School in England
“Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.”
– Chinese Proverb
A typical student?
As I approach my 90th birthday, I reflect on the fond memories of the year I spent at Haileybury and Imperial Service College in Hertford, England. Somewhere down the line, the school dropped Imperial Service College from the name, and they didn't even consult me! It was 1947 and I had been selected as one member of a group of 22 U.S. private school students who were awarded a full scholarship to attend an English Public School. No one could explain why these elite English private schools were called Public Schools. And no one could explain to me why I was chosen to join this select group. I had a good scholastic record but was not in the top five percent of my class. I was on the varsity football, basketball and track teams but there were far better athletes. I was active in student government but not a class officer. The only thing I can figure out was that I had been selected because I was a “typical” student.
New York City was a long way from my home in Kansas City, still I found my way and joined 21 other English-Speaking Union students boarding the Queen Mary for our trip to England. In those days, the Queen Mary was a three-class ship and we students were relegated to the lowly tourist class with cabins at the bottom, just above the hull. Of course, that did not prevent a group of curious teenagers from exploring the entire ship.
Monet must have painted the grass in South Hampton. I had never seen grass that lush and green. When they showed me my cubicle in Lawrence House, the Haileybury school term had started two weeks earlier. They obviously did not expect too much of me academically for I was assigned courses with the boys who were destined for state colleges, not Oxford or Cambridge. And it was just as well because I found the academic level was far higher than it was in the U.S. Also, there was a language problem. For the first few days, I was not always sure which class I was attending as the accent was so strong, I wasn't sure they were speaking English. Of course, they were speaking English and I was speaking American.
At my U.S. school, I had shared a room with two others, but now I was sharing with 43 others. Each student had a cubicle separated from its neighbor by a short, three-foot wall. A cubicle contained a bed, a chest of drawers and a footlocker. The youngest students’ cubicles were at one end of this large room and the more senior students at the other. I was shocked to learn that the ten-year-olds at the far end served as “fags” and were required to shine shoes and do other errands for the more senior students housed at the other end of the room. I was quite proud that I had a picture of my U.S. girlfriend for my dresser. To the best of my knowledge, I was the only one in the dorm that had a girlfriend. The British may have been miles ahead of us scholastically, but they were way behind socially. It seemed that the opposite sex was seldom discussed.
There was a strong sense of community, team play and sportsmanship at Haileybury. I was eager to join the house rugby team and I felt welcomed right from the start. Rugby football is a distant relative of American football. Since players played without all the American padding, I assumed it was not as rough, but I was very wrong. There were no substitutions and no timeouts. I had to unlearn hanging on to the ball after being tackled. If you did not immediately release the ball you would be penalized. So, when tackled you release the ball, but keep your body between the ball and the opposite team, because once you are down, a scrum would form and the biggest guys on both sides would try to kick the ball back to the smaller runners. Once I got the hang of it, I fell in love with rugby, and I was pretty good.
I was on the track team. But I never had a chance at cricket, which to play properly, a player must start in grade school. But I did learn that cricket was not a game for sissies and the ball was harder than a baseball, and no one wore gloves. It takes nerve to be standing less than 10 feet from a batter who could hit the ball as hard as any baseball, yet you had to handle it barehanded.
My housemates and I had many cordial debates about the merits of our countries. The craziest debate was over which country drives on the correct the side of the road!
What I hadn't thought about until I arrived in England was how much they had suffered during the war. Although the war had been over for two years, the rationing in England was far worse than in the U.S. at the height of the war. Meat, shoes, butter, everything was rationed, and no one complained about it. I never liked Brussels sprouts but we sure ate a lot of them. There was the usual casual griping about the food, but it was good-natured. Serving that limited diet in the U.S. would cause rioting in the streets.
If any of my schoolmates remember me, they probably remember me for introducing popcorn into their diet. My parents had sent me a bag of popcorn and a bottle of popping oil. There was a stove near our study for making tea. I found a pan, put in the oil to heat, and added the popcorn. Think about it. If you have never seen popcorn pop, it is truly unbelievable.
The British school year makes far more sense than ours does. Our school year was designed when they needed the kids to work on the farm, so we have long summer vacations, so long that kids get out of the routine of school. The British have a more enlightened system of a month vacation at Christmas, a month in the spring, and about six weeks in summer. This meant that when July 4 came along, all my U.S. buddies were sailing and swimming, and I was still in the classroom. Being the only American in the school I felt I had to make a statement. I took a pillow slip and felt tip markers and made an American flag. That was the easy part. The hard part was sneaking out a window and climbing across the rooftops to reach the flagpole that graced the school entrance. There it was waving proudly the next morning. Of course, no one could guess who the culprit was.
I was not surprised when I had a summons from the Head of school that morning. I figured that he would not be as upset with me for raising the flag as he would be for my breaking curfew and risking my neck climbing across the roofs. The traditional punishment was caning where you were bent over a desk and received as many as 10 lashes with a cane. I wasn't looking forward to that but was prepared. Instead he gave me a far worse punishment. I was required to write a 1,000-word essay on the futility of the American Revolution. The Head was a good sport and sent the flag back to my mother who had it framed.
In those days international phone calls were prohibitively expensive, and, to my knowledge, we did not even have a phone accessible to students in the school. I hadn't talked to my mother for almost a year so when I called her from New York she recognized my voice but thought I was putting her on because I had a strong English accent. That was gone within a week.
Unlike U.S. schools I did not hear anything from Haileybury for at least 10 years. There were no fund-raising letters, no alumni publications, and I don’t believe there was an alumni organization. I tried to contact my classmates, but this was long before the days of the internet. I wrote a couple of letters to the school requesting contact information but had no success. To this day I think about my classmates and wonder what they did with their lives. They were a brilliant group, and I am sure they accomplished great things.