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Article: Memories of School House

Length: 1800 words

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30 years ago Brian Jenner left School House. He describes

what it was like to be a boarder at MCS.

Over 45, life becomes not so much about having new

experiences, but recreating old ones. I recently bought a

Phillips Airfryer because it supposedly makes heavenly

chips. My memory of heavenly chips is the ones served by

Brett’s Burgers, which used to be on Cowley Road. Mine

were always doused in mayonnaise and tomato relish.

They tasted especially wonderful because I was an

undernourished boarder at MCS. In the 1980s, the guiding

principle in education was, if an experience was

unpleasant, it was probably good for you. A 21 Century

education puts emphasis on the pupil’s ‘emotional needs’,

I’m not sure we would have been able to tell you what an

emotion was.

The horrors started on my first day. I went to put a

piece of white bread under the grill and I was told that

2nd and 3rd formers were not allowed to make toast. I

practically lived on toast at home, so this was a

terrible deprivation.

School House had many arbitrary rules. We couldn’t climb

the Masters’ staircase, go through certain dormitories,

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studies or the front door. Our lives were governed by

bells. First bell at 7.30am, second bell at 7.45am,

followed by third bell at 7.55am. If you weren’t dressed

and siting down at breakfast by then, the door was shut

and a register was read. The housemaster sat at a high

table with the prefects and matron. He said Latin grace

at breakfast and supper.

In my first term, I got an aching back one evening before

bed and I started sobbing. One of the prefects took me to

matron, who was off duty. She was not happy. She told me

to ‘turn off the waterworks’. It was classic English

stiff-upper-lip conditioning. 24 hours later I was in

hospital with suspected meningitis.

In a Bible class last year and I heard the explanation

why Joseph’s brothers threw him in the pit. It was

because he was pompous, opinionated and a sneak. Things

don’t change. There were cruel nicknames and older boys

could be unpleasant. Aged 12 we were playing poker or

pontoon for small amounts of money in the lunch breaks

and exchanging profanities like New Jersey gangsters.

The idea of privacy has come into fashion since the

1980s. The only study bedroom was occupied by the Head of

House. 20 boys slept in Junior Dorm in black iron beds

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with red bedspreads and white sheets. If Florence

Nightingale had wandered down Junior dorm with her lamp,

she would have not seen anything amiss. Each bed was

separated by a bed side cupboard and a chair. Our clean

laundry was placed on the end of the bed wrapped in a

shirt twice a week.

There were communal baths (we were allocated two a week),

showers and studies. In the studies we had a small

cubicles with a chair to store our books and do our work.

The shared washroom opposite Junior dorm had a stone

floor with a solitary lavatory in the middle of it,

without a seat, which we weed in before going to bed or

during the night. The educational advisors warned my

mother it was spartan, they reassured her that the

academic standards made up for it.

Prefects supervised prep, sat with us at meals, and

watched over us in the dorms. It was quite a benevolent

regime. One of them was quite overweight. Every two weeks

we’d have to change our sheets. We’d bundle them all into

a corner ready to go to the laundry. 40 sheets create

quite a pile. We’d hide under them and growl: ‘FAAAAT

BARNETT’. He’d come over, jump on the pile and sit on us.

That was boarding at its best.

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Thrift was a governing principle at MCS (remember in the

1980s Mr Brown pointed out the Bursar didn’t even like

teachers making photocopies). Somebody once poured a

large quantity of salt in the sugar store. It wasn’t

thrown away. It was served up at breakfast and tea time

until it all went. The boys reacted like it was The Great

Escape. At Stalag Luft III they concealed soil, we

concealed a sugar and salt mix. It would be poured away

surreptitiously in the Rose Garden.

When Mr Ritchie caught us pillow fighting, we’d be sent

down to the Governor’s Dining Room to be set an essay.

This has held me in good stead when faced with writing

crises in my life. At university I was given two hours to

dash off an essay for a competition. I consciously

imagined that I’d been set a punishment by Mr Ritchie,

sat down, and wrote it off the top of my head. I won an

expenses-paid trip to Japan.

As boarders we could profit from the laziness of some

teachers. There was a trade in past exam papers between

different years. I got a copy of a Biology exam for a

couple of Cadbury’s mini rolls. We knew the question was

going to be: explain the digestion process of the ham

sandwich. And we were right. But several of the boarders

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didn’t spot that the question had been changed to a

‘cheese’ sandwich. We lost two marks each.

Interior design, food, furnishings, facilities - all were

primitive. I left school utterly insensitive to décor,

lighting and soft furnishings. MCS was not a ‘feminised’

environment in those days. In the Sixth Form I was able

to decorate my study. The Athena woman with the tennis

ball had passed her prime by then. I put up pictures of

Nastassja Kinski and Enoch Powell.

Tea was served at 4.15 every day in a huge teapot by

retired ladies with names like Mabel or Olive. On Sundays

we were allowed one Mr Kipling’s cake as a treat. Some

boys would try to befuddle Mabel to get more than one

cake. We never had to worry about washing our clothes,

clearing up our dishes or doing any cleaning. One thing,

I never remember being cold. The heating bills must have

given the Bursar sleepless nights.

We had to wear a dark suit for chapel on Sunday mornings.

Rev Ev would take the service. He made us learn the

Catechism by heart for confirmation classes. Mr Cook

would come in and sit at a stall in his full academic

regalia. I remember vividly him reading the story of

Dives and Lazarus at Sunday chapel one morning. MCS was

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definitely on the side of Lazarus in that era. Only in

the 1990s did money start cascading down Headington Hill.

The boarders got a heavy dose of high Anglican

spirituality – something which I’m grateful for.

On my first May morning, Magdalen Tower was covered in

scaffolding. A drunk climbed up and did a moony from 20

metres up. The scaffolding came down and the Tower was

pristine. I noticed recently that it’s getting grubby

again.

The choristers were the reason MSC had boarding

facilities. They would wear their gowns and mortar boards

and gather in the foyer outside the ground floor washroom

for rehearsals. One would bellow ‘Chorus’ at about 4.30pm

and they would disappear through the door and over the

bridge to the college for Evensong.

The choristers were very English, but the school topped

up the fees with boys from Malta, Nigeria, Ghana,

Germany, Croatia, America, Egypt and other nations. It

broadened our horizons. It prepared me for living in

London in the 1990s.

There were many positive peer group influences from other

boys. I remember one boy reading Crime and Punishment in

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the Lower Fourth. Pop music was everywhere. Bob Marley,

David Bowie, Queen, the Sex Pistols: I would never have

had their records at home. TV was turned off at 6.30pm

and put back on at 9pm, but it never appealed much. We’d

read the newspapers every morning in the reading room. By

the time we were in the Sixth Form, we were competing

with each other to get letters to The Times.

As we got older, we had more freedom. We could go to the

Playhouse, the Penultimate Picture Palace and at

weekends, the Bear or the Turf. We used a cashpoint card

to get back in through the side door late on a Saturday

night. The boarders were the backbone of the school

providing on site support for plays, sports teams and

chapel duties. We also had somewhere to skive games,

careers’ lectures and CCF.

There was much that now seems romantic. The smell of cut

grass in Trinity term, filthy teacups, milk on the

windowsills, Saturday school, the sound Magdalen College

bells, the term card with fixtures against Berkhamstead,

Bloxham and Douai, but was it so then? Exam stress

dominated then, as it probably does now.

The Cowley Road had a wonderful subculture. Not only was

there Brett’s (which sadly closed after a fire), there

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was a philatelic shop run by a chap called Geoffrey, the

Choccy, where the owner had a one penny sweet tray, and

the CND bookshop, filled with lots of anti-Thatcher

propaganda and books on alternative living. Then there

was the Private Shop and further up there was Fred’s

Discount store for Christmas presents.

A few years ago I went back to School House. The stone

staircases with worn away lips have been boxed up. The

whole place is light and wholesome, but back then there

were dingy under-used rooms like the games room, sick bay

and the 2c classroom.

The sanitised, comfortable, well-lit 2014 version was a

huge improvement. Still, the old version left me with an

affection for decaying church halls and melancholy

Victorian architecture. It’s striking that the school

site is now all locked up. Anyone could wander in 30

years ago.

MCS was a unique institution. Super-intelligent boys with

unworldly schoolmasters in a community connected to the

university through parents and friendships. I didn’t want

to leave. The habits and values were so deeply

entrenched, it took years to get used to the outside

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world. I still love the smell of an institutional

breakfast.

Boarding was tough. I remember sitting down on a step by

the prefab buildings looking at my school diary, thinking

it would be three weeks until I saw my parents again on

an exeat weekend. I felt utterly desolate. But those

moments passed. There were things to do, conversations to

be had, prep to be finished.

The setting was so beautiful. We’d go down New College

lane on the way to the shops, we went on summer walks

through the Parks, and I’d go running around the Old

Junior and see some of the finest buildings in Europe.

Who could resist an Oxford education? There were so many

dramas. Life as a day boy must have been dull by

comparison. One film that makes me nostalgic for those

days is The Go-Between (1971). We named my son Leo after

the boy. Would we send him to boarding school? Well it

couldn’t be MCS. And other places are all Harry Potter

duvets and ensuite study bedrooms these days. Who’d pay

for that? I’ll probably stick to trying to emulate

Brett’s chips for him.

ENDS