Are you talking to me?: A Life Through the Movies

Captain Bligh pursed his skinny mouth with distaste. Well, I thought, this is going to be fun: one nasty, face-chewing man in long white socks, and one Chinky-faced, oily-haired clot with a foolish accent and a cloak, who was happier with silly women in ringlets and picture hats than with daggers and swords and stuff.

But once Mr Fryer, the dependable first mate, said, ‘Set topsails and headsails,’ we were away on a voyage and I was happily away too. There was an unstoppable swing to the voyage, and the narrative on which we’d embarked, a feeling of being swept up in it all as if you’d been press-ganged aboard and you wouldn’t be able to get off, even if you wanted to. It was like being on a ride at Battersea funfair – a place I haunted for weeks every summer – when you’d ridden the long train to the top of the Water Splash and were turning into the long slide down to where the water lurked, and there was nothing you could do but sit there amid a lot of screaming strangers, and scream along with them.

The Bounty hit the open sea, to the strains of ‘Rule Britannia’. The sailors swarmed up the rigging, spread themselves out on the crossbars like slivers of marmalade along a thin slice of toast, dropped the sails and watched them fill with wind. There was surge. There was heft and swell. There were creaking timbers and sailors doing baffling things with ropes. But things soon took a turn for the worse at deck level.

Seaman Mills, played by Robert Harris, the devil-may-care Irish troublemaker among the roistering matelots, was accused of stealing some ship’s cheeses.

Fletcher Christian listened to the complainant with a superior smile and dismissed the whinger condescendingly. ‘Was there something further you wished to discuss? Early Renaissance sketching, perhaps?’

Below stairs, surrounded by his mates, Mills blamed the captain, who, he said, had asked him take the cheeses to his home. Suddenly we were involved in a hurricane-lamp-lit subversion, as Harris recklessly urged his fellow rank-and-file scum to believe their captain guilty of pilfering. Unluckily, Bligh chose just that moment to descend the gangway, where he stopped to listen to Mills’s accusations. The thuggish sailors fell silent, but Mills was unstoppable: ‘It was the captain helping himself to the ship’s stores,’ he shouted into a mortified silence. ‘The captain’s the thief, not me!’

Behind him, Bligh and Mr Christian took stock of what had been said. For us schoolboys, it was a terribly familiar scene, familiar from a dozen classroom encounters when we’d performed a hilarious impersonation of the Maths master while the Maths master watched unnoticed, from the doorway.

A nasty smile twitched across Bligh’s razor mouth.

Christian recommended cancelling the mouthy Irishman’s grog for a month.

‘Two dozen of the lash will teach him better still,’ grated Trevor Howard. ‘All hands on deck to witness punishment, Mr Christian, if you please.’

Along the row of seats, Mr Breen leaned forward, looked to right and left, and said, ‘Boys? This man is going to be flogged. It may get rather nasty. If any boy wants to sit on my lap, now is the time …’

Film and reality suddenly merged. We were all, choir and altar servers and teachers and actors alike, suddenly complicit in an act of collective sadism. We schoolboys were suddenly hands on deck, forced to gaze at a punishment ritual, whether we liked it or not. Nobody took Mr Breen up on his kind offer, for fear of seeming a wimp. We sat there, entranced by our first exposure to the delights of sadomasochistic teasing.

For minutes that were like hours, the hapless Mills was filmed sitting on a bunk, wondering how savage his punishment was going to be. We were obliged to look very closely at Richard Harris’s handsome, sunburnt face. He appeared half in love with his distress, while a dangling rope behind him suggested a death that might soon overwhelm him. One of the sailors offered him a cup of grog, but he waved it away. All his brave buddies fell silent. And then Quintal, the second mate, dragged something out of a storage cupboard and brought it down to the floor, there to ferret out, from its rummagy depths, a long red crimson sock with a draw-string neck. We watched its retrieval with collective foreboding, as if we were all, individually, the miscreant sailor looking at the thing that was about to lacerate his flesh.

But of course, we knew all about this stuff already. In the early Sixties, it was a matter of no great consequence that schoolboys could be flogged with a ferule, a short rod made from a whalebone encased in leather. If you forgot your sports kit twice in a row, or were caught fighting in class or throwing paper darts or cheeking the bovine Geography master, you might be sentenced to four or six ferulas, or (if you were really evil) nine or (for unimaginable depravity) twelve. At 4 p.m., when the lessons were over, you presented yourself outside the headmaster’s study, where pipe tobacco smells mingled with the sweat from your fear. You joined the queue of chastened youths, who all, in those days, simply accepted that they were about to be whacked and brutalised as a normal part of the school routine.

When it was your turn, you knocked on the door and, at the words ‘Come in!’, turned the handle. Inside the room, everything looked posh and stately, the living room of a successful gentleman-scholar, with a humidor smelling of cigars on the antique desk and a gramophone softly playing some sobbing Italian operatic tenor.

You had to say, ‘Six ferulas, please, sir,’ in a polite, Oliver-Twist-asking-for-more voice that was the second-worst thing about the experience.

The head would write something in a little book (‘Walsh – 22 May 1961 – running in crrdr – 6f’) and stand before you, with one hand behind his back. He would beckon with his fingers for you to extend your arm, palm upwards, and from its hiding place the whalebone would suddenly appear, soaring up then crashing down on your innocent flesh in a vivid trajectory of blurred malevolence, and a noise like ‘Whop!’ that didn’t seem to suit the astounding, metallic pain that shot up your arm. You would put the bruised limb somewhere behind you and extend the other arm, with a kind of stunned fatalism, and that hand would be whopped in turn. Then the first hand again, rising from the depths of wherever it had sunk, like an animal returning to a vicious master out of some sad, vestigial loyalty, then the second, the first, the second …

The headmaster never, ever, looked at you. He stood with eyes cast down at the glum brown carpet, waiting for you to say, ‘Thank you, sir,’ like a good little victim and take yourself off to the lavatories where you anointed your stinging hands with soap and running water.

The worst bit, though, was the waiting. From sentence to execution, hours would pass when nothing entered your mind but the prospect of what was to come. Bluebirds could circle the playing fields, grocer’s boys could whistle on their bicycles in a sonic emblem of the freedom beyond the school gates, but none of it would alleviate the pain of your imminent tryst with The Lash in the headmaster’s study.

So we watched with lively professional interest as Mills, stripped to the waist, was tied to a trellis and Quintal hissed in his ear, ‘Now just remember this, mate, it ain’t me that’s whipping yer.’ I’ve never forgotten those words. The crimson sock from the teak chest yielded up its baleful cargo of a cat-o’-nine-tails, Quintal shook it out and, before the ship’s crew’s incurious gaze, proceeded to lash Mills’s remarkably white flesh.

Counting off the lashes, we took in with our young eyes the blooding and flaying of Mills’s back, the wincing of the more sensitive crew-members, the gloating interventions of Captain Bligh (‘You’re going too soft, Quintal – lay on with a will or you’ll take his place’ – a classic piece of schoolmasterly brinkmanship) and the gradual sinking down of the victim.

Bligh’s mouth twisted in a smile. God I hated him. He reminded me so much of Mr King, the sports master, who always had me in his sadistic sights. Once, when I had weedily underperformed at some football practice, he actually picked me up by the ears and held me dangling in agony. But you didn’t fight back or argue with Mr King. You accepted that he had every right to do horrible things to you, because you were a nasty little boy who was probably in the wrong. All you would say was ‘Flippin’ heck, sir,’ like a Cockney droll, and take your punishment in good heart and not complain. You weren’t allowed to make a fuss, even to answer back, when you were eight, in Wimbledon, in 1962.

When Quintal had delivered the final lash and his shipmates had thrown a bucket of water over the flayed and knackered Mills, we breathed a collective sigh, we innocent choirboys and altar servers – half relief that it was all over and half a perverse satisfaction in cruelty that would live in our impressionable hearts for years. But something more important happened in those five moments, something that was to change us all. It was the first time we’d been confronted en masse by the grotesque unfairness of corporal punishment, a system that had changed little since the days of Tom Brown and Dr Arnold. At school, we sympathised with the boys who were on their way to the punishment room, and afterwards noted their tears, the weals on their flayed hands. But we’d never all witnessed it taking place in front of us before, never watched it as a hostile, wounded, grumbling, collective unit. You could almost hear a mutinous sigh from the fourteen schoolboys in the cinema stalls. We’d all experienced it as individuals. Seeing it portrayed on screen as an example of capricious revenge by an autocratic authority figure was something new.

It was shocking. No, it was outrageous. Why was Mills being subjected to such treatment? Because the Captain said so. Whose rules allowed the Captain to say so? Some naval statute, thousands of miles away in London. For the first time, we considered the possibility that the rules might be wrong – that it shouldn’t be possible to flog someone half to death because of some gubernatorial whim. And that it shouldn’t be possible to find oneself beaten in a book-lined study because some ancient ruling dictated that it should be so, because you had forgotten to bring your sports kit on a particular day. A shock-wave of rebellion passed through us. Mr Breen looked down the line of boys, checking to see that we had all come through the trauma of the flogging scene and nobody was weeping with distress. We weren’t. We were thinking how we’d all put up with it for so long. And how we might change the system so that we wouldn’t have to go through it any more. But where did you start?

In the captain’s cabin that evening, Bligh and Christian discussed punishment. Christian advocated leniency and charm to win over a crew and make them sail a happy ship. Bligh rejected such piffling liberalism. He was an advocate of ‘cruelty with purpose’, the efficiency brought about by pain. When a sailor has to be ordered aloft in freezing weather, Bligh maintained, it was better that he feared the retribution of his captain for being a bad sailor more than he feared death itself. ‘When a man has seen his mate’s backbone laid bare, he’ll remember the white ribs staring at him, he’ll see the flesh jump and hear the whistle of the lash for the rest of his life.’ Against which, all Christian had to say, with a glass of port in his hand, was, ‘I’d steer clear of this cheese, sir – I think it’s a bit tainted.’

I’d never heard the like of it before. Christian was subtly alluding to the cheese-stealing incident, criticising the captain in his own study and getting away with it. This would have been described by our parents as cheek. It was a smart remark on the lips of an inferior, directed at a figure of authority, its implied condemnation of the man and his attitudes sleekly concealed behind a veil of polite warning. It was cool. I was beginning to like Fletcher Christian.

There was another significant row, when Bligh announced his intention of sailing round Cape Horn. Rather than declare him an outright madman for steering them into a Force 12 inferno of crashing waves, 200 m.p.h. tempests and certain death, Christian said, ‘Well, we shall have ourselves quite a little adventure … Of course, Admiral Anson did it, but not in a 91-foot chamberpot.’

Bligh lost his temper at last and told Christian that he possessed only one emotion, namely contempt.

And Marlon Brando said this marvellous thing. He didn’t deny the accusation, but replied: ‘I assure you, sir, the execution of my duties is in no way affected by my private opinion of you.’ And he left the captain silent and fuming, unable to out-sleek his hated rival, glaring uselessly at the sea with his lower lip petulantly stuck out like a drawer in a Regency dresser.

You have by now, I’m sure, realised what was going on, though we hardly knew it ourselves, in the Odeon, Leicester Square, in 1962. We were watching the world about to collapse. We were watching a film about school, in which the whole system of masters and students, bound together in ancient protocols of supposedly common ideals, was about to founder. It was the moment with the crimson sock that did it – that collective shudder about a punishment we couldn’t evade – that made us realise the Bounty was a huge floating metaphor of school. Everything on board had its counterpart in the inky purlieus of Wimbledon College.

Captain Bligh was a classic headmaster – Mr Quelch from the Bunter books, Jimmy Edwards from the Whacko! television series, and Father Egan from our prep school. The sailors on the quay were second-year rude boys, joshingly welcoming the new bug, Wilson; they’d even watched him sign on for the voyage at a stained and pock-marked old desk. They’d told him to beware of the head’s frightful temper. The uniformed midshipmen were prefects, boys you couldn’t be friends with because of their little tin badges of authority and their direct line to the caning room. The three miscreant sailors, played by Richard Harris, Chips Rafferty and Gordon Jackson, were the anarchic naughty boys in class, always getting into trouble with the beaks as if they longed for punishment

And there, right there on screen, was a blueprint about how you could deal with the beaks, if you had the nerve. You could be cool. You could be sleek and inscrutable. You could fight back with words which couldn’t get you into trouble, either because they seemed to be about something else (like saying the cheese was tainted) or because they were simply too polite. We suddenly learned, at eight years old, the vital weapon of irony.

The rest of the film passed in a blur. I came out of the cinema with my head full of sea water, Pacific sunsets, rolling barrels, Tahiti dances, half-naked native girls holding nets in the sea, and disjointed images of the mutiny itself. After three hours of sadism, storms, death, topless women, breadfruit, romance, attempted escape and the final drama of the Bounty in flames, I was overwhelmed by sensation, jaded by extreme emotions, exhausted by proxy passion, and ready for bed. But all the action stuff was superfluous to the two crucial events, the flogging and the shipboard spats between Bligh and Christian. We had all, I think, learned collective outrage, although the actual chances of organising a decent mutiny at school seemed desperately slim.

(#ulink_8b157f78-9755-5c34-8f48-b98a67a1a2e5) More important was the personal lesson I’d learned – about the power of words to help you stand up for yourself.

A week later, at Saturday morning rugby practice, Mr King, the sadistic sports master, stopped our listless passing and tackling and delivered a pep-talk about our lack of energy and attack. We’d heard it all before. We knew he’d pick on someone to hurt, as he always did. He called out Paul Gorham, a small fat boy upon whose prodigious folds of warm flesh we used innocently to rub our freezing hands when nothing much was happening at our end of the pitch.

‘Gorham,’ he said, ‘you’re useless. Why are you not trying harder? Mmm? Mmmmmm?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘So it’s just ignorance, is it, Gorham, rather than just indolence, mmmm?’

‘No, sir. I’m a defender, sir. I thought I’d better wait at this end, sir, in case they tried to break through, sir. And,’ he concluded pathetically, ‘it’s very boring, sir.’

‘Well,’ said Mr King nastily, ‘we must try and make life more exciting for you, mustn’t we?’ And, as he’d done a dozen times to a dozen other boys, he ran his hands over poor Gorham’s face, circled them around the boy’s cold-reddened ears and began to hoist him up off the ground.

‘Aaargh,’ said Gorham. His portly frame dangled agonisingly, four stone of small fat boy held up in the air by two straining lumps of cartilage and flesh.

‘Don’t do that, sir,’ I said, out of nowhere. ‘You’ll hurt his ears, sir.’

Mr King put Gorham down and ambled over to me.

‘What did you say, Walsh?’

‘You’ll hurt his ears, sir, picking him up like that. My father’s a doctor and he says it damages the ear-drums.’ It all came out as a rush. It must have sounded a little too prepared, but I’d been thinking about Mr King’s casual savagery, and I was fed up with it.

‘Do not tell me what to do, boy,’ said Mr King. He sounded momentarily puzzled. Had the parents, urged on by my father, been talking about him? ‘This team is a disgrace to the rugby pitch, and you, Walsh, are one of the worst offenders.’

‘Yes sir,’ I said.

‘You run about aimlessly, you can’t tackle for toffee, you’re positively lily-livered in the scrum. You don’t even try to play rugby. And to cap it all – to cap it all – you are cheeky to my face. I don’t like your attitude, Walsh.’

I looked into his eyes. They were a milky shade of blue. I’d never looked him in the eyes before. You didn’t look a teacher in the eyes. You looked at the ground. You muttered ‘Flippin’ heck, sir’ while he punched you in the stomach or hoisted you aloft by your ears. But for the first time, I looked straight into his blue eyes.

The words came into my head, unbidden, perfect: ‘I assure you, sir, that the execution of my duties on the pitch is in no way affected by my private opinion of you.’