More About Boy(42)
My sisters shrieked with laughter when I appeared. ‘He can’t go out in those!’ they cried. ‘He’ll be arrested by the police!’
‘Put your hat on,’ my mother said, handing me a stiff wide-brimmed straw-hat with a blue and black band around it. I put it on and did my best to look dignified. The sisters fell all over the room laughing.
My mother got me out of the house before I lost my nerve completely and together we walked through the village to Bexley station. My mother was going to accompany me to London and see me on to the Derby train, but she had been told that on no account should she travel farther than that. I had only a small suitcase to carry. My trunk had been sent on ahead labelled ‘Luggage in Advance’.
‘Nobody’s taking the slightest notice of you,’ my mother said as we walked through Bexley High Street.
And curiously enough nobody was.
* * *
Bexley High Street.
* * *
‘I have learnt one thing about England,’ my mother went on. ‘It is a country where men love to wear uniforms and eccentric clothes. Two hundred years ago their clothes were even more eccentric then they are today. You can consider yourself lucky you don’t have to wear a wig on your head and ruffles on your sleeves.’
‘I still feel an ass,’ I said.
‘Everyone who looks at you,’ my mother said, ‘knows that you are going away to a Public School. All English Public Schools have their own different crazy uniforms. People will be thinking how lucky you are to be going to one of those famous places.’
We took the train from Bexley to Charing Cross and then went by taxi to Euston Station. At Euston, I was put on the train for Derby with a lot of other boys who all wore the same ridiculous clothes as me, and away I went.
* * *
Public school is anything but that. Although it might sound as if it’s open to the general public, ‘public’ refers to schools named in the Public Schools Act 1868. These schools receive all their funding from private sources, rather than from the state or the government and now prefer to be called independent rather than public.
* * *
* * *
While at Repton, Roald Dahl lived in the Priory House. But a house was much more than a place to live – it was a team too. Everything you did at school was as part of that team.
* * *
Boazers
At Repton, prefects were never called prefects. They were called Boazers, and they had the power of life and death over us junior boys. They could summon us down in our pyjamas at night-time and thrash us for leaving just one football sock on the floor of the changing-room when it should have been hung up on a peg. A Boazer could thrash us for a hundred and one other piddling little misdemeanours – for burning his toast at tea-time, for failing to dust his study properly, for failing to get his study fire burning in spite of spending half your pocket money on firelighters, for being late at roll-call, for talking in evening Prep, for forgetting to change into house-shoes at six o’clock. The list was endless.
‘Four with the dressing-gown on or three with it off?’ the Boazer would say to you in the changing-room late at night.
Others in the dormitory had told you what to answer to this question. ‘Four with it on,’ you mumbled, trembling.
* * *
Boazer wasn’t a real word. It was Roald Dahl’s way of spelling ‘Beausieur’, which means ‘smart young man’ in French.
* * *
* * *
Later Roald became a footballer (he’s in the front row on the far left) but never a Boazer.
* * *
This Boazer was famous for the speed of his strokes. Most of them paused between each stroke to prolong the operation, but Williamson, the great footballer, cricketer and athlete, always delivered his strokes in a series of swift back and forth movements without any pause between them at all. Four strokes would rain down upon your bottom so fast that it was all over in four seconds.
A ritual took place in the dormitory after each beating. The victim was required to stand in the middle of the room and lower his pyjama trousers so that the damage could be inspected. Half a dozen experts would crowd round you and express their opinions in highly professional language.
‘What a super job.’
‘He’s got every single one in the same place!’
‘Crikey! Nobody could tell you had more than one, except for the mess!’
‘Boy, that Williamson’s got a terrific eye!’
‘Of course he’s got a terrific eye! Why d’you think he’s a Cricket Teamer?’
‘There’s no wet blood though! If you had had just one more he’d have got some blood out!’