Free Out of India by Michael Foss Page B

fumbling shillings for the one-bar electric fire, staring in hopeless resignation at the faded regency stripes of the wallpaper and the stain of the water-leak in the corner of the ceiling that looked like a map of Nowhere. And no need also to fret herself ill out of worry for her children.
    We too, her children, were busy getting acquainted with a type of normality that was new to us. From the popish dark of the convent, so baroque and un-English and blighted by a suspect religious enthusiasm, we were put into the care of the English middle-class system of private schooling. Though we did not know it, we were exchanging the subtle intellectual cruelties of the Jesuitical Counter-Reformation for the hearty violence of Dr Arnold’s Anglo-Saxon invention, a regime still bearing the imprint of the whiskered old goat himself, with his love of floggings and cold baths and many hours on the muddy playing fields.
    This was a part of our English bourgeois inheritance. And it was not hard to see that there was a certain grandeur to it. An imposing gateway, with tall stone piers and a wrought-iron gate thrown open, embraced us with a large gesture. Then a long driveway marched boldly through the pitches of the games fields to a gravel circle before the front door of a big eccentric Victorian house. The house had been built with all the lapses of an over-rich, whimsical domestic taste, but was now transformed into a school with too many odd compromises for either convenience or comfort. From the front door, the main passage was lined with hunting trophies, the large heads of slaughtered animals, their old fur scruffy with dust and baldpatches and the glass eyes looking unbearably despondent. Another place, an administrative office off the passage, had walls prickly with the tines of many antlers.
    Unavoidable draughts swept through the house, enough to please even the most austere of muscular Christians. Great, rattling windows seemed to sail over the sea. The views were magnificent. From the dormitories, clattering with wind noise, we looked across rabbit-bitten turf and over the low cliff to the sun setting out in the dizzy vista of the ocean. We were tempted to hug ourselves, though unsure whether from cold or wonder.
    In the convent, we had inhabited a world of sullen whispers, sidelong glances, secretive, cautious, withdrawn. Our new world was ringing with loud halloos, voices perpetually raised, doors slammed, feet stamped, instructions roared as if from passing ships. Our amusement in the convent had been solitary and painstaking and private. In our new school we were taught the steamy satisfaction of corporate effort, how to work for a team, and take our knocks like little men, without complaint. Strange English excesses, such as cricket, were revealed to us by sport-besotted schoolmasters. Footballs were kicked around, not in the wild chaotic rushes of the convent playground, but with the communal aim of goal-scoring in view.
    The convent had taken the individual soul in hand, for rigorous discipline on the road to heaven. Our new masters looked askance at that. It sounded to them selfish and ungentlemanly. Teamwork was what mattered. Play the game and life would follow from it.
    At last, I was beginning to get the hang of how to be English.
    In a short time, adaptable as most schoolboys, we had learnt to fit in. Only our Catholicism held us apart. There were no other Catholics in the school, but our peculiarity was treated with the respect that a liberal tradition gives topuzzling metaphysical anomalies. On Sundays, my brother and I put aside the hard-boiled eggs from our breakfast – the ration was one fresh egg each per week – and we set out alone for Mass in a nearby village.
    In good weather we went across the fields, stopping to crack our egg-shells on the stone pillar of the gatepost. On weekends, nothing disturbed the tranquillity of the wartime countryside. No traffic, the farm tractors at rest. Working men with