The slippery slope

Another thing that can drag you out of the age of innocence and nudge you towards a berserker frame of mind is institutionalized violence.

The violence at Pocklington School is much more organized than the parental smacking routine. Of course there is some rough and tumble between the boys, but the real brutal stuff is inflicted on the boys by the teachers. One or two of them find corporal punishment distasteful and don’t participate, but the vast majority a) think beating boys is a perfectly wholesome form of discipline, and b) seem to enjoy it.

I get beaten a lot.

As with my parents, I’m still pretty much in the dark about my actual crimes. It would be churlish to imply that they’re spuriously dreamed up by the teachers, but the fact that I can’t remember much about them until the later years – when they generally centre around fags and booze – suggests they’re mostly minor misdemeanours. I think the word ‘cheek’ crops up a lot. I’m ‘too cheeky’. I’m ‘showing too much spirit’. I don’t show enough deference. I don’t fawn upon them enough. The teachers are quite high maintenance in terms of the respect they feel they should be paid.

My first formal punishment is a slippering. I’m twelve, I’ve only been there a few weeks. I’m called into an assistant housemaster’s ‘flat’ just before bedtime. It’s more just a bedroom, with a desk and an easy chair crammed into one corner, and it smells of liniment – a kind of all-purpose embrocation, garishly pink in colour, used to massage aching limbs and joints, with a lingering odour of camphor and menthol. It’s the snake oil of the seventies, and the rugby players of the school like to rub it in all over. The sight of them massaging it into their inner thighs after a game has a slightly homoerotic charge.

The assistant housemaster tells me the punishment for my crime is ‘four’, and asks me to bend over. He then feels my bottom through my pyjamas to make sure I’m ‘not wearing any padding’. This check takes a long time. Once he’s satisfied (!) he picks up one of his size twelve slippers – he’s a big man – and hits me with it, very hard, four times. My parents would have been very pleased with the smacking sound. Justice is definitely heard to be done.

It hurts a lot but I am determined not to give him the satisfaction of crying. Once the fourth blow has been delivered I stand up straight, holding in the urge, and wait to be dismissed.

‘Not crying?’ he asks.

I don’t make a reply.

‘I can’t have done it hard enough,’ he continues.

There’s a silence. He stares at me. I try not to look at him, but some errant flicker of curiosity causes me to glance at him for the briefest of moments. This quick look must have some measure of defiance or ‘cheek’ in it, because he then says: ‘You’re an insolent boy, aren’t you? I think I’d better give you four more. Bend over.’

There’s absolutely nothing you can do in these situations, which is precisely the point – complete subjugation. And humiliation. Even in Lindsay Anderson’s film if . . . about insurrection at a public school, when Malcolm McDowell’s character is getting caned by the prefects in the gym, he stands when the ‘four’ have been delivered without being asked to stand, and this provokes the prefects to make him bend over again and take four more. And he does it. It’s so disappointing. Just when you think the revolution is about to begin he backs down, and takes four more.

Of course – spoiler alert – at the end of the film Malcolm McDowell’s character, Mick Travis, finds a stash of weapons belonging to the cadet force and goes berserk, shooting most of the bullies dead from the rooftop.

There but for the keys to the armoury go I . . .

In the assistant housemaster’s liniment-reeking bedroom, I bend over again. He hits me four more times, harder than before, but I still don’t cry. He makes me stand and stares into my face. He can see that my eyes are smarting, that my bottom lip is starting to quiver.

‘Nearly there,’ he says, grinning. ‘I’m going to hit you until you cry. Bend over again.’

And he keeps on hitting me until I cry.

Once I’m crying properly he comes over all avuncular. He drops the slipper.

‘There you are, you see – not too hard, is it?’

He puts an arm around my shoulders to comfort me and tousles my hair! Then pats me on the bottom and sends me on my way.

I’m aware that I’ve described this in a rather matter-of-fact way, while an obvious question might be:

Are you a victim of sexual abuse?

I don’t think masters should feel boys’ bottoms in that way, or hit them until they cry, but I certainly didn’t feel like a victim at the time. Mostly because this form of ‘mild’ sexual abuse was the way of the world back then, in that school and many others. It was happening to so many people.

Consider the routine that’s followed at bath time in that first year at school. There’s a communal bathroom with eight large baths in it. It’s three boys a bath, and we get into the water that’s been used by the previous batch of boys. We have to soap ourselves all over, then stand up and raise a hand. The master will come over and check that we are soaped all over. We will then rinse, stand, and raise a hand again, and he will check that we are rinsed. Then we get out and dry ourselves, and he will make sure we are dry. Each of these inspections involves varying degrees of ‘touching’ and ‘checking’. Some teachers are known to be more thorough than others. They don’t grab our genitals as such, it’s a sort of fluttering of the hands down the front and back that might accidentally brush against your penis.

We are mostly pre-pubescent, and pre-sexual. It’s only in hindsight that we get an understanding of what might be going on. As we move up the school system to the next boarding house these bath checks are dropped, but we’ve decided who the ‘pervs’ are. We learn to avoid them as much as possible.

It’s society that lets the predators operate in plain sight. For instance, we hear stories in the early seventies of Jimmy Savile fiddling with dead bodies in a Leeds hospital, but he doesn’t get ‘outed’ for another forty years. We know we wouldn’t let ourselves be alone in a room with Jimmy Savile. We know he’s a wrong’un back then, and if we schoolboys know, then everyone must know. They’re just not saying – because they’ve got vested interests. People must know about Rolf Harris and Stuart Hall and Gary Glitter too.

Are you damaged by the experience?

If we are the sum of everything that happens to us, then the answer is probably yes, but working out the various weights of all these experiences is not an exact science. We’re ground down by so many things at school – chiefly harsh discipline and poor pastoral care – but I’d say the most damaging thing is a lack of love. Love definitely isn’t mentioned in the school prospectus.

Some boys ‘thrive’ under these conditions, others, like me, go gently berserk.

The film if . . . is made in 1968, the year before I go to Pocklington. The school depicted is a bit posher than ours, but the studies, the dormitories, the cadet force, the cold showers, and the lack of love, are all very familiar.

Our local fleapit, The Ritz, in Pocklington, generally turns a blind eye to age restrictions, and has a strangely progressive attitude to programming. It often shows art house films, classics, and occasionally porn (or what passes for porn) on Sunday evenings. Praise the Lord. Many of us get to see if . . . a couple of years after its release. I would say young public-school boys are the perfect audience for this film, and perhaps the owner of The Ritz has spotted this.

‘Violence and revolution are the only pure acts,’ says Travis, sitting in his study with his two pals. ‘One man can change the world with a bullet in the right place.’

Oh, the pipe dreams I have. Travis and his mates are so hard slash cool. If only I could be more like them.