Free Against the Tide by Noël Browne

the funny legs. Being a good athlete is a magic passport to popularity in any English public school.
    Mr Lowndes had grey hair, cropped close, was obsessionally clean and lived with his mother in a fine red-brick house opposite the school. He seemed to be the only serious teacher we had. His
manner was somewhat brusque and impatient. He wore a grey Norfolk jacket with peeping white shirt cuffs. His pink hands were carefully manicured, his shoes always shining black, and clever blue
eyes shone from his scrubbed face. He always seemed to be at his happiest leaving through the front door of the school; to him, I suspect, we were simply a tiresome collection of morons whose
wealthy social origins presaged a life of never-ending decadent entertainment and recreation. There was no purpose in casting any cultural or intellectual pearls before us. I remember him taking
the trouble on one occasion to show us how to brush our nails; he did not aspire to anything more testing for our pampered lives.
    There was also Mr Robinson, a big, jolly ex-Naval man with blazing blue eyes. He wore enormous ill-fitting plus-four suits of light grey, and shiny brown leather shoes with great finger-shaped
leather flaps to them. We liked to listen when he played rollicking music-hall songs and sea shanties at the piano for us. Because of his ill-fitting false teeth, he spat a lot as he sang, but he
must once have given great pleasure to his shipmates, for his voice was soft, pleasant and musical. He made no attempt to teach us anything.
    The wife of the proprietor, known as ‘Maw P’ because her husband’s name was Patton, was a particularly well cared-for, dumpy, knock-kneed lady always dressed as befitted her
position, complete with a shining necklace of pearls and a gold wrist watch. She was the sole person of whom all of us went in some fear, though she did not harass or try to interfere with us. She
had a strait-laced severe appearance which we found intimidating, but it was said that she was a compulsive gambler on the horses. Her husband, ‘Paw P’, was a charming, self-effacing,
equally knock-kneed tubby little man, who appeared to enjoy life uninhibited by his managerial cares. He took his pleasures where he found them; even we young children could see that. I understand
that the school no longer exists. Whether this is in any way related to the gambling proclivities of his wife or not, I do not know.
    In the school holidays I would return to Miss Salter’s holiday home in Worthing. A number of the boys whose homes were too distant to justify travelling home during the shorter vacations
lived with us there. Life for all of us in the home was very spartan — a bread and margarine existence. Since we were near the sea, I swam continuously and in all weathers. My distracted
sister Kitty, whose job it was to mind us at the beach, continually pleaded with me ‘not to go out too far’. The South American boys were unhappy about the food, the crowded dormitory
conditions and above all, the winter cold. Julian Romero from Peru even attempted to heat his bed by putting a lighted candle beneath it.
    Kitty and my youngest sister Ruth, aged four, were accepted as boarders in a convent run by the Notre Dame Sisters in Worthing. Kitty was happy there but for the infant Ruth convent life was no
substitute for her broken home and the loss of both parents. Ruth stayed there until she was eighteen, then took up a secretarial job in Sussex. When she and I met again, during the Second World
War, we had to carry specific newspapers to be sure of recognising one another. Ruth later returned to Ireland to live with us for some years, but is now happily married in Tennessee.
    With the closure of Miss Salter’s home in the late 1920s, following her death, the medical mafia of Irish doctors all over England helped Eileen by taking me to live with them during
holiday times. Sometimes I stayed with limitlessly wealthy aristocratic friends in their