Read Online Basil Street Blues by Michael Holroyd - Free Book Online

great success: doing wonderful things on the cricket and football pitches, excelling as an intrepid diver into the school plunge, performing miracles in the gym and, despite only scraping into the lowest form at Eton, gaining the approbation of the headmaster. This was not easy. Ronald Vickers was ‘a remote austere figure, despite his underlying care and interest’, his son Richard admits in the school history. ‘…Discipline was extremely strict.’ Except for his academic record, Kenneth ‘was everything I wasn’t!’ my father exclaimed. ‘At first my life was absolute hell. I was scared stiff of the bigger boys and when frightened I talked my head off instead of being quiet. I was the butt of the school bullies. My locker was ransacked, my belongings stolen.’
    This glimpse of rampageous school life differs from the picture of an extended family presented in the school history. There is no illustration in this book of the most visible Scaitcliffe master, Edgar Ransome (nicknamed Rampoo), but there is a fine description of him which contrasts rather dramatically with my father’s boy’s-eye view at the age of ten. Richard Vickers writes:
    Despite his great size – he weighed over 20 stone – he was a slow bowler of considerable skill who regularly attended nets each morning of the summer term. He was also a fine amateur pianist, whose rollicking songs were always an amusing interlude on winter evenings. His class presence was truly formidable, so woe-betide any boy who was slow to learn his tables or whose writing strayed from the line during copy-book exercises.
    Certainly he must have had a lasting effect on my father whose writing never strayed from the line until his final illness. Ransome was the junior form master at Scaitcliffe for twenty-six years before retiring to be a tobacconist in Basingstoke. To cover his bald head he always wore a cap, and became ‘pre-eminent’ among the ‘great characters of the school’s early years’. But my father greatly feared and disliked him. ‘I never quite understood how Ransome got a job at Scaitcliffe,’ he wrote.
    He was a particularly coarse old man with a large stomach and a big fleshy hooked nose from the end of which hung a permanent dew drop. He couldn’t even speak correctly, so heaven knows why [Ronald] Vickers, a purist, came to engage him.
    One of my worst recollections of Scaitcliffe was being made to stand in the corridor for bad behaviour. Should Vickers happen to come along the culprit got six sharp cuts with the cane. Edgar Ransome, who took the lowest class of very small boys, loved to inflict this form of punishment. His classroom was opposite Vickers’s Study door, so the unfortunates were particularly vulnerable.
    Basil could not wait for the holidays. During the war, the family spent more time at Brocket, but because of school he was seeing less of Joan. By the age of twelve his best friend had become his dog, a mongrel officially named Pat whom he called ‘Woorah’ – ‘I don’t know why.’ Looking back at this period he was to write: ‘I loved my dog dearly but did nothing for him. Nan [Kate Griffin] fed, sometimes bathed and generally looked after all our animals. My contribution was to reckon up how long he could live and imagine there would be no world for me when he died. And now I can’t even remember how he died or when.’ Knowing as I do his last solitary years with his dog, this passage has for me an almost Johnsonian tone of self-recrimination.
    My father’s last year at Scaitcliffe was more tolerable. Memories of his glamorous elder brother were receding and he himself was a bigger boy now – not someone who could easily be bullied or have his locker ransacked. He was playing cricket and football not too badly. He had escaped from Ransome’s form and there were fewer beatings. He had even learnt when to be quiet and not talk his head off. ‘I wasn’t too unhappy,’ he concluded. ‘I kept out of the way.’
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