The Tall Girl from Somerset 7 Henry

HENRY   The Walrus and the Carpenter, Jacques, rugby and the tower of St Aidan's.

School days at Waterbury

It was on ancient history, that old school textbook.  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 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 about Egypt in that history book.  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.  This chapter began with the verse of Lewis Carroll:

“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.  Through my life I have wondered from time to time whether they had cabbages in Ancient Egypt.  Surely they did. I thought I would never know but oddly enough the other day I was watching a gardening programme on TV and the man just happened to say that cabbages were an important part of the diet of ancient Egyptians. Just think of that. The man just came out with it there and then. My mind went straight back to us all sitting on the hard wooden benches at school and reading that book. So the author could have included cabbages after all. What a pity he didn’t know.

We also had a red book. It was extracts from English literature and chapter two was ‘The Seven Ages of Man’.  There was the text from 'As You Like It',  ‘All the world’s a stage’ and  the pictures on the opposite page showed each of the seven ages.  There was a little drawing for each one.  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, if you remember. Or perhaps you are young enough to have had books with colour.   Not many illustrations at all, so you appreciated the few that there were.  We had 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. Jacques' view of life. 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 left untravelled.  That’s what’s sad. Life should be circular, you see.  That’s how things are.

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 of the great cathedral or even beyond its shadow.

Ah yes, school.  Rugby four times a week: 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, as I look 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.  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

St Aidan’s with its tower looming through the late afternoon mists.  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 to beat.  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 Liberties!  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 the dormitories in our school had no heating

all the winter through.  There was a theory that fresh air was good for character

building, for morals and for the general education of boys.  Our dormitories

were enormous fridges with beds in.  This seemed normal to us then. It was how

life was. We never thought of countries further south where you did not need to

possess a coat or scarf or gloves, and where your hands never tingled with the

frost.  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.  At ten to five in the afternoon we were 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 opened 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 over 70 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 at home and make myself a cup and have some slices of bread with some butter and a little jam.