David Micklethwait

My earliest story of Durlston Court is not my own recollection, but my mother’s. My parents had no idea how to go about choosing a prep-school for me, but my father’s younger brother Guy, who was in the Foreign Service and unmarried, used to stay with us when home on leave, and he happened to be in England when the matter was being discussed. “Old Mac’s got a school somewhere in Hampshire”, he said. ‘Old Mac’, I think, was a friend of Guy’s from his time at Oxford. Of course, he didn’t ‘have’ a school at all – he just owned the buildings, lived in the gate-house, and on Friday evenings used to give us compeletly incomprehensible talks on ‘current events’. In one such talk, I remember, he told us about a play that had just been put on in Moscow (in 1955) called We Three Went to the Virgin Lands. What on earth was that about? Anyway, Guy got in touch with Mac, and he went with my parents to look over the school.

Pat Cox first showed them the boys’ side of the main building – the gym, the art room, the dormitories (named after public schools), the classrooms, and finally the dining room, with silver cups to be won in sports, and a board showing who had been awarded scholarships to Bradfield. “And through this door here,” he said, “are my private parts. I am lucky enough to have larger private parts than most prep-school headmasters.” He went on to tell them that his private parts had recently been repainted in a rather attractive shade of green, chosen by Mrs. Cox!

My father and Guy could not take this. They returned to the boys’ side, and made their way into the garden, where they could hold each other up and roar with laughter, unobserved. My mother had to cope with Pat Cox and his private parts on her own, and try to explain where her menfolk had gone. Perhaps she told him that they were allergic to the smell of fresh paint.

The same sort of innocence was apparent when Cockeye gave a little talk – known as ‘the sex razz’ – to small groups of leaving boys. This was intended, I think, to ensure that we were not too alarmed by manifestations of puberty, and also to warn us of the dangers of being led astray by bigger boys in the wider world of public school. The whole thing was couched in a mysteriously horticultural idiom – we faced the risk of being “led up the garden path”, at the end of which something or other was to be found “under the gooseberry bush”. I still do not know what that meant.

CARPENTRY
Carpentry was one of the optional ‘extras’ at Durlston (which meant, I presume, that one’s parents had to pay extra for it). My father was, or had been, a keen carpenter, and so he put me down for it, regardless of expense. I duly attended carpentry classes for a term, but then I absolutely refused to do it any more. This upset my father, because he took my rejection of carpentry as a sign of rejection of himself – the more so as I also refused to give any explanation of why I did not want to go on with it. Actually, the reason had nothing to do with my father. It was something strong enough to outweigh the affection I felt for him, but I felt too ashamed to explain it to anyone – the chap who taught carpentry was a countryman, and I could not understand a word he said.

THE G.K.
At the end of each term, we had a take a test, which was in the form of one hundred General Knowledge questions, and was therefore known as the ‘G.K.’ We then had to take it home, and were supposed to look up the answers, and learn them, during the holidays. The same test was set at the beginning of the next term, and we were expected to get full marks.
In my case, I never looked up anything at all. I gave the paper to my mother, who could generally answer three-quarters of the questions. She was well informed, but mischievous, and when asked “Who was Samuel’s mother ?”, put in “Mrs. Pepys”, hoping nobody would notice. I spotted that one because I knew the correct answer – Hannah – which was commonly cited as an example of a palindrome. After my mother had written in the answers that she knew (or had made up) the G.K. was passed on to my father, who took it in to his office and gave it to the youngest of his associates, who had to fill in the rest with the assistance of an encyclopaedia.

HISTORY
History learning at Durlston was largely a matter of memorising, with perhaps not a great deal of understanding or analysis. The various Royal Houses were the subject of a useful mnemonic – “No Plan Like Yours To Study History Wisely”. To build on that framework, from early on in the school, we had to memorise a list of the Kings and Queens of England, with their dates of accession : “William the First, 1066, William the Second, 1087, Henry the First, 1100, Stephen, 1135 … ”, and so on. As a back-up, when memory failed, one fell back on “Willy, Willy, Harry, Ste,  Harry, Dick, John, Harry three …” etc. Progressively, as one got older, extra events (mostly battles), with their dates, were added to the list, one per reign. Then, when it came to the Common Entrance, Capt. Goodin would study past papers, in order to spot what topics in the syllabus were due to reappear (not having been included in recent papers), and – as Michael Palau has recorded – “we learned by heart  a series of essays”, which the good Captain dictated to us, and which covered the questions he thought we were likely to be asked. It only recently occurred to me (when hearing of examiners seeking to identify essays that have been downloaded from the internet) that the people marking Common Entrance papers must have noticed that all the candidates from Durlston gave identical answers. What would they have made of that ? I then found myself wondering whether the Captain had himself written the essays, or had he perhaps been taught them himself ? Would it not be rather beautiful if the same words had been passed down from generation to generation, like the oral history of an aboriginal tribe ?

LATIN and GREEK
The Latin textbooks we used were Kennedy’s Shorter Latin Primer, and Latin Prose Composition  by North and Hillard. The front cover of the first of those was commonly altered by a few strokes of the pen to read Kennedy’s Shorter Eating Primer.  I have heard of more adventurous schools where it became Kennedy’s Shortbread Eating Primer, but I do not remember to have seen that at Durlston. At the back of Kennedy are gender rhymes, and verses showing which prepositions take the accusative, and which the ablative, such as :

Prepositions with the ablative:       A, ab, absque, coram, de,
                                                  Palam, clam, cum, ex, and e,
                                                  Sine, tenus, pro, and prae:
                                                  Add super, subter, sub, and in,
                                                  When 'state,' not 'motion,' 'tis they mean.

For some reason, Durlston did not choose to bring those to our attention, which left us classically less well educated than boys from more academic prep-schools. Mr. Vibert, however, had simplified versions, one of which started “to, into, ad, in plus accusative; in, at, in plus ablative …”, and these we not only had to learn, but to recite as fast as possible, against the clock – he actually timed us ! It was jolly good fun – in fact those were the only lessons I remember at Durlston that were fun.

In the Upper Sixth, classics were taught by Rev. F. I. Nelson-Wright. Pat Cox used to call him ‘The Padre’, but to the boys he was ‘Smelly Nelly’. In my memory of it, the Upper Sixth classroom was a wooden hut – or one end of one – but I don’t think that was in any way educationally harmful. The class was divided into two halves, those on the left side (who I suppose were those who were taking scholarship exams) were taught Greek, while those on the right (destined for the Common Entrance) were not. I was in the Common Entrance group, but could not avoid hearing the teaching of Greek, so that I learned most of what was on offer, though without the opportunity to practice writing in the Greek alphabet.

After games, the boys would be splashing about in the communal baths at the end of the changing room, and Smelly Nelly would often be seen standing in the doorway of the changing room, watching them. We were well aware that he seemed to like to watch bare boys bathing, and we regarded it as slightly comical, and not in the least threatening. He lived in a wooden hut or chalet next to the chapel, with a sitting room in front and a bedroom behind, and I do not remember the slightest suggestion that any impropriety ever took place there. Those were more innocent times, when (as it has since been said) boys aspired to get into the clergy, and not the other way round.

SOME OTHER MASTERS
Mr.Trubshaw objected strongly to boys who said “Oh” when they should have said “Nought” or “Zero”, but he never managed to stop it. If he beat you, he used a leather slipper which stung more, but hurt less, than the headmaster’s cane.

Mr.Barton taught me the recorder, which I learned to play rather well. In one School Concert I played the Telemann Sonata No.1 in F major;  at his suggestion, after playing the first movement, I put my treble recorder on the ground, took a sopranino out of my pocket, and played the repeat an octave higher. He drove a Bond minicar, which was ludicrously light. At one time (for a reason I cannot remember) it was brought indoors by a couple of chaps who picked it up and carried it.

Mr.Ogden, who taught boxing, would line up the class, and instruct them in the correct stance with the order “Left foots forward !” – he did not encourage southpaws. I always wondered whether he imagined “foots” to be the correct plural to use when seeking to acknowledge that each boy had only one left foot. As I was subject to nosebleeds even outside the boxing ring, this was not a sport at which I excelled.
 
OTHER SPORTS
I have been surprised to see that in many others’ recollections of Durlston in the 50’s and 60’s there is mention of the school’s sporting super-heroes Stevens and Close. The reason this is surprising to me is that Stevens and Close were the sporting super-heroes when I was at Durlston also – but surely the same boys cannot have remained at this pinnacle for ten or twenty years ? Were they  in reality gods, who did not age, or were there production lines of some sort, turning out a succession of athletic Stevenses and Closes ? I myself achieved no sporting distinction of any sort at Durlston, being rather averse to running. I later took up rowing, because one did it sitting down. My speciality in rugger was “falling on the ball”, which gave me an excuse for not running. It was therefore rather curious that Pat Cox was forever trying to persuade my parents to donate a new set of rugger posts to the school, in the mistaken belief, I think, that they were rather rich. This may have been because they used to turn up at the school in an enormous (though rather old) Rolls Royce. What he didn’t realise was that a succession of pre-war Rolls Royces and Bentleys were my father’s hobby, and were in part the reason that he was not as rich as he might otherwise have been.

	Mother, daily help, sister, me, and the big Rolls - May 1955

Pat Cox offered various financial inducements to encourage sporting excellence. In football, whenever Durlston were taking a corner kick, he would stand on the touch line calling out “Penny for the heads !”, which nobody ever came near to earning. The footballs of those days were very heavy leather things, and no corner kick was anything like high enough, or long enough, for anyone to have a hope of heading it into the net.  In cricket, there was a standing offer of sixpence (or it might have been half-a-crown) for anyone who managed to hit a ball so far that it broke the pavilion clock.

In the School Sports, attempts were made to encourage family participation. There were races for fathers, mothers, sisters and little brothers. There was even a race for grandmothers, in which granny and grandson started at opposite ends of a length of wool, and the grannies shuffled along while rolling the wool into a ball – the first to reach her grandson with a complete ball of wool was the winner. My grandmothers were both dead before I went to Durlson, and my parents did not join in. They were only willing to be spectators at these events, and anyway, my mother said, nobody had any chance against the Stevens family, who all turned up in running shorts and spiked shoes – she was in her Ascot summer frock, and my father in his city suit.

At one Sports Day I suffered an indignity which left me emotionally scarred for life. It was in the Obstacle Race. The obstacle in question was a framework from which were suspended several motor-car tyres hanging from ropes, through which the boys had to pass. An athletic boy might manage to dive through a tyre, landing with a graceful somersault before running on to the next obstacle. More normally, a boy jumped into a tyre, swung a while with the tyre under his tummy, and then levered his hips through it, falling on his head at the other side. I was definitely not in the graceful somersault class, and I had just reached the stage of swinging with the tyre under my tummy, when damn me if Kirk, the fattest boy in the school, did not jump into the same tyre! We were jammed together, swinging some way off the ground, unable to advance or retreat, pushing and shoving and swearing at each other, our legs waving in the air, as the rest of the field disappeared into the distance. It didn’t help that the spectators thought it was the funniest thing they’d seen in years. My only consolation was that I did at least manage to extricate myself from the obstacle before Kirk, so I didn’t come last in the race.

AN OFFICIAL APPOINTMENT
In my undistinguished prep-school career, the only official appointment given to me, and not for very long I think, was the position of ‘Duc du Papier Buvard’, which means ‘Duke of Blotting Paper’. In those days, ball-point pens were only just becoming available, and few of us had fountain pens, so writing was done with dip-pens. They had replaceable nibs that easily got twisted out of shape, and used ink held in little china inkwells set into the corner of each desk. Blotting paper was essential, and it was my job to carry out a weekly distribution of little sheets of the stuff.

RECREATION
The School Library had an unrivalled collection of the works of G. A. Henty, with pictorial hard covers, but I don’t remember anyone reading them. It was not very long after the war, and we preferred our own paperbacks telling tales of wartime adventures, busting dams with Guy Gibson VC, sinking the Bismarck, and escaping from POW camps such as Colditz Castle and Stalag Luft III. In the Library there were magazines in which we could study the designs of wartime aircraft, and interesting planes were sometimes to be seen overhead. I particularly remember the occasional appearances of the Saunders-Roe Princess, the last great flying boat ever made, lumbering over from its home in the Isle of Wight.

There was a good deal of building of model aircraft. Some of us had little diesel engines which were supposed to leap into life with a couple of flicks of the propeller – but they never did. One’s fingers became sore from flicking the propeller, and the most that ever happened was a few seconds of snarling fart, but never enough for a flight. The only planes that flew were either powered by twisted strips of rubber, or were gliders. Only later did glow-plug motors become available, which were easy to start. The construction method for the models was very much like that of the aeroplanes of the first world war – a balsa-wood frame was covered in tissue paper, which was then painted with ‘dope’; this made it tight and hard, so that it could be painted. The dope had a very distinctive smell, but only now does it occur to me that one might have got ‘high’ by sniffing it (so that its sale to children will nowadays be illegal) and perhaps that is why it was called ‘dope’.

An alternative power source was the ‘Jetex’ rocket engine, which was a small canister in which you put a pellet of solid fuel. The engine was stuffed up the back end of what was to be propelled, and the fuse was lit. I had a Jetex-powered car, which was on the end of string. It whizzed round in a circle until the fuel ran out, which was not particularly interesting.

A popular hobby was butterfly-collecting, and my recollection is that the better-equipped boy had a large net, and a killing bottle in which specimens could be dispatched without causing them damage, by the use of cyanide. Can that really have been so ? If it was, it is no doubt another thing now prohibited. I did not collect butterflies myself, but I became familiar with the different varieties. In the summer of 1985 I was walking up 3rd Avenue in Manhattan, and was astonished to find myself in the midst of a vast cloud of Monarch butterflies. I had learned at Durlston that the Monarch, Milkweed, or Brown-veined White was one of the rarest butterflies in Britain, so my experience in New York seemed little short of miraculous, but I later learned that they migrate in large numbers in North America. They are rare in Britain because not many get blown across the Atlantic.

Another feature of Durlston life that may now be illegal was the carrying of offensive weapons. To us, wearing a sheath-knife on one’s belt was perfectly normal, and it was not considered to be a weapon at all, merely a useful tool. It might be used, for example, in constructing ‘huts’ in the Pine Wood. These were not actually huts at all, but snug shelters. I remember one time when they were damaged by visiting village vandals, and this was considered to be particularly unsporting because the rotters had done it during Sunday chapel – the ungodly taking advantage of our piety. The next weekend, chapel was cancelled, and we crept into the wood and concealed ourselves, hoping to ambush the oicks when they returned to do more damage. Unfortunately, they didn’t return, so the thing was a bit of an anti-climax.

Roller-skating took place on the hard playground beside the Upper Sixth hut. I had old-fashioned skates with metal wheels, but the luckier boys had more modern ‘Jakoskates’ with rubber wheels. Another popular activity was chariot-racing, where the ‘chariot’ was a board with a single roller skate strapped in the centre; the rider sat on the board holding each end, with roller skates on his feet, and was pushed by another boy running along behind.

Beyond the hard playground there was an area where vegetables and fruit were grown, and this gave the opportunity for ‘apple-buzzing’ in the Summer season. A small apple impaled on the end of a short bamboo could be propelled by a flick of the wrist for an enormous distance. The principle is exactly that of the Australian aboriginal spear-throwing stick or ‘woomera’.

In an episode of Hancock’s Half Hour concerned with the boredom of Sundays, Bill Kerr makes the suggestion: “Let’s play Beat Your Neighbours Out-of-Doors”. Hancock initially scoffs at the idea, but finally asks how you play. It turns out that nobody knows. Durlston had a game of exactly that sort, which was called Lurkey in the Copse. The Copse was a small area of woodland beside the drive on the further edge of the playing field, and we sometimes played there, but though the invitation “let’s play Lurkey in the Copse” survived as a form of words, the rules of the game did not. Perhaps the Headmaster knew how the game was played, but nobody else did, and we were not bold enough to ask him.

AN ATTEMPT TO GET MORE POST
Life at boarding school was somewhat like imprisonment – we were isolated from the world outside, and allowed only occasional family visits. Receiving post was very important. My mother understood this, and whenever she was away from home would send me and my sister almost daily postcards. This was not enough for me, however, and I had an idea for getting something extra in the post. In those days, stamps were supplied in little booklets which, between the panes of stamps, had pages of advertisements. One of those, from the Sun Life Assurance Company of Canada, I think, offered an insurance policy which would pay “£4,315 for you at age 65”.  That was a considerable sum in 1954 – the top prize on the football pools was then £75,000, which was a life-changing amount of money – and you had only to fill in your name and address and send off the little advertisement, to receive further particulars. This I did. Unfortunately, what I got was not an exciting envelope in the post, but a summons to the headmaster’s study, where I was forced to apologise to a very angry insurance salesman, who had driven over to Durlston Court in his Daimler, thinking D. Micklethwait was a member of the staff, and a potential customer.

SOME DOMESTIC REMINISCENCES
In the area of food, I have few memories, so it cannot have been too bad, or memorably good. I do remember the so-called ‘scrambled egg’, which was not scrambled at all, but made from post-war egg powder. It came in a pale yellow homogeneous slab and was served by the slice rather than the spoonful.
A memorable feature of the dormitories was the enamel bucket which served as a potty for those who needed a pee during the night. Once (when I was in ‘Winchester’, I think) we all had a huge amount to drink before going to bed, so that when the maid came to remove the bucket in the morning she would find it surprisingly heavy – how we laughed !

Every boy had his hair washed periodically by an under-matron, and when this had been done  an excellent hair-drying system was employed. A towel was placed over the boy’s head so that it hung down in front of him, and behind. The boy then grasped the front end, scrunched up, and the matron placed a hand on the boy’s back to steady him, and grasped the back end of the towel with her other hand, so that the boy’s head was encased in a tube of towel. The boy and the matron then pulled the towel alternately, to and fro, very vigorously, which stimulated the scalp, and dried the hair in no time at all.

THE CORONATION
The Coronation was a great event during my time at Durlston. The whole school watched the ceremony on a small black and white television, and a boat was hired for the school, which chugged round the Home Fleet, parked in impressive rows for the Spithead Naval Review. The boat trip was particularly memorable for me, because I put my sixpence into a one-armed bandit on board, and won two shillings, which I spent on a bottle of cherryade, big enough to share. I’d never tasted cherryade before.

PLAYS
My first theatrical performance at Durlston was in the ‘Scenes from Shakespeare’ that were put on in the garden. I was given the part of Trinculo in The Tempest. In the action the party have been shipwrecked in the storm of the title, and Trinculo complains “Here's neither bush nor shrub to bear off any weather at all. And another storm brewing, I hear it sing i' th' wind. …” This cannot have been very convincing to the audience, for we were in the garden, and were entirely surrounded by bushes and shrubs.  In the picture, I’m the one kneeling on the right.

The first School Play that I remember (on the stage at the end of the gym) was The Ghost Train, in which I was not involved. Two things remain in my memory from that production. The first was a jolly good poster stuck up in the station, which had been painted in ‘Art’ by my friend Dean. It showed a stylised jockey on a horse, and advertised a race meeting which might have been Ascot. The second memorable thing was a square biscuit tin with holes cut in the sides, and an electric light inside. When the tin was rotated, it projected onto the windows of the waiting room a very convincing image of the lights of railway carriages passing through the station, accompanied by thunderous sound effects.

In my last year at the school there was a play in which I had a starring role. It was called Crime in the Jungle, and I played the part of a chap who was pretending to be a bug-hunter, but was actually some sort of policeman, chasing a gang of villainous drug or alcohol smugglers in league with the natives. It was memorable for various reasons. One was that Pat Cox’s brother, Colonel Cox, was on the scene. My impression was that he was something of a hero to the Headmaster, having done adventurous things of a military and colonial sort, while Pat Cox was leading the less exciting life of a schoolmaster. Also, I think he died not long afterwards. The Colonel threw himself into the preparation for the play with great enthusiasm, undertaking to coach the jungle natives in their dancing – because he knew about that sort of thing. There was a rumour that he also offered his service revolver for use in the performance, but after he’d let off a few practice shots (just missing Miss Dawson, it was said) the Headmaster confiscated it, and we had to make do with a little starting pistol firing .22 blanks. 

In one scene, I was seated at a camp-fire, made of a few sticks, some orange paper, and an electric light, and I was given an empty pipe to chew on.

To liven things up a bit, I spent some time before the first night wandering round the school grounds collecting cigarette ends. There were fewer tipped cigarettes in those days, so I easily got enough tobacco to fill the pipe. When the time came, I lit it, and puffed out tremendous clouds of smoke, to the great delight of the audience, who thought it was an intended part of the show. I could only do it once, because the powers-that-be quietly removed the spare tobacco from my desk.

LATER EVENTS
In about 1969, I was sent to do a small job in Lymington, and when I’d finished it I decided to go and see what had happened to Durlston Court in the years since I’d left.  While I was a boy at the school, Ian Onslow had arrived to join the staff. He was then a single man, with a red MG and a black spaniel. Now, he was the headmaster, and a family man. The MG had been replaced by a large people-carrier, and the spaniel by black Labradors. Perhaps because he wanted his children to be educated entirely at Durlston, he had had to open kindergarten and pre-prep departments, and make the school co-educational. I wondered if Pat Cox would have made the same changes if he had had children later. I didn’t ask him, though, when I went to see him in the house he and his wife shared in his retirement with Marjorie Dawson. It was a bit embarrassing actually, because he was full of memories of the school, but my time there had been so unremarkable that he scarcely remembered me at all.

Some years later, in the Brick Lane market on a Sunday morning, I found a merchant who had a black plastic rubbish bag entirely filled with Durlston caps. I’ve no idea why these were being sold off, but for old times’ sake, I bought one. A few years after that, I read in a copy of the Saga magazine (for old folks) that Marjorie Dawson, when she retired,  had started taking piano lessons again, after a gap of fifty years or more. When the article was published, she was about to give her first public recital, at the Chewton Glen Hotel, at the age of 100. The magazine was an old one (which I was reading in a launderette) and by the time I saw it the performance had already taken place, so I could not go.

David Micklethwait December 2011