The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More(76)

        ‘I held it too close. I’m sorry.’

        ‘Which do you want? Four with the dressing-gown on, or three with it off?’

        ‘Four with it on,’ I said.

        It was traditional to ask this question. The victim was always given a choice. But my own dressing-gown was made of thick brown camel-hair, and there was never any question in my mind that this was the better choice. To be beaten in pyjamas only was a very painful experience, and your skin nearly always got broken. But my dressing-gown stopped that from happening. The prefect knew, of course, all about this, and therefore whenever you chose to take an extra stroke and kept the dressing-gown on, he beat you with every ounce of his strength. Sometimes he would take a little run, three or four neat steps on his toes, to gain momentum and thrust, but either way, it was a savage business.

        In the old days, when a man was about to be hanged, a silence would fall upon the whole prison and the other prisoners would sit very quietly in their cells until the deed had been done. Much the same thing happened at school when a beating was taking place. Upstairs in the dormitories, the boys would sit in silence on their beds in sympathy for the victim, and through the silence, from down below in the changing-room, would come the crack of each stroke as it was delivered.

        My end-of-term reports from this school are of some interest. Here are just four of them, copied out word for word from the original documents:

                     Summer Term, 1930 (aged 14). English Composition. ‘I have never met a boy who so persistently writes the exact opposite of what he means. He seems incapable of marshalling his thoughts on paper.’

            Easter Term, 1931 (aged 15). English Composition. ‘A persistent muddler. Vocabulary negligible, sentences malconstructed. He reminds me of a camel.’

            Summer Term, 1932 (aged 16). English Composition. ‘This boy is an indolent and illiterate member of the class.’

            Autumn Term, 1932 (aged 17). English Composition. ‘Consistently idle. Ideas limited.’ (And underneath this one, the future Archbishop of Canterbury had written in red ink, ‘He must correct the blemishes on this sheet.’)



        Little wonder that it never entered my head to become a writer in those days.

        When I left school at the age of eighteen, in 1934, I turned down my mother’s offer (my father died when I was three) to go to university. Unless one was going to become a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist, an engineer or some other kind of professional person, I saw little point in wasting three or four years at Oxford or Cambridge, and I still hold this view. Instead, I had a passionate wish to go abroad, to travel, to see distant lands. There were almost no commercial aeroplanes in those days, and a journey to Africa or the Far East took several weeks.

        So I got a job with what was called the Eastern Staff of the Shell Oil Company, where they promised me that after two or three years’ training in England, I would be sent off to a foreign country.

        ‘Which one?’ I asked.

        ‘Who knows?’ the man answered. ‘It depends where there is a vacancy when you reach the top of the list. It could be Egypt or China or India or almost anywhere in the world.’

        That sounded like fun. It was. When my turn came to be posted abroad three years later, I was told it would be East Africa. Tropical suits were ordered and my mother helped me pack my trunk. My tour of duty was for three years in Africa, then I would be allowed home on leave for six months. I was now twenty-one years old and setting out for faraway places. I felt great. I boarded the ship at London Docks and off she sailed.

        That journey took two and a half weeks. We went through the Bay of Biscay and called in at Gibraltar. We headed down the Mediterranean by way of Malta, Naples and Port Said. We went through the Suez Canal and down the Red Sea, stopping at Port Sudan, then Aden. It was tremendously exciting. For the first time, I saw great sandy deserts, and Arab soldiers mounted on camels, and palm trees with dates growing on them, and flying fish and thousands of other marvellous things. Finally we reached Mombasa, in Kenya.