WAGBAI: PREP SCHOOL

WINDLESHAM

            It’s far from my intention to malign today’s version of the school I attended three quarters of a century ago. It has changed a great deal since my day. For some time now, the school has been admitting girls, and I’m sure their presence has had a much needed humanizing effect; and there are day students as well as boarders. Then too, it is no longer owned and operated by the single family, the Maldens, whose ancestor founded it in 1837; fresh ownership must have breathed some new life and new ideas into the ancient institution. There have also been radical changes in educational philosophy since 1944. Discipline—and punishment for lack of it—are no longer the sine qua non. In particular boys’ boarding schools have become more accountable to the education system generally; perceptions about them have changed, and with them, surely, their practices. Corporal punishment—I was about to write “capital”!—is viewed in a different light than it once was. And finally, a caveat: as I write them down today, my memories should not be read as objective assessments but rather colored by the fears and misery and pain of a seven-year-old boy—a boy who was not particularly well adjusted to the rigors of private school. You are encouraged not to rely on their accuracy.

Let’s posit, then, that Windlesham today is a fine school, and that boys and girls are the happy recipients of a wonderful education. Why not? The images I have found online show the faces of many happy children, boys and girls. That is now. This was then…

The head master at the time was Mr. Chris—Mr. Chris Malden, that is, but he was universally known and addressed as Mr. Chris...

 Here he is, in a picture with his family before the time I'm writing about. Mrs. Chris is on the right. Mr, Roger has to be the boy at top right and Miss Anthea the girl at bottom right. The girl at top left must be the Miss whose name I have forgotten. I also forgot the younger son. His name, I now recall, was Mr. Charles.

Mr. Christ was a short, swarthy, and distinguished-looking man with silver hair and intense dark brown eyes, of the kind that looked right through you and saw all the errors of your ways. His dark study, with its heavy drapes, its brown, leather-covered furniture, and its sweet smell of the pipe tobacco that he smoked, was the heart center of the school. We would be invited there for one of two reasons: a school meeting on matters of importance, or a caning. For the latter, it was no use to put blotting paper in your pants—a strategy rumored to reduce the pain; with Mr. Chris it was trousers down, shirt tails up, to reveal the bare bottom, and bend over the arm of one of those leather chairs. I suspect that Mr. Chris enjoyed the spectacle of more small boys’ bottoms than most men do. Whether or not he actually enjoyed the infliction of pain on them remains an open question.

While Mr. Chris was the nominal headmaster, we all knew that it was Mrs. Chris who ruled the roost. She was a formidable woman, a dragon lady, fierce-eyed and ruthless when it came to the maintenance of order in her domain. I remember her as being more masculine than feminine in appearance, and with a manner to match. She was not the person to whom a small boy ran for comfort—no mother figure, then. Rather, she was to be avoided whenever practicable. Passing her on the stairs or in the hallway, you were careful to avert your gaze lest you attract her always critical attention. Perhaps, to Mr. Chris, she was a tender and loving wife. Perhaps, to her children, she was a tender and loving mother. To us boys, she was to be as feared as any harridan.

She did have children, already grown-up children who were also active presences in the school. The one I remember fondly was Miss Anthea, who inherited both her fathers’ dark skin and the kindness that he kept mostly hidden from us. Come to think of it, Miss Anthea’s role in the activities of the school remain a mystery to me. Perhaps it was she who oversaw our swimming lessons in the indoor pool, down past the changing rooms, because I do recall, stripped naked as we were required to do for swimming, feeling intensely bashful in the presence of a woman who was not my mother. Or perhaps this was her older sister, a Miss something, the one we all knew as her mother’s daughter rather than her father’s, another dragon lady, whose name I have thankfully erased from memory. This Miss was as tall and angular as Miss Anthea was comfortable and round, and we feared her as we feared her mother, Mrs. Chris.

There was one other Malden, the most mysterious of them all, because he rarely appeared on our horizon. His name was Mr. Roger, and he was an officer in the English army. When he made his rare appearance at the school he would be resplendent in his military uniform, with a stiff-peaked army cap, medal ribbons on his chest, and a swagger stick tucked underneath his arm. His face was bronzed, like his father’s, and he wore a prickly military mustache on his upper lip. Whenever his name was uttered in our hearing, it was with reverence. He was held up to us boys as the epitome of courage and endurance, a man to be honored and, should we be able, emulated. My lasting impression of Mr. Roger was of the occasion when he gave us a lecture on the Battle of El Alamein, in which he had played a prominent role in beating back German tanks and liberating Egypt from the Nazi occupation. He used a hot and humming projector to show maps, creating sharp shadows on the screen as he pointed to the arrows designating critical movements with his swagger stick. We were never so impressed as we were with Mr. Roger, one of Monty’s heroes on the desert battlefield.

So these were the Maldens, to whom our parents had entrusted the education and the direction of our young lives. They were intent, I’m sure, on doing their best to turn ungovernable young scalawags into men of upstanding moral caliber and disciplined intellect; men of whom their native country could be proud, and on whom she could rely in times of peace as well as war; men destined to lead and rule over those less fortunate than we privileged few. There were a handful of us, though, myself included, who did not fit into the picture, and who either felt chronically uncomfortable and out of place… or who rebelled.