Free Noisy at the Wrong Times by Michael Volpe

I lied.
    I wish I could remember his name.
    The end of summer 1976 arrived. The heat wave, which in those pre-global warming days had become a legend, subsided, and Serge was at the end of the remarkably long summer holidays that Woolverstone provided. My confidence about going there was starting to fray at the edges, and I would lie in bed, badgering Serge about the school. What would it be like? Would I enjoy it? Would I be homesick? Occupying me more than anything else was the fear that I wouldn’t be the toughest boy in the year – a status I thought I enjoyed at primary school. Because I had visited the school many times previously, I had not been required to attend the open day for new boys, but Serge had been one of those showing people around and he sought to reassure me.
    “I saw all of the boys coming in your year, you look harder than all of them,” he said.
    It is, I suppose, an indication of what was important to me at the time that I had become concerned about such things. I was obviously sanguine about the academic challenges of Woolverstone, but that could well have been because I never truly realised there were any. It is also possible that of all the obstacles Woolverstone would place before me, the one I feared most was being a young boy who had to compete with other young boys of equal or, heaven forfend, greater potential. Serge took some time to explain the protocols and rules of the school, the regulations forbidding me to walk on the grass, rules insisting I use particular doors to enter and exit buildings and rotas for menial tasks around the house. He pointed out with desperate pleading in his eyes that things would be better for me if I developed an understanding of why these seemingly petty demands had a purpose. Naturally, none of this was making much sense or difference to me, and my brother was transparently alarmed by my imminent arrival; I would surely become a responsibility he could do without and he was aware of the explosive consequences once I was required to conform.
    I don’t remember being upset at the prospect of leaving Mum, my other brothers or home, but that may have been because I had a sibling to keep an eye on me. That sibling was developing quite a fear of the impending union between his little brother and his school. I was only eleven, after all, a child in all ways, but I suffered from the affliction that many eleven-year-old boys fall prey to, which is the unshakeable belief that they are twice as old. Serge was astute enough to realise that the strength of my conviction in this regard presented him, let alone the school, with complications of an acute nature.
    * * *
    September 1976.
    Wearing a uniform only added to the disquiet that was growing in me as we headed to Waterloo to take the coaches to Woolverstone for the start of term; regulation grey trousers, light blue shirt and navy blue crew neck jumper was the casual symphony of colour of the day. Apparently, it had been far more formal in years past, when boys were permanently required to wear ties, shirts and jackets. Now we only had to don blazers for Sunday assembly.
    In that preceding summer, I had enjoyed the process of equipping myself for the school by going to the designated uniform suppliers and being issued with rugby kits, shirts, jumpers with the school crest, blazers, trousers et al. I especially loved the fact that Mum had to order lots of name tags with my name embroidered onto them in red, silky thread in a classical typeface. To me those name tags demonstrated why Woolverstone was a school of a different hue from any other I could have gone to. Name tags were so incredibly
posh
in my mind. These items of regulation clothing with graceful little name tags sewn into them were the first sign of Woolverstone’s boundaries and expectations. Like all ‘public’ schools, it was essentially based on the military model and, although over time it had softened a little, there was still a curious and