Shooting History: A Personal Journey

The only good politician in my father’s house was a Tory politician. Labour never got a look-in. My father’s Christian faith did not extend to embracing the birth of the welfare state. His faith was the Tory party at prayer: war, Conservatism and Anglicanism were the trinity upon which my father’s philosophy was founded.

My mother never dissented from my father’s view; if anything she was even more conservative. But my relationship with her was of an altogether different texture. I enjoyed her femininity, her Blue Grass scent, her pearls, tweed skirts and Jacqmar scarves. It was not until I was eight that her greatest burden, the loss of her hair, was shared with me. Consequently she was reserved, and never let me clamber about her or run my fingers through what I still thought of as her hair. It was not until after my father’s death twenty years later that she discussed her loss of hair openly.

The piano was our thread of contact throughout my childhood. My mother was a wonderfully bold performer, in stark contrast to the retiring role she played within the family. Her long, slender, beautifully manicured fingers ranged powerfully across the keys as she played her beloved Brahms. She did not play often, and never without sheet music. I longed for her to extemporise and light upon some of the tunes I knew. She never did. Instead, from perhaps the age of four I began to pick up themes from her playing, and hummed or sang along with her. I was concerned that my brothers, who spent their time buried in my father’s workshop soldering solenoids, might tease me for this, but gradually, by the age of about seven, I began to sing with more gusto. It was in this activity alone that my mother revealed her most demonstrative maternal delight. Her eternity ring would clink about on the ivories as I, who could only vaguely decipher the clusters of notes on the page, waited for the nod that would signal me to turn it.

‘I say, Joan.’ It was my father calling out from behind The Times one day at breakfast.

‘Yes, darling?’

‘There’s a notice here about a voice trial at Winchester Cathedral to select new choristers. Shall we put the boy in for it?’

So began an intensive few weeks of arpeggios, harmonics and music theory. On the appointed day in April 1956 I turned up at Dumb Alley, a musty rehearsal room in the Winchester Cathedral Close where all the choir practices were held. Almost immediately I found myself standing next to the seated figure of the man who would be my choirmaster for the next five years, the aptly named Alwyn Surplice. After a rendition of the carol ‘Oh Little Town of Bethlehem’, I was in. I became a choral scholar at the Pilgrim’s School in the cathedral close.

My father was visibly pleased with my achievement. ‘You can have anything you want, under a pound,’ he announced. This was an extravagant gesture for him, in response to my saving him some severe school fees for the next five years. It was well after five o’clock as we headed for the shops. ‘You don’t need to spend it now,’ he said. But I wanted it right now, quick, before the shops closed at 5.30. Instant gratification, when we found the toyshop, came in the shape of a pale-blue Dinky Toy car transporter. It cost sixteen shillings and sixpence – no mean sum in those days.

Within three months I had arrived at Pilgrim’s School as a very full-time boarder, my holidays truncated and term times extended by saints’ days and high days, for which the sixteen members of the choir had to be present even when the other boys had gone home for vacations. The parting from Ardingly, treehouses, warfare with my brothers, music with my mother, was unutterably painful. At eight years old, I felt abandoned and inadequate. ‘He can’t do up his shoelaces, you know,’ my father had called over his departing shoulder to my new headmaster. Yet within weeks I found myself becoming part of the medieval weft and weave of the cathedral. Snaking across the close two or three times a day, we sixteen choristers were with Trollope, and Trollope was with us. We had stepped into history and joined with the characters of Barchester: dry old Canon Lloyd, with long strands of oily black hair draped across his naked pate; fat, jolly Canon Money, who didn’t seem to have any because his cassock was full of holes; and deliciously eccentric Dr Lamplugh, Bishop of Southampton, who still had a Christmas tree in the hallway of his house come July. These were the decaying generals of the Church militant, presided over by learned Dean Selwyn and the remote Bishop of Winchester, Bishop Williams. We choristers were in thrall to Alwyn Surplice, our organist and choirmaster, who smacked the backs of our hands with a ruler whenever he wanted better of us.

The fingers of Alwyn Surplice’s right hand had become closely clustered as a result of years of Morse-tapping and top-secret code-breaking at Bletchley Park during the war. This heroic condition was said to excuse the occasional duff notes in his organ playing. In reality, he played the organ like a demon. Practically all the staff at the school had been to the war. Principal amongst them was the dashing Rodney Blake, who was to run off to New Zealand with the piano teacher, deserting a wife with large ankles and two children, to the scandalised gossip of the cathedral close. Rodney taught me a love of the English language in general, and of the adjective in particular. He was a man full of mystery who had served on ships in the Atlantic, and his stories of derring-do had me ready for action any time.

I soon discovered that the entire cathedral was a kind of mausoleum to unbroken centuries of the direst conflict. Right in between the choir stalls where we sang lay the second proper King of England, William Rufus, with an arrow in his back. High on the side screens that led to the rood screen above the high altar were funny-coloured boxes in which the powdery remains of even earlier Kings lay, among them Canute and Ethelred the Unready. There was hardly a man interred in the building who had died peacefully in his bed.

On either side, all the way down the nave, the transepts were festooned with officers who had died from Afghanistan to Zanzibar. The two World Wars seemed to have taken half the population of Hampshire with them. Everywhere there were memorials incorporating guns, cannon, stone-cast flags, swords and worse. Every day we were amongst this stone-entrenched certainty of war. To crown it all, the great west window stood testament to the results of a cannonball fired by Oliver Cromwell from the hill overlooking the cathedral. Every piece of glass in it had been smashed and rescued. The result was a jumble that left a cat’s head on a slice of human armour, a sword under the upside-down leg of a horse. Even the language of faith included words like ‘defender’, ‘sword’, ‘shield’, ‘armies’ and ‘victory’.

Outside the cathedral, school in term time was a Dickensian nightmare: ghastly food, sour milk in small bottles, a potted sick-like substance called ‘sandwich spread’ on curling bread, regular beatings, cold showers and endless inspections of our fingernails. The headmaster, Humphrey Salway, was a former Guards officer with a fearsome capacity to inflict psychological and physical pain, the latter at the hand of a wooden ‘butter pat’. This was a flat, spade-like object with a leather tassel attached. It had the facility to produce blue-black weals on your buttocks, laced with red slashes. We would stand in line in our shivering pyjamas outside the headmaster’s study after being caught talking after lights-out in dormitory. The decision as to whether or not we would be beaten was entirely arbitrary. If we were, we would not be able to sit painlessly for a week or more. In a very rare act of theft, at thirteen years of age, I stole the butter pat on my last day at the school. I have often thought of old Salway, on the threshold of inflicting a sound beating, marauding around his study searching for the weapon and failing to find it. These days his motives would be questioned, but then he was a celebrated and feared figure in the cathedral close.

On 8 June 1958 I was summoned home from school to meet the Queen and Prince Philip. This was a huge event. The whole of the downstairs of the house had been decorated. The lavatory – euphemistically called ‘the garden room’ – where my father sat reading the traditionalist magazine Time & Tide for unreasonable quantities of time had been gutted and refitted against the possibility that one of Their Majesties would need a pee. My mother had made a special trip to Harrods in London to secure two Crown Derby cups and saucers from which the royal lips could sip tea.

The Queen and Prince Philip had opened Crawley New Town and Gatwick Airport in the morning, and were now descending upon Ardingly as part of the school’s centenary. Suddenly my father and mother were not in their usual posts at the top of the social tree. The Queen’s secretary, Sir Edward Ford, whom my father had taught at Eton, arrived early to see that all was in order. My father spoke of Harold Macmillan having played a part in securing the moment.

At 3 p.m. prompt, the biggest Rolls-Royce I’d ever seen steamed through the archway and onto the quadrangle in front of our house. My brothers and I stood at the top of the steps outside the front door. Our hands were shaken. The Queen was rather small, pleated, hatted and stiff. The Duke of Edinburgh burbled, but I couldn’t understand what he said. Then they were inside, and I began to think about the garden room. Even if not sitting there, the royal bottoms must by now be sitting on some of the cushions that I knew and loved so well.

Soon the Queen was gone, and I was on the train back to Winchester. Mr Salway treated me briefly like a conquering hero. At breakfast the next day I was allowed to sit next to his wife Lorna, a warm and affectionate woman who let me eat her fresh toast and marmalade instead of the usual soggy white bread and spread. But very soon normal sadistic services were resumed by her husband. This was, after all, term time.

Yet once the holidays dawned and the ‘ordinary” boys went home it would be all smiles, and we sixteen who constituted the choir were never tyrannised or beaten. We were cast loose upon the town to spin out our tiny five-shilling budgets. We had absolute freedom in those days, and gained absolute sympathy too. We were spoilt rotten, people in both school and town taking pity upon us for our enforced separation from our families as we lingered on to service Christmas, Easter, Ascension and the rest. These days sowed a love of music and of the cathedral, and if not of religion, certainly of peace and contemplation in a great building. But they were also central to the destruction of our family lives. Holidays amounted to only four or five weeks a year for the five years of my time at Winchester. My father was so rarely encountered, I called him ‘sir’ by mistake.

From this familial wreckage emerged a confident, independent child of thirteen – primed for adolescence, or so I was indirectly told. For Humphrey Salway’s parting shot was an obscure account of the ‘facts of life’. These centred on the ‘golden seed’, which at some point I was going to wake up and find in my bed. Beyond rust spots inflicted by the mattress springs beneath, though I searched, I grew up minus ‘golden seed’. Indeed, I left the choir school with my voice still unbroken.

The letter to my father from Number Ten Downing Street arrived at Ardingly just before I returned there from my last day at Pilgrim’s: ‘The Queen has been graciously pleased to appoint you Bishop Suffragan of Whitby.’ The signature at the bottom read ‘Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister’. The new Archbishop of York, in whose domain my father’s territory lay, was to be his friend Donald Coggan. All my father’s ducks were in a row, and the longed-for preferment had come on the very eve of his retirement from Ardingly. The Church, political, militant, ecclesiastical and old-boy network, had done its stuff, and we were all thrilled. We now had a new status in life, and after Ardingly a grand new home in darkest North Yorkshire.

The Old Rectory in South Kilvington, with its own little Saxon church in the garden, was as near paradise as the Brontës would have dared imagine. My new bedroom looked south and west over the garden. I was not to pass much time there, but I spent enough in that first summer to talk hungrily with the remarkable octogenarian who tended the garden. Joe Clarke had only ever left Kilvington once in his life, and that was to go to Egypt in the First World War to dig pit latrines for victory. Joe was conscripted into the First City of London Sanitary Corps. Wherever Allied man had to do his duty, Joe was there to facilitate the needs of the lower bowel. He served for five years. ‘I tell you, master Jon, I had to give up on digging the waste to bury the dead, there was that many.’ Joe, who had dug his way through Europe after Egypt, burying the war dead, now dug his way through the Old Rectory’s rhododendrons. The carnage of the Great War was fifty years before, but Joe’s memories were as vivid as if it were yesterday.

I wanted nothing more than to garden and learn with Joe, but I had a music exhibition to St Edward’s, a minor fee-paying school in Oxford. The headmaster, Frank Fisher, was the son of yet another prelate, Geoffrey, Archbishop of Canterbury. He took pity on my father’s high-born impecuniousness and secured me an ill-deserved cut in fees in the form of a choral exhibition. So on the one hand here was Joe giving me the side of war from the ranks, of which my family knew nothing, while through my father I was able to observe the insidious methods of the upper classes in securing hegemony in matters military, educational, ecclesiastical, even episcopal.

Three Bishops were ‘done’ on the day my father was consecrated in York Minster, and a grand affair it was. Eight feet tall in his mitre, my father was every inch a Bishop. The Whitby nuns had toiled through the nights to spin and embroider his voluminous cope. The silversmiths had beaten his pectoral cross and crosier out of some dead Bishop’s leftover silverware. Fully adorned, my father was some spectacle; and the minster bounced with sound and colour.

It was as an innocent abroad that I arrived at St Edward’s, a seriously Victorian environment. The first three weeks were spent mugging up for an initiation test, essentially a compendium of names and concepts that were peculiar to the school: ‘chaggers’ for changing rooms, ‘beaks’ for masters, ‘boguls’ for bicycles, and some ludicrous piece of ironwork on the chapel roof was ‘the boot scraper’. Sixteen years after the Second World War, here was an institution still ordered around the ball and the gun. Games were everything, and when we weren’t playing rugby, we were square-bashing in full uniform on the parade ground.

I didn’t mind playing games, although my gangling form meant that my brain seemed to be too far from the extremity of my limbs. Messages as to when to kick the ball failed to connect adequately with the foot in question. In short, my hand–eye co-ordination was abominable. Watching games left me both physically and mentally cold. Yet the pseudo-military hierarchy of the place depended on hero-worshipping those who excelled in games. Because I failed to watch, or worse failed to concentrate when I was watching, I failed hopelessly at the hero-worshipping. When matches were being played I preferred to hide in the art room and paint, or strum on the piano in a practice room.

One day after a rugby match, still only fourteen years old, I returned to the day room, where perhaps twenty ‘horseboxes’ were arranged around the walls. The ‘horsebox’ was your own personal space – a small contained area with a seat, a desk, shelves, and somewhere to stick up pictures of Mummy, Daddy and the dog. On this particular day I made towards my horsebox, only to find that it was completely naked – the curtain, the photos, books, cushions, possessions, all gone. Suddenly I was jumped on from behind by half a dozen of the other horsebox-dwellers. Grabbed by the hair, I was shoved into the large wastebin in the corner. In the bin already were Mummy, Daddy and the dog, all ripped to shreds, while Quink ink and the Blanco used for greening our military webbing had been smeared on what remained of my precious possessions.

The bullying was institutionalised. The housemaster, a shy, dysfunctional bachelor, lived next door to our day room, and must surely have heard all the noise. Sexual activity between the boys was also commonplace. Boys were talked about as sexual objects. Blond, blue-eyed newcomers – as I had been – were trouble from the outset, importuned by bigger boys for mutual masturbation. I remember how a prefect in the neighbouring boarding house, who was building a canoe in the basement, lured me down to see it. Before I realised it, he had his hand down my trousers, and demanded mine down his. Fagging, or acting as unpaid servant, was almost as exploitative as the sex. I fagged for a diminutive seventeen-year-old prefect who demanded that the insteps of his shoes be polished so they would glisten when he knelt for communion. It was a rocky and wretched introduction to adolescence, so far from Nanny and the backlit fields of stooks that I still dreamt of from childhood. Yet it also made me political, and made me yearn, if only subconsciously, for change, and later to campaign for it. Some of us went under. I remember one boy called Prythurch – I never knew his first name – who was teased mercilessly for his pink National Health spectacles. One term he simply never came back.

Academically, I was a failure. In a sense, the teaching mirrored the sport. If the school decided you were bright, you secured the best teachers, and were pushed. If you were deemed ‘thick’, you got either the rugby coaches who had to fulfil their teaching quota, or the straightforwardly unemployable. One of these was Stan Tackley. Stan was perhaps the most boring and uninterested teacher of Latin, English and French of his generation, and I had him for all three subjects. He taught with an elderly, flatulent golden Labrador at his feet.

My year with Stan and his dog Brandy delivered me bottom in Latin, bottom in English, and bottom in French. I was in the bottom fifth form, 5f; my brother Nick, two years my junior, was already ahead of me in 5b. Things were looking bad, and my father took me into his study when I returned home. ‘Sonny,’ he said, causing me to wonder if he used the word because he couldn’t tell which of us was which, as we had been away so long, ‘Sonny, your mother and I have decided you should leave St Edward’s and become apprenticed at Dorman Long in Middlesbrough.’

‘Crumbs,’ I said. ‘Me a steelworker?’ Dorman Long had a vast series of steelworks on Teesside, and my father admired the heavy industry in his diocese, never having been exposed to it before. ‘One more year, Dad,’ I pleaded. When I returned to school, Stan was still teaching me some classes, but fewer of them.

In the afternoons, Stan was Major Tackley, and ran the Combined Cadet Force. The school would suddenly become a sea of khaki and air-force blue. Boys would run about brandishing bolt-action Lee Enfield guns. We were tutored in war. The staff’s wartime exploits were the iconography of discourse at the dinner table. But no member of staff could hold a candle to the school’s most famous old boys. These included Guy Gibson VC, who led the original ‘Dam Busters’ raids against German dams and was one of the greatest pilots of the Second World War, but died in action, and the legendary Group Captain Douglas Bader DSO, of 242 Squadron, RAF, who was very much alive, but literally legless. Bader was a living legend who had had both legs amputated when his fighter plane crashed during a stunt. He fought back to fly again in combat, wearing artificial pins.

Now, in the early 1960s, he would rock around the school grounds, stickless and unaided, a lesson to us all. He had no job there, he was just a professional old boy. Bader in many ways typified the politics of the school. If they were ever mentioned, the Labour Party, the burgeoning ‘Ban the Bomb’ anti-nuclear movement, socialism and, of course, Communism were the enemies of what we were about. It was a political culture that chimed with that of my parents.

My first memory of an ambition was indeed, at the age of fifteen, to be a Tory MP. Whether this aspiration derived from my early brush with Macmillan or from the school I don’t know, but it was certainly there. My sense of the outside world depended almost exclusively on the Daily Mail. We were only allowed the radio on Sundays, when we would listen to Forces’ Favourites, yet another reminder that all over the world there were British troops ranged against ‘the enemy’. Otherwise we listened to Radio Luxembourg, the only pop station then in being. We had no access to television. So our knowledge of world events was narrow in the extreme.

I was fifteen at the time of the Cuban missile crisis. Bearded Castro, dictator of Cuba, and bald-headed Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union, were depicted as exceptionally unpleasant and dangerous men. Never more so than when the latter repeatedly banged his shoe on a desk at the UN General Assembly in New York in October 1960. By contrast the handsome and clean-shaven American President, John F. Kennedy, couldn’t put a foot wrong. And Harold Macmillan had by now been transmogrified into ‘Super Mac’. The argument that Cuba might need Russia’s nuclear missiles to guard against, or even stave off, another American invasion was simply never made. Russia wanted to put her missiles on Cuba to attack America, that was the only interpretation we were ever offered. This was the Cold War, the East–West standoff.

As the missile crisis deepened, we went through our nuclear protection exercises on an almost weekly basis – under our desk lids, heads in the brace position. It wasn’t until much later that I began to learn about the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, in which Kennedy had sent 1500 US-trained Cuban exiles to try to overthrow Castro. For a time the world was on the edge of the abyss of nuclear war, but I cannot pretend to have been aware of the true magnitude of it at the time.

By November 1963 the world had changed again. Adorned as a woman, I was strutting my stuff on the school stage. I was playing Eva in Jean Anouilh’s comedy Thieves’ Carnival. Of my performance, the Oxford Times wrote: ‘the only giveaway is the too-masculine stride’. On the twenty-second of that month my mother and father drove down to watch the play. Act One passed without incident, but something happened during the interval. Somehow members of the audience found out that Jack Kennedy had been shot, and was dying in a Dallas clinic. The belly laughs of the first half of the performance were not repeated in the second. There was much whispering and talking low. People scurried away at the end. It was as if innocence itself had been shot. My parents were overwhelmed with gloom. ‘Super Mac’ and Jack had bonded like father and son. There had been a new optimism abroad, a new sense of Camelot and magic. And now this spirit was all but dead.

With Kennedy gone, the wheels started coming off Macmillan’s wagon. The sixties began to swing. The Daily Mail revelled in telling us who was having whom, and where and how. Suddenly the where was Cliveden, and the who was the Minister for War, John Profumo. Profumo, who had had the misfortune to make love to a woman who was already sleeping with a Russian diplomat named Ivanov, a Soviet spy, was unhorsed for being economical with the truth about the matter in the House of Commons. We boys, reading this stuff, simply couldn’t believe it. The entire British Establishment had its collective trousers round its ankles, and we were thrilled by it. One day I would encounter John Profumo myself, in a very different guise.

We, with our posh accents, sneered at the Yorkshire-accented Harold Wilson, who became Labour Prime Minister in 1964 with a wafer-thin majority. But he won us over the moment he set fire to his jacket pocket with his pipe. Few other outside events impinged upon our lives. And then, one bleak winter’s day in January 1965, Winston Churchill died. Every living Field Marshal and more than sixty world leaders, led by former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, attended the funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral on 30 January. Classes were abandoned for the day, and we were allowed to cluster around the few black-and-white television sets near the school. The lying in state, the swarming crowds, the vast procession, the gun carriage and the service in St Paul’s were all on an epic scale. Eisenhower, when he spoke, made my backbone tingle.