School’s Out

my formal education was close to a complete disaster. It began at the local primary school in Henfield. Flat-roofed and newly built, it was a kind of heaven made up of sand pits, poster paints and plasticine and women teachers who spoke in soppy toddler speak. The first day was fine and the second too but by the third I was already bored and decided not to go to school that morning or any other morning for that matter. My mother, however, had other ideas and when I had finally been subdued and broken like a new pony I was delivered, red and moist and full of shame, into the headmistress’s sympathetic care. She took my hand and guided me towards the other toddlers playing in the sand pit who had been specially primed to give me time and space to pull myself together. I, however, was determined to have the last word and, looking over my shoulder to my mother, screamed: ‘Well I didn’t know I had to go every bloody day!’

Although this is not quite true of school, it certainly is a fault of adult working life, and I can vividly remember the clammy horror I felt when it finally dawned on me that long indolent summer holidays were a thing of the past.

I failed to thrive at the primary school and one day my mother was summoned to be told the possibility that I had learning difficulties. My parents were understandably shocked and wondered what best to do. All I cared about was that the longed-for Christmas holidays should soon be upon us and I had already made a card for the form teacher in the shape of a cut-out Christmas tree. She sent me one in return. My parents were less excited than I was when they read what was inside:

Dear Geoffrey thank you for the lovely hand made fur tree you made for me this Christmas. With love Miss Brown

From that moment on, my days at the local school were numbered, numbered on the fingers of one hand and, in the early new year of 1959, I was on the bus to Brighton in a light grey blazer, clown-like shorts (‘He’ll quickly grow into them, you’ll see…’) and a matching cap trimmed with bright blue beading, all brand-new from Daks in Brighton. The fear of a new school, fresh relationships and a future seemingly as limitless as space itself was fixed in the smell of wool from my new school clothes. They were the uniform of St Michael’s, a prep school for 20 pupils founded by an old dame called Dorothy Willis in a converted Victorian villa at 2 Harrington Road. Miss Willis was an aged tartar who to a small boy seemed to be older than God. In fact, she was born in 1888, the year of Queen Victoria’s Silver Jubilee, and was 77 when we first met. Her face was lined like that of a heavy smoker, which she was not, and her pepper-and-salt hair was gathered in a no-nonsense chignon. One or two random moles punctuated the contours of her face and horn-rimmed, half-moon spectacles completed her forbidding physiognomy. Her ample breasts were gathered tightly into a dress made of floral fabric, buttoned down the front, and belted beneath the bust. She wore thick, opaque flesh-coloured stockings and her shoes were brown lace-up brogues. When Miss Willis (known to us as ‘s’Willis’) spoke, her teeth, long, gum-less and brown could be seen working up and down against the dark void of her mouth. They consisted of one brown incisor above and one or two teeth below. My father was fascinated by them and referred to them as her ‘pickle chasers’. Here at assembly in the morning, we sang hymns and Miss Willis read her favourite texts from the onion-skin pages of her floppy, gilt-edged Bible. In the morning we learned joined-up writing and were allowed to choose pencils laid out in every colour of the rainbow. ‘There’s a sight for sore eyes!’ she would say every time the technicolour box was opened. Each one of them had a pencil rubber on the end, bound in a little collar of brass. Later, we were trusted with dip-pens and white porcelain inkwells lodged in special receptacles at the top right-hand side of heavy oak fliptop desks. We learned Latin and French and studied more of the Bible. Dorothy Willis believed children should be treated exactly as adults and this extended to the appreciation of poetry. In some ways I think she was right and if I have an ear for the music and the resonance of a word or phrase, then I have to thank her for that. However, I am not sure even the most precocious of 8-year-old students is quite ready for ‘Death the Leveller’ by James Shirley or ‘On His Blindness’ by John Milton. These and other classics we learned by rote from the anthology, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, first published in 1861 and later revised by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–92).

In the morning we drank milk, subsidised by the state, from 1/3-pint bottles and ate Rich Tea biscuits at break time. Sometimes there would be beef stew for lunch, made up of tough little chunks of iridescent meat cooked with carrot cubes until grey and hard; yellow stripes of wobbling fat turned me right off. And on Fridays there was fish. This was none too fresh and presumably akin to that encountered by Edwin Lutyens (1869–1944) at the Garrick Club, which he described as ‘a piece of cod that passeth all understanding’. These veined and sallow flakes of flesh were absolutely repellent, and I could not eat them. The only solution open to me was to transfer my fish surreptitiously to a handkerchief and then to my pocket where it lay, forgotten gently putrefying over the weekend. On Monday morning, after a hot weekend, the sickening effluvia of rotten cod was quite impossible to ignore.

In the main, St Michael’s was cosy and nice enough even if from time to time one would be summoned to Miss Willis’s study for a dressing down for giggling in prayers or for a private recitation of the Latin noun mensa whose declension had been such a disappointment in class. On went the metronome and with the tap of a ruler she echoed its rhythm:

Mensa, Mensae, Mensarum…Men… what Munn?... Dooo try to pay attention! We will run through it again and again until you get it right, you lazy little ass! (Pronounced, in all innocence, as arse!)

This is when I dried up completely. I prayed to God to let me disappear into the glass paperweight full of bubbles on Miss Willis’s occasional table and on which, in my despair, I had fixed my gaze. No such luck, the ordeal went on interminably and, in the end, I emerged brain-washed, dazed, hoping only to join the other boys at their beef stew as inconspicuously as possible. Miss Willis was not a cruel person but I think she knew very well that isolation is what children dread more than most things. Despite her best efforts to drum Latin into me aged 9, nothing seemed to work. She wrote on my school report in 1962: ‘He does not think and consequently he makes stupid mistakes.’ In fact, I was thinking about all manner of things, though I admit Latin was not one of them. As she was a stickler for discipline, I was terrified of Miss Willis but she was a formative influence and somehow she always held my respect. When she died, the news of it reduced me to tears.

From St. Michael’s, I went to Shoreham Grammar in 1963, which, despite its name, was a fee-paying school. When I arrived, it was in the throes of a melt down from above. Discipline was at very low ebb and although the school rules demanded all pupils should wear a uniform the challenge was to do so in a way that implied insolence and contempt. Ties were secured in a tight knot positioned at the height of the third shirt button and the cap, always too small and severely crumpled was worn at the very back of the head in a way intended to affront the adult world.

At lunchtime the pupils of Shoreham Grammar were banned from the cafés in town, so they chewed on tiger nuts and liquorice laces instead. More often, they slouched on street corners; invariably with one hand behind their back to conceal the pungent blue trail of smoke coiling upwards from a cheap cigarette. Number Six and Extra were the favourites but my first experiment with smoking was Dunhill menthol cigarettes. The artificially cool fumes were easier to inhale but, as a result, their effects were doubly toxic. I made myself so ill I had to feign a fever and lie down in the sanatorium for the whole afternoon. How the staff did not smell the smoke on our breath I will never know; I can only assume they were heavy smokers themselves. Certainly, the air was acrid and sour when the door of the staff room was opened at break.

To be caught smoking might bring about the endless penance of a thousand lines or even a caning. Although the latter increased one’s kudos with the other boys, it was a truly fearful experience: staggeringly painful the applicant was chosen. Instead, Kenneth and my colleagues decided to employ one Caroline Watney. She is the three times great granddaughter of James Watney (1800–84), the founder of the famous brewery. On her maternal side, Francis Hopkinson (1737–91) signed the United States Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776 and it was he who designed the first official flag of the newly independent United States. Twin portraits of Caroline’s grandparents were made by the famous modern British painter William Nicholson (1872–1949).

However, none of the above was relevant to the interview at Wartski during which Kenneth Snowman’s first and foremost question was: ‘Can you type?’. From my point of view, his choice was not only meant but heaven-sent because Caroline and I would be married on 9 April 1983. As well as being the devoted mother of our two sons Alexander and Edward, she has been a constant in my life ever since.

Caroline Munn with Lady Charlotte Bonham Carter at the Wartski exhibition

‘Artist’s Jewellery’ on 7 March 1989. Caroline was 31 Lady Charlotte was 96.

Prudence Cuming

Good Old London Town

having left home once and for all, my first home in London was a tall Victorian villa called 503 Fulham Road. The landlady was a rather imperious woman called Miss Collins. Presumably as a result of diminished circumstances, she had partitioned the larger rooms into compact bedsits. There was a washbasin in the room but the bathroom and lavatory were up the stairs on the right. A single bed was positioned against the partition wall. It had a laminated wooden headboard with post-war sunburst effect and a rose-pink candlewick bedspread covered the rest; a matching wardrobe and chair were the only other pieces of furniture in the room. There was a single gas ring in the corner on which to boil a kettle. French windows opened onto a narrow balcony above the busy road below. At my parents’ home in the country, the velvety silence of the night had occasionally been disturbed by the shriek from a passing owl or the haunting bark of the vixen but here the traffic noise was incessant, and the thin curtains allowed the orange street light to keep me awake. At about midnight the muffled noise from the television in the next room faded away and I could hear the creak of floorboards as my neighbour shuffled about his room. A light switch on the other side of the partition was flicked off and within seconds I realised someone had got into bed beside me. The only thing separating us was a thin sheet of plasterboard. We slept this way, side by side, week after week, and I never saw his face. I could tell he was a heavy smoker by the smell from under his door. He snored and, in the morning, he coughed incessantly but this was all I ever knew about this lonely man except to say he is almost certainly dead by now.

My conversations with my landlady were cold and courteous. She was interested in art but liked nothing more exciting than English watercolours. After several heated debates, I realised the futility of trying to convince her of Picasso’s genius. There was something about the house that was old and hopeless, and I was desperate to leave. Tim, my friend from school, suggested I take a room in the flat he shared with friends and within a few weeks I handed in my notice. The landlady kept a good