WHAT A GOOD BOY AM I: THE STORY CONTINUES

AMBLESIDE

I would be wrong to suggest there were no happy moments in that first year at Windlesham. Were I to able to be more consciously in tune with my surroundings, as a little boy, there could be no place in the world of greater natural beauty than Lake Windermere and the hills and dales surrounding it. The village (town, now?) of Ambleside nestles at the northern end of Windermere, and Croft House...

.... the temporary home to Windlesham during the war years, was perched a short distance away, on the northwestern corner of the lake, up the hill from the main road. Behind the big, white house, the woods stretched further up a long, steep hill, ending—so far as I remember—at a stacked stone wall of the kind that is ubiquitous in the Lake District, defining the grazing areas for the farmers’ flocks of sheep. It’s perfect country for the annual sheepdog trials, where border collies (like our dog Hank, but trained for this work) go chasing up the hillsides at a whistle from their owner and herd mobs of reluctant sheep across to different grazing lands, or, every year, down into the valley to be shorn. The hillsides are dotted with the shepherds’ crofts, and the almost daily mists that rise over the lake and the frequent, mostly gentle rains bestow the landscape with that limpid look of watercolor paintings.  The climate is mostly temperate in the three seasons other than winter. The winter, though, can be quite brutal, bringing with it an assault of frigid winds and snow; and gusty squalls can roil the lake at any season, endangering boaters with their unpredictable arrival. I was caught once on Windermere, some years later, by just such a squall in a small sailboat and can testify to its terrifying intensity.

As a grown-up you can perhaps imagine no place more idyllic for a boy to go to school. For this small boy, however, the grand house with its strict rules felt like prison; only outside, in the woods, at play, did I escape that feeling for moments that seemed all to brief and ended, always, in the clang of the bell that called us back  to school…

We played war. It was wartime, after all. Running off with shrieks of delight into the woods, at break time or on a free afternoon, we boys would search for sticks of the right heft and length to serve as swords or rifles and, thus armed, scatter to hide behind the trunks of great chestnut trees or outgrowths of rock to ambush our enemies. Sometimes you might be lucky enough to be chosen to be on the English side, and you could fight the Hun or the Jap (yes, we did need the denigrating insults to belittle the enemy and assert our superiority) in often hand-to-hand combat. At other times, in the role of the Hun or the Jap yourself, you’d be forced to succumb to the victorious Allies. It was “Bang, you’re dead”, and you’d have to lie there in the mud and the mulch of rotting golden leaves while the battle raged around you. The not unpleasant tang of moldering foliage stays with me to this day.

And there were walks. They were group walks, to be sure, but they took you away from school. You’d have to choose a partner and walk in pairs, down across the main road to the path along the lake, with the trees on one side and the silver waters of the lake on the other. The woods to your right are filled with fiddlehead ferns, a luminous green in the spring and summer and crushed to a withered brown in autumn. Once in a while, you cross an old stone bridge that straddles a stream...

... its waters cascading down from the hills to meet the lake. Along the way, you’ll have to negotiate a series of stiles, constructed of grey slate slabs between two lengths of wall...

... and you’ll need to be careful not to lose your foothold on the slippery, moss-green step. With luck, down by the lake, you come upon a boathouse pier reaching out over the glassy surface of the water, and from its worn wooden boards you might catch a glimpse of a brown trout darting in the shallows from the sound of your approach.

So, yes. I would be wrong to say there were no moments of contentment in that first year at Windlesham, moments of escape from that aching, hollow feeling of loneliness and alienation with which the experience of boarding school can afflict the child who is not, like some others, a good fit. While I had no way to know this at the time, I am convinced it was the solace of this kind of escape into nature that shaped my consciousness and left me with the understanding, at the age of twelve already, that my life’s mission was to be a writer and a poet. A romantic notion, perhaps, but one that emanates from the landscape that was the inspiration of the Romantic poets themselves.