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Lawrence College, Mt Abu
The Lawrence College, Mt Abu, was one of
four schools associated with the name Lawrence. It was a military-funded
school and my eldest sister, Kathleen, and I were there during 1935.
It was, like other Lawrence schools, a co-educational establishment.
The senior staff were mainly retired, ex-military personnel.
The Headmaster was Major Tarbottom (retd.),
an unfortunate name. I had never heard it before and always wanted
to see his backside to find out just where the tar was spread or, was
he born with tar on his bum? I would ask myself. Furthermore, I was
intrigued because I felt that, if the tar had been applied after he
was born, the application must have been very painful. I had seen hot
tar being spread on roads and, on one occasion, had seen a labourer
get some on his bare feet and yell as though he was about to die. Poor
Major Tarbottom, I thought, it must have been so painful.
I was the youngest boarder in school and
all the girls used to want to fuss over me. On one occasion, three
or four of them, teasing me and telling me that they were going to kiss
me, tried to pull me into the girls’ dormitory. I struggled without
success and finally, just at the door of the dormitory, I must have
decided that attack was the best defence because I leapt forward and
bit the girl immediately in front of me on the chest. I bit hard.
She screamed out in pain and let go of me,
likewise the others. I didn’t get kissed, — more’s the
pity when I think of it and, many times since then, as I grew older
and “discovered a thing or two”, I have wondered how nice
it might have been to bare the young lady’s breasts and service
her properly.
*****
Lawrence College, Mt Abu — Main
Building
Lawrence College, Mt Abu —
Playing Field
Our junior classroom was on a floor above
the gymnasium, a completely separate building from the main school block.
I noted that during classes several of the students would put up their
hands and say “May I be excused please, Miss?”. Then the
teacher would say “Yes”, and the student would leave the classroom
for what seemed like an eternity. I wanted my share of this absence
from the class-room and asked one of the pupils what it was all about.
“Well, it’s when you want to go
to the ‘bogs’ .” I was told.
So the next day I asked to be excused, but
when I got outside the classroom I could not be bothered to run across
the playing field to the bogs in the intense heat but, instead, I just
imagined I was running across. My eyes did all the work but I totally
miscalculated the “speed” of my imaginary “run”.
Right, now I am at the top of the stairs.
Now I am at the bottom. Now I have run across the playing field and
am at the bogs. Now I am doing a pee. I’ve finished and am running
back and up the stairs. I have returned. Now I enter the classroom.
Of course the whole deal took less than
fifteen seconds. I re-entered the classroom.
“Well, didn’t you want to go,
after all?” asked the teacher and all the other kids giggled.
“I went,” I lied.
The teacher, almost certainly thinking I
had pissed on the landing, went out and had a look. She came back in,
looking puzzled.
“You were very quick.” She commented.
“I think I must have run very quickly.”
I said, and then realised I was not breathing heavily enough to convince
her that I had just “run” a couple of hundred yards.
After that I lost interest in being excused
from the class. It was far too complex a business just to get out of
the classroom for a few minutes.
*****
I had noticed that Mum and many visitors
to our home appeared to take pleasure in holding the push-handle and
levering my baby sister’s pram on its two rear wheels and cooing
and clucking at Phil, who was in it. Phil seemed to enjoy this a lot
and she would coo and cluck and occasionally giggle back at them.
One day, while Mum was busy working with
her sewing machine on the front verandah and Phil was in the pram, I
decided that I would follow the example of my seniors and amuse our
baby by doing the same thing. Each time I levered the handle further
back, thus lifting Phil further and further towards a vertical position.
Each time I would call out “Coo, Coo, little baby” and she
would really laugh and giggle. I loved the effect the game was having
on her.
Then suddenly, I overdid the levering and
Phil came tumbling out of the pram and onto her face on the verandah
floor. There was no reaction for a full second or so. Then suddenly
she let out an almighty scream. I was terrified and so was Mum who
leapt out of her chair and came to rescue Phil, while at the same time
shouting at me, “What have you done, you bad boy?”
I expected to see Phil’s face flattened
like a plate, at least, and pouring with blood. I was out of my mind
with guilt and fear. A bloody great bump came up on Phil’s forehead
yet, apart from that, there was no lasting damage. However, I didn’t
wait, I had done a bunk into the house and hid from Mum while she attended
to the situation by nursing the baby and cuddling her close. Phil eventually
stopped crying and I heaved a sigh of relief, but I did not even push
a pram again for years after that episode.
*****
Mount Abu is home to monkeys by the million.
They are cheeky and often, because they seem to move in great packs
of several hundreds at a time, threatening. Dad had planted a garden
and grew lots of vegetables. He was particularly proud of his tomatoes,
huge things, bigger than a cricket ball.
From time to time the garden would be invaded
by monkeys and they would virtually denude the tomato bushes, sitting
there with their families eating all the ripe fruit. We kids were afraid
of them and stayed in the house watching Dad trying to dissuade the
marauders from their raids.
Usually it was a case of trying to throw
tomatoes at the “bunders [1] ” — incidentally, that is where the English
slang word “bounder” comes from — but the monkeys were
able to duck and dodge the missiles and would often catch and hurl them
back at Dad. The inscrutable expressions on their tiny black faces
seem to suggest that they are glowering and ready to attack. Otherwise,
they bare their teeth at you and it is hard to decide whether they are
laughing or letting you know that they mean business.
The Mount Abu lot are biggish — maybe
120 pounds or more, when adult — and powerfully built. To be honest,
I think Dad was more than a little scared of the things himself.
*****
Lawrence College, Ghora Gully –
1936
In between 1935 and 1936, my father was
posted to Landi Kotal in the North-West Frontier Province region of
India. It used to be the last town on the road up to the Khyber Pass.
As a family we stayed in the town of Peshawar.
The landscape around Peshawar and Landi
Kotal was mountainous. Peshawar was fairly well populated and green
while Landi Kotal was hardly more than a village built well into the
Hindu Kush mountains and desolate beyond imagination. This was the
frontier between India and Afghanistan where there was constant fighting
and frequent marauding raids by the Afghanis. The people of the North
Western Frontier were mainly Pathans and Pushtun many who were regarded
as descendants of Persians and the progeny of the same tribes as Ghengis
Khan. The men-folk were often tall and ferocious-looking people with
European complexions — fair skins and blue eyes.
On one occasion, Dad had taken me up to
Landi Kotal for the day, as company for himself on the longish drive.
He had left me in his office while he went out to check on his company
in the field. After some little while, getting fidgety, I walked out
on to the verandah and then across the maidaan [2] looking for my father.
Coming to the edge of the maidaan, I stared over into the distance and
saw the most amazing sight — four bodies of Afghanis were hanging
by their necks from the crossbar of a construction which had been set
up for just such a purpose.
Frightened, I ran back to the office and
sat down and waited until Dad returned. But I never said anything to
him about the hangings neither did I query them. Many years later as
an adult, I came across a photograph which was of four bodies hanging
in the same way. Dad said that they were probably the same chaps who
had been hanged — I think the word “lynched” would have
been more appropriate — on the day we went to Landi Kotal.
Peshawar, like Quetta, was quite prone to
severe earthquake tremors and I can remember quite clearly on one occasion
being at the movies with one of our bearers. I suppose I must have
been dozing, but I was suddenly disturbed as all hell seemed to break
loose. The audience were leaping out of their seats and rushing for
the exits.
At the time I thought that there had been
an announcement on the screen that there were prizes, presents or something
being given to anyone who got out of the cinema really quickly. I jumped
out of my seat and joined the melee heading for the door. I had lost
my bearer but soon found him again outside — Did he have any presents
or prizes and where could I get one? I wanted to know. It was only
then that I discovered that there had been an earthquake and part of
the cinema walls had collapsed.
*****
For a few weeks my sister, Kathy, and I
attended the local day-scholar convent in Peshawar. But March 1936
arrived all too soon and we were shipped off as boarders to the Lawrence
College, Ghora [3] Gully. The train station was
at Rawalpindi and from there it was a bus-ride, followed by a pony-
or mule-ride up to the school. I was in the junior school and Kathleen
was in the Girls’ School. We had a common playground.
There was a bit of bullying amongst the
kids, and now and then I would come in for a measure of it. “Fight
back” was the watchword of the time, but in my case it usually
resulted in an additional punch on the nose or a thump in the belly.
I don’t remember how she came to hear of it — Kathy was my
own special guardian and Bodacea and always protected me — but
I remember that she had only landed a few juicy thumps on my current
attacker when word got around that she was “tough” and not
to be “messed with”. They stopped bullying me after that.
*****
There were a couple of strange kids in Ghora
Gully. When we caught butterflies, grass-hoppers and dragon-flies we
would take them to Dickie Hall, another pupil, who promptly ate them.
I remember spending hours and hours trying to swat these flying creatures
with my hat, shaped like that of a French Foreign Legionnaire, so that
I could feed Dickie with them. Surely, I thought, he must be even hungrier
than I am.
But we were all hungry most of the time.
I remember on one occasion finding a half empty, discarded, baked-bean
tin on the hillside between the back of the school and the teachers’
house. It had probably lain there for several days. I stuck my finger
in and greedily devoured what remained of the beans only to find that
nestling under the top, which had not been properly removed by the tin-cutter,
was a great fat slug. I felt sick to my stomach but figured that, if
Dickie actually chewed and swallowed those other “juicy” creatures,
perhaps it was OK, since I had only eaten the beans and thrown away
the slug!
*****
As juniors, we were assisted in our dressing,
washing and bathing by “ayahs” [4] . There was one of whom I was
particularly fond. On more than a few occasions, sleeping in the dormitory,
I would have the misfortune to wet the bed, or worse, mess myself during
the night. This ayah would come on early duty and gently wake me and
take me off for a bath and sneak my pyjamas off for a thorough laundering
before dressing me in my school uniform and before the other kids were
awake.
Maybe some of the other kids had the same
mishaps ; I never got to find out if that was the case, but nobody ever
scolded me for messing the bed and neither was I ever taken before Miss
Clegg (the headmistress ) for a trashing — at least not for messing
the bed. My ayah was, I figured, a real trooper for keeping my secret.
In later years I have thought about those
episodes and cannot help but feel that they may have been due to lack
of parental presence, sheer loneliness and dread. I was, after all,
only six years old, away from my parents for nine months at a time and,
living in an almost perpetual state of fear, constantly terrified of
a wallop or even a “few of the best” from Miss Clegg’s
crop — a length of date-palm branch with the leaves removed, but
the knobbly ends still intact.
*****
There is the story of a classroom where
each morning there was a puddle of what appeared to be pee on the floor.
The teacher had become quite concerned about the occurrences and had
tried to find out who the culprit was. But no amount of general questioning
could identify the boy or girl responsible. In desperation, she finally
said :
“Well I’m going to turn the black-board
away from the class and towards me so that no-one else can see it.
All of us will close our eyes and promise not to open them until told
to do so. The guilty person can then come up to the board and write
his or her name on the board and return to their seat so that when we
open our eyes only I will know who it is. Is that agreed?
The class all agreed and so the blackboard
was duly turned away from the class and the children were told to close
their eyes.
“All eyes closed now. Let the guilty
person some up and write their name on the board.” said the teacher,
closing her own eyes.
There was the sound of feet walking across
the classroom floor and the “squeak, squeak” of the chalk
writing on the black-board. There was a bit of a delay and again came
the sound of the culprit retracing their steps across the floor and
returning to their desk. The teacher opened her eyes and told the class
to do so too.
On the floor was yet another pool of pee
and writ large on the blackboard, — “The Phantom Pisser
Strikes Again.”
Ayahs
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