, and even now, after 65 years, I am still governed by some of the times.  It’s 5 o’clock now, so I’m late for the tea queue. I'll wander into the kitchen here and make myself a cup and have some slices of bread with some butter and a little jam.