My Biggest Influence Writing Competition Spring 2013

A Quiet Conversation
Michael Whitehead

It wasn't that I was particularly wilful, or destructive or seriously anti-social at the age of 11. It was just that I was easily led, they said, and had too much energy which often resulted in mischievous or even dangerous antics. I did not take easily to either guidance or correction. Our modest home was suddenly too small for us and I teased the rest of my family unmercifully. In the end I think even my father, the most placid of men, decided that enough was enough.

The decision having been made for me to continue my education away from home, my father and I made a reconnaissance by train, bus, then foot through the school grounds one Christmas holiday. With breath hanging in the morning air we stepped out onto the road in front of the house which towered over us through the mist. A Gothic mansion, angular, grey, unwelcoming, surrounded by dripping trees and guarded by high metal railings. Massive double bronze doors set in a huge columned portico.

Now a successful boarding school, the huge building set in an estate of some 120 acres had been commissioned originally by a millionaire’s wife early in the 20th century and perhaps in a moment of madness. Within a few years she had convinced her husband to relocate, being horrified to see from her bedroom window, the new gas storage tanks built on the horizon by the local council.

Her private house was to be my new home and despite the alacrity with which I had initially greeted the news that I was to 'go away', I sensed cold feet and a worrying feeling that I had no one to blame but myself. The following September I arrived by coach in front of those same magnificent doors complete with a large metal trunk full of everything I would need. After being processed by matron and sundry masters and prefects, I was allotted a dormitory in the mansion itself to be shared with five others.

I quickly determined that the new regime would not undermine my overall attitude and proceeded to take on anyone who represented authority. I continued to show off, be a rebel and a nuisance. This bravado did not go un-noticed and after a few sticky months I was summoned for a meeting with the headmaster in his study.

Dressed usually in a black gown and mortar board he was a product of public school and Cambridge and well over six feet tall, with short grey hair and a severe demeanour. There was nothing he did not know about boys. He was against corporal punishment and the author of a disciplinary code that caused offenders to think hard about their conduct and the world about them. This was 'citizenship' as he called it. It was the ethos of the school. and he quietly explained what he expected of me whilst he sat and I stood.

He went on to outline his plans for my development, saying that by the age of 14 a boy should have learned the ordinary principles of social behaviour. He should know how to stand up and speak to a variety of people, to his mother, to someone else's mother, to his father and to other people at all levels in society, and to do this without any self-consciousness. He should have built a framework of competence in language, mathematics and social behaviour. Later, to begin to exercise taste and by the age of 16 to have acquired a sense of the beautiful and the ugly, of the strong and the weak, of good and evil. And then finally by 17 he should have developed a capacity for judgement. He did not raise his voice once and looked me square in the face. Whilst I did not remember all that he told me that day it began to dawn on me that the faith my teachers and my family had placed in me had somehow to be justified. Better behaviour was probably a good place to start.

Our conversation that day stayed with me for a long time. I expected something entirely different. No one had ever spoken like this to me and, gradually, I began to notice these qualities he mentioned in fellow pupils and the school staff. I was seeing things in a different light which encouraged me to be less 'agin the government'. With this slow but steady change of attitude my school work improved, my physical energies were channelled into different sports and pasttimes and I developed an interest in music. This did not happen overnight however and I relapsed from time to time. But I was getting there, was happier in myself and more at ease with my surroundings.

And that was a start.