In September 1960, my parents dropped me off at Aston Hall, which was to to be my boarding school home for the next two years.  I would not see them again until the first Exeat, when we could go home again for the weekend.  This was three whole weeks away! 

I was filled with anxiety but also anticipation – was boarding school really going to be as much fun as the immensely popular “Jennings” books I’d been reading made it out to be?  There were 24 books in the series and I must have read most of them.  They’d even been serialized on the radio.

We were greeted by Mr. Anderson the housemaster who explained that our year was called First Form (equivalent to Grade 6 in the US).  We’d progress up the years to Fifth Form, then Lower Sixth, and finally finish our seven year stint at the school in the Upper Sixth.

He then told me I was assigned with nine other First Form boys to Ward House.  Houses in boarding schools were like families – we lived together and competed with the other houses in sports competitions.  Aston Hall was also home to the Second Formers of Ward House, and the First and Second Formers of the other boarding house: Adams.

We were taken upstairs to what was to be my dormitory for the next year, a large room that could accommodate all ten of us Ward First Formers.  After we’d stowed my few belongings in the bedside cabinet we were taken down to the common room to meet the new boys from the other house, and also the twenty Second Formers, whom we regarded with some unease.  One of the Second Formers was quick to explain that Mr. Anderson had been assigned the nickname “Flapper”, and it would be a faux pas of the highest order to refer to him by his proper name.  I would go on to learn that all the other teachers in the school had insulting nicknames too.  Apparently it was a boarding school thing.

Once all ten of us in Ward were assembled in the common room, the Ward House prefect came to give us a tour of the building.  Each House had a prefect in residence, an Upper Sixth Former who had been assigned to live at Aston Hall for his final year and help run the place.  Actually, the two prefects did run the place, Flapper having a full-time job teaching at the school (French) only got involved when a boy had committed an infraction that was serious enough that the issue had to be escalated to him.  We started in the entrance hall.  Aston Hall was a classic country house, rather small as those things went, over here we’d call it a large center-hall colonial.  Like many others it had become too expensive to keep up as a private residence in the post-war years of austerity, the high estate taxes imposed by the socialist government being the last straw.  And so it had been sold to the school a few years before.

There were two large rooms at the front of the ground floor.  To the left was a room filled with tables and benches, where we would take our meals and do our homework.  To the right was the common room we were now in, where we’d be spending all our free time: going up to the dormitories before bed time was strictly forbidden.

The prefect then led us through a passageway to the back of the house.  On our right we passed the kitchen; on our left was the apartment where Flapper and his family lived.  His family lived such separate lives from us that we never even knew how many children he had.  Now I look back on it, I realize that he might well have been single with no family at all.  But to us small boys every adult was married, and we just assumed he was too even though there was no evidence for it.

At the back of the school, a changing room block had been added on, with showers, lockers, coat racks, and our precious tuck boxes.  Out back of the house the prefect pointed out some old stables that we were forbidden to explore.  There were a lot of rules.

The prefect led us back to the central hall, and stood at the front door, pointing out the grass tennis court (out of bounds without permission; we would sometimes pull a heavy roller around on it as a punishment).  Behind it was an aged oak with some of the lower branches propped up that was called ‘Big Tree’.  And beyond that was an open area of grass surrounded by trees – our sports field.

He then took us up the staircase where we encountered the Prefects’ Study.  “This is where you report when you’re in trouble,” he said.  Our dormitory was next door on the right.  To the left were the Adams House dormitories, which we were forbidden to visit at any time, and the sickbay.  “Go down and get some supper, then you can come back up and go to bed.” he said.

Supper turned out to be so unappetizing that it could safely be left out on a tray unsupervised without fear that a boy would just come and take the lot.  Usually, it was a plate of Rich Tea or some other cookie that had the consistency and flavor of cardboard, and a pitcher of orange squash, a fruit flavored concentrate that was diluted so much that any taste was completely gone.

Back in the dormitory, we put on our pajamas and hopped into bed.  The prefect came and turned the light out.  The room was only in semi-darkness because there were no curtains on the windows – I guess it helped get us up in the mornings.  It didn’t take long for a boy whose older sibling was in boarding school somewhere else piped up in the semi-darkness that the thing to do was to have a slipper fight.  A couple of boys jumped out of bed and started throwing their slippers at each other.  Gingerly, the rest of us joined in.

Almost immediately the light was flicked on by Flapper, who stood scowling in the doorway.  “Looks like you boys can’t wait to try out the cane.” he said.  “Be sure to here at 5:30 tomorrow before dinner for your punishment.”  We were stunned into silence.  This wasn’t in the Jennings books.

After breakfast the next morning we set off for school on our bikes.  There was no alternative transport, we had to ride rain or shine.  It was a journey of just 1.3 miles mostly along the A518, a fairly busy main road.  We all had to get to school at the same time so we ended up traveling in a loose sort of convoy that was obvious enough to the other road users: safety in numbers.  Coming back in the afternoon we were more spaced out, but I’d usually be riding along with a couple of buddies. There were never any accidents on our commute, but some years later a dayboy riding alone on this road wasn’t so lucky.  A bus rolling along behind him intimidated him closer and closer to the side of the road, to the point where his descending pedal finally hit the curbstone and caused his bike to flip over into the path of the bus.  He died.

Once we arrived at school, it was 9am and time for Morning Assembly.  This was a fairly short Church of England service led by the headmaster that we all had to attend every day.  It was really only a reading from the bible, followed by one of the better-known hymns that we could be relied on to get through to the end without serious disarray at that time of the morning.  Boys of a different religion (basically Catholics) were excused from attending, and just hung around in one of the classrooms instead.  After the service there would be announcements, followed by dismissal to our classes.  We always knew when an important announcement was coming up because there would be a pause after the service while the Catholics were shuffled in to hear it with us.

Classes finished at 4pm, and we were too young for any after-school activities so we’d pedal straight back to Aston Hall.  After the evening meal it was time for “Prep” (homework): we returned to the dining hall once the boys on duty had cleared the tables, got our books out, and studied for an hour or so, supervised by one of the prefects.  After Prep was over we were chivvied to the changing room to wash and clean teeth,  and then up to our dormitories.  A prefect would come by to do a bed check to see no one was missing, and put the light out.

But this first day was dominated by our impending caning.  At the appointed time we assembled nervously in our dormitory.  Flapper was an old hand at keeping small boys in line, and he know that a day’s anticipation was more effective than physical pain, so after each of us bent over our bed and received three swats on our rear ends the punishment was over.  I don’t think he actually said, “I’m going to start as I mean to go on,” but the implication was clear – we weren’t in Kansas anymore.  He didn’t have to use the cane much after that.

The tight scheduling continued on the weekends.  Saturday mornings at 9 we’d play some sort of game on the sports field, and then we’d be back in the Dining Room at 11 to spend an hour writing a letter home to our parents.  After lunch we might have to walk half a mile to the school’s sports fields and watch the older boys playing rugby against some other school.  Sunday, we’d get up later, and walk to the nearby church for Sunday Service.  Sunday afternoons were free time - which we’d spend outside in the grounds (climbing ‘Big Tree’ was always popular) if the weather was halfway decent.  The first Sunday the Second Formers said we had to be initiated - it was a tradition - which would be done by a couple of them taking one hand each and propelling us headfirst into a nearby holly bush.  I said this was stupid and fought against them (I may even have cried).  They eventually gave up on me as a spoilsport.  The next year, we were now Second Formers ourselves, but we forgot all about it.  So much for tradition.

If it was raining we’d be in the Common Room, which had no TV nor radio, only a beat-up old upright piano on which some boy or other was always playing ‘Chopsticks’ – the novelty of which never seemed to pall.  Strangely, no one ever learned any other tune.  Without passive entertainment we needed something to occupy our spare time.

So it wasn’t long before a mania for stamp collecting swept through Aston Hall.  A couple of the boys had the stamp collector’s bible, a catalog by a company called Stanley Gibbons that listed every stamp ever produced in the British Empire, along with the price they would sell one for.  Prices for just about any stamp in the catalog were way beyond our meager pocket money’s reach, but there was a solution: we could buy a packet of 25 or 50 assorted stamps for a shilling or so.  Every boy could afford that, so we all sent off for our packets.  Then came the fun part, as we traded our new treasures between us.

As soon as a packet arrived the lucky recipient would whip open the catalog to see what each stamp was “worth”.  Usually the total value of our haul would add up to two or three pounds or so, at least according to Stanley Gibbons.  It never occurred to us to question why a dealer would send us three pounds worth of stamps for a shilling, though we had some fanciful theories.  Most of our treasures would be lovingly added to our stamp album, each attached to the page by a folded over ‘hinge’ of sticky paper so that they could be removed without damage.  My father bought me a large album that Christmas, and I have it to this day.

Each stamp would be annotated with its position in the catalog - and of course the price.  My pride and joy was honored with first place in my album: an example of the first stamp ever issued in the world, a Penny Black bearing Queen Victoria’s face, issued in 1840.  I can still see its 1961 value penciled in beside it: 75 shillings.

We were very chauvinistic in our choices of which stamps to collect.  Britain itself was the focus of each collection of course, and most of us were also avid collectors of stamps from the colonies of the British Empire.  But what to do when a colony left the empire and became an independent state?  Most of us lost interest in the stamps of a country once the Sovereign’s head no longer appeared on them. 

Countries outside the empire had little interest for us.  Occasionally, a boy who had received some birthday money would splash out on a bargain packet of a couple of hundred stamps for a pound, and to his dismay would discover that its value was diluted with some stamps from the United States.  Most boys threw these away.  I took pity on mine and found a home for some of the more interesting ones at the back of my album.

From the get-go we were trading duplicates.  But there were many other reasons to trade: some boys went for quality, and gave up a large number of minor stamps for one they particularly treasured.  Others wanted a large quantity to fill their album.  Some boys went much further, exercising their budding entrepreneurial skills by building stamp hoards, buying stamps at a cheap discount from boys when they needed cash urgently for some reason.  The collecting mania reached its peak with the Penny Reds.

Penny Blacks were replaced after only a year – it was too difficult to see if they had been canceled or not, and unscrupulous people were saving money by steaming them off and reusing them.  So in 1841 the color was switched to red.  And in 1864 plate numbers were added in the curlicues at each side of the stamp.  These plate numbers triggered a weird but intense burst of acquisitiveness among us.  Most Penny Reds were quite common – there were millions printed after all – so we could get a whole packet of them for our shilling.  But those with certain plate numbers were incredibly rare, and worth hundreds of pounds (and still are – a Penny Red with plate number 77 sold for £495,000, half a million dollars, in 2016). 

The plate numbers were very hard to read even in the best specimens, and were frequently partially obscured by the cancelation mark.  Boys used to spend hours with a magnifying glass examining their Penny Reds.  Was it a plate 77 worth a king’s ransom, or a common-or-garden plate 177 worth very little?   The entrepreneurs had a field day selling ambiguous stamps to their victims.

At the end of Second Grade, when our time in the hot-house atmosphere of Aston Hall’s Common Room was over and we moved to the main school, the stamp collecting mania simply ended, evaporating like a puff of smoke.  

Following the Adams’ principle that every boy had to try everything the school had to offer, Francis Wells and I were drafted into the percussion section of the school orchestra.  In line with the school’s overall frugality this section was not very well equipped – in fact all we had was a triangle and a pair of cymbals.  Since Francis was learning to play the piano, he was deemed the most musical of the two of us, and thus directed to take the most challenging part in every piece.  We were surprised to find that even these humble instruments had complete scores, which as you can imagine had an awful lot of rests, bars in which neither of us played.  We were excused Prep for a half hour each week to rehearse out of earshot in the changing room, an activity that seems ludicrous now that I look back on us counting out the bars: “…ninety-one-two-three,  ninety-two-two-three, ninety-three-two-three Ting-two-three, Ting-Ting-Ting, Crash.”  Our newly acquired skill evaporated on contact with the rest of the orchestra, how could we count with all that music going on, and after a few unexpected crashes the teacher who was the conductor came to an arrangement with us: we could ting away as much as we liked during the loud bits, but could only crash when he explicitly pointed his finger at us to do so.

There were two other members of staff at Aston Hall: the Cook and a part-time Nurse.  There were no cleaners: it was the boys who kept the place clean and tidy, served the food and cleaned up afterwards, on a Duty Rota or as punishment.  With all these jobs to hand out the prefects had little need to resort to corporal punishment (delivered with a slipper).  We were even co-opted to help the Cook, I remember being assigned to operate the potato-peeling machine one day, and figuring out that if we ran it long enough it would sand off the eyes as well as the skin, eliminating the tiresome chore of digging out the eyes by hand.  Unfortunately the tiny pebbles of potato that ultimately emerged weren’t what Cook was expecting.

To my friends in America it’s just a truism that English food is awful, but I have to confess that what Cook served up left something to be desired.  Gristly lumps of meat with great gobs of yellow fat hanging off them, vegetables boiled to death, fish with bones left in that caught in your throat, we had it all.  So for nutrition we depended a little too much to be healthy on the desserts, but even these were sometimes inedible.  They were mainly of the crumble variety, so much easier to make than pies: just pour some fruit filling into a deep enameled steel catering dish, top it up with crumble mix, and pop it in the oven.  Add a gallon or so of hot custard on each table and dessert was complete.  If we were lucky, the crumble filling would be the dark red mixed-fruit goo that we called, with typical schoolboy delicacy, Period Pudding.  The apple and peach weren’t too bad either.  But the rhubarb was cooked so long that it took on the consistency and color of tar.

Our letters home often included a desperate plea for a food parcel to replenish the tuck box.

The Nurse had two roles: she tended the normal scrapes and bruises that small boys were prone to, but she was also a mother figure for boys finding themselves away from home for the first time.  And some of them had a legitimate need for mothering: one boy’s parents were administrators in Kenya, and it was impractical to ship him out there for the short Christmas and Easter holidays, so in our first week in September he was coming to terms with the fact that he wouldn’t be seeing his parents until the following July – a tough burden for an eleven year old to bear.  He cried for the whole of that first week.

We were generally pretty healthy.  Most parents weren’t so far away – they could come and take their son away if they suffered serious illness, but this was rarely necessary.  One day an unfortunate boy caught mumps, and was confined to the sickbay; we were told to keep far away.  Speculation was rife about the long term impact this would have on him but he emerged no worse for wear two weeks later, and refused to answer our more salacious questions.

When I look back on those days I find it remarkable that a single teacher and a couple of teenagers could manage and keep safe a group of 40 eleven and twelve year olds for weeks at a time.  I doubt such a staffing ratio would pass muster in America today.

By having such a minimal managerial staff, and with the boys doing so much of the work, the boarding fees my father had to pay could be kept to a minimal £60 per term.  In today’s money that would be about $40 per day.

My father kept all my report cards, and when I was clearing their house for sale I brought them with me.  So I’ll let Flapper have the last somewhat anxious word as I prepared to graduate from the cozy security of Aston Hall:

Housemaster’s Report

His attitude to the normal features of everyday life seems rather airy and unpractical.  His work in the school is excellent, and I hope he will be less in the clouds outside.

Des Shaw

01/19/2024