Innocence Read online

  From then on, during all the time I was at St Peter’s, I never went to sleep with my back to my family. Different beds in different dormitories required the working out of new directions, but the Bristol Channel was always my guide and I was always able to draw an imaginary line from my bed to our house over in Wales. Never once did I go to sleep looking away from my family. It was a great comfort to do this.

  There was a boy in our dormitory during my first term called Tweedie, who one night started snoring soon after he had gone to sleep.

  ‘Who’s that talking?’ cried the Matron, bursting in. My own bed was close to the door, and I remember looking up at her from my pillow and seeing her standing there silhouetted against the light from the corridor and thinking how truly frightening she looked. I think it was her enormous bosom that scared me most of all. My eyes were riveted to it, and to me it was like a battering-ram or the bows of an icebreaker or maybe a couple of high-explosive bombs.

  ‘Own up!’ she cried. ‘Who was talking?’

  We lay there in silence. Then Tweedie, who was lying fast asleep on his back with his mouth open, gave another snore.

  The Matron stared at Tweedie. ‘Snoring is a disgusting habit,’ she said. ‘Only the lower classes do it. We shall have to teach him a lesson.’

  She didn’t switch on the light, but she advanced into the room and picked up a cake of soap from the nearest basin. The bare electric bulb in the corridor illuminated the whole dormitory in a pale creamy glow.

  None of us dared to sit up in bed, but all eyes were on the Matron now, watching to see what she was going to do next. She always had a pair of scissors hanging by a white tape from her waist, and with this she began shaving thin slivers of soap into the palm of one hand. Then she went over to where the wretched Tweedie lay and very carefully she dropped these little soap-flakes into his open mouth. She had a whole handful of them and I thought she was never going to stop.

  What on earth is going to happen? I wondered. Would Tweedie choke? Would he strangle? Might his throat get blocked up completely? Was she going to kill him?

  The Matron stepped back a couple of paces and folded her arms across, or rather underneath, her massive chest.

  Nothing happened. Tweedie kept right on snoring. Then suddenly he began to gurgle and white bubbles appeared around his lips. The bubbles grew and grew until in the end his whole face seemed to be smothered in a bubbly foaming white soapy froth. It was a horrific sight. Then all at once, Tweedie gave a great cough and a splutter and he sat up very fast and began clawing at his face with his hands. ‘Oh!’ he stuttered. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh no! Wh-wh-what’s happening? Wh-wh-what’s on my face? Somebody help me!’

  The Matron threw him a face flannel and said, ‘Wipe it off, Tweedie. And don’t ever let me hear you snoring again. Hasn’t anyone ever taught you not to go to sleep on your back?’

  With that she marched out of the dormitory and slammed the door.

  Homesickness

  I was homesick during the whole of my first term at St Peter’s. Homesickness is a bit like seasickness. You don’t know how awful it is till you get it, and when you do, it hits you right in the top of the stomach and you want to die. The only comfort is that both homesickness and seasickness are instantly curable. The first goes away the moment you walk out of the school grounds and the second is forgotten as soon as the ship enters port.

  I was so devastatingly homesick during my first two weeks that I set about devising a stunt for getting myself sent back home, even if it were only a few days. My idea was that I should all of a sudden develop an attack of acute appendicitis.

  You will probably think it silly that a nine-year-old boy should imagine he could get away with a trick like that, but I had sound reasons for trying it on. Only a month before, my ancient half-sister, who was twelve years older than me, had actually had appendicitis, and for several days before her operation I was able to observe her behaviour at close quarters. I noticed that the thing she complained about most was a severe pain down in the lower right side of her tummy. As well as this, she kept being sick and refused to eat and ran a temperature.

  You might, by the way, be interested to know that this sister had her appendix removed not in a fine hospital operating-room full of bright lights and gowned nurses but on our own nursery table at home by the local doctor and his anaesthetist. In those days it was fairly common practice for a doctor to arrive at your own house with a bag of instruments, then drape a sterile sheet over the most convenient table and get on with it. On this occasion, I can remember lurking in the corridor outside the nursery while the operation was going on. My other sisters were with me, and we stood there spellbound, listening to the soft medical murmurs coming from behind the locked door and picturing the patient with her stomach sliced open like a lump of beef. We could even smell the sickly fumes of ether filtering through the crack under the door.

  The next day, we were allowed to inspect the appendix itself in a glass bottle. It was a longish black wormy-looking thing, and I said, ‘Do I have one of those inside me, Nanny?’

  ‘Everybody has one,’ Nanny answered.

  ‘What’s it for?’ I asked her.

  ‘God works in his mysterious ways,’ she said, which was her stock reply whenever she didn’t know the answer.

  ‘What makes it go bad?’ I asked her.

  ‘Toothbrush bristles,’ she answered, this time with no hesitation at all.

  ‘Toothbrush bristles?’ I cried. ‘How can toothbrush bristles make your appendix go bad?’

  Nanny, who in my eyes was filled with more wisdom than Solomon, replied, ‘Whenever a bristle comes out of your toothbrush and you swallow it, it sticks in your appendix and turns it rotten. In the war’, she went on, ‘the German spies used to sneak boxloads of loose-bristled toothbrushes into our shops and millions of our soldiers got appendicitis.’

  ‘Honestly, Nanny?’ I cried. ‘Is that honestly true?’

  ‘I never lie to you, child,’ she answered. ‘So let that be a lesson to you never to use an old toothbrush.’

  For years after that, I used to get nervous whenever I found a toothbrush bristle on my tongue.

  As I went upstairs and knocked on the brown door after breakfast, I didn’t even feel frightened of the Matron.

  ‘Come in!’ boomed the voice.

  I entered the room clutching my stomach on the right-hand side and staggering pathetically.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ the Matron shouted, and the sheer force of her voice caused that massive bosom to quiver like a gigantic blancmange.

  ‘It hurts, Matron,’ I moaned. ‘Oh, it hurts so much! Just here!’

  ‘You’ve been over-eating!’ she barked. ‘What do you expect if you guzzle currant cake all day long!’

  ‘I haven’t eaten a thing for days,’ I lied. ‘I couldn’t eat, Matron! I simply couldn’t!’

  ‘Get on the bed and lower your trousers,’ she ordered.

  I lay on the bed and she began prodding my tummy violently with her fingers. I was watching her carefully, and when she hit what I guessed was the appendix place, I let out a yelp that rattled the window-panes. ‘Ow! Ow! Ow!’ I cried out. ‘Don’t, Matron, don’t!’ Then I slipped in the clincher. ‘I’ve been sick all morning,’ I moaned, ‘and now there’s nothing left to be sick with, but I still feel sick!’

  This was the right move. I saw her hesitate. ‘Stay where you are,’ she said and she walked quickly from the room. She may have been a foul and beastly woman, but she had had a nurse’s training and she didn’t want a ruptured appendix on her hands.

  Within an hour, the doctor arrived and he went through the same prodding and poking and I did my yelping at what I thought were the proper times. Then he put a thermometer in my mouth.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘It reads normal. Let me feel your stomach once more.’

  ‘Owch!’ I screamed when he touched the vital spot. The doctor went away with the Matron. The Matron returned half an hour