Low life
Say cheese
Jeffrey Bernard
Iwent back to my old school, Pang- bourne College, last week for only the sec- ond time since leaving the place in 1948. Once again I was pleasantly surprised and a little taken aback at how good the sixth formers were to me, in so far as they didn't try to verbally shoot me down in flames. The purpose of the visit was to open a new sixth form common room that even has a bar in it. How times have changed. A glass of beer in my day would have meant immediate expulsion if not execution.
I felt a complete twit cutting through a ribbon with a pair of scissors to open the place while the cameras of the local press clicked away and they kept asking me to smile. At the best of times I find it difficult to smile to order but when I know I look particularly awful it is impossible and for the first time since I had my leg amputated did I feel somewhat humiliated and even embarrassed at the spectacle I must have made of myself, plus the fact that I had forgotten to put a cigarette out which was stuck between my fingers all through the ceremony. Not like our own royal family and maybe fractionally worse than the famous episode of Michael Foot wearing a duffle coat at the cenotaph on Remem- brance Day. Incidentally, that was a bigger mistake than he thought and not in a mil- lion years would the English allow a man to become Prime Minister who would wear desert boots, although I would have thought that William Pitt the Younger would have been given quite a bit of lee- way by the public.
Anyway, as I say, the sixth formers were or seemed to be particularly civilised and interested in more than listening to rock music and swilling coca cola or lager. As they sat around me they fired a succession of questions, all of them about what the place was like in 1948.
I expect most of them thought I was exaggerating as I heard myself describing a school that sounded to be somewhere half- way between Do-The-Boys Hall and Ravensbruck but I know it was since it took forty four years for me to pluck up the courage to revisit the place of my six- teenth year of misery. I can remember once asking the late Roger Mortimer, the Sunday Times racing correspondent, how his three years in Colditz was and he said, `Not as bad as my prep school.' But how odd it is that they didn't find someone who had been a star pupil and a good boy which I certainly wasn't. Apart from their fascination with the punishment methods in my day, they also seemed rather sur- prised to hear of the violence that existed. The sight of the two squash courts where we knocked shit out of each other brought back sharp memories.
Nearly everything since those days, except for the odd falling out with ladies, has been like a holiday camp which is exactly what it seems to be today. When I had lunch with the headmaster — he had also invited two senior boys, another thing unheard of in my day — he told me that he had foxed up with the Admiral in charge of HMS Victory and most of Portsmouth as far as I can make out, another old Pangbournian, to have me shown over the Victory one day when it wasn't open to the public and that maybe I could have lunch below decks and sit in Nelson's chair.
Meaningless to most Spectator readers probably, but a hell of an occasion for me like pissing on Napoleon's tomb. But I sup- pose that the most indelible memory of these visits to Pangbourne is to see that, happily, today boys and masters are friends and actually talk to each other, unlike the master and slave relationship that existed in my day. The place must have had an even worse effect on Ken Russell who still won't go back and speak to them. I suggested they invite Beverley Cross, the playright married to Maggie Smith and who once gave me four cuts for reading a novel in prep. That used to cost him a large scotch when I used to meet him sometimes, but I haven't seen either him or a large scotch for years now.
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