The Enchanted Places (1974) by Christopher Milne

Author:Christopher Milne [Milne, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447269847
Publisher: Pan Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

14. The Busy Backson

On 15 January 1929 – the only date that has survived from my childhood unforgotten – wearing my new, bright red blazer and my bright red, rather large and loose-fitting peaked cap, with my hair of a length which, if not exactly boyish, was at least no longer girlish, at half past eight in the morning and accompanied by Nanny, I climbed onto a number 11 bus at the corner of Church Street, bound for Sloane Square and my first day at Gibbs. Four hours later I was home again and in my father’s library, telling him all about it, telling him about the thing that had impressed and amazed me most.

‘We have to call Mr Gibbs “Sir”.’

‘Sir’ was what Gertrude called my father, what servants called their masters, what people who worked called the people they worked for, not what boys like me had to call anybody, surely. I expected my father to be as amazed and indignant as I was, and was even more amazed when he wasn’t. Gently he explained to me that schoolboys did address schoolmasters as ‘Sir’, that he had done so when he was a boy and that now I must. Gently he reassured me . . . And thus we reached a small landmark in our lives. For me it marked the full realization of the newness and strangeness of the world I had just entered; for my father the first of many opportunities to help me on my way through it.

Gibbs was – indeed it still is – a boys’ day school. It was then at the bottom of Sloane Street and Mr C. H. Gibbs was its headmaster. It took boys from the age of about six to the age of thirteen. I arrived at eight-and-a-half, stayed for four terms, then went on to boarding school. Gibbs for me was therefore a bridge between kindergarten and prep school, between Miss Walters and Boxgrove, between Plasticine and raffia on the one hand and Latin declensions and simultaneous equations on the other. It was a bridge between childhood and boyhood, between the nursery world of Nanny and the drawing-room world of my parents, between the years in which I could identify myself with the Christopher Robin in the books and the years spent trying to escape from him. And since my arrival at Gibbs also marks the halfway point in this book, it is perhaps a good moment to pause and look back.

At Gibbs I was still living in the nursery. Nanny was still very much at the centre of my life. She took me there every morning and was waiting in the hall to take me home at the end of the day. She came to the lantern lectures we had every Tuesday afternoon and helped me with the essays I had to write about them the following weekend. She prompted me with:

Lars Porsena of Cluseum, by the nine gods he swore . . .

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