arrived, I was more than a touch nervous. Twelve hundred boys, tailcoats, strange white bow ties which had to be tied with the help of a paperclip, my own room, a house of forty boys, a completely new set of rules and regulations to learn. I would have a much greater degree of freedom than I had experienced at Sunningdale, where obviously the young boys had to be kept under close and watchful guidance. Eton was a huge step nearer to the big wide world, and was both frightening and exciting because of it. ‘There will be plenty of other new boys,’ Grizel had said to me in a voice which suggested that that put the argument to bed once and for all.
After a journey of about four hours, not particularly helped by Grizel trying to jolly me along in between spirited bouts of backseat driving, we all trooped in through the front door of Common Lane House and shook hands with M’Tutor and Mrs M’Tutor, as they were known in the Eton vernacular, Geoffrey and Janet Nickson. Geoffrey Nickson was bald and quite small, with a beaming smile, a warm handshake, twinkling eyes and a chuckling laugh, all of which made that first frightening step so much easier than it had been at Sunningdale. He could have taught Mr Fox a thing or two, but then I was five years older, and better able to cope.
As I sat on the ottoman in my own room at Eton, with its lift-up bed hidden behind curtains, my own friendly shooting prints on the wall – I still have them today in my bedroom – and a few family photographs, I was acutely conscious that I was now on my own, in a much more grown-up society. It was a help to know that my brother John had been through it before me, in the same house, and had survived. All the new boys were in the same boat, but at that moment it was a personal, not a communal thing. When we arrived we were all tremulous little islands in a rough sea. I had had many lessons at home on how to put on a stiff collar, how to use collar studs and how to tie that alarming white bow tie – alarming until you had done it once, after which it was simple, as many apparently difficult things turn out to be. There was an official form of ‘cheating’, in that the white strip of the tie had a hole in the middle, through which you put the collar stud between the two ends of the stiff collar. One end of the tie was then held sideways across the collar, while the other was tucked over the top by your Adam’s apple, and then thrust down inside the shirt, where it was held in position by the paperclip. This was the ‘cheating’ bit. The two ends were then pushed under each side of the collar – simple really – then it was nervously down to breakfast, my first outing in my tailcoat. I had well and truly begun my first half at Eton.
We new boys sat at a small table in the corner at one end of the boys’ dining room, which had the somewhat mixed benefit of being presided over by ‘My Dame’ (M’Dame), who was a sort of high-falutin’ house matron. She was called Miss Pearson, and while I must say I never found her particularly loveable, it was a less aggressive sort of unloveableness than Miss Paterson’s. I suppose M’Dame had to be bossy, but she made rather a business of it. When I came down, extremely frightened, to that first breakfast I found myself being stared at by those who were not new boys in a ‘Look what the cat’s brought in’ sort of way.
I was lucky with my housemaster, M’Tutor. Geoffrey Nickson had all the qualities of a perfect schoolmaster. He was kind; he was thoughtful; he was never in a hurry; he never panicked; he never shouted; he was unfailingly interested in everything you did; he suggested, firmly at times, rather than ordered; he had a splendid sense of humour; and he punished firmly and without relish or enjoyment. At Eton, like all masters, he was known by his initials, ‘GWN’. The ‘W’ stood for Wigley, which was harmless enough, but gave rise to a certain amount of childish amusement. GWN was a classical scholar. He was not an Etonian himself, but you would never have guessed it. I arrived at Eton near the end of his fifteen-year spell as a housemaster, which finished at the end of the summer half in 1955. I don’t think it would have been possible not to love GWN. He was always immensely approachable – a schoolmaster, and yet very much not a schoolmaster. He had a wonderfully ready, infectious and enthusiastic smile. He was always fun, whether you were a member of the library, the elite five at the top of the house, who sat at his end of the long dining-room table, or a lower boy, as we all were for at least three halves, whom he took for pupil room, known colloquially as ‘P-hole’, at the end of formal lessons each morning in the mildly improvised classroom outside his study. He was equally enthusiastic whether bowling his leg-tweakers in the nets or watching members of his house in whatever sporting contest they were competing in against other houses. A perfect illustration of GWN’s skill as a schoolmaster came when he caught four of my friends playing bridge – cards were strictly illegal. He made them all write a Georgic which entailed copying out more than five hundred lines of Latin verse. He then asked them down to his study every Sunday afternoon to teach them to become better bridge players.
On Sundays, Mrs M’Tutor, Janet Nickson, who was the perfect complement to GWN, would read to the lower boys in her husband’s study, and we had to suffer such improving literature as Lorna Doone in her slightly schoolmistressy voice. When we became upper boys, GWN himself read to us in pupil room. We listened spellbound to, among others, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and J.K. Stanford’s The Twelfth, about Colonel the Honourable George Hysteron-Proteron’s exploits on a grouse moor on 12 August, the opening day of the season. GWN himself was no mean shot, and a considerable fisherman.
One of the first exams a new boy had to go through at Eton was a ‘Colour Test’. There were goodness knows how many different caps, or colours, as they were known, given exclusively for prowess in sporting pursuits ranging from cricket to rowing to the field game, the wall game, fives, racquets, squash, beagling, athletics, gymnastics, tennis, soccer, rugby and many others besides. About three weeks into my first half new boys gathered in the library – in non-Eton talk, the house prefects’ room – where they were asked many searching questions. A profusion of different-coloured caps were produced, and we had to identify them. We had to show that we knew the masters by their initials, that we understood the geography of the place and other Etonian lore, not least the idiosyncratic language which was peculiar to the school. The geography was extremely important, as once the Colour Test had been passed, we lower boys began our fagging career. If you were told by a member of the library to take a fag note (a written message) to a boy in, say, DJGC or FJRC, it was as well to know where you had to go. When a member of the library needed a fag, he would make a ‘boy call’, his yell of ‘B-o-o-o-o-oy’ going on for twenty seconds or so. The last lower boy to arrive got the job. Having taken middle fourth in my Common Entrance, it was my lot to be a fag for five halves.
I enjoyed my five years at Eton as much as any period of my life. As I had discovered at Sunningdale, having the luck to be reasonably successful at games was a great help. Good schoolboy games players become little tin gods, a status which provides a certain insulation against the petty struggles of school life. Of course, this doesn’t happen at once. I spent my first half trying to unravel the mysteries of the field game, an Eton-devised mixture of rugger and soccer played with a round ball. There is a sort of mini scrum, known as the ‘bully’, and much long and skilful kicking up and down the field by the three backs, one behind the other called ‘short’, ‘long’ and ‘goals’. I played at ‘outside corner’, on the edge of the bully, a sort of wing forward. I was never any good at the game, and didn’t enjoy it much. The umpire only blew for infringements if the players appealed. ‘Cornering’, which meant passing, and ‘sneaking’, being offside, were the two most common offences, although the most enjoyable, for obvious reasons, was ‘furking in the bully’, which was lightly, delicately and tellingly adapted on almost every occasion. This was for what was known in less esoteric circumstances as back-heeling, as would happen in a rugger scrum. The wall game was another complicated and esoteric Eton institution. Like many Oppidans (non-Collegers), I never played it, and I still have no clue about the rules. It is best known for the annual mudbath that takes place between the Tugs (Collegers) and the Oppidans on St Andrew’s Day alongside a high and extremely old brick wall in College Field, by the road to Slough.
I had a terrific time in my first half, being ‘up to’ Mr Tait for classics. He was known as ‘Gad’ Tait, for the obvious reason that his initials were GAD. Most of the beaks’ (masters’) nicknames were pretty unoriginal. Dear old Gad Tait
