Wish You Were Here

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Authors: Nick Webb
Tags: Biography
clear to all schoolboys that to carry on wearing shorts after the age of twelve indicates some profound psycho-sexual confusion or, worse, a tragic yearning to become a scout-master. Douglas describes it as so mortifying that for four weeks he played on the edge of station platforms and forgot the Highway Code when crossing roads.*  38 All his life he was rather clumsy, and at school his uncontainable arms and legs, pumping gallantly but to little effect, made the role of sporting hero impossible. (Most large men know
—pace
American footballers—that well-knit, compact blokes tend to be much better sportsmen than ill-coordinated giants. Alas, they are usually tougher too, as large males, offending merely by an accident of size, sometimes discover in rough pubs.)
    In Douglas’s day Brentwood was—and probably still is—a very good school in a fee-paying, curriculum-heavy, sport, values, and nicknames sort of way. Is there anywhere outside an English public school or a P.G. Wodehouse novel where so many soppy nicknames are still to be found? Where else can you meet “Squiffy” and “Bunny” and “Spud”? Brentwood teachers included
—inter alia—
“Tusky” and “Funf.” Such schools, especially for boarders, create an entire world, safely equipped with rules, regulations and the society of peers in the same boat. If the regime is basically fair-minded—as it was in the 1960s under the headmastership of Richard Sale—such worlds can have huge appeal to their inmates. Douglas was a boarder from the age of eleven. Beyond that Old Red Wall lay uncertainty.
    For its size, Brentwood has produced a good crop of old boy high-achievers: several bishops, a Home-then-Foreign Secretary (Jack Straw), Robin Day, who broke the mould of abject deference when interviewing shifty politicians on TV, Noel Edmonds, Griff Rhys Jones, some superior journos (Peter Stothard and Brian MacArthur for instance) and a fair sprinkling of senior lawyers, scientists and military men. The teaching itself was very competent. The older teachers were drawn largely from a generation when the Depression drove a lot of people with first-class minds into the profession, and the younger staff were often men with good degrees and a sense of vocation.
    Douglas attended Brentwood for twelve years in all. It wasn’t his very first school. That honour goes to Mrs. Potter’s Primrose Hill Primary in Brentwood town. At six he took the exams and had the interview for Brentwood’s prep school. Middleton Hall was not just a machine, like a
foie gras
factory, for stuffing little boys with enough academic learning to cope with promotion to the senior school. It had traditions of its own, lovingly maintained by generations of formidable headmasters. Jack Higgs was the legendary head whose philosophy of character development lived on there. He maintained that it was a school’s duty to turn out pupils who were not only adequately briefed with knowledge but who were “honest, kind and useful.”*  39
    It was while Douglas was still in the prep school that Frank Halford awarded him the legendary ten out of ten for a story. Frank Halford, by then Deputy Head, retired from Brentwood in 1991, and he is still remembered with great affection. In his piece in
The Best of Days?
he records his pleasure that this perfect mark later became such a morale-booster to Douglas when the muse was being capricious. Years later, in 1992, Mr. Halford met Douglas again at a speech day celebrating the centenary of the founding of the prep school, and he also attended the secular but nevertheless touching version of a christening for little Polly Adams.*  40
    When Douglas moved up to Middle School, his housemaster was Micky Hall, referred to, naturally, by all students as Henry. Assiduous digging through the well-produced school magazine*  41 reveals that for some years Douglas excelled at being tall, but took little part (or at least not prominent enough to be mentioned) in the

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