London Triptych by Kemp Jonathan

Author:Kemp, Jonathan [Kemp, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780956792693
Publisher: Myriad Editions
Published: 2011-05-15T23:00:00+00:00

1954

I was carted off to boarding school at such a preposterously young age that I cannot now recall anything about my life before that, try as I might. Fleeting scenes of ambrosia, paradise lost, Eden before the fall, that kind of thing. An innocent brightness before the descent of darkness, like a last glimpse of sun from the edge of a cloud as it sinks out of sight. Boarding school is not a place for children. Indeed, one is actively discouraged from being a child the minute one arrives. One must replace joy with discipline, freedom with submission, and curiosity with a deadened obedience to umpteen rules and regulations, facts and figures. It is a painful process, growing up by force, becoming an adult at the age of six, becoming a ‘little man’, as they called us. How we became little men, though, was through a brutalisation of the highest order. If you weren’t willing or able to beat others into submission, you were beaten into submission yourself. I was weak by nature and physically small for my age and so it was my lot to suffer during my time there, caught as I was between the barbarity of the staff and the decadence of the older boys. I think now that I and the other weak boys were punished for not conforming, or for not being able to conform. I never breathed a word of it to my parents, and of course my experience of boarding school made me long to conform even more, rather than the reverse. I used to pray every night for God to kill me, or save me. When he did neither, I became an atheist. Since that time I’ve never once doubted the non-existence of God.

The sexual indignities I had to endure at the hands of the older boys were made even more unbearable by the fact that, for the most part, I took a shameful delight in them. I even looked forward to some of the encounters, had crushes on some of those older boys, though none ever showed me a scrap of affection.

The only thing about becoming an adult that I rushed towards with open arms was that I would no longer suffer the brutality of school, and could blot the experience from my memory, along with my desires. Life seemed so much easier for adults. In many ways, I was much more capable of conforming to the accepted behaviour of middle-class adults, though I say that with absolutely no feeling of pride whatsoever. I’ve always been too frightened to do anything else. My timidity shames me all the more since I met Gore.

Sis ut videris was our school motto. ‘Be as you seem.’ No pretence, no airs, no affectations. We would become good, solid, bourgeois men, reliable, capable, honest and true. Masculine. Transparent. Be as you seem. Ah, but we seemed, and still do, so much less than we really are or might be. Right down to marrying Joan, I did exactly as expected.

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