MEMORIES OF MERCERS’
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 that day. 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.
1942 to 1944
My brother and I spent many of our school holidays with relatives in South Wales. We were there, as usual, in the summer of 1939. When War began, we stayed in Caerphilly. I went to the local grammar school and came away with School Certificate distinctions in Maths and Physics.
Come the autumn of 1942, it was felt safe enough for us to return home. After the openness of South Wales, there was sooty atmosphere by day and the blackout by night in London. And overall a sort of ‘make do and mend’ miasma.
The Lower VIth at Mercers’ was a much depleted rump. On the Arts side we numbered barely more than a handful.
I treasure the enthusiasm of G G Allen’s history lessons in the school library. Government, religion, finance, and foreign policy. Good guidelines. (Inevitably we invented French without Thiers.)
Bonner’s French classes were uninspiring. We plodded through French Romantic Poets as though dissecting yesterday’s cold chicken. Maths More Advanced, for us, was a disaster. Maths was a Science subject with six periods a week. We Arts men were admitted to only four of those periods. Poor timetabling. I never did come to terms with the differential calculus. Jepson’s Clear Thinking, once a week, taught me syllogistic logic and a quirky approach to the literal interpretation of certain public notices.
Spanish with Señor Barragán, a Civil War refugee, proved to be an unanticipated bonus. In a rare confidential moment, the Head informed me the classes were there simply to fill up the Arts timetable. But when, ten years later, I travelled in Spain, I found myself with more than adequate conversational skills. Olé.
I was now tall enough to play the school’s War Memorial organ for morning assemblies once or twice a week. Ironic that I was on duty to lead ‘Ye that have spent the silent night in sleep and quiet rest’ when a doodle bug had partly demolished Mr Rowsell’s house in the early hours of the morning.
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I was just 15 years old when I applied for the position of organist and choirmaster at St Peter’s Church, Fulham. I went for a preliminary interview after school one day. As I sat down in front of the vicar, he saw my school tie and said : “So, you’re at Mercers’.” I was appointed.
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Soon after Easter 1944 I began rehearsing for my first professional tour as a pianist with a Canadian Legion concert party. I went to say goodbye to Mr Jepson. He was staggered to hear my initial weekly income was more than a brand new Oxford graduate would receive at Mercers’.
At the beginning of 1945 I joined the Royal Academy of Music as a full-time student. In the late 1950s I returned as a professor. Many adventures later I moved on to Sydney, New South Wales, as Assistant-Director of the State Conservatorium. In 1980 I came to Oxford for a postgraduate year with the Department of Ethnology. I bought a house. I still live there. I find it congenial.
©francis cameron, oxford, 2 march 2013
