ALCUIN HOUSE PREPARATORY SCHOOL FOR BOYS



1927-1962
87 OLD CHURCH LANE
STANMORE
MIDDLESEX

Alcuin House vs Stanburn School (i)
Alcuin House School was a prep school for the children of middle-class parents who were very anxious that their children shouldn’t endure the inferior company and the inferior schooling, as was thought, at the local council school: that was, in this case, Stanburn School, the elementary school about a hundred yards up the road. ‘Stanburn’ was a sort of horrible word, really to denote a horrible place. One avoided the school as a child, where a lot of working-class children went, and I was rather glad I didn’t go there. I wondered whether I would ever have survived if it had been my fate to be educated there.

School buildings - Thomas Darcy Yeo, Headmaster
All my parents’ associates and neighbours sent their children to prep schools of various kinds, most of them to Alcuin House, a school which was really a big rambling suburban house, planted in the midst of semi-detached South Stanmore suburbia, an ugly house, painted dark green on the outside, with ugly stone stucco all over it, surrounded by an unkempt garden in front, with big cypress trees, a paved playground,  decrepit wooden bicycle sheds and a kitchen garden at the back, run by the headmaster T Darcy Yeo and Mrs Yeo, and a big playing-field. He did quite a lot of the cultivation and maintenance himself, but the fence and sheds were ramshackle, and the place needed a thorough going-over. It all disappeared many years ago with its grounds covered with suburban houses, and no trace of it remaining [note: the school was demolished c1963 and the housing development that replaced it is called Alcuin Court so at least the name lives on]. None the less, it was a very important influence on my life, and on the whole I got a very good educational grounding there. It was to present-day eyes a very odd institution, and perhaps I should try to re-create it, because it’s the sort of institution that’s now I suppose largely vanished.

Early impressions - Miss Dalgleish - Miss Keast
The school took children from the age of about five to the age of about thirteen, which was the period during which I was there, and there were basically three ‘forms’, as they were called. I remember the first day I went to school my mother deposited me in the entrance hall and I must have been taken up to the top (that is, the first floor). The youngest form was for children aged about five to eight. It was a big L-shaped room, with small desks and little round-backed wooden chairs, and what was called 'the shoe corner' where coats and outer garments were left. I recall learning early on to write figures when I first went to the junior form, writing the figure five the wrong way round, and being told that one wrote eights in a single movement rather than through drawing two superimposed circles. The mistress there, who was my first schoolteacher, was Miss Dalgleish, a rather slim and spinsterly figure with glasses, as I remember her, but in retrospect, I think, a very good schoolmistress who was very patient with me. I’ve still got the school reports that were written about me all through my school career, and she took great trouble with me, and was very understanding. I was an only child, and in the first year or so I used to hate going to school. The lavatories were filthy, but that was not the reason why I disliked using them; it was because I had a very strong sense of privacy, and disliked being accompanied there, so I got my mother to write a note to Miss Dalgleish to instruct her not to accompany me to the lavatory.

For quite a long period I was frightened to go to school, and I think the reason was that Miss Dalgleish was ill. Her health was not good, and the class was to a large extent run by Miss Keast, the mistress who ran the intermediate form for those aged from about 8 to 11. She took the form in Miss Dalgleish’s absence, and she seemed to me then a quite terrifying figure. She was rather tall, and for some medical reason she quivered. She had rather built-up grey hair from which money-spiders hung. She was very strict and rather ugly, and as children attach great importance to appearance, I was then terrified of her. For as long as she was in charge of the form I didn’t want to go to school at all, and my parents were really rather understanding about that, and I was allowed to stay away from school for an entire term. But I remember Miss Dalgleish writing a letter to my parents (no doubt prompted by them) saying that I was missed at school, and they hoped that I would come back soon, so I went back to school after a term away, and I don’t think I had a major problem like that again.

The problem wasn’t academic work, I was always very good at that, and I seemed to come top of the class pretty well all the way through that school. It was more a problem of various kinds of sensitivity which I can’t now fully remember, but I recall scenes in the car when my father used to take me to school at the age of about seven or eight, and his asking me quite what was wrong, and I couldn’t explain. It wasn’t only Miss Keast’s period of rule in the junior form: it was also I think other matters, because I remember sitting on Miss Dalgleish’s knee and crying and being sort of comforted by her in the full presence of the class, until I think at one point one of the boys - Derry [sc. Derek] Porter, I think - referred to somebody as ‘blubbering’ at school, and I thought to myself ‘well, perhaps I blubber as well’, and I recall deciding that really this wasn’t the sort of thing that I ought to be doing, and then growing up a bit after that.

Playground games
I suppose between the age of about eight or so and about thirteen when I left the school I was extremely happy there. I remember having the most marvellous time in the playground playing ‘chain he’, which involved holding hands and rounding people up by forming a human chain. Then in the summer we ran the school’s big field, and it was in its hedges that Miss Keast used to take us for ‘nature study’, singling out wild flowers from the ditch to study them. Most of the year we were on the  paved playground, but in the summer we ran around on the field playing, as I remember, ‘Chinese Communists versus, presumably, the United Nations’, and forming gangs of that kind. There was a boy called Minting, who looked vaguely Chinese, and we identified him as leader of the wrong side. We played many games of that kind on ‘the field’, as it was called.

Girls at Alcuin House
The school’s intake was almost entirely male, but there were three girls among the pupils, and I remember getting on rather well with them, teasing them quite a lot and pulling their pigtails. There was Frances Yeo, the headmaster’s daughter, and two other children: Lydia Adams and Jeannette Porter (or was it Porter? Jeannette something anyway). I remember Frances’s father always looked out of the kitchen window while he was having his mid-morning drink in the residential area that was attached to the school, and made sure that Frances wasn’t being pushed too far with the teasing, which I recall consisted partly of poking the girls in the belly. Those three were the only girls in the school, and I recall having a very happy time in the playground – longing for the mid-morning playtime and looking forward to getting outdoors.

Lessons
But I also enjoyed the lessons, and was quite good at them.  I remember quite enjoying my work in all dimensions, really, until in the senior form, run by Mr Yeo, I had to do geometry, which from the age of about eleven onwards I loathed. I used to dread Wednesdays and Saturdays when we had geometry lessons, but I liked writing essays, and I recall being praised before the age of eight for an essay I wrote on dreams, I think, which described fairgrounds. I used as a child to be fascinated by fairgrounds, and it was a very long essay describing that. One of the great bonds between me and my mother was that she was a good sport, and would always join me in going on the fairground machines that threw you about. I particularly enjoyed helter-skelters, chairoplanes and switchbacks.

Love of Reading
I’ve still got one or two school work-books which were kept by the school for some time afterwards, and were later passed on to me. I was very interested in maps, and I recall having a huge collection of Geographia maps of England. I was a studious child, I suppose. I used to read a lot at home, reading Enid Blyton, and at an earlier period Beatrix Potter, kept in a specially-made little wooden cabinet in my room, all of which I possessed except some oddities like Appley Dappley’s Nursery Rhymes and The Pie and the Patty Pan. I loved the beautiful drawings of animals that illustrated the stories, especially the lovely one of a mouse in a lacy piece of cloth in The Tailor of Gloucester and the frog in The Tale of Jeremy Fisher, pushing himself along the river on a lily leaf.

From there I progressed to Alison Uttley’s Little Grey Rabbit books, almost all of which I possessed. I somehow managed to bypass A A Milne, though my first cousin Ann was deeply influenced by him, as were many other children in my and earlier generations. I progressed later to the Famous Five stories of Enid Blyton and thence to Malcolm Saville’s books for children, which I think included The Gay Dolphin Adventure. The latter was broadcast on Children’s Hour, and we were furious with our friend Bryan Osborne, who lived opposite the church and also attended Alcuin House, for having a birthday party which clashed with the denouement of the serialised story on the radio and, in the absence of tape-recordings in those days, prevented us from hearing it. It always seems to me a great pity that Children’s Hour has subsequently been given some trendy name or abolished altogether.

Dick Barton, Special Agent was always a bit too macho for my taste, though Kenneth Barker, a younger boy who also attended Alcuin House, perhaps under the influence of his older brothers, had more of a taste for this sort of thing than I had. From there to Arthur Ransome, all twelve of whose children’s books I possessed, though I was always disappointed at Missee Lee, which seemed to me the odd one out in the series. I particularly liked the ones set in the Lake District, especially Swallows and Amazons and Swallowdale, and was fascinated by the maps in the end-covers, as with the map in Treasure Island, and then onwards. Robinson Crusoe, too, I enjoyed.

I don’t recall having comics until I got The Eagle as a young teenager, and immediately began going in for competitions, winning one for making an ordnance survey map out of a written description of a locality. The Dandy and Beano seemed rather downmarket, for the working classes, whereas the upmarket Children’s Newspaper was prosy and boring, and Boy’s Own Paper was again a bit too dull, and also too macho, for my taste, though I later acquired a taste for W.E. Johns’s Biggles books, many of which were in the school library at Alcuin House School. I always looked forward to visiting my uncle Geoffrey, however, because he had several volumes of Harmsworth’s encyclopaedia, fat green volumes, and I used to lie on the floor looking at pictures of ancient buildings (the Seven Wonders of the World, for example). When we visited my aunt Margot Hunt, who also lived in Old Church Lane, Stanmore, I used to like looking at the big pre-First-World-War atlas that her husband Basil possessed, with the boundaries of states particularly interesting because they’d all changed since the atlas was compiled.

Mrs Binney, Miss Dalgleish and some fellow-pupils
Mrs. Binney, the curate’s wife, used to come in for divinity lessons, I think once or twice a week, dressed in a black fur coat, and helped out with the smaller children as well, a bit. But Miss Dalgleish was the main person, and I was very attached to her. There were two somewhat uncouth boys in the class, Hunter and Richard Penfold, who lived in a semi-detached house not far from the school. Their father was in the army, and their mother neglected them. They’d arrive at school unkempt and with what Miss Dalgleish called ‘debris’ (a word I’d not been familiar with up to that point) for their lunch, and there was some consternation among the adults about how the situation could be remedied. I seem to recall that the boys were eventually sent to a rather unusual school at Harpenden. I recall later the presence at the school of two brothers, David and Andrew Mercer, sons of schoolteachers, who knew how to play the system, and used Alcuin House School for their boys as a staging-post in their upward move.

Collecting
As a child I was quite a collector. I used, round about the age of 11 or 12, to collect cigarette packets, picking them off the street and sticking them into a large album. I also collected stamps. My father had a large stamp collection and used to receive stamp catalogues. I wasn’t at all professional in my approach to this, and tended to buy stamps that had nice pictures and colours. Some of the British colonies, most notably North Borneo, Papua and the Cayman Islands, seemed to specialize in this, and I particularly prized them. The British government then took a pride in not going in for pictorial stamps, which were seen as money-raising ventures sold as commercial ventures by second-rate nations: the King’s head was good enough for us.

I also acquired a terrific collection of newspaper cuttings with the encouragement of Miss Keast, to whose form I had gravitated by that time, on the royal tour of South Africa in 1947. I collected far more than anyone else in the form, and stored them in a big white box adorned by a map that I’d drawn of South Africa on the front. I used to go round to my aunt Margot and pick up old issues of their Times which they left out for me on their veranda at the back at the back of the house, one of its features which interested me as we hadn’t got a veranda of our own, nor did we take the Times at home; we had the Daily Express, much prized for its Giles cartoons, and for a time we also took the Daily Sketch, partly I suspect because there was a nature column in it by Frances Partridge which I’d been encouraged at school to keep an eye on. I remember going to Miss Keast saying that I’d got so many cuttings from the newspapers about the South African tour that I didn’t know what to do with them, and I was a bit disappointed when she said that I should give some of them away to other children, because it didn’t seem fair that this should be the outcome when the others had made less effort.

Other outside interests and activities
My well-funded childhood none the less seemed to focus on a quest for a sequence of urgently-desired possessions, and I was desperate to earn money so as to be able to finance them. Quite early on as a child, when I could not have been more than ten or so, I cut up outlines of fish on plastic sheets, and these were later made up by my father’s firm into stuffed toy fish for sale, I think as toys in the bath, and then as a teenager I served behind the counter in my parents’ two shops in order to raise more funds. To be fair to myself, I gave good value to my parents who employed me in their sub-post office, as I was a hard-working, quite imaginative and enthusiastic employee, and I was rather effective behind them counter.

The War
What strikes me, in retrospect, is the complete absence of the war as an influence within the school. I recall it being referred to only once in Miss Dalgleish’s class. I must have mentioned that my mother went up weekly to the West End of London, and Miss Dalgleish seemed to think this very bold. When I asked why, she said ‘there are Germans there’, or some such.

The results of bombing lay there all around us, of course, and you could see the remnants of bombed-out occupants in the wallpaper that hung from exposed walls, and in the marks on adjacent houses made by vanished staircases, but although I was a timid child, these didn’t bother me. Indeed, bombing provided a major source of entertainment because I and Winscombe Way friends used to build huge card-houses in the drawing room with old cards acquired as discards from card-players in Balsham pubs, and after huge efforts at construction engage in ‘bash-bombing’ what we’d built and then reconstructing it to repair the damage. It was an endless source of enjoyment, and did not seem ominous at all.

A bomb dropped in woods about a mile from our house, adjacent to expensive houses opening off Stanmore Hill, but it didn’t explode, and as far as I know caused no injuries. It did, however, leave a large crater, and that to my knowledge was the nearest Stanmore came to direct experience of the war.

I suppose the lack of mention of the war stemmed partly from a desire not to frighten the children, but partly also from the sheer assumption, at least after 1942, that we’d be on the winning side, so it didn’t need to be talked about, though one might perhaps have expected the progress of the allies to be closely followed towards the end of the war. For me, the realities of the war came through the newspapers, not through the school: the photos of piled-up bodies in concentration-camp trucks, and my mother’s shocked expression when she read from headlines that Roosevelt had died.

Short-sightedness
From the age of eight onwards, a very important thing in my life was the fact that I was short-sighted, and rather earlier than other children I had to wear glasses. This seemed to me a great humiliation. I was eight before it was discovered that in Miss Keast’s form I couldn’t see the blackboard. This was one reason why I wasn’t doing so well academically then: I just couldn’t see what was going on, and nobody understood that this was happening until I was moved from the back row by the bay window to the front of the class. It must have been after that when my parents pointed out something (I think it was an egg) on a ledge in the farmyard shed at the Samworths’ farm in Balsham, where an uncle lived, and were surprised that I couldn’t see it. I eventually of course had to have glasses. If you’ve never worn glasses, you just don’t know how much you’ve been missing, and so it is someone else who has to point out to you that there’s something wrong. It was symbolic of my mother’s desire to do the best possible for me that she took me to a specialist, Mr Green, who had a Harley Street practice too, in Edgware, to ensure that I got the best possible treatment. He said (I don’t know how accurately) that if my problem had been caught earlier, I might have been able to avoid glasses by doing eye exercises. I was very self-conscious about the glasses right the way through to the age of seventeen or so. I recall being very cross with my mother because she laughed at the sight of me wearing glasses, saying something like 'you do look funny'. It was one of those episodes in my life which made such an impact that I recall exactly where I was when she said it: we were walking past the bus stop opposite Stanmore Church, presumably on the way home from consulting the optician in Edgware. It was one of the things that made sport more difficult for me. I couldn’t see the ball properly because I obviously couldn’t wear glasses while playing games, and I suppose that was quite an important thing, really.

Hatred of school sports
It was at Alcuin House that one of the main miseries of my teenage and young adulthood became manifest: that is, sport. Mr Yeo was very keen on sport – cricket and rugby football, I think on Wednesday afternoons, and I hated all sport, and after school-hours in the summer at Alcuin House I didn’t go to the ‘nets’, as they were called, which were voluntary practice periods for cricket, whereas many of the boys did. Of course my eyesight made it difficult for me to shine at rugby football, or at football of any kind, as I had to take my glasses off, and then couldn’t get a close focus on the ball. Sports and geometry days were my dreads.

Poetry lessons
The middle form at Alcuin House was run by Miss Keast, this rather formidable woman. I quite enjoyed reciting poetry, as we had to do at school, especially in Miss Keast’s form, standing in front of the class while doing so. I remember one of my fellow schoolmates – Richard Hall, I think his name was - who had a terrible stutter, and lived in a tall Victorian house in Bushey Heath, as I went there more than once – struggling to get through The Wreck of the Hesperus, and he just couldn’t get through it without stuttering dreadfully. It was humiliating for him, and this would not now be thought a good way of tackling his problem. We all had to recite poems in this form. Miss Keast, like Miss Dalgleish and Mr Yeo taught all subjects. They were extraordinarily versatile prep-school teachers. We wrote essays and did the usual things, started learning French with Miss Keast much earlier than any of the council-school children at the dreaded Stanburn School would have done.

Alcuin House vs Stanburn School (ii)
Though the drawback, I suppose, of the school, by comparison with Stanburn, was that there was no medical inspection, otherwise my short-sightedness might have been discovered earlier. No dental inspections either at Alcuin House School. I do recall, though, regularly meeting for a half pint of milk mid-morning in the so-called ‘milk room’ with a bay window at the front of the house, and for a time there was some sort of allowance of sweetened cocoa powder, which I think came from Canada.

I remember being surprised, when my scout troop met in Stanburn when I was aged 11-13, at how well equipped the school was by comparison with Alcuin House, the school which my parents paid for: at how superior the lavatories were, how high the classroom ceilings were, and how one big room was fitted with big folding doors to make it even larger when needed. Alcuin House was extremely unhygienic. It was a very untidy school, but the whole place was superficially transformed once a year for the government inspection. A great deal of whitewashing went on beforehand, and disinfectant would be poured over the lavatories which otherwise all through the year were filthy, and the washbasins too. We used to hold our breath when we entered the urinal, a lean-to shed near the playground, and I don’t think I ever did anything more than piss at the school because the lavatories were so uninviting, especially as I used to cycle back home at lunchtime and then return in the afternoon.

School uniform
In every other way I had a head-start as a result of going to Alcuin House. We used to wear a grey uniform, with grey short trousers and a grey viyella shirt; the grey jacket had a blue monogram ‘AH’ on it, and there were blue rings round the grey school cap. All this was bought from Daniel Neal, a big shop in Portman Square which specialized in selling school uniforms to parents whose children went to independent schools. It was a rather memorable experience to go there, partly because I was fascinated by the x-ray machine through which you looked down at your feet to see whether the shoes that were being considered for purchases really fitted, partly because I was self-conscious about being kitted up, and used to look warily as boys do at the other boys who were going through the same experience.

Walking to school
I used to have to walk to school from Pantiles in Winscombe Way, up Church Road and then down Old Church Lane past the Victorian station in Gordon Avenue and on past a very smelly pig farm on the right (holding my breath) and then past the so-called ‘Cottage Hospital’ and some modern flats. On the left was a big house that a man took a long time building for himself, almost opposite Byworth's Nursery School, and soon after that I hastened past a side-turning on the right (Wolverton Road) that led into a working-class area. I remember being rather frightened when I was walking on my own past that road, which was about fifty yards or so from Alcuin House, and being frightened of getting attacked by the working-class children who would spring out to trap me. It was the only area of risk on the route. I also remember being very upset when I must have been five or six round about there by a woman (a complete stranger) who said, out of the blue, when I was exploring a puddle on the way to school, that if she was my mother she’s smack me for putting my feet in the puddle. I remember being very resentful and hurt at this. I was fascinated by water as a child, and we used to build up huge mud dams across the Bentley Priory stream and wait for the water to build up till the dam burst, with all the attendant excitement.

The Middle Form
The middle form, Miss Keast’s form, was a small classroom with a bow window looking out on to the front garden, screened from Old Church Lane by large cypress trees. It was separated from the headmaster’s dining room by a set of dividing doors which could be thrown open in some circumstances (singing classes, for instance). I suppose Miss Keast’s classroom housed about 20-25 pupils. The room was on the ground floor on the left-hand side as you entered the main school door. I grew rather to like Miss Keast. She remained a really rather formidable figure: tall and rather gaunt and ugly, but I was less terrified of her between 8 and 11, when she was my form mistress, than I had been earlier. She was well able to stir enthusiasm in her pupils, one vehicle for which was the so-called ‘holiday task’. One of these was to visit and study the Roman theatre at St.Albans: Verulamium. I remember getting very interested in this and going to the museum there and doing quite a lot of work on the subject. This must have been an influence leading me to get interested in Roman Britain, and I remember being particularly interested in the references to Roman towns, roads and villas on the ordnance survey maps I owned. Many years later Mr Yeo turned up, and I think gave me, a work-book which showed my close interest in drawing the Roman road system, and which I still possess. In my parents' eyes, Miss Keast was a religious fanatic, and involved us in energetic collection for charity, particularly for the League of Pity, which was the junior branch of the N.S.P.C.C. She brought too much moral pressure on all of us to contribute, taking us to outings organized by the League, and my parents eventually felt that this was too much. Or, at least, I’d told them that the pressure was too much, and they wrote a letter I think to Miss Keast, or told me to tell Miss Keast when pressed to give to the League that my parents had forbidden me to give money to it.

Miss Dalgleish used to come down to Miss Keast and have long gossips at coffee time while we were supposed to be doing something. I don’t know what the gossip was about; children have a curious indifference to adult conversations, unless they have reason to think that the conversation relates directly to themselves. I suppose they used to talk together about the running of the school, or whatever. But we were very well taught by Miss Keast, really. She used to go up to the village for her lunch, and we used to be rather fascinated with what she would do in her spare time. We used to joke rather about how badly dressed she was. There seemed a certain oddity in the fact that, outside the classroom, she was an ordinary human being, and had to eat, like other people. She also used to visit the church during her lunch hour, and her clothes were in ill-assorted colours such as orange and purple; my mother thought such colours just didn’t go together at all.

The Senior Form  - Hatred of Geometry
At the age of eleven or so we moved on to Mr Yeo’s class, a large L-shaped room on the ground floor, with French windows opening on to the playground. It was the senior class, yet he taught us everything. He started us off on Latin at the age of 11, and we started algebra and geometry at the same time. Geometry I absolutely hated, and never understood it really at all; it must have exposed a defect in my intellectual equipment, though I didn’t realize it at the time: I just hated the subject. Maths at that stage I was rather good at, and languages too; English and History I liked and was also good at. I used to win the top position in most years all the way through the school in almost all subjects, though never in geometry.

School awards for academic achievement (Lists)
We had a system at the end of term when a sort of celebratory gathering was held in Mr Yeo’s form-room, and everyone in the school crowded round when ‘lists’ were handed out of the names in the subject, the list for each subject was given to the person who did best at it. These lists had the name in rank-order of the children, and how they had performed at the various subjects. And when we were all assembled in the big L-shaped classroom downstairs in which he taught, the people at the top of the class in the subject used to go up to Mr Yeo and collect the list from him, and I kept having to walk up and collect the lists for almost every subject as they were called out, all the way through the school – except for geometry. Other parents used to congratulate my mother on having such a clever child. I don’t think this went to my head, but I certainly got used to doing well at school, and was I suppose rather competitive, and have retained that trait ever since. I expected to be top of the class, and when it came to being at Merchant Taylors’ and finding myself not so, I was very worried, and took steps to get out of that situation. That eventually led to my leaving the science side of the school where I had begun, and heading off for the subjects in which I did well, on the arts side.

Schoolfriends
One of my main friends at school was ‘Pooley’, as he was called – David Poole I think his name was, and he had an elder brother named (I think) Richard. David was the son of Methodist parents who lived nearby in Lansdowne Road, and nonconformist attitudes were rather alien to me. The only other nonconformists that I was aware of on the Old Lodge estate were the Claysons, who lived in Old Lodge Way, and were I think Congregationalists. Nonconformists were somehow different from everyone else, socially slightly inferior, relatively austere and unfashionably dressed, a bit bleak. Pooley I was very attached to; he eventually went to Owen’s School in Islington. The family eventually moved to Pinner, after which (I think after a single visit there) I lost contact with him. He once created rather a sensation in Miss Keast’s form because he’d sent off to some firm for a lot of blank notepads, and a huge parcel of them arrived in the classroom which had to be sent back. One root of my friendship with Pooley was that for part of our schooldays on at least one day a week when for some reason our mothers couldn’t give us lunch, we used to go out to lunch at restaurants, usually the ‘British Restaurant’, which was in Belmont on the right-hand side going south from the roundabout opposite the big cinema. It was there that I first came across the word ‘compote’, because fruit compote was often my choice for pudding. I used to say to Pooley ‘BR ha ha?’ to find out whether he would be lunching there that day, and we’d go there together.

Philip Moss was another of my close friends – a friend from both Winscombe Way and school. He was very good at maths, and had a sort of instinctive ability for the subject which I never had.

Another friend later on in the senior class was Roger Frais, who came from a Jewish family, and this was much commented on by my parents. He had a very good sense of humour, and I remember cycling home with him a lot and having a lot of joking and so on, with him. We used to make jokes about ‘the old man’, as Roger called Mr Yeo, and the hairs that grew out of his nostrils, and we were very conscious of his appearance, as children tend to be, as well as of accent and ways of speaking. Yeo was a tallish man with beetling eyebrows and grey balding hair, rather a big nose and rather shabby clothes. I was quite frightened of him. Roger Frais was rather bold, and when Yeo’s back was turned he used to touch his jacket without Yeo knowing, though the rest of us all knew. When the curate came rather innocently to show us some Bible pictures, Frais provoked suppressed laughter by pointing to the less salubrious aspects of the pictures (nude figures, and so on), while the curate was holding them up and unable to see what he was doing.

Two other Jewish boys became fairly prominent in my life later. One was called Michaels, who lived in a big late-Victorian house on the road to Stanmore station, was in my cub troop and I used to play with him there. For some reason I’d confessed to him that I wasn’t sure I should have been promoted to the dizzy height of ‘senior sixer’, with three yellow stripes, in the cub pack, and somewhat patronizingly he invented various ways in which I could ‘prove myself’ worthy of the post. I recall meeting his rather forbidding father once, in a rather cavernous drawing room. The other was a boy called Fredericks, who also lived near the station, in a Crittall Span house, as I recall, and as a young teenager I used to travel with him on the 114 bus from Stanmore to Harrow-on-the-Hill station, on the way to Merchant Taylors’, where we were both pupils, though I think he was junior to me. I was never particularly conscious of their Jewishness, and treated them just like other boys, found them good company, and in retrospect I think they were culturally rather adventurous by comparison with my own rather anti-intellectual family.

Senior schoolroom
Mr Yeo’s room, the main room, for the senior class, must have contained about twenty boys and had all sorts of miscellaneous objects stacked round the edges. There was an old museum case in the corner at one end of the L, with a lot of old bits of rubbish in it: bits of stone and jewels and bits of rock and stuff, all very dusty. And there was a school library adjacent, from which one could borrow books (I got a lot of my Biggles reading from there). There was a fan-shaped piece of coral sort of hanging on the wall, and maps, and in front a stove into which Yeo used to shovel coal in the winter. There was a blackboard and we all occupied desks in rows in front of him. Philip Moss, Roger Frais and I used to occupy three desks in the middle rows immediately in front of Mr Yeo, at least in my last year.

Latin
Mr Yeo used to teach us Latin, at which I was rather good; I rather enjoyed doing proses. We were introduced to the subject with a textbook First Steps in Latin, which some wag had altered to First Steps in Eating, and like all textbooks at the school it was very shabby. We did Caesar’s Gallic Wars, and I attained a level of skill in Latin not surpassed at any time at Merchant Taylors, translating both into and out of the language. At Merchant Taylors’ I acquired an admiration for Tacitus, for the brevity of his juxtapositions and for his pithy ways of saying things. I also think in retrospect that the skill Latin developed in me for handling long sentences with dependent clauses was an important source of such ability as I now possess to write English clearly and euphoniously. Not that I would ever regard this as a justification for continuing to lend Latin the prominence in boys’ education that it enjoyed in the 1950s. I aimed to get my homework done, an hour’s homework or so, in the lunch hour, so that I would have the whole evening free to play with friends in Winscombe Way.

Mr Yeo reads to the class

Mr Yeo was in some ways rather a country person, keen on outdoor sport, and often spoke of ‘The Quantocks’, so he must have come from Somerset [Note: He was actually born in Eastbourne, Sussex, but was raised in Somerset, in Portishead, where his father was a Head Teacher]. He loved what was then rather out-of-date fiction, and on Friday evenings ended the week with long readings from Charles Dickens and Harrison Ainsworth, among others. Fellow pupil Roger Frais and I were furious because we wanted to get out into the open air and get back home to play, but although we tried in our restlessness to show that we were bored, and tried to dissuade others in the class from laughing in the right places, we never succeeded in getting our message across.

School discipline
The Headmaster used to hit the children round the head, sometimes quite hard, when they did bad work, or whatever. In cases of severe delinquency he used to bring out a cane, and we used awe-struck to look through the window while people were being caned by him, though rather rarely. I recall the elder Mercer boy being caned for some delinquency, with our faces pressed to the window of Mr Yeo's form in an unsuccessful attempt to see what went on.

I remember a chap called Waite-Brown, who was really not bright, being hit by him on the head quite regularly during lessons, with the repeated comments ‘hopeless and helpless’ from the Headmaster. This invariably resulted in tears. His parents must have been quite well off because he lived in Gordon Avenue, which represented the height of social aspiration in the area, given that its large houses also had large gardens.

I was very cowardly as a child, and was absolutely terrified of this happening to me. I suppose Mr Yeo detected that I was a sensitive child, and never did it to me, perhaps also because I was just academically rather good, though it seems to me in retrospect very unfair on some of these children, who just lacked the capacity to do well, and being hit in this way and humiliated in front of the whole class couldn’t have helped them at all. 

Those being punished often burst into tears, which in itself added interest, because as a child I (and others) were always curious about how people would behave under stress: would they cry? Would they hold out sullenly?  I remember the Headmaster twisted the hair of a rather tough but wiry boy called Michael Berriff, who was a bully. Presumably Berriff was not doing well in his studies, and he was twisted right round so that he fell on the floor, and it was all rather embarrassing. A rather big boy called Jarman once complained indignantly that the Headmaster had delivered what he called ‘a rabbit punch’, I think on the back of his neck. There was really quite close discipline maintained in this rather unpleasant way, I suppose, and people were made to stand in the corner, and that sort of thing. It was very humiliating. I also recall an undisciplined small boy from the youngest form being brought into the senior form and taken into the private part of the premises, and making the most terrific scene as he was led through our room, leaving a trail of piss-drops to mark his route.

Bullying
I was very cowardly generally in the playground too, because Berriff, Michael Neal and Keith Jarman formed a sort of gang of bullies there, taking the equivalent of ‘protection money’ from those of us cowardly enough to pay it. I’m not so sure that it was money or food that we gave them during the break in the middle of the morning – Danegeld to deter them from bullying us and to obtain their protection against bullying by others.

There was quite a lot of teasing and bullying generally in the school, especially by my friend Bryan Osborne, who lived opposite the Church, and who I was rather surprised once to find was disliked by my scoutmasters, whereas I had long seen him as a friend. He was an only child, better off even than I was for toys of all kinds, and he rather intrigued us because he had ‘a lodger’ in the house, and no such creature was known in the homes of anyone else, nor did we ever see ‘the lodger’ because he was away in the daytime. On reflection, Bryan’s parents couldn’t have been terribly well off, and his father (who went to Monkton Combe, and was devoted to the school, where I think Bryan himself went later) did not seem to hold down a proper job. His mother was rather noisily sociable, and was very fond of him, spoiling him somewhat. Bryan introduced me to two interesting and relatively affluent nearby families: the Perrises, who lived just by the bus stop opposite the church in a large bungalow; and the Dunhills (of the cigarette firm) who lived in a big house behind a high wall at the bottom of Green Lane, and in both households I went to play sometimes. But Bryan was very keen on sport, and was rather prone to keep ‘bad company’, which usually meant people of a socially lower grade than ourselves; I remember some of them, older than us, used to hang about the fence by the playground and talk to Bryan till Mr Yeo (looking narrowly out of his kitchen window as usual) warned them off.  One of the schoolboys, Peter Willcox, had a cleft palate which prevented him from speaking normally; Bryan used to imitate his odd way of speaking and nicknamed him ‘Willicopter’. To Osborne’s treatment Willcox responded with some dignity, tough or sensible enough not to cry.

Brian Thomas was very different in his response. I remember with some shame the delight with which we watched him being tormented. He was an odd child, who saw himself as a railway engine, and used to shunt himself down from school down Lansdowne Road to his home in Marsh Lane once school was over, in the belief that he was on a rail track. He was tormented in the most merciless way, especially by Bryan, who took the lead in teasing. I remember the delighted fascination with which we watched his furious reactions, eventually ending with his bursting into tears and flailing his arms about in all directions in his fury and misery when driven beyond endurance. I never took his part, and I feel ashamed that I didn't; I used to just, sort of, spectate, though I don't recall being prominent in teasing him myself. On the whole, I left teasing to others but was fascinated to watch the outcome, I’m afraid, and I was very lucky that this was never done to me – though when I got to Merchant Taylors’ I myself became a victim in a rather milder way, one of the reasons why I was so unhappy there to start off with.

Leaving 
The good side of the Alcuin House School was that academically it was giving us a head start which I never subsequently lost. With the senior boys the main objective was entrance or even scholarship entrance into the major independent schools in the area, and also for King’s Canterbury as a boarding school, whither Philip Moss was eventually dispatched. Merchant Taylors’ was another of Mr Yeo’s schools, as was its slightly inferior equivalent in Cricklewood: Haberdashers. Alcuin House specialized in giving the local parents what they were paying for: a pass in the ‘common entrance’ exam into a ‘good’ school, and Yeo advised my parents early on that I was Merchant Taylors’ material. The better children got scholarships. I remember going in for a scholarship examination at Merchant Taylors’ (we had to go to the school to take the exam), and being told by a future contemporary at both Merchant Taylors' and St John's College Oxford, Ernest Newhouse, that his father had told him that he had a 50-50 chance of getting in, or even stronger odds than that, and I felt very daunted when I heard it. I thought I wouldn’t have a hope, and I was really quite frightened that I wouldn’t get anything at all. In fact I got a minor scholarship – an ‘exhibition’: that is I came I suppose about fifth among the competitors, and the first eight got awards to Merchant Taylors’. I think it was worth about £40 a year. Anyway, that meant that I went there from Alcuin House School. I was the only person at the Merchant Taylors' from Alcuin House School in my year, one reason why my first year or so at there was very unhappy. Most of the others seemed to be from prep schools in the Pinner and Northwood regions, especially St. John’s.