Unsung Heroes

The library at Fonthill Preparatory School was just what I imagined a Gentlemen’s Club to be like: shiny brown leather armchairs with velvet cushions, long oak tables, panelled walls, a coal fire in the corner, and windows looking on to the branches of an enormous beech tree. And, of course, books. It was there that I came to know the schoolboy classics of the time: the adventures of Biggles, the misadventures of William, and the voyages of the Swallows and the Amazons.

Masters would occasionally wander in and out, and it was not until years later that I realized they were not only doing their duty rounds but also guiding young readers to other authors: ‘Have you tried this one? Or this one?’ Why else would I have bothered to pick out those shabby, dog-eared old volumes? But the people and places discovered in the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, G. A. Henty, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Rider Haggard, Talbot Baines Reed and many others became part of my world as the wintry wind rattled the windows and the fire sank into glowing embers. There were other territories to explore as well: huge red volumes of Chums and The Boys’ Own Paper, crammed with cricketing heroes and gallant midshipmen; leather-bound copies of the Illustrated London News sprinkled with strategic maps of the Battle of the Somme; dozens of volumes of Punch decorated with the cartoons of George du Maurier, with brief explanations for those who did not get the joke – Collapse of stout party! There were more recent heroes to read about as well. We were born in the Blitz and we grew up with gas masks: we had no doubts about 90 the rightness of our cause. Most of our schoolmasters had served in the armed forces, although they did not talk about it much, and titles such as Major and Wing-Commander were only attached to their names for a few solemn minutes on Armistice Day. The classic war stories were beginning to appear, and we identified with the real-life heroes of The Dam Busters, Reach for the Sky and The Wooden Horse, and their fictional counterparts in The Cruel Sea (only permitted in the bowdlerized ‘Cadet Edition’ with the swear words and sexual references prudently purged). But it was in the form-rooms that I began to appreciate the sounds and rhythms of language: not, at first, in English classes, but up several flights of stairs in Mr Storey’s cluttered little kingdom. Jammed uncomfortably into ink-stained and battle-scarred desks we were introduced to the intricacies of Latin grammar using, as generations of schoolboys had done before, Kennedy’s Shorter Latin Primer, first published in 1866. It must be one of the few books in which the Appendix is better remembered than the actual content, because it is there that are found the ‘Memorial Lines on the Gender of Latin Substantives’. These were universally known as ‘The Jingles’, so we missed the mild Victorian pun in the original title. We were required to learn them by heart because (as the Reverend Benjamin Kennedy wisely realized) although learning the rules of grammar is inevitably tedious, the process can be eased by rhythm and verse:

Masculine are fōns and mōns, Chalybs, hydrōps, gryps, and pōns, Rudēns, torrēns, dēns, and cliēns, Fractions of the ās, as triēns . . . Fillet of a fenny snake, In the cauldron, boil and bake . . .

The last two lines may have been written by somebody else. That does not matter. They are all memorable, and they made me aware that words are not just there to tell a story but can speak for themselves. Our English master, Mr Stawt, was clearly of that mind, as he introduced us to poetry through verses that appealed to schoolboys who would much rather be running around outdoors. We learned not sonnets or haikus, but poems which cantered and galloped in our heads, like those of Sir Walter Scott:

Young Lochinvar is come out of the west, Through all the wide border his steed was the best;

and, more dramatically, Lord Byron:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Most especially I remember Don John’s approaching army in Chesterton’s Lepanto – at first just a heartbeat in the distance:

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard . . .

then reaching a crescendo as my fingers tapped the tempo of the drumbeat on the desk:

Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold, Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums, Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.

We were fortunate in having schoolmasters who loved reading and books, and their example fuelled my own growing fascination with words. Mr Kingsley Storey and Mr Michael Cooper, however, stand head and shoulders above the others because they read to us. On seemingly endless June evenings, when we had to go to bed long before it was dark, Mr Storey, Head of Classics, would stand in the doorway of one dormitory so that he could be heard in others down the corridor and read aloud. He was a good reader, and through him we became familiar with some of the great works of children’s literature. He read us Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, The Jungle Books and the Just So Stories; he read us Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse, and one memorable week he read (and sang) The Mikado. He was a tall, slight, rather untidy man with reddish hair, but he managed to conjure up the Wandering Minstrel, the Three Little Maids and the Lord High Executioner as evening shadows lengthened across our iron bedsteads. Mr Cooper, our History Master, had very different ideas about literature. While I associate Mr Storey’s readings with summertime, Mr Cooper’s took place by winter’s firelight. Once a week or so half a dozen of the older boys were invited down to the sanctuary of the Masters’ Common Room after the younger boys had gone to bed. In our dressing gowns and slippers we scurried down the draughty stairs and passages and sat on the worn carpet round the little coal fire, by the light of which Mr Cooper would read aloud from his armchair as he puffed on his pipe, and his fat black cat purred on his lap. He read us The Thirty-Nine Steps and Greenmantle; he kept us enthralled with the adventures of Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond, although the trip back upstairs in the dark was long and scary after a chapter or two of The Island of Terror. Most memorably he introduced us to the terrifying ghost stories of M. R. James: one of these tells of a man on holiday who finds an old silver whistle. The whistle summons the wind, which batters at his hotel window to get in, and when it finally succeeds, it makes itself a body out of the sheets on the empty bed next to him, a body with an ‘intensely horrible face of crumpled linen’. It was a windy November night when Mr Cooper read us that story, and the clouds were shuttering across the moon. It was not until I had made my nervous way back to a chilly bed and pulled the blankets up around my ears that I realized the bed next to mine was empty – its usual occupant was in the Sick Bay. I didn’t sleep much that night. My family moved to Africa after I left Fonthill, and I never saw any of my former schoolmasters again. It was not until many years later that I realized how much they had taught me over and above their classroom responsibilities, but by then it was too late to say thank you. They had taught me to read, and it is no coincidence that among the hundreds of books that overflow my shelves are those I have mentioned here. There is one other book which I have always associated with Fonthill. When I first read Stalky & Co. I naturally set it in a familiar place, a boarding-school I knew very well, and I transposed Stalky, McTurk and Beetle with their escapades to the classrooms, corridors, dormitories and playing fields of my own prep school. There were not really many similarities, I know, but Kipling’s tribute to his schoolmasters may serve to express my own gratitude:

‘Let us now praise famous men’ – Men of little showing – For their work continueth, And their work continueth, Broad and deep continueth, Greater than their knowing!

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 60 © Alastair Glegg 2018