Temperate Zone

Trials of the Coot

In August, sickly stench of the lime trees diminishing,
a coot built her nest on the side of an overturned shopping trolley lying mid-river.
She sat with her three young.

Unfortunately, heavy rains came overnight,
the river flooded, the nest was washed away.
A day later I saw her swimming with her young among the bankside reeds.

A week passed, another coot made her nest, just near the trolley on an exposed strip of mud
(not three feet away, a duck sat on HER nest with young).
The river flooded again, the nests and they disappeared.

Another week: Undaunted, coot 2 (for I think it was she!) ...again gathering material.
She appeared to be in a hurry, energetically pulling at greenery from the bank and roots in the water.
I spent a while watching her, in solemn appreciation of what seemed a noble effort.

The next day the crudely assembled nest had gone, I saw no young.
When circumstances demand, they can be brutal mothers,
but -pathetic fallacy allowing- these activities seemed courageous.


Dies Caniculares

Sturdy arching canes of Bramble, thorny, an inch thick,
thrusting through abundant quivering white trumpets of Hedge Bindweed.
Six-foot tall Cow Parsley, umbels like candelabra.

Seed-tray sized blackened rectangles in the grass, from one-use barbecues.
Horror (they seem to appear each year), a pallid scrawny youth with jangling guitar;
others, in packs, having their moment, peacocking with press-up and ball.

A young woman, haltingly reading aloud from the biography of a grimy 60's ten-percenter.
She ran her finger along the sentences as she spoke, a Slav accent.
There seemed a contrariety, the slim text being accorded much consideration, wonderment.

In recent years I've noticed many referring to what they intend doing and being 'over the summer',
these months, warm or no, apparently now considered a wholly other arena:
looser, loucher, louder; dreary dull bands in fields, harrowing what badgers remain.

There was the ever-more pugnacious and repugnant facial contortions of the players at Wimbledon.
Certain parts of poor, beloved Radio 3 continued their descent into overfamiliar asininity.
As ever, the silliest gesticulated / wept / brayed and barked, were paraded, lauded, mercifully forgotten.

For most it was the train, office, performance review,
betrayed promise and unfocussed blankness; perhaps a lark or two in the pub or club.
There were antagonisms (the gibbering of Horatio Bottomley's heirs; a farrago of conceits).

Most pleasant memories?
A stroll through St James' Park; a cup of chocolate in Piccadilly (clean table linen); Lulu at ENO;
a day in Margate; a late afternoon picnic at Beachy Head; revisiting the score of 'Bluebeard's Castle'.


The Great Fleet

Perhaps, territorial waters sometime regained, an enlarged flotilla of factory trawlers or
'fish processing vessels' shall again put out to peturb shoal and shelf, lay waste reef, scour the
abyssal plain. More 'bycatch', discards, disturbed lives, confusion, tumbling of habitat.

The naming of ships:
The Ravager, The Molester, The Plunderer, The Marauder, The Despoiler...
With rear-gunners?...for seeing off the French as the death nets are drawn up the ramp.

What flag shall they fly? That of Jack? George? Andrew? St Piran?
-no more matter to the tossed and ripped coral or flounder as to to the fowl and swine of the
death camps- whether it's EU or UK-funded tormentors that bedevil and violate.


Die Wetterau

After the Fischfest: long tables with cakes, tarts, flans, ein viertel Rudesheimer Rosengarten.
Then meandering back along Bundestrasse 275, through the wooded slopes of the Hoch Taunus,
visiting Weilburg, Limburg, Schloss Brownfels.

I more clearly remember strolling through Bad Nauheim than Bath, Freiburg than Oxford,
feeling just as 'at home' in the Vogelsberg as the North Downs, in Campulung as Sevenoaks
(and as gratified in Eisenach -with trip to the Wartburg- as ever in Winchester or Tintagel).

My inmost lights shine from 'The Continent' (is this description to return?):
The south west approach to Brasov along the Carpathians; the Leutasch Valley; the Tatras; Konigsee.
And feeling love in Bratislava, Munich, Copenhagen, Bucharest.


The Dreadful Feasts

In September, the gory insanity of Eid ul-Adha, the 'Greater Eid': approximately ten million animals
slaughtered, streets running ankle-deep in entrails. Throughout the year, frenzied butchery to
appease or mark this or that. The Christmas blood-letting yet to come.

The transportation, incarceration, torture, humiliation, murder of our fellow creatures continues.
Still the exploitation and 'entertainment', the 'sacrifice' and bloodlust, the experiments, the 'sports',
the hunting, gassing, electrocuting, throat-cutting, clubbing, ripping by dog, the appalling violence.

We seem to blunder on, often unknowingly colluding, complicit, our taxes propping up obscenities
on farm, on moor, in bull ring, perpetuating barbaric rituals, preserving a nation's 'traditions',
numbing the young to cruelty and a disregard towards other manifestations of life.

To derive satisfaction from the bewilderment, terror, hopeless rage of other creatures...
to gain pleasure from inflicting pain, devising devilish methods of punishment, ridicule, unnatural
display. It's time we grew up, for we have proved ourselves poor guardians, bad shepherds.

Of course, there is ignorance, lack of empathy, thrill for some in exercising power, in killing.
There is the idiocies of much religious observance, a perverse delight in chastising self and others.
There is the fur-draped 'celebrity', grisly 'trophy hunters', corporate weekends of massacre.

But, also, attempts to assuage our anxieties, compensate for feelings of powerlessness;
a dismal, ineffectual 'protest' before our perplexities, our inability to face that we have little
control over much in the world: uncertainties, mutability, our limited comprehension.


Purgatio Vulgaris

The ordeal? Oh, always...
getting through the summer, remaining innocent of red neck and nose;
and exonerating oneself, via, by turns, asperity and solicitude, for ruinous appetites.

This year, many were disconsolate, aggrieved, unreconciled, some
with rancour equally for Pole, Czech, Dane, Slovene, Baltic and Balkans; they railed against
the loss of all manner of things dear to them and of which they apparently once were sure.

I appreciated the earnestness, tolerated the frivolity, 'rumbustiousness', chicanery and backstab, less
so the bad manners, philistinism, parochialism, celebration of things matey, mediocre, mischievous. 
-Are we still able to be agreeably modest, usefully circumspect, properly liberal?

All sorts may emerge from the fissure, with unctuous whine, forceful cry, banner and symbol:
the moral myopia of zealots, facile formulae of miscreants in tirade (with bludgeon or blandishment).
In schism there's fragmentation, realignment, adaptation, strange bed-fellows and stranger claims to veracity.

By all means let's have a clear-out: let's have done with the dealers and spitters, the market ghouls,
sharks, spivs, swindlers, the incendiary tub-thumpers, odious meddlesome clerics (of whatever
persuasion), daft league tables et al.  I hope we may manage to do so with dispassion, discipline.





Peter Jennings 
London
December 2016

The Beak is Down *

New Beacon School

(Motto: Dare Ex fumo Lucem)

November 1961

There he lay, Cecil L. Norman (M.A. Oxon), fallen Standard-Bearer, right cheek to the ground; always somehow both fearsome and frail, then in his 70's I imagine.

It seemed only I was witness to this, staring dully from the lower pane of the sash window; the path on which he lay, head towards me, gently sloping away downhill.

I speculated idly: had he slithered a little to this position? nails raking the impacted ice?

His left leg was jammed awkwardly into the stand (in Atco green) for the hockey sticks, foot entangled in their blades; right arm crooked towards the black drainpipe outside the 'front lavatories', a designation I thought -until years later- geographical rather than anatomical.

I could go and kick him.



Just below me, worn broad stone steps down to the caves (changing rooms). A peg for one's coat in the mornings, another peg and a locker for games clothes.

I recall the distinctive smell of rugby shirts, dank, mud spattered, red or blue; and the boots, Pococks, all leather, studs, nails; occasionally someone had a daringly modern low-cut pair.

That morning two boys had set up an adversarial chant 'Kruschev', 'Kennedy', 'Kruschev', 'Kennedy'...

My attention had been on safely carrying my drawing of a robot to the art room. Astonishingly, the art master had both beard and smock.



To my right was the 'gym' where morning assembly and much else was held: on the brick wall behind the Master's dais, a floor-to-ceiling tapestry depicting the glorious land, Kent, The Garden of England.

We sat, crossed-legged before the Wealden montage, part Rowland Hilder, Oasts, balk and furrow, + formal representation of orchards, the pliant gaze of animals looking up from their cropping.

...We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts...

Less explainable perhaps, there in the tapestry, the baleful stare of serried pikemen in receding overlap, cuirasses the colour of dulled pewter.

...We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us...



To come, would be my own Magical strip of Kent: Shoreham, by the Darent.
There, an early love; and afterwards, a longing for that place.



The gym was also used for the school G & S productions; the previous term it had been H M S Pinafore. Singularly miscast, a peaky youth, Cash's name tag hanging out over floral culottes...

"For I'm called Little Buttercup - dear Little Buttercup..."

I had been a sailor of some sort, undistinguished, striped trousers, headscarf.

It served as the room for the annual House 'parades', a distinctly peculiar mix of quasi-military tattoo, House Vs House team games, and, at the end (and all rather 'Riefenstahl') various tableaux vivants.

It was where the school orchestra rehearsed, where I, at the back, counted the bars before entry of triangle or drum.

...and on rainy afternoons, when perhaps there seemed little else to do, this was where the boxing ring was erected; swift, bloody encounters.



The songs closing assembly were invariably 'The British Grenadier', followed by the dreadful 'Keel Row', its vulgar repetitions seized upon with barked emphases:

"As I came through Sandgate, through Sandgate, through Sandgate..."

-after which we filed up the steep wooden stairs to the corridor, along which lay the window where my attention had been arrested that morning by the figure in the snow.



Earlier, in 'short break', after mucking about behind St George's Chapel, there had been the mandatory 'Squads': right-dress, arms length, eyes front; in the adjacent 'squad', S and H, the beautiful brothers, eyes like frozen lakes.

(I was in Wellington House, our colours a dreary maroon; they were in Nelson, cornflower blue)

Then I had set off for English, with Commander A. A. C. Ouvry, D.S.C., R.N (ret).

Passed the rifle range where, twice a week, 303 tucked into shoulder, bullets thudded pleasingly into target and surrounding earth. This was before Lindsay Anderson's 'IF' set out some possibilities in this area; probably just as well.

I remember the feel of the rifle's green canvas sling, this now reminding me of times a few years on: after a cross-country run around Headcorn or Chart Sutton, fagging duties done (making much toast featured), then early evenings before prep, attending to belts and buckles, the smell of Duraglit and Blanco.

Passed the playing fields. Some golden moments in the First XI; coming in at number three and making a spirited 78; seven fours and an elegant, gloriously fine, leg glance.

(There were less heroic times in the 2nd XV: at wing three-quarter, mostly running for my life)



Then came the realisation: I'd forgotten my blotting paper.

Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways;
Re-clothe us in our rightful mind...

Dread, hopelessness, suffused my Being.


If one had forgotten anything, pen, protractor, textbook, there were three connected classrooms to negotiate (gingerly knocking on each door, asking permission to enter and traverse) so to reach the cubby holes of rough-hewn oak where each boy kept such things.

Classroom 1

Despite all the years I sat before him, stiff with terror, focussed on heavy black eyebrows and heavy black spectacles, the actual subject Dennis Pratten taught is unavailable to me; merciful repression intervenes, permitting only slivers of his dreadful purplish mien: cadaverous cheeks, line-mouth, a gauntness further
distorted by a seeming permanent rage.

I mostly perched awkwardly, a vigilant vacuity, hoping that nothing about me invited that hellish stare and ferocious displeasure. Here was nascent distrait before awfulness, attentive absence.

Pratten glared (a fleck of foam at the corner of his mouth) but little else, his attention returned to terrorising some luckless fellow.

2

Mr Davies, earnest, bottle green corduroy jacket; often, or so it seemed, describing the Hell of the trenches, wearily, meticulously. As on this occasion, he would usually wave absentmindedly, motioning one through.

3

The prize for uncommon sadism went to Mr Stannard (perhaps matched only by the delight Mr Maddock, Chaplain, took in kicking boys on the backside with his heavy brogues).

In Stannard's classroom, the cubby holes being along the farthest wall, the forgetful boy would be 'invited' to 'run the gauntlet'.

He egging them on, his boys would line up and -armed with a ruler, a removed shoe, or just fists- they would hit out at the unfortunate on his way there and back.

Stannard's gifts were evidently appreciated; he went on to become Head of a most prestigious school.



Surviving these trials, returning, I reached the relative gloom at the back of Pratten's long classroom. I imagine this place may have been one of wonder and reverence for some, of fear and sinking hearts for others.

Lining the walls were ranks of varnished oaken panels, tabulating -in gold lettering- the names of those boys who had secured scholarships, had passed their Common Entrance Exam and, entered below, the Public Schools to which they had ascended.

(Among the names, S. Sassoon, A [Anthony] Powell)

On the panels were names often familiar to us boys for having distinguished themselves in war (many being the fathers of one's contemporaries): Group Captains, Wing Commanders, and so on.

Being likely destined for The Services (or The Church, Foreign Office, Diplomatic Corps) we had the day before been addressed in this sanctum by a be-whiskered military sort, a brigadier I think (sometimes we had an Archdeacon) entreating us to serve, do our duty, grow to be honourable men.

He had worn a mustard-coloured waistcoat, Plus Fours, a monocle.
In, perhaps, two or three years, much of this would, to most, be unfathomable.



I gained the safety of the corridor, part polished wood, part white-flecked pale green linoleum. 

Walking past the window, I saw The Beak.

From the classroom across the corridor, Mr Goodman, Maths, cast the algebraic runes.

It came to me that perhaps I should ring the school bells; but which? Little bell or Big bell? The first sat on a table outside the refectory, the second was housed in its own tower in the grounds, thick knotted rope dangling nearly to the ground.

Before I moved either way, a group of boys rounded the corner and came upon the still figure. They shouted, ran, raised the alarm.

They turned The Beak over; bulky, lumpen. Some aspect to that scene now brings me to Waterhouse's St. Eulalia (where was a barrel of knives when one needed it?): a disposition of limbs, the snow perhaps; but here was no martyrdom, no rising dove.


I moved away, indifferent.

...Don't Care was made to care, Don't Care was hung;
Don't Care was put in a pot and boiled till he was done...


After that, in 'long break', over games of L'Attaque or 'Dover Patrol':

"The Beak fell over"
"Is he dead?"
"Good Riddance!"
"Oh, he wasn't such a bad old stick"
"What? he's a swine!"

Even the ragging of Smith '4' ceased (boys bearing common surnames were so differentiated). He was often mercilessly taunted; poor chap probably had what today would be called 'learning difficulties'.



A day or so later the Beak returned, characteristically brandishing an outstretched, admonishing right forefinger (for some unknown reason he addressed all boys as "Tommy").

At assembly, centre of unsmiling phalanx, he delivered a diatribe on the regrettable manners of the young.

He reminded us that our quartered red and blue caps, bearing the school insignia, were the very lamp of hope in a darkening, declining world.

They should unfailingly be raised to all women, of whatever age or 'rank', on every occasion, and on no account were they to be thrown for sport over the bus shelter in the lane.




London
December 2013

* At our Prep School -and probably many others- The 'Beak' was the term used for the Headmaster.

Deliverance 

1)

When asleep, I find my beloved snow.

I'm walking through the forest, it is all around, it is close beside me.

I walk and walk, through the snow, my legs become heavy and aching;

but the way is delicious, astonishing, addictive, 

a vision of undisturbed purity and radiance.

I do not wish to discover, or be led towards any clearing, any revelation,

any idea posing as a resolution to suffering.

I wish to wander, to worship, feel the longing.

I do not want to return to morning, to matter and chatter, to my fallenness.

Instead, may I be turned to wood,

and stand through centuries of other's sadness and grieving,

with the ferns, the mosses, the ivy.

May I observe, but be unmoved; may I feel a little, but be unable to do anything.

2)

Upon waking, I feel that the snow hasn't come, so I cannot die.

The snow hasn't come for so long, I yearn for it so.

But it doesn't come and I am not touched by it,

and I know I want to die in the snow; so this must be postponed.

If I had energy left, I could travel to another land where the snow still falls,

and then lay down; such blessed relief.

And I would not turn blue or grey, or be grimacing or pitiful.

I shall be transformed, rearranged, purged of all dishonours, cowardice, duplicities.

-No more betrayals.

But, for years there has been just rain and swirling wind,

never a completely still day; I cannot bear it any more.

I can keep faith only with the the cold, the stillness.

3)

When going about my duties, I do not consider or comprehend much.

I have ice water for blood, icicles for hands and feet.

My soul is a frozen lake.

A snowflake is my heart (it falls),

it is delicate, refined, subject to enchantment,

-it melts......is always melting;

but when wounded, it tries to freeze.

I do not look up or down, the pools of water that are my eyes would spill,

and I would cry forever.

I hold myself steady, with carapace and accumulated devices of magic,

the artifices of self-deception.

4)

Many times, in utter joy, excitement, reverence,

there in the exquisite, rare, January light,

are seen the clusters of winged seeds of the Ash,

hanging like gold-braided epaulets, on black branches

against the blue sky.

I taste, see, smell, touch this; I remember it always.

5)

WHOOSH!

I have pieces of ice on my woollen hat, my heart is beating fast,

stupid people in my way, standing around yacking;

my boots are hanging off the end of the toboggan, sliding this way and that.

WHOOSH!...I go, feet first;

WHOOSH!...I go, head first;

WHOOSH!...I go, sitting, holding the string to steer;

-and WHOOSH!...paddling frantically with my arms, faster, turning, slewing.

There was just that, and then, and the grey skies.

There are, truly, only physical experiences, 

sensations, feelings in and through our bodies.

There is just a handful of these occasions, meanly scattered through our lives,

times blessedly free from distraction, concern, contingency.

It's not fair!

WHOOSH!

The last time, nearly dark, cold, forlornly pulling the the sledge back up the hill,

jerking the scraped runners from rut to rut.

Then home: the coal fire, marrow soup, nettle soup, bean soup,

and dreadful school in the morning.

6)

When it comes again, the proper snow,

I shall let it fall and settle for a while.

Then, in my finest dress, I'll wander in the woods, select my snowdrift.

I'll curl up.

 Oh, I feel it: there is snow on my eyes, in my ears, on my mouth, in my nose.

It is very good. 

Pain recedes.

In time, I am taken up, into the Larch, the Birch,

there to stand for centuries through other's sadness and grieving;

-with the ferns, the mosses, the ivy, the fungi.

I observe, but am unmoved; 

I feel a little, but am unable to do anything.

Peter Jennings : February 2016

'Deliverance : Six Pieces for Piano and Voice'
is performed on youtube at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v9ZpcC5v4U

The Radio Tower

1963 - 1964

At four we changed into dark green, our evening uniform, from our daytime light blue and grey check.

An S-bend in the A24 straightening, the River Mole beyond:
Kurt Hahn's seventh school.

We sometimes cycled, J and I,
beside that dual carriageway, where the motorcycles roared (as they still do)
up towards Burford Bridge and the Stepping Stones, to gather at the foot of Box Hill.

Then, the machines were Triumph, Norton, Matchless.

I rode behind her, occasionally seeing stocking tops / suspenders as she pushed down on the pedals.
I was 13, she 12, much brighter than I, already in the sixth form.
She spoke of the Byzantine Empire (of which I knew nothing), I of Zuleika Dobson, which she had not read. 
She was a decent pianist. We talked of one day hosting gatherings at her home in London, off the Prince Albert Road.



The village of Mickleham: church, shop, the 'Running Horses' public house; and Box Hill 'Outward Bound' school.

Something of an experiment, my being sent there,
arising from parental exasperation, rather than any embrace of its 'Round-Square' ethos.

A boyfriend of my mother secured me a place.
When telling of this school, my parents had described (with uncertain smiles)
seeing pupils running with abandon, ripping wallpaper off the corridors; I smiled back, it sounded awful.

It did prove to be different, radical even, after a traditional prep school.

For one thing: no compulsory games in the afternoons; instead, we had the ill-defined 'activities'.
I hit a few golf balls in the lower field, or, with other boys, would gaze at, sometimes tinker with a
car engine squatting on the floor of a shed in the grounds.
-Dinginess, the smell of oil, damp, dirty rags.



Otherwise, I mooched around the 'Italian Gardens' for a while.

Here, amongst the crumbling statuary, we were allowed to camp out on a Saturday night,
after a meal that could bring surprises: an apple, crisps, black coffee...

(In the mornings we had 'Swiss Porridge', a then-unfamiliar concoction, later known to all as Muesli)
And, there was no detention, or writing 'lines' for misbehaviour; pupils were awarded 'circuits'
-running round the school perimeter- as a penance for wrongdoing.

Of my fellows?

Lowest: us 'Training Diary Holders'; then, ascending, 'Reeves', 'Syndics', 'Guardians'.
There were sons / daughters of diplomats, writers, actors, of a meso-American president or two, of Asian politicians, African chiefs. 
We had rugby-playing bullies, some older girls of apparent poise and sureness (one, improbably, the lover of a wizened master), 
and boys from rougher estates, with language and gesture unknown to me.



One term, first morning, a breeze had wafted AF's skirt aloft as she walked from the village shop.

Someone said "She's the fastest sprinter in the junior girls"
I watched for her during our mandatory pre-breakfast morning runs.

Early notoriety: "Did you hear?.....Jennings punched Campbell!" To his surprise, no less mine, my
flailing hands landed a blow to my tormentor's face; he staggered, bemused, smearing blood along
the green and brown of the passageway. Briefly, I basked in the reputation of being one not to trifle with.

Another occasion, same passage, seeking refuge, I found myself in the girl's laundry room. 

Once, I was again in that room; J, sitting carelessly astride a bench, tracing out for me (a little unsure
of the details) a sketch of some female anatomy. We had by then spent a pleasant afternoon or two at the 'Old Cottage', 
a house / dormitory for boys in the village. We listened to an LP of Stravinsky's Firebird that I had brought from home.
I remember the feel of the amaranth coarse-haired blanket, our reddened cheeks, drowsiness, warmth.




We did have a compulsory cold shower after our morning runs.

Unwilling boys were poked back under by the vigilant Miss Seymour, boy's Matron....a full 10 seconds
having to be completed. (She also inspected the underside of our shoes, to check this area was polished)

Sometimes, instead, our run was followed by a length in the outside pool.
Then back to dormitories: Norbury, Juniper, Ranmore, Headley.
The girl's dormitories were on the floor below ours, Miss Ruegg presided, equally formidable.

A little fascination: there were girls from Persia, Finland, Korea, Cheadle Hulme...

One Saturday, GL and I played tennis on the court on the front lawn, conscious of some girls
looking down at us from their dormitory window. On the day of the Summer Term Fete 1964, similarly observed, 
I arranged trestle tables, back lawn this time. Music blared out from the girl's window...'Johnny Remember Me', 'Runaway'. 
That day I was dreading having to conduct a children's 'Jazz Oratorio'.



Periodically we were driven off in the school bus, some distance, then set down in the countryside.

We were to find our way back to school before nightfall, or hysteria, descended.
Once, four of us trudged all day in the cold, across field, woodland, feeling bleaker by the mile.

Fractious, we stumbled upon Westcott village, there took a bus to Dorking (where, now, at the town's entrance, 
in this area of 'Outstanding Natural Beauty' I see a giant blue metal cockerel has been erected).
That evening, aggrieved, unreconciled to my lot, I puffed on cigarettes with GL as we strolled by the river.

He was aghast at a particular soft toy his mother had bought him to give to H, his girlfriend at school.

He was for burying it.
His mother was an actress. I'd seen her swanning into school a couple of times.
I counselled against the interment; he gave it to H, it was received well enough.
On holiday, in Cannes, I bought both J and H soft toys. These were never given, I have them still.



The Junior Common Room: smell of cedar tuck-boxes, oranges.

Here I kept my ten-shilling notes from home, and with TC (later the drummer in a scandalous if rather short-lived band)  
I thumped out primitive rhythms on the sides of empty floor polish cans.

At half-terms, those boys without family were sent to spend the time with other boys. TC had spent one
weekend at my home. We had combed back our hair, put on heeled boots, suede coats, and visited my prep school at dusk. 
When carving our initials into the brickwork, we were discovered and dispatched.

Weekend gatherings and dances were held in the Common Room.

-The dreadful bleating of Roy Orbison, pointless asymmetry.
I held J to the Beatle's 'And I love her' (set to summon moist eyes for a while to come).
And, primed by J's accounts of her delicious rebelliousness, I awaited the arrival of FB, in her black leather jacket. 
Alas, Matron (and cocoa) intervened: a girl from Teheran threw a jagged-edged tin can at me. I have the scar. 



Near the end of one term, a concert:

I accompanied a particularly bumptious master (he played the clarinet) in Pensylvannia 6500.
I then gave a long drum solo. The hall rose chanting my name. 

J performed in a short play during that same concert; she wore a blue towelling dressing gown.
She lived quite near to Primrose Hill. At her home there was a door opening onto the street, a winding staircase, 
a breakfast bar with stools, a cellar with a couch, such modern things.

Twenty years later, she a journalist and theatre critic, we met in a restaurant off Covent Garden.

I spent my last Box Hill half-term with J. Her father had been a General in the Russian army (or was this a story?). 
She and I went to a recording studio to hear the harmonica player Larry Adler, a family friend. 
The next day we went to the Tate Gallery; on leaving, the belt of her coat fell to the ground, she didn't notice and walked on. I retrieved it. 
That evening I washed her hair over the bath.



The 'Radio Tower':

A staircase, between the boy's and girl's landings. A door, behind which a jumbled pile of travelling chests and trunks stretched for some yards, then, narrow, rickety stairs up to a first level, with a wooden bench.

Another steep narrow staircase led to a tiny room. If one stood on a chair, pushed up at the hatch on the ceiling, as on a conning tower of a submarine......then slid this to one side, we were able to look out over the roof. 
There was one walnut roll-top desk with many compartments. There was room for two to sit.

TC and I discovered this place, we kept it secret; apart from us only J came there.

Peering over the flashing round the ornate chimneys: we bemoaned regulation haircuts; I complained at having run out of people to bribe to play instead of me at morning assembly; TC spoke of 'The Ghost of White Hart Lane'...who I later found to have been a player for Tottenham football club; we planned visits to the ruined lodge near the school's front gate. 
We drank nescafe there, amongst the brambles.



Autumn Term, one afternoon, J and I had agreed to meet in the Tower that evening.

Someone came into our classroom, whispered to the mistress in charge, who then told us that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Lessons were suspended.

My thoughts were elsewhere (this now reminding me of Auden's observations in 'Musée des Beaux Arts') 
-wondering whether J and I would, undetected, from our respective landings, reach the door to our secret place. 
'Twixt Ruegg and Seymour, Scylla and Charybdis. We made it.
We sat on the bench, then climbed to the upper room, opened the hatch, looked down over the school.

J once stayed a weekend at my home in Sevenoaks.

My father ran us to Tunbridge Wells, where we saw the group the 'Applejacks', or was it 'The Big 3'?
There was a fight in the dance hall, many young men with close-cropped hair. Not long before this, at the cafe on top of Box Hill, 
I had seen a similar-looking crowd marching along. I thought they were Americans, I was told they were 'Mods'. 
They wrecked the cafe. Us pupils were shepherded to safety.



On the last day of the Summer Term 1964 J and I were expelled.

We had wandered out of bounds, on the way to Juniper Hall.
Following representations from J's mother, our sentence was commuted to 'Asked to Leave'.

Of the rest that year -the subjects taught, whoever taught them, my other contemporaries- I remember little.  
For me, there was mostly J, and the 'Radio Tower'; occasionally I would improvise at the piano.
There were frequent beatings certainly, one quite severe, 12 energetic strokes from a Housemaster.

I recall, I liked, the Victorian-Gothic architecture of the main building, the panelling, the stained glass.

I remember us all being allowed -goodness knows why- to stay up to watch a Cassius Clay / Sonny Liston fight.
And, of course, J and I winning the school dancing competition.
On the Alumni page of the school's website I recently saw a photograph of J and I, at 13 and 14.
We do not look uneasy in one another's company. I imagine a fondness to have been there.





Peter Jennings : London : October 2015