Shooting History: A Personal Journey

In our own childish warfare there was more than a whiff of class. The few children of the teaching staff who lived near enough qualified for our war games. Oliver was one of these, a dependable friend who generally took my side against my two brothers, squaring up the numbers. But the children of the ‘domestic staff’ did not qualify for such sport. Susan lived across the road from Oliver, but she was the child of the school’s Sergeant Major. Although enticing and blonde, she was to be kept at a distance, and so almost became a kind of foe – unspoken to, mysterious. Her father had charge of the school guns, of which there were many. I have vivid memories of boys strutting around in military uniforms in large numbers, and of invasions staged in the school quadrangles. They were a further signal of that persistent sense of the overhang and threat of war.

A remote rural English boarding school is at best a strange and intense environment in which to grow up. My father, as headmaster, was God. He was an enormous man, six feet seven in his socks, and at least sixteen stone. He wore baggy flannel suits in term time, and leather-patched tweed jackets in the evenings. In the holidays he embarrassed us all with huge scouting shorts and long, tasselled socks knitted by my mother. His hands were large and handsome, the skin cracked and tanned. He was old for as long as I can remember. To me he was strict, dependable, and at times remote. I was a very inadequate son of God. In the ever-present school community, I felt exposed and commented upon.

Many of the domestic staff who lived on the school grounds seem to have been drawn from prisoner-of-war or internment camps. There were Poles, Italians, and others who appeared to have recently been released from mental hospitals. We knew them all by their first names. Among them was Jim, a kind man who was often to be found standing outside the kitchens having a smoke. One day, on one of my regular tricycle circuits of the school, Jim stopped me and asked if I’d like to come up to his room for some sweets. I was five or six. I left my tricycle and followed him up the dark staircase. Inside he sat me down and started to talk. Very soon he was undoing my brown corduroy shorts. I was worried that I’d never be able to do up the braces again – I couldn’t handle the buttons on my own. Suddenly I had no clothes on. Jim undid his trousers, and produced something which to me seemed absolutely enormous. At that very moment from beyond the door a voice shouted, ‘Jim! Jim! Come out here.’

‘Quick!’ said Jim. ‘Under the bed!’ He hoisted his trousers and left the room. I could hear raised voices. I recognised the voice of the other man – it was the school bursar, an ex-Wing Commander who often came to lunch at home. Home, three hundred yards away, suddenly seemed a very long way away indeed.

Jim returned, and peered at me under the bed. It seemed he’d been spotted abducting me. ‘You’ve got to go,’ he said.

‘What about the sweets?’ I asked.

‘Next time,’ he said.

‘Will you help me with my braces?’ I asked anxiously. He did. I was never to see him again. My brother Tom told me some time later, when I cautiously asked, that Jim had been sacked. No one ever spoke to me about what happened. Yet I can’t imagine that the bursar didn’t tell my parents. The next time he came to lunch he didn’t look me in the eye. I felt something bad had happened, but I didn’t really know what.

Beyond the prison-camp feel of the domestic quarters there was one other place where there was evidence of war: Ardingly village, a long walk from the college. Most walks, most day care was in Nanny Rose’s hands. She was a solid, dependable, working-class Kentish woman, with an irresistible laugh. We had two regular walks with her. The first would take us down past Collard’s farm and the ageing foot-and-mouth warning signs on the gates, to the Avins Bridge Hotel, which straddled the little railway line that ran from Ardingly to our nearest town, Haywards Heath. This walk was always a treat, because Nanny would time it to coincide with the arrival of a train. The steam engine would let loose just under the bridge, and for an age our world would be enveloped in dense white cloud. After the train had gone we would wipe the sooty residue from our faces.

The second walk took us in the opposite direction, to the village. And there we would see them: men in invalid carriages, one with a hole where his ear had been, another with an open hole in his forehead. There were younger men too – men with white sticks and eye patches, back from the Korean war. There was a large war veterans’ home in the village. Nanny said these crumpled humans were ‘shell shocked’. They frightened me, and I wanted to know what had caused those holes, but Nanny’s Daily Sketch seemed to have left her more comfortable talking about the royal family.

While hints of war lay around many corners, there was also the balmy, backlit sense of security that the harvest and the annual crop of Cox’s orange pippins from the orchard yielded. The reaper binder tossed the corn, and men made stooks in the field beyond the herbaceous border. The wind caught the scent of the magnolia on the terrace wall, and bumblebees hovered around the delphiniums. My distant parents seemed at times to display more affection for plant life than for us, while in her own way Nanny loved us as if we had been her own. The contrasts of my childhood world mirrored those in the life of my family.

My father’s lack of experience in the trenches was more than compensated for at the dining table by the exchange of verbal grenades with my older brother Tom from behind The Times. For as long as I can remember, Tom was on the warpath. He was a revolutionary almost as soon as he knew the meaning of the word, and his targets were my parents. Tom was to become a lifelong committed trade union official, representing some of the lowest-paid people in the country. From an early age he asserted that he intended to break with family tradition. For three centuries each eldest son had fathered a son, and each George had named that son Tom; each Tom had followed suit with George. But this Tom was most assertively never going to call any son of his George.

The Toms and Georges from three hundred years dominated the walls not only of the dining room of our home, but the drawing room to boot. Most prominent of all the portraits was that of my grandfather, Lieutenant General Sir Thomas D’Oyly Snow KCB, KCMG, who hung scowling above the dining-room mantel. I never ate a boiled egg that he didn’t seem to have inspected. He was a massive presence in the home, despite having died seven years before I was born. My father spoke of him with reverence and not a little fear. My brother Tom regarded him as a monster, ‘one of so many in the ruling classes who had led their unsuspecting serfs to wholesale slaughter’.

From time to time our table warfare would be joined by my first cousin Peter – destined one day to lead many a sandpit war for both ITN and the BBC. Peter was ten years older than I, and in a better position to take Tom on. His father was a serving Brigadier, and Peter himself possessed more than a streak of the old General, our mutual grandfather, in his make-up. His main contribution to the table tensions was at critical moments to reach for, and upset, the overfull and highly unstable sugarbowl, scattering the stuff across the entire battlefield. Whereupon, of course, hostilities had to be suspended while Nanny was summoned to clear it all up.

Throughout the First World War General Tom, like so many of his time, had resisted mechanisation, believing in the value of the horse long after the tank had come to stay. I was perhaps six years old when my father recounted how his father had gone to Khartoum in 1885, after the failed attempt to break the siege in which General Gordon had been surrounded for ten months by the Mahdi. Tom had arrived too late to prevent Gordon’s shooting on the steps of his residence, but soon enough to acquire a chunk of the step upon which he’d died and to cart it home. It was to languish in his home at 3 Kensington Gate in London until the Blitz struck the house in 1940 and the ‘Gordon step’ was rendered indistinguishable from the rest of the rubble.

As far as I could divine as a child, General Tom had been knighted twice, at least once for leading a retreat. Commanding the Fourth Division during the First World War, it seems his actions in sorting out the retreat from Mons in 1915 saved many lives. My brother Tom of course preferred to dwell on the lives the great man had caused to be lost, and of these there must indeed have been very many. General Tom was a large and austere man who ended his days in a hand-operated invalid carriage. His horse had been shot from beneath him in 1917, smashing his pelvis. He was probably one of the last British generals ever to ride a horse into battle.

Further round the dining-room walls from my grandfather the General hung the family black sheep. He was a yet earlier Tom, who had made a killing of a somewhat different kind from the South Sea Bubble in 1720. He had presided over Snow’s Bank, which stood on the street named after him to this day, Snow Hill on the edge of the City of London. Of this Tom little was said – so little indeed that at one point I thought he was such a black sheep that he was in fact black. Either it was a very dirty painting, or he appeared to be of an unusually dark complexion, with black curly hair.

There was no representation of my mother’s family anywhere in the house. Like everything else about her, her forebears stayed obscurely in the background. The most interesting thing about her father, my maternal grandfather, Henry Way, was that he had been born in 1837 and sired her at the age of seventy-three. He was an estate agent in Newport, on the Isle of Wight. My mother was the last of nine children born to Henry’s three wives, two of whom died in childbirth. Her eldest half-brother was fifty years older than she was.

Beneath the daunting images in the dining room, our family gathered for prayers at the start of every day. Adamson the butler, his wife the cook – always known as ‘Addy’ and ‘Mrs Ad’ – and Nanny Rose would join us three boys, my mother and the eternal conductor of this solemn moment, my father. We would stand in line in order of importance. Mrs Ad always saw to it that her husband came at the end of the line. She was a formidable woman who regarded herself and Nanny Rose as at least as good as those they served. Poor Mrs Box, who did the cleaning, and Mr Webster – ‘Webby’ – the gardener, didn’t get a look-in. They were so far below stairs they never even got to glimpse the dining-room floor until it came to cleaning it or bringing in the logs.

‘Our Father, which art in heaven …’ intoned my father. This formal, ordered start to the day, which included the collect and a brief reading from the Bible, was part of the absolute security and order amid which I grew up. From the moment I could stand, I was in that line for prayers at eight in the morning, prompt. Then, while my mother and father and Tom took to the large oval dining table, my brother Nick and I, always referred to as ‘the little ones’, would go to the folding square table in the corner. My father would erect a home-made newspaper stand and settle to reading The Times. Tom would sneer at some upside-down headline that he’d caught from his vantage point, and the first salvoes would be exchanged. Sometimes, on a really good day, my mother would burst into tears, pleading with Tom to stop. ‘Your father is right, Tom, he’s not to be upset,’ she would cry. Sometimes the fusillades would be so frightening that Nick and I would cry too, and then the proceedings would have to be halted as we were ushered from the room for making too much noise.

Happy days were those when some preacher or family friend had come to stay. This invariably stilled the warfare. Tom would be on his most charming behaviour. There was Aunt Rhoda, my father’s sister, who’d married and then been immediately widowed by Alec Begg, a hugely rich New Zealander thirty years her senior whom she’d met on a cruise. She would talk of war, and how safe New Zealand would have been to live in had her husband not died. She was over six feet tall, thin as a birch sapling and mad as a March hare. She lived on her beloved Alec’s money in a series of rambling hotels along the south coast. When she came to stay, we ragged her rotten.

My father had another sister, Mary. Confusingly she was called Sister Mary, and looked like a seriously overgrown penguin. At some stage the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, conferred an MA on her, allowing her to enjoy the title ‘Church of England’s top nun’. She must surely have been the tallest. Over six foot like her siblings, she visited only rarely, and then eternally adorned in her white head-dress and black habit. Deeply austere, she would talk of high-flown ecclesiastical matters with my father, and of little else to any of the rest of us.

Among the many preachers who came to stay were people like the Bishop of Bradford, Donald Coggan, one day to become Archbishop of Canterbury. Dad was an excellent Bishop-spotter. He always seemed to know who was on the up. This mattered because, as was often discussed at the table, my parents assumed that he would sooner or later be ‘preferred’ and elevated to some bishopric or deanery before his time as headmaster came to a close. Because Ardingly College was part of a religious foundation of schools, he was required to be both teacher and ordained churchman. Even as a child, the ‘Church’ felt to me like something of a war machine. The Church militant seemed to have an officer class – plenty of generals, with suitable quantities of gold braid – and my father was somehow, one day, bound to take his place in their ranks.

Among the big-shot visitors who came to stay were people of genuine humility. Standing out from all others was Father Trevor Huddleston, who was at the forefront of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. His Church seemed to be the total opposite to my father’s, although of course it was the very same Anglican. Father Trevor wore a habit with a rope around the middle. His sandals were open, and I clearly remember his knobbly toes peering at me from beneath the dining-room table. My father was taken with his simplicity and holiness. I cannot imagine that he had a clue about Father Trevor’s politics. Certainly he never raised with us the suffering of Africa or anywhere else. It was through Trevor Huddleston, sitting at his knee at the age of six, that I first learned about Africa, and about an unequal world very far from the one implied by Tom Snow’s portrait above the mantel. ‘One day, my boy, you must come to South Africa,’ he said. ‘You’d be amazed by the people, by the villages, the animals. You could come with me on my rounds.’ I was to know Trevor on and off from my earliest childhood until his death in 1998.

These visits, when the outside world would come to call, were sadly all too rare. For the most part we were oblivious to what lay beyond the long trains that snaked across the viaduct in the far distance of our Ardingly world. If we did go to Haywards Heath we were barred from entering Woolworth’s: ‘You may catch something,’ my mother would warn. Likewise the cinema – I didn’t see a film until I was thirteen, a double bill of Genevieve and Doctor in the House.

My father listened to the BBC Home Service on the ‘wireless’ in his study, or to the BBC Third Programme in the drawing room. He was captivated by electronics. As a master at Eton College in the 1920s he had been the first member of staff to possess an electrically driven gramophone, and one of the earliest with a crystal wireless receiver. By the early 1950s, before the dawn of stereophonic reproduction, he had built a vast contraption out of light oak and plaster of Paris and set it in a corner of the drawing room. This was a state-of-the-art Voight mono loudspeaker. The sound came up from the belly of the beast, and was thrown up through an enormous plaster trumpet. It would then hit the canopy above and be splayed out into the centre of the room – theoretically, at least. I have no vivid memory of the sound, save that it was very loud, but the appearance was of a glorified ice-cream stand on Brighton pier.

We had no television. Indeed, until the coronation of the Queen in 1953, I had no idea that there was such a thing. Our neighbour in the adjoining part of the school had just purchased one. Derek Knight was a housemaster. He lived alone and chain-smoked Senior Service cigarettes, which stained his long fingers orange-brown and made his sitting room stink of tobacco. His entire existence seemed to centre on cigarettes. My mother had smoking in common with him, and had rather a soft spot for him. She did motherly things like darning his pullovers. One day he called us in to observe a new invention. An enormous walnut cabinet stood in the corner. It had a little window in the middle, with a couple of brown Bakelite knobs beneath it and a lot of wire hanging out of the back. This was my first sighting of a television set. I couldn’t really make it out. After all, I had never seen a moving picture.

Shortly before this I had been taken on my first trip to London, to see the preparations for the coronation. I remember a hot, sunny May day. The roof of the Hudson was fully down. As we approached Buckingham Palace through thronging crowds we passed open dustcarts full of workmen throwing boiled sweets. I caught one. ‘Don’t eat that, Jonathan,’ my mother chimed from the front seat. ‘You don’t know where it’s been.’

In the smelly, uncomfortable safety of Derek Knight’s sitting room, the thick brown woollen curtains were drawn against the summer sun. Ten or twelve of us craned at the little window to watch the great Coronation Day on 2 June 1953. The picture was a series of greys. It appeared to be snowing in London. From time to time I could detect a carriage, a white-gloved hand, and lots of men in ridiculous clothes. ‘This will never catch on,’ said my father of the walnut-facia’d contraption, and marched us out long before the service was over. The little window was certainly very small, and the picture indistinct, but to me it was still very intriguing.

Monarchy and the royal succession matched war as part of the background to my childhood world. The third fixed point was my parents’ marriage. Yet even here, war had played a role. In 1942, in addition to being the unpaid auxiliary fire chief and air raid marshal, my father was chaplain of Charterhouse School. This was an institution some notches higher up the league of English fee-paying schools than Ardingly, to which he was to move as headmaster in the year of my birth. In his role as a cleric he would go occasionally to the neighbouring YMCA, and it was in the canteen there that he encountered Joan Way, serving tea from a large urn. She was thirty, he was forty. In the extensive scrapbooks in which he recorded his life I can find no hint of a woman until that night. Indeed, my father, the indefatigable scoutmaster and housemaster, seems to have been far more interested in boys. That is not to say that he was a homosexual. More a self-obsessed man – he called his scrap albums ‘Ego books’ – he seems to have spent his holidays in the company of some of the boys he had taught. He and they built and maintained a narrow boat on the Grand Union Canal.

My mother’s arrival in the ‘Ego book’ is sudden, and comes with their engagement. George, the seasoned bachelor, proposed within three weeks of meeting Joan, and married her six weeks later. ‘That’s how it was in those days,’ my mother told me. ‘We were so conscious that we might not even survive the war.’ The engagement was so short that my father did not realise that my mother had no hair of her own. She had to tell him on the day he proposed to her that she had suffered an attack of alopecia totalis at the age of thirteen, after sitting her exams for the Royal College of Music. Her hair had fallen out over three nights, and never came back. ‘Your father was an absolute saint,’ she would say. ‘He asked for twenty-four hours to think about it after I told him, and he said he’d marry me anyway.’ This defined her status thereafter: her life was dedicated to his every need. It was a status which defied the reality that she was a concert-grade pianist who had studied composition with Herbert Howells, one of the great influences on twentieth-century English classical music. She knew as much about music as my father did about the Bible.

For us, growing up with George and Joan, the lodestar was the war. Nothing was ever quite so good or quite so bad as it had been ‘during the war’. Deeply conservative, they both worshipped order, an order in which everyone knew their place. Yet my father was not entirely conventional, for in addition to his love of the electronic he had a passion for fast American cars. Apart from this, in contrast to the absolutely dominant role America was to assume in my own life, George never went there, and he expressed little or no interest either in the place or its people. In his mind Britain still ruled the world.

The elevation from his 1920 Buick to the Hudson took place before I was born. The Hudson Essex Terraplane Eight was a rare beast indeed. Only six were ever made, and this one had been on the Hudson stand at the New York Motor show in 1931. Twenty-eight horsepower, she had a long bonnet and a very flat, almost unusable boot. My father had found and purchased the car through Exchange & Mart. In British terms, the Terraplane was like a cross between a Bentley and an MG. The dashboard looked like something from a makeshift cockpit: my father had installed an altimeter, a gradiometer and various other gadgets. The car was his greatest material joy. We would shop in it, pick up logs in it and go on holiday in it, squashed in the back, towing a vast caravan behind. My poor mother had to lash her wig down with tightly knotted headscarves.

One day in 1956 my father upped and sold the Hudson for £70 without warning. That was the moment that I discovered we were at war again. Our enemy this time was not Hitler, but someone called Nasser. It seemed funny to me how enemy leaders always seemed to end in ‘–er’. Ration books were back for petrol, and I was reduced to riding to school on the back of my mother’s bike. My father regarded Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister who had precipitated the Suez crisis, as a ‘good egg’. Many others thought he was unhinged. Certainly we now know that he was on a cocktail of antidepressant and other drugs at the time. With his white hair, tall good looks and white moustache, Eden seemed very much out of the top drawer.

I was too young to grapple with the full story, but according to my father, ‘This man Nasser, President of Egypt, has taken it upon himself to seize the Suez Canal, which we built, and will have to be dealt with.’ Washington, for once, saw the adventure for what it was, and provided the pressure which forced the British, French and Israelis to withdraw. The Anglo-French attempt to flash the flaccid tail of empire had failed. All I knew was that our world had retreated still further into the Sussex countryside. There was another consequence too, for Suez delivered a new Prime Minister.

From time to time on a Sunday evening I would go with my parents to 6.30 evensong in the school chapel. Sitting alone across the gangway, rather stooped, would be an old man in a tweed coat. One Sunday after Suez, my father introduced me to him. ‘This is the Prime Minister, Jonathan,’ he said.

I shook the man’s hand and looked up into rather sad eyes and drooping eyebrows. ‘Do you know what a Prime Minister is, young man?’ Harold Macmillan asked me.

‘Something to do with the Queen?’ I suggested. ‘Are you married to her?’

‘Good Lord, no!’ chortled Macmillan. ‘One day you might like to be a politician. That’s what I am.’ With that he got into the waiting Humber and purred away to his huge country home, Birch Grove, just beyond Ardingly village. Little was I to know that Macmillan’s wife Dorothy was probably at that very moment in bed with the scoundrel Tory MP Bob Boothby, with whom she maintained a torrid affair throughout her husband’s premiership. Perhaps this strikingly sad man gained solace from the chapel services while she found hers between the sheets.