Classroom Revolution

Let me start with a confession. I too had visited the mobile shop beyond the school gates. I too had crept along the hedgerow into the back of the school, clutching a bulging brown paper bag. I too had stashed away its contents, to be enjoyed in the dorm after lights out.

The mobile shop was, as you would expect, strictly out-of-bounds. Parked at the bottom of the drive of a rural Shropshire prep school, it enticed us with the allure of sweets and the adventure of breaking bounds. The sweets must have been cheap, for our pocket money wasn’t more than half-a-crown a week. We stocked up on chewy toffee sticks, pink spearmint, fruit salads – four a penny – and black jacks at the same price. This went on for a fortnight or so, but at some point we must have been spotted sneaking back into the school. The headmaster stormed into our classroom during prep and made us open our desks and empty our lockers. Now my sweets were zipped up in the ball pocket of a golf bag, which was propped up in the corner of the classroom. As we stood by our desks with the lids up, and as the headmaster examined each desk and emptied each locker, I remember thinking: ‘He’s sure to look in my golf bag, he hates me playing golf. He thinks I play cricket badly on purpose (and that it’s my fault we lost to Abberley last Saturday), and if he does find them, he’ll give me more than the others, six at least, for being sneaky . . .’ But he didn’t look in the golf bag, and I escaped the cane. My conscience still pricks me when I remember the beatings received by my fellow adventurers, and now, as a housemaster in a boarding school, my understanding of hypocrisy and irony is sharpened every time I deliver a gentle, but I like to think firm, homily on the importance of being honest. And should any of the boys in my house read this, then I suppose it will have to be a case of ‘Do as I say and not as I did.’ For those who have travelled the English boarding-school route, similar prep-school memories are sure to be jogged by reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s My Affair with Stalin, a wonderfully entertaining and evocative novel, set in a rural prep school during the 1970s. A daring midnight raid on the tuck cupboard is masterminded by the book’s precocious hero, William Conroy. Once he has established control of the cupboard, Conroy is virtually guaranteed his position as leader of the dominant school gang, for crisps, soft drinks and instant snacks play a disproportionately large part in the life of boarding-school pupils. Inspired by his hero Stalin, Conroy stirs up a revolution in the school which sees the school’s ancien régime, essentially composed of hearty games players, out-thought, out-manoeuvred and eventually routed by an arty party, made up of clever boys with few if any ball-game skills (aided and abetted by some local lads, bribed on this occasion not with sweets but with cigarettes). That Conroy’s regime ends up imposing a tyranny quite as brutal, repressive and intolerant as its predecessor makes comparison with Orwell’s Animal Farm inevitable. Not quite an allegory and a bit longer than Animal Farm (39 short chapters – ideal for bedtime or, dare I mention it, prep), it is also a shrewd political novel. William Conroy has acquired a thorough knowledge of Stalin’s career and methods (in much the same way as contemporaries of mine at prep school seemed to have a comprehensive knowledge of test cricket statistics absorbed from Wisden). Each step of Stalin’s rise to power is matched by WC (whose initials can’t be accidental) as he enlists the support of the exotic Mendoza to defeat the athletic Dugganoes, capture the Camp (henceforward the Kremlin) and initiate a reign of terror. The author provides a helpful chronology of the main dates and events of Stalin’s career, while such chapter headings as ‘The Battle of Stalingrad’ point up the parallels between William Conroy and Josef Stalin. Orwell’s classic is not the only point of comparison. Those who have relished Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall will be amused by the gallery of prep-school pupils, teachers and parents: the teacher whose surname is Allcock, thus giving the boys an opportunity to chorus ‘. . . and no balls!’; the headmaster, whose electric hair, archaic slang, good humour and lack of worldliness endeared him to me almost as much as the unfortunate teacher whose bald head seems fated to attract the attention of every passing pigeon; and the pupil Mendoza, rich, foreign and frighteningly grown-up, who is brought to school in a chauffeur-driven limousine. Lessons (about which teachers care a great deal) rarely feature, while free time, leisure and after lights out (about which boys care equally passionately) are especially vivid. The author takes on a third heavyweight contender in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Few of us can read about an English prep school without being reminded of those stranded boys on their tropical island. The violence in My Affair with Stalin, however, is tinged with a healthy black humour: during one of Conroy’s purges we learn that ‘One glimpse of the Bunsen flames was usually enough. But if not, they stoned them in the Fives Courts, dipped their faces in the Chapel font or hung them by their feet off the squash court balcony. In fact those butterfingers dropped Minto. But he survived.’ No Health and Safety officers around in those days. The author’s feel for schoolboy slang is pitch perfect: likewise his depiction of the young teacher Miss Snow’s wardrobe, a delicious catalogue of half-forgotten fashions. And Conroy’s progress, between the ages of 11 and 13, from victim to bully, from wimp to Alpha Male, is charted with wry detachment by an author for whom the sensations of schoolboy life are still vivid, perhaps even raw. Quoting from the book is almost irresistible. I love the bathos of Conroy’s order to his second-in-command Petty: ‘You can arrest him after Scottish Dancing on Friday.’ And who could resist the description of the ‘brave commissars of the NKVD wearing pyjamas and dressing gowns’ or the revelation that the ‘bullets were choc-ices stolen from the kitchen’. William Conroy’s affair with Stalin concludes as he begins an affair of a different kind and is introduced to the pleasures of the flesh by the half-Filipina Catalina who works in the school’s kitchen. Appropriately the description of their first encounter involves food: ‘She put her hand on my shoulder and, once again, she handed me a cake. I swallowed all its chocolate and its pastry before I looked up at her . . . I could have sworn she smelled of warm loaves, maybe the sponge of her cakes.’ William is not just precocious intellectually. And for those who wonder what happens to such precocious young prep-school boys, Simon Sebag Montefiore has gone on to write a scholarly book entitled Stalin and the Court of the Tsar.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 9 © Peter Broad 2006