Stand Before Your God by Paul Watkins

Author:Paul Watkins [Watkins, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76566-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

I had myself in tears the first morning of classes, trying to get dressed in the Eton uniform. The gold studs that attached the starch-stiff collar to my shirt kept popping loose. My sleeves hung down almost to the tips of my fingers. My trousers were too big, so I had to buy big clown-type suspenders for keeping them up.

The Lower Master, who we called the Lower Man, kept coming up to me and saying that my shoes weren’t clean. The Lower Man was in charge of the junior boys in the school the same way that the Headmaster was in charge of the senior boys. The Lower Man had a nose like a hawk and eyes that stared straight through you. He’d come up from behind, so it was always a surprise when his arms slithered around your shoulder. He asked my name and my house and my tutor.

I didn’t like polishing my shoes. I’d been in trouble for it at the Dragon School as well. So I went down the High Street, bought some floor polish, and painted my shoes with the stuff. After that, the shoes would wink and blind me on a sunny day.

I learned about not doing up the bottom button on my waistcoat, and I learned that the tailcoats looked strange but were actually very comfortable.

We wore the uniform all day and every day. It wasn’t like at the Dragon, where we had our Sunday-best suits and then the blue corduroy for the rest of the week. When the weather got cold, we had to buy old Army or Air Force greatcoats because it wasn’t allowed not to have a winter jacket that didn’t cover the tails. The only coat that I could find came from a flea market up in Slough. It was a gray Russian thing with a red lining and a place for a sword to be worn.

On Saturday afternoons, we could wear Standard Change. This meant jacket and tie. But even here, there was kind of a uniform, because everyone wore Harris Tweed jackets, baggy corduroys, and Army sweaters. You had to wear Standard Change when you went down the High Street and crossed the bridge into Windsor, because there were people who would chase you and beat you up or throw you in the river if they knew you went to Eton. They were called Oiks or Camden Town Bootboys or sometimes the Great Unwashed. With them, there was no fooling around. If you didn’t run, they’d kill you, and if you stayed to fight, they always had something to cut you with, like razors or Stanley knives, or bits of broken bottle.

• • •

I was not a Pretty Boy.

If I’d been pretty, I wouldn’t have been last choice on the list of servants to the senior boys.

It was a tradition at Eton. All first-year boys had to be servants to the senior boys.

In the end, the House Captain took me on, to set some kind of example. His

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