Free Wish You Were Here by Nick Webb

have their own dire song. Some have verses that have to be destroyed by controlled explosion. Decades after leaving, the alumni can only bring themselves to sing the words after much forehead-smiting and six pints of beer. Brentwood School has a fine example of the genre called “The Old Red Wall,” a reference to the handsome brick wall that contains the grounds; it’s a truly gruesome mix of cruelty and sentiment.
    According to the song, the institution was founded in the mid-sixteenth century following a spasm of guilt over the public burning to death of an innocent lad. Despite these inauspicious beginnings, the lyrics assure us that there is no question so vexed that it cannot be settled with a good chat by the stove for “why we conquered and how we strove/They tell of it still by the old school stove.” Brentwood was endowed in 1558 by Sir Anthony Browne, a clever time-serving career lawyer, part-time land speculator and an early prototype of Essex Man.  37 * It was a grammar school in which a boy could learn Latin all day and be beaten for mistaking a declension. He could also be expelled for syphilis or lunacy. There was no namby-pamby counselling in those days.
    These days, however, Brentwood includes girls among its 1,500 pupils. The school stands in seventy-two acres of its own grounds with an appealing miscellany of buildings, from eighteenth century to modern. The facilities are by any standard—and especially those that prevail in the State sector—excellent. It even boasts that essential accessory, ghosts. Countless Tasker, who lived in Middleton Hall until the turn of the nineteenth century, left that handsome building as a legacy to Brentwood and it now houses the Preparatory School. It is said she occasionally makes a visit, and in her posthumous incarnation she is known as the Blue Lady.
    Brentwood School was perhaps the only cliché of Douglas’s life. He attended for twelve years, having started at the prep school. His mother recalls that he loved it. When she told him, five years after her divorce from Douglas’s father, that she was remarrying, he burst into tears because he thought he might have to leave school. He magically cheered up when told he would be staying.
    Brentwood gave him a fine formal education and a grounding in all the odd social and moral apparatus of an English public school. It boasted Praeposters (up-market prefects), a house system (Douglas was in School House), an improving motto (“Virtue, Learning, Manners”), mud, cold showers, rugby, and innumerable societies. Above all, it kept the forces of change at bay and frowned upon tawdry competitiveness—while encouraging it in matters of personal merit and team spirit—by endless regulations.
    A host of rules defined the school uniform. Even today school uniforms are the last refuge of the visually illiterate. Perhaps the roadkill ties and staphylococcus yellow and bruise-purple blazers are thought to discourage vanity, but the worst of contemporary designs are as nothing to the prickly horrors we wore in the fifties. They seemed to have been woven out of cardboard and gravel. Douglas and his fellows were lucky inasmuch as the uniform was designed by one of their famous old boys, Sir Hardy Amies, the couturier to the Queen, who devised an elegant grey check—albeit surmounted by an absurd straw boater for especially embarrassing occasions. Nevertheless the blazer was woven, or perhaps constructed, from intensely scratchy material. Can worsted really be derived from sheep? Or are there herds of wild worsteds with hides of steel wool that evolved to repel the predators of the plains?
    One of these regulations obliged Douglas to wear shorts at prep school. To his horror, when he graduated to the main school, the shop had no long trousers with a sufficient length of leg to fit him. For a whole month at the age of twelve he had to wear shorts, despite towering over his contemporaries and most of the masters. It is a fact