After being introduced to Mr Bellamy who had been a great lover of Hugh who also had adored him in spite of the numerous beatings with the cane that he had recieved from his hand, I then went on to meet the boys of the house. There were 45 in all and as soon as I had arrived and had been curtly questioned as to why I was joining the school so  much older, and I told them  the reason briefly. I stood in the junior common room with a crowd of boys and went through all the details of our capture by the “Thor” and all about  German Surface Raiders, Japan, the bombing, the harsh conditions of the POW camp and then the wonderful liberation, and the voyage in a Royal Navy carrier across the huge Pacific Ocean, to Australia first to India, then Ceylon and then finally the RAF flying us to England to join Hugh’s old Army House. The boys were in raptures that day, and sat entranced at my story and so I had started off with a good reception.
Bradfield at that time was a school designed like so many other public schools to turn out leaders for the Empire and also leaders in industry and the professions. The regime was pretty harsh with boys “fagging” for a prefect for two years, and then later having their own fag. The idea was that you were put through the mill as a youngster so that you appreciated  harshness, and so that  when you were that much older you dealt out orders in a  much  more tolerant  manner knowing already what harsh treatment was all about.. As I was two years older than normal, I was excused fagging but still underwent the normal day to day privileges etc of a sixth termer. We slept in small dormitories of  about 6 or 8 and rose at 7.00 am with an ice cold shower, which in the cold winters of that time  was really harsh. Depending on seniority one could return to bed for 5 or ten minutes to warm up before dressing but all underwent the daily cold shock. Meals were in the Big Hall and at that time Bradfield was reckoned to have excellent catering facilities, but with the shortage of rations in the post war period, not many boys today would have rejoiced in whale meat sausages and snoek fish.
The teaching for the most part was excellent, but as I was so far behind, on most free afternoons when I was not actively playing games, I would have private extra tuition with various masters in their homes. For the first year , I rarely if  ever had a spare moment to myself when I was not either actively swatting or playing games or harshest of all, going on cross country runs. I found cross country running in particular a tremendous strain on my heart, which whether it was from the TB or the harsh conditions of the camp, at the most I could manage was about a two mile stint.  In the house there was after the initial warm welcome the usual cruel bullying from various boys who always found a weakness. I was a   “bloody colonial”  my first term and was constantly ragged, but fortunately the following term I was joined by two boys from Kenya, and we held our own well. I think the harshest thing that I found about the life in a public school in comparison with a POW camp, was the fact that you  felt isolated and on your own. In a camp, the prisoners were all loyal with one another against the system and the Japs. Here the system was  designed to be against you,  until one  had  built up confidence in oneself, made a few close friends  and was self confident enough  to tell the rest to go to hell.  Life was lonely and one felt one was on an island surrounded by sharks .  All the more so in my case, with my  Mother and Father gone back to Ceylon and only my sister Helen as a close member of the family in England.
But there  were compensations. The school was situated in the most beautiful Berkshire countryside, and Hugh  had told me where to visit and to find the best pigeons nests, the places in the small River Pang where the mallards and moorhens nested,  where the crayfish were to be found, and where to go fishing for perch in the Thames. In the autumn I used to go shooting with a small folding .410 for rabbits and pheasants until I got caught by Squire Benyon the local landlord who owned a couple of thousand acres around at Inglefield, and he gave me a severe dressing down and warning after I fired a shot at a bird when he just happened to be passing with his gamekeeper one Sunday afternoon.
“ You horrible little boy” he shouted “come here, which house are you from?”
“Army House Sir”.
“I’ll phone Bellamy and tell him to give you a damn good beating if I ever catch you firing at my birds again. Be off with you double quick?”
I never heard anymore from anyone about this and presumably he had a good laugh at my expense!
One of the things that amazed me in the house was the detailed knowledge and the following of cricket. There were boys who could almost repeat the whole contents of Wisden almost verbatum. Coming from my environment  abroad  with a family who had no interest whatsoever in competitive team sports, this I found extraordinary. I enjoyed tennis and swimming, the latter  I was quite good at after so much   practice in  the tropics  and I looked forward to the time  when the swimming pool was cleaned in June  and made fit for competition. The pool was situated in flood meadows near the River Pang and once pumped out, automatically filled half way up with icy cold natural spring water. The first time I dived in to really show how fast I could move, I nearly died of heart seizure from the bitter temperature. What a change and contrast from the warmth of the Colombo Swimming Club.  Later on in the season the  pool warmed up a bit but never enough to please me.
I made some good friends at Army House, and over the coming years had some very enjoyable experiences. On the whole life was regimented but also there was a lot of freedom to pursue ones own interests. I was always interested in the woods and wild life where in the winter I would go shooting and in the summer with a pair of climbing irons scale trees to look at pigeon nests and others. I kept a pair of tame jackdaws behind the cricket pavilion in a cage and would let them out in the afernoons and they would return for feeding. The glory of the gentle country side, the soft rounded oaks, the silhouettes of the tall elm trees in winter, lolling under a tree on a summer’s afternoon watching cricket , all these things left a lasting and quiet impression on me for later years, and together gave me an everlasting love of the English countryside.  The whole pace of life was slow and quiet. A journey to Reading ten miles away took over three quarters of an hour on a red double decker bus, after all the stops in villages and hamlets on the way. Not that I did the trip often, as my pocket money for the term was limited.  But for all the basic necessities of life, buying cream buns, loaves of fresh crusty bread from the Tidmarsh bakery I never felt financially constrained.
The first summer holidays in 1946 was spent more or less constantly  working at my books trying to catch up. Just before the autumn term was due  to start I spent a week with an old retired schoolmaster called  Tomlinson. He was a fine fit specimen of a man well over 6ft extremely good looking in his 86th year. He was a double Oxford blue for squash and rowing and would in the evenings chat away about what life was like in the Victorian era. It was a real  privilege to talk to a man who had been born in 1860 at the height of the British Empire and was now discussing with me the wetness of the body politic in the country with the new Labour Government.

Next Page 1/4