The Lonely Sea and the Sky Read Online Free Page A

time I was transferred to another preparatory school, the Old Ride, at Branksome, Bournemouth, I must have been a thorough savage, a rebel against everybody, including my parents. But I loved the Old Ride. I liked the boys, I liked the masters and I liked the place itself with its strong, pine smell, and the sandy soil covered with pine needles. In summer we used to go down to the sea through a chine in the cliff, and bathe every morning. The salty water and the hot sunshine made one feel so languorous that it was difficult to struggle back up the chine. I usually found time to scan some of the silvery-sided leaves looking for puss moth caterpillars, with their tapered green bodies and huge, dark-faced heads with two horns. We would be quite content to get a little brown egg or two on the underside of a leaf, and rear the caterpillars ourselves, until they made cocoons in a piece of pine bark. The headmaster, S. A. Phillips, with his stubby, round figure, walrus moustache (off which he would suck drops of soup) and big round spectacles which he pushed up his forehead, made his mistakes, but who doesn't? Perhaps one of the worst that I got involved in was when our dormitory was caught after Lights Out with everybody visiting some other boy in his bed. There was the most frightful hullabaloo about this, and we were brought up for questioning one at a time for week after week, and finally all flogged. We were told we were very lucky not to get the sack, and I believe that if we had not all been involved, we would have. No one mentioned the word 'homosexuality', and I would not have known what it meant if it had been mentioned. And as we used to visit every other bed in turn, I am quite sure that I must have known if any of the boys were interested in this vice. I don't think any of them knew anything about it, and that we merely used to go and swop yarns, and the whole spice of the matter was that it was forbidden to talk after Lights Out. Later, I nearly got expelled from my public school for the same offence when I was caught handing back a piece of India rubber that I had borrowed from another boy, and which was suspected of being a note. At that time I still did not know what homosexuality was, and was not in the least interested. Maybe this was unusual at a public school. My view is that only one or two boys went in for it, though the masters seemed to think that every boy in the school was at it.
    Â Â One of the first excitements at the Old Ride was a visit from HMS Eclipse , a cruiser training ship for Osborne cadets. We played cricket against them and, after dark, they turned their searchlight on to the school from where they were anchored in Bournemouth Bay, and I thought this was thrilling. From my dormitory window I could see the Old Harry rocks at Swanage, and I wonder what I would have thought if a fortune-teller had told me that fifty years later I should be navigating Stormvogel in the dark to an anchorage near these rocks so that a new main halyard could be rove during the Fastnet race. One of the masters was a young parson called Copleston, who was a tremendous favourite with us. He came to stay at my home one holiday. My mother liked him, but I don't think my father did, and the visit was not a great success. Another great favourite as a master was a brother of Beverley Nichols; later he introduced me to Beverley at Marlborough. There was another young master who could not control boys, and I got involved in an episode that made me squirm with shame afterwards. We were out for a walk and crossing an open heathland on a hot summer's day. We were teasing this master, who was very well dressed (it was a Sunday), and wearing a bowler hat. While one boy distracted him in front, I tipped the hat over his eyes, whereupon he lashed out with his stick and hit the wrong boy, which caused tremendous joy amongst the rest of us. At that moment two of my cousins, who happened to be staying at a house near by, although I