A Life in Questions. Jeremy Paxman
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over tea, and an occasion on which he was cornered by a gang of girls who pinned him to the ground so that their leader – now doubtless a highly respectable grandmother – could clamber on top to kiss him. On our first day of term there we returned home to find that Mum had given birth to a baby girl who would be named Genevieve – which, after Jeremy, Giles and James, at least had the advantage that when someone was to be shouted at, there was a reasonable chance that the first syllable might come out right.
The next stage of 1950s private education required ambitious parents to commit their children to the care of a bunch of drunks, pederasts and cashiered army officers at a local preparatory school. There is said to have been a question posed in the New Statesman of the time: ‘Has anyone ever met a sane prep school master?’ I do not know whether any was found, but there were certainly very few at the Lickey Hills Preparatory School.
The place had originally been built as another Victorian mansion for a successful Birmingham businessman, and over the years had had various classrooms added on to the original structure. The headmaster was – or appeared to a small boy – a tall man with straight brown hair swept back from a face which seemed to have been sculpted from sandstone. He wore cavalry twill trousers and tweed jackets, and turned an exceptional shade of violet when angry, which was much of the time. When he was in this state you could see the pulses in his temples throbbing. I imagine something had happened to him in the war.
But then, something had happened to more or less every grown-up in the war. Colonel Collinson, who taught us French (more precisely, he taught us how to make an invisible margin down the middle of the page, on either side of which, at some vague date in the future, we might perhaps write French words and their English counterparts) was missing a finger, and Mr Thomas, our gym master, was minus an eye – if you asked him nicely he’d pop out his glass replacement and let you have a look inside the socket. It was hard to imagine Mr Steer, the classics master, in uniform, since he found it hard enough to puff his way up the three steps into our classroom, pinching out his roll-up at the door with mahogany-brown fingers and slipping the dog-end into a matchbox which then went into the pocket of his astonishingly filthy houndstooth jacket. There were a few older masters who might, I suppose, have seen action in the First World War, and the occasional young man about to go to university or seminary – the only thing I learned from them was that the Prayer of Humble Access in the communion service was ‘almost certainly blasphemous’.
The sole women in this odd world were the headmaster’s long-suffering little wife and the school matron, a thin, beaky figure who bustled about the place in dark-blue uniform and starched nurse’s cap, dispensing ‘malt’ to boys who weren’t growing quickly enough, ‘tonic’ to boys who were growing too fast, and laxatives to anyone who hesitated in answering her questions about their bowel movements. Since the lavatories were housed in an outbuilding which regularly froze up in winter, daily bowel movements were low on the list of priorities. Matron also supervised the compulsory once-a-week bath.
Why did our parents surrender us to the care of such a bizarre institution? The short – and correct – answer is that they thought they were buying us a head-start in life. Neither Paul nor Gerald, my friends at home, seemed to be especially disadvantaged by being spared the experience – though it was hard to tell when we were playing war games or cooking bannocks on the ovens we made in the woods out of old bricks and a sheet of corrugated iron.
Slowly but surely, though, the chasm widened. There were new friends among the fellow inmates of the Lickey Hills Preparatory School, and they were the sons of doctors and architects. Which, I suppose, was one of the things my family was paying for. British class divisions were much deeper then (though the subject is still endlessly written about in newspapers and magazines, as if nothing has changed). The truth is that, for those who can afford it, education has been for generations a way of translating the children of one class into the adolescents of another. The parents made things and generated wealth. Their children emerged from education for careers in the professions. On the way, they have been hived off from the mainstream. Few of us ever recover. The obvious solution is to make the education provided by the state so good that no one but a lunatic would want to go elsewhere.
My parents’ pockets weren’t deep enough for me to feel entirely at ease with the boys who genuinely belonged to the professional classes. One day, at my friend Philip Kelly’s house, I saw the milk delivery. It included yoghurt, a substance which had never darkened the door of High Lea – or 262 Old Birmingham Road, as it was less portentously known – and of which I had indeed never heard. Phil’s father was an architect. My own father’s sally into sophistication was to bring home an avocado pear one day. We were all rather baffled by it.
Life at High Lea had a predictable routine. In the morning, after a teaspoonful of cod-liver oil followed by another of viscous orange-juice concentrate – both of them provided, I think, by the National Health Service – my brothers and I set off in our grey shorts, blue Aertex shirts, navy blazers and caps to walk the mile to school. Occasionally we were waylaid by other boys, notably the son of the local butcher, who once boasted to us that he could hold a piece of liver in his hand for longer than any of us could imagine. Sometimes the encounters got physical and we had to run for it. On the way home in the evening we might stop by the post office to see if we could extract any forgotten coins by pressing button B in the telephone box, money we would then spend on sweets – the penny chew was particularly popular.
The sixty or so boys in the school ate together in one great dining room. There was tea from an enormous urn, at break there was a small bottle of milk (again provided, I think, by the state) and chunks of bread coated in beef dripping – delicious when heavily sprinkled with salt. Lunch was generally a stew or some variety of shrivelled offal – liver or kidneys or whatever was cheap that week, I suppose. The evening meal was usually something like tinned pilchards in tomato sauce, washed down with soapy-tasting tea from The Urn.
For the last year or so of my time at prep school I was expected to live in as a boarder, the final enrolment into the repressed self-reliance of what the middle classes took to be ‘a decent education’. We slept in dormitories of four or five beds apiece, in which the only visible contact with home was the rug we had each been given by our mothers. Mine was in some odd artificial fibre, striped in yellow, grey and white – testament to the family’s unfamiliarity with boarding-school life: everyone else had some species of woollen tartan, sometimes claiming it to be that of the family clan. Sunday mornings were spent writing letters home. This was done under the eye of a member of staff, and followed a strict formula:
Dear mother and father,
How are you? I am well.
The first eleven played Abberley yesterday. We lost five–nil.
After that, it was a desperate struggle to creep over onto the back of the piece of paper, as we knew that a letter that was too short would be rejected by the supervising teacher.
Looking back on it, the life we were leading was so utterly separate from our home lives that it was a wonder we found any point of contact at all. A stranger glancing in through the big Victorian window might have guessed that the adult was there to censor what was being written. And indeed, sometimes he did: my brother Giles, who was having an absolutely wretched time, several times wrote letters reading ‘I hate it here, please come and take me home,’ which were torn up. He managed to smuggle a couple of notes out in the pockets of day boys at the school, but our parents thought he was making a fuss about nothing, and would eventually settle down. When he finally ran away and barricaded himself in his bedroom at home they returned him to the school: it was important to them that you did your duty, and ‘putting up with things’ was part of that.
By the standards of the time, I suppose the Lickey Hills Preparatory School was no worse than many others. If there were school inspectors in those days, we were unaware of them, and it seemed that anyone could open a school whenever and wherever they liked. At least we had little trouble of the kind which befell a friend enduring a similar education elsewhere. When he eventually plucked up the courage to go to the headmaster to report that the geography master kept putting his hand up his shorts, the head replied with a long-suffering air that ‘Mr Jones is what we call a homosexual. Do you know what that means? No? It means he prefers