School Days with David

I shall always remember my first night at Durlston Court. The school had been evacuated from Swanage to Eamshill a Georgian mansion near Currey Rivel in Somerset. I was a month late in starting the autumn term, having lost two front teeth in an accident. The train was three hours late on account of the bombing and my mother and I did not arrive at the school until seven in the evening. I was hurried off to a dormitory with six other small boys and afforded the kindest and warmest of welcomes. Jon Franks seemed to be the master of ceremonies whereas David who was in the far corner was more reserved, as if summing me up. Immediately the lights were put out, each little boy produced a torch and started making animal silhouettes on the ceiling, and I thought this place wasn’t going to be so bad.

My second winter term at Durlston, I found myself in a dormitory at the top of the house looking out over the park. Out of six boys I’ve kept in touch with four of them for over sixty years. They were Timothy Chavasse from an old established family in County Cork, Jonathan and David, and the prefect in charge was none other than their elder brother, the suave Roly Franks. David displayed a remarkable talent for telling ghost stories after lights out. The denouement of one particularly hair-raising tale went something like this: ”and suddenly {pause} a knife {pause}” followed by a blood curdling scream from Chavasse as a slipper whistled past his ear, then David’s familiar chuckle.

Early on I became aware of David’s sang froid. We were once chasing a snake along a hedgerow. We assumed it was a grass snake, but it might have been an adder. David took off his shoe and threw it at the snake. He was convinced that he had wounded it, but just then it disappeared down a rabbit hole. Determined to close with his quarry, he put his arm down the rabbit hole and pulled out the snake more dead than alive. When I gently reproved him saying that it might have bitten him, he said, “Oh, no”. Since it went down head first he figured he would be able to grab it by the tail. I was not so sure.

The river Parrett flowed through the water meadows below the Park. In most places in summer it was possible to wade across, in the winter the water meadows frequently flooded. My second summer term David, Timothy and I were walking by the river one warm June evening and we thought it would be fun to swim across. We were about eleven at the time. Timothy and I could swim, but David couldn’t do more than a few yards doggy paddle. In truth, we were only out of our depth for about six feet. “That’s all right”, we said to David, “We will swim on either side of you and, if necessary, hold you up.” All went well to start with, then David put his arms out on either side and all three of us went under. Timothy and I emerged spluttering but for a second or two there was no sign of David. He eventually surfaced and later recounted how he had reasoned in a flash that if he continued his journey on foot he would eventually reach the other bank.

The following two summer terms, it must have been 1942 and 1943, a number of us took to swimming regularly. We found an ‘L’ shaped bend in the river where the bed had been scooped out and it was deep enough to dive. Many a warm July afternoon was spent lazing about in the muddy lukewarm water – completely naked of course.

With almost a quarter of the school decamping to the riverside every Saturday afternoon and returning for tea, reeking of river water, it is hardly surprising that the authorities decided to put a stop to it. Mr Moss, a particularly slimy younger master, was sent out to approach from downstream from whence he could come upon us without being detected. Suddenly, the river cleared and several boys made off across the field clutching their clothes. That night Mr Cox beat fifteen of us. It was not the last time that I stood in silence in line with the Frank’s twins. It is in such moments, rather as it must have been awaiting the guillotine, that one appreciates the true meaning of comradeship.

There was a further occasion when David threw a tennis ball belonging to me up onto the roof. Georgian houses often have a balustrade round the top of the outer wall. It was then that I conceived one of the more hair brained schemes of my life. We couldn’t climb on the roof during daylight in full view of the headmaster’s study, but we could climb up an overhanging yew tree in the hours of darkness. Unfortunately, the tree was perilously near the headmaster’s bedroom. Towards the midnight hour and halfway up the tree, the timorous voice of Mr Cox was heard saying, “Is there anyone there?” Apparently he thought at the time that David, Jon and I might have been burglars. There was a deadly hush, then David piped up with, “it’s me Sir, Franks” and our fate was sealed.

Much energy was expended at Durlston in building huts; the smaller boys spent many happy hours on the woodpile; the bigger boys built more elaborate constructions in the wood. One often sees pictures in children’s books of gnomes living inside large trees, but I never thought it was possible until one day, the Frank’s twins, a boy called Horner, and I were walking across the park at Eamshill.

The north view of the house had a vista with venerable oak trees on either side looking out over the haha down to the river. Several trees had water trapped at the base and the bowl was steadily rotting. This was manifest by large growths of toadstool-like fungus growing between the roots. As we idly hacked away at the fungus with our penknives, we realised that the whole of the inside of one of the trees was hollow.

Eventually, by turning sideways, we were able to squeeze between the roots and found ourselves standing in a small chamber in about a foot of water. We tried baling out the water but it was too laborious. Just then, an older boy called Lushington came by. he was the sort that always knew what to do in such situations, and he went off to fetch a crowbar. Soon the water gushed forth and flowed down the hill. For several weeks we worked like beavers, hacking out the rotten wood, laying a brick floor in the sludge and even cementing in a small glass window between a couple of roots on one side.

For our last five terms at Durlston, we spent many happy hours sitting in our hut. On a Sunday afternoon we would heat up tins of soup on a candle, or smoke rotten wood in home made pipes. There were bamboo bushes in the wood and the bowls of our pipes were hollowed out of Elm while the stems were made of bamboo.

Our early attempts at cooking nearly ended in disaster. We had filled a small biscuit tin with paraffin and were trying to light it, when suddenly the whole tin became a fireball. I had gone back to the changing rooms in the old stable block to get some more matches. Suddenly David appeared breathless and white as a sheet – “the hut’s on fire”, he said. I raced back to the hut, followed by David carrying a bucket of water. Already a small pall of smoke was drifting across the park. Somehow we got the blazing tin of paraffin out of the hut and spent an hour dowsing down the smouldering walls. Our clothes reeked like a bonfire for days and how we were not detected, I shall never know.

The Franks family lived at Norney Cottage in a hamlet called Eashing just south of the Hogs Back. It was a spacious Edwardian family house with substantial garden on the south side overlooking a broad meadow on rising ground to the west. Hardly an Easter or Summer holiday went by without an invitation to stay.

Mrs Franks performed miracles feeding a husband and three growing boys on wartime rations. She kept a few chickens in the backyard and in the school holidays, the boys had to feed them and clean the coops out. David seemed to form a special relationship with each hen. Every chicken had a name and he used to chat to them like old friends.

One summer’s afternoon, the farmer opposite invited Mrs Franks to send her boys across to pick mulberries. The tree was of considerable size, standing right by the farm gate. I remember sitting up in that old mulberry tree, long after our basket was full, picking the fruit until our brown corduroy shorts ran purple with mulberry juice.

Just beyond the trees to the south was the new Godalming bypass. One Easter holiday, Jonathan had been given an air gun, and we spent hours taking pot shots at almost anything that moved. It was about a year before ‘D’ Day and there were Canadian troops stationed all over Surrey. The Canadians used to exercise their tanks along the bypass; just below Norney it ran between two high banks. This was the ideal place for an ambush and we used to lie in the bushes firing furiously at the tanks as they rolled past, pretending they were Germans.

All members of the Franks family were big talkers and even I, not noted for reticence, had to take my turn in the queue. I remember the convivial family lunches at Norney often enlivened later by Roly’s nautical yarns when on leave from the New Zealand line. What a contrast with my own family where my father said little and my sister even less. If anything, the quietest member of the family was David and he seemed to become more taciturn in early manhood.

Not always however, on one occasion my parents arrived at Durlston with a picnic lunch and invited Timothy Chavasse and the Franks twins to join us. We were sitting on an old fallen tree trunk in the park and David was doing most of the talking. Meanwhile, Timothy was ploughing his way steadily through the sandwiches. Suddenly, David stopped talking, looked at Timothy and said, “well, one advantage of not talking is that you can eat more”.

There were return visits to my parents home at Chantersluer Farm, near Charlwood in Surrey. One summer holidays we chopped down a young Ash tree in the nearby spinney and dragged it over two fields, singing the Song of the Volga Boatmen all the way. Our aim was to haul it up between two young Elm trees and make a bridge into our tree hut. Our final problem was to get my six year old brother up into the tree. I still have a photograph of John peering nervously over the edge of a farm bucket suspended ten feet above the ground.

There cannot have been a boy at Durlston whose family before the war had not kept at least a cook and a parlour maid. When the war came, demand for labour, not only by the armed forces but also the factories drove up wages. Together with a severe curtailment of middle class affluence, this led to domestic servants vanishing. It meant that the Mums had to buckle to and cook, something for which they were not necessarily qualified, as many of my contemporaries will recall.

A distinguishing characteristic of the Frank’s twins was their impeccable manners. On one occasion after staying at Chantersluer, they both thanked my mother profusely. David (age 13) added, “and I can truthfully say Mrs Dix, I don’t’ think that we have had a single dud meal the whole week!”

I was sent to Tonbridge School in the Michaelmas term of 1944 and Mr and Mrs Franks thought that, among other reasons, it might be of some advantage if the twins had a friend at court. Accordingly, the twins followed me into Parkside House in the Easter term. We found that first year at Tonbridge unspeakably depressing. We were cooped up in what had once been an ugly Victorian villa with bleak dormitories for the younger boys. The older boys each had a sparse cubicle about the same size as a prison cell. There was no park, no river, no beauty and little freedom. Moreover, the food was worse than it had been at Durlston.

Tonbridge, like many public schools at the time, seemed stuck in a time warp of the twenties and thirties. One did not appreciate at the time, the rationale underlying many of the institutions and practices then in vogue. For example, discipline: which was draconian, was entirely in the hands of praeposters – the most senior boys. At the same time, there was little bullying and no loutish behaviour. One had to stand to attention when addressing a senior boy, but this prevented over familiarity and all that which it might have led to. Even the institution of ‘fagging’ was not without its merits. It was no great hardship to be sent off to buy crumpets for one’s allotted ‘prae’ on a Saturday afternoon. It gave a new boy a personal relationship with ‘his prae’ to whom one could take one’s troubles. Besides, if you have experienced being a servant, you learn how to treat servants. David fagged for a Canadian boy called Macrae with whom he got on perfectly well.

As a result of living in a tightly controlled environment enforced by endless punishments, usually learning a poem – David, Jonathan and I practically know Palgrave’s Golden Treasury off by heart. It did mean, however, that one could be on relaxed terms with the masters. Many of them were excellent men and at least three of them held Military Crosses.

The one master, for whom the three of us had limited respect, in retrospect, was our Housemaster, John Knott. Although amiable enough, he took little personal interest in us. He had played cricket for both Oxford and Kent and was a former All England Racquet’s champion. If you weren’t much good at ball games, he wasn’t interested in you. In other respects, his horizon did not seem to extend much beyond the saloon bar at The Rose & Crown.

For the whole of our second year at Tonbridge, the head boy of Parkside was Gordon Bowler, a good athlete, but otherwise running ‘Flashman’ a close second. We were terrified of him; he once beat poor David, for the usual offence of “talking after lights out”, and drew blood.

One idyllic summer’s afternoon, Bowler was batting for the School. It was Collin Cowdray’s first term also playing for the School. The Tonbridge ground is one of the most beautiful cricket grounds in England. Mr Somervell, the senior history master, happened to be seated on a bench next to a pompous little man. Every time Bowler scored a run the latter would clap loudly and shout “shot”. Suddenly, he said, “Oh dear, that wasn’t a very intelligent shot”. Mr Somervell, who had endured the ordeal in silence then turned to him and said “well, it’s not very surprising because he’s not a very intelligent boy”. Whereupon the pompous little man said, “what do you mean, that’s my son”.

Enormous emphasis was placed on team games. Taking some sort of exercise every day was compulsory. To skip games or be late for chapel were both offences that would have led to a beating; I never remember anybody skipping either. I persuaded David to come to an old boy’s reunion several years back and, perhaps as a result of the ingrained habit of taking regular exercise, there was hardly anyone there who was overweight.

David, as we all remember, was lean and hard without an ounce of spare flesh on him. It was, I know, a disappointment to both the twins that they had not got the eye to make cricketers, especially as old Mr Franks had played for Malvern and even got a Kent trial. David, if not the fastest scrum half Tonbridge had ever had, nevertheless played two seasons for the School. He was always in the thick of the fray. With his fair hair I used to think that he was rather like a Saxon warrior of old, placid by temperament but formidable when roused.

A particularly creditworthy aspect of the system was that however distinguished academically a master might be, and for the most part they were graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, all would take third and fourth year classes.

Thus David, Jonathan and I were each, at different times, taught by Mr Whitworth, the Headmaster. His was a rather dry personality, yet there was little doubting his sharp intelligence. Realising that most boys would give their eye teeth to have owned a motor bike, he used to turn to Jonathan and say, “but of course Franks and I would far sooner own a good strong cob”. The hallmark of a successful teacher is that one remembers what he said. He once turned to David and said “Franks, you know, almost the saddest lines in the Bible are: ‘your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions’."

The Franks family had a connection with Tonbridge because it was where their grandfather had started one of the most successful coal businesses in Surrey and Kent. Tonbridge was Mr Franks’ home town; a sister was married to one of the school doctors, and the unmarried sister, Aunt Dossy, lived in a flat near the school. Many Sundays David, Jonathan and I would repair to her flat after morning chapel for coffee and cake, and an hour in a civilized environment.

Mr Franks was lucky to have missed the trenches, but he had volunteered for the Royal Naval Flying Service in 1917 as a pilot, in the days when it was almost as dangerous to take off as to go ‘over the top’. I shall always remember him as having had the most perfect manners of almost any man I’ve ever met, something which he managed to transmit to this three sons. Mrs Franks’ family were substantial farmers in Hampshire and to her I put down the twins’ love of the soil and unshakeable moral integrity.

The common experience of Durlston drew us closer at Tonbridge and the twins and I went everywhere together. One of our great common interests was music. Mrs Franks had been instrumental in introducing her cousin Joyce St Croix as music mistress at Durlston. She had drawn out the marginal talent of David and I for the piano and she had been a first class choir mistress.

Under the indefatigable Dr Bunney, the Tonbridge School Choir was almost up to Cathedral standards. All three of us sang in the choir and choral society. In four years David sang treble, alto and bass. The chapel itself was one of the most impressive school chapels in England, and a haven of beauty and culture in the otherwise drab surroundings of Victorian classrooms.

In the course of four years we sang at morning chapel and at Evensong on Sundays. Most Sundays the choir sang an anthem or motet. The peak of the year was the Festival of Nine Carols and Lessons. Then there was the Choral Society. Each winter term we did a major choral work: Bach’s Matthew and John Passions, Handel’s Israel in Egypt and, of course, The Messiah. Every summer term we did a Gilbert & Sullivan Opera: The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado, Iolanthe and The Gondoliers.

When David left Tonbridge he had to wait about six months before being called up so Mr Cox took him on as an assistant master at Durlston for two terms. He was good as a rugger or football coach but my brother, who was at the school at the time, aged 12, remembers that Mr Franks’ equations didn’t always come out.

His great love at the time was his horse, an old chestnut cob called “Gleam”. One day he went out hacking on a nearby common and found himself cantering down a sandy track. Like all horses, once they turn for home they seem to spring to life and the canter soon turned into a gallop. David knew there was a main road dead ahead. In vain he tried to rein in his excited steed, but to no avail. When we asked him what he did, he replied “oh, I just threw myself off”. I have often wondered if David ever really knew the meaning of the word “fear”.

Eventually David had to report to the excellent Home Countries Infantry training battalion at Shorncliffe near Folkestone. I had passed through the same unit six months earlier and can vouch for the rigour of the training under sergeants and corporals, most of whom had served in the war, and also the bracing sea air up on the cliffs. He was then posted to the Officer Cadet Training Unit at Eaton Hall, the former seat of the Duke of Westminster, outside Chester. Under the system then prevailing, one was commissioned into a British Regiment, but as likely as not to be posted to a colonial one.

David was commissioned into The Queen’s Royal Regiment, the county regiment of West Surrey and the oldest English regiment, being 2nd of the line. He was then seconded to The Mauritian Guard Company guarding ammunition dumps in the Suez Canal Zone. Anybody familiar with that part of the world will confirm that it was about the most barren, fly-blown, God forsaken station in the whole of The British Empire. One consolation was that Robert Halliday, an old friend from Parkside, was posted to the same unit. He recalled many happy hours spent fighting with David over the lilo in the swimming pool.

I did not see so much of David and Jonathan after I left school. My life as a bank trainee was so different from theirs on a market garden. I did persuade David to come on two holidays. The first was when he first came back from Egypt and we had a fortnight in Italy which cost us each £25.00 all in. We took the train as far as Stresa on Lake Garda and then hitched to Venice, down to Florence and on to Rome. The youth hostels in Italy in the post-war era were a bit primitive to say the least but we consoled ourselves every evening with a huge plate of spaghetti and a couple of litres of wine. The sad fact of going on holiday with a boyhood friend is that you gradually realise that you are growing apart. This became more obvious when, in our middle twenties, we went skiing.

David was a much better skier than I; snow conditions in the Tyrol were dreadful, and we tended to wander off on the upper slopes by ourselves not realising the dangers. One morning, as we cut along the mountainside, David suddenly started to move off downhill on top of several hundred tons of snow. Fortunately the slope was gentle and he came to a halt after about half a mile.

In search of better snow, we went up to Obergurgl, the highest point in those parts. There we were paid a compliment I shall always treasure. On our last morning we caught the last lift up before, owing to deteriorating conditions, the whole system was closed down. All was silent and we seemed to have the mountain to ourselves. When we later emerged in the outskirts of the village, it was snowing quite hard and two young Austrians expressed some surprise that we had been up to the top. The I heard one say to the other, “oh, they are English”.

One of the joys of old age is returning to the friends of one’s youth. For the last few years, I have been going down to meet David on the Isle of Wight. If I had to name a quality of his I would say that he never seemed to change. I felt that he was a familiar landmark, like an oak tree you thought would always be there. He remained true to the soil. You could go for a walk with him along the Down and he would suddenly stop and say, “listen, that’s a ‘something or other’ warbler, I haven’t heard one for a long time”.

He retained a straightforward simplicity to the end. When I finally took his hand he just said, “Goodbye old boy” and his grasp was firm and his voice was strong.

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