memories 1938 & 1939

MEMORIES OF MERCERS’ (part one)

the interview

I was just ten years old when my godfather took me to the Mercers’ School. He was deputising for my father who had other commitments. In the headmaster’s study I met Mr R W Jepson, MA. Perhaps the quintessential headmaster with a pair of pince nez.

I remember little of the interview apart from the comprehension test. Mr Jepson handed me a couple of paragraphs to read and then went on talking to my godfather. I quickly read through the text then looked up. Mr Jepson asked me one or two questions then turned to the mule at the heart of the passage. What did I know about the characteristics of a mule? I remembered something I’d heard on Children’s Hour. “It kicks in all directions.” The two men roared with laughter. I was in.

1938 & 1939

So, in January 1938, I presented myself in Form IIA. That first morning was occupied with the varia of a new term. Did we all have our health certificates? What arrangements were we making about midday meals? Were we going to pay for school dinners? or did we propose to bring sandwiches?

One by one, we were questioned. I was the last on the list. The 16th boy in a class designated for a maximum of 15. I replied in the demotic of my London home. “I’m gunner ‘ave me dinner in school.” Mr R W H D Murray gave forth a stream of withering invective. How contemptible, how utterly contemptible it was to mutilate the King’s English. From that moment on, so it appeared to me, I could do nothing right in Mr Murray’s eyes. I was made to feel unwanted. Outside the Pale. A boy whose fees were being paid by a friend of the family. A boy whose idiolect deformed the purity of the English tongue.

I knew no algebra. Mr Tabbard (sp?) invited me to join his after school class for boys who needed additional tuition. Many years later, as an Old Boy, I was able to thank him in person for his encouragement.

When the next term began I was in Form IIB with Mr K B Rowsell. An ideal teacher. I became accepted. In the class Orders I usually had top marks. My speech patterns changed into such conformity I was voted to represent the class in an elocution competition. (‘Many a time and oft. In the Rialto you have rated me. About my moneys and my usances. .. ..’)

Towards the end of that Summer Term, we were called to an assembly in the school hall. Should there be a State of Emergency, we would be evacuated from London. We should take refreshments for the journey. Dried fruit and currants were good. Chocolate was bad. It made you thirsty.

It was the year of Mr Chamberlain getting out of that little aeroplane and waving a sheet of paper above his head. It was the year of the Munich Agreement.

My transition to the 3rd form was smooth. Now I sang in the school choir and played violin in the orchestra.

A few weeks before the end of the Summer Term of 1939, we bought and sold our textbooks, as was the custom, and  moved up to the Lower IVth. I elected to drop Latin and begin German with ‘Pussy’ Moss. I still remember those first few pages of Deutsches Leben Erste Teil. It was the only actual tuition in German I ever received.

ethos

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

that is forever England.

The Great War was still with us. We lived in its shadow. The terrible losses of 1914 - 1918 still permeated. Whenever the family gathered, the old men would talk of Gallipoli and the Somme. dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. The insidious lines from Horace lurked in every churchyard. But they never taught us of Wilfred Owen and ‘The old Lie’. Our ethos was still of preRaphaelite medieval knights in shining armour riding to defend All that was great and good. We should treasure our heritage as English Gentlemen. And the natives in the far flung corners of our Great and Glorious Empire would forever be grateful for our presence. That, and the command to Conform, is my memory of Mercers’ before that September when the curtain went up on Act Two of War with Germany.

© francis cameron, oxford, 28 february 2013

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