10. “Aggie” Travers and the West Wing
Universally known (behind her back) as “Aggie”, I believe Miss Travers’s full first names were Agnes Margaret. She looked after what were officially called the “Junior Senior Boys” or some such name, but this group was more usually referred to as the “West Wing”. It covered the boys from the age they started “going out” to school till the time they became full Senior Boys, at around fourteen, and went into the Colt House. The large playroom, and a smaller room for quieter study, was on the ground floor, together with the washrooms, the laundry rooms and a corridor where we kept our shoes and the bag with our P.E. kit for school. The dormitories were on the first floor, as was Miss Travers’s own room. She kept this well locked and had a remarkable number of other keys for various rooms and cupboards, as well as the stables. She kept all these on a big ring tied around her waist under her skirt. The keys rattled as she walked, which was useful since we always knew when she was coming. When she had to enter her room, she would take a quick look up and down the corridor before bunching up her voluminous skirt to extract the keys.
The great thing about Miss Travers was her glorious predictability. I suspect she deliberately played to her mannerisms. She had her set phrases and never failed to say them. If anything was amiss, she always began “Can I have a word in your ear?” Before Chapel and Meeting, it was “Clean your shoes within an inch of their lives!” When we took an empty tube of toothpaste to her, to prove we needed a new one, she would declare, “I’m a past master at this” and squeeze an abundant amount from it. After breakfast, if honey was served instead of marmalade, it was “How I hate being sticky!” as she headed for the washbasin. If an old boy came back on a visit and had long hair, it was “I’m afraid he’s rather let himself go to pieces”. Another of her breakfast specialities was to leave her place to get herself a cup of tea, then return to the table having spilt a certain amount into the saucer on the way. She would then pour the tea from the saucer back into the cup, something I later learnt is not exactly comme il faut.
Anybody who has forgotten all this will assuredly remember the morning call “Time, runs and showers!”
Though Miss Leila had taken some ideas, early on, from the Montessori method, she later stiffened them with importations from Gordonstoun. Principal among these were the early morning runs and showers for the boys, from West Wing age upwards. These were done, in all seasons, in shorts and plimsolls – tops were banned whatever the weather. The run went from the cattle grid just below the Colt House to the second cattle grid at the beginning of the Hornbeam Wood, a distance there and back of about two-thirds of a mile. We were exempted only when there was heavy snow on the ground, since we might slip. The message never got to the powers above that icy puddles in sub-zero temperatures were more dangerous still. Back in the house, we had a ten-second cold shower. The water could be gelid, but after the temperatures outside it sometimes seemed luxuriantly warm. At breakfast, the girls, who got a grandstand view from their upstairs dormitories, would offer pointed comments on our athletic performances. I once protested with Miss Travers that the girls ought to do runs too, and got the surprising answer that “It’s not their fault. When we were at Mote House they did” (though not topless, surely?). Apparently, it was felt that the position of their dormitories at the top of the house made it impossible. They might have slipped on the stairs, poor things, while we were outside slipping on the ice.
So every weekday morning (Saturdays were just showers and Sunday was a day of rest), we woke to the call of “Time, runs and showers!” It always came out in exactly the same not very melodious singsong. Miss Travers was at Caldecott from 1941 to 1967, so if we calculate nine months of term per year and five days a week (forgetting the Saturday variant), at a conservative estimate she called out the phrase 4,500 times in her career. Only in the depths of winter did she allow herself a little extra prelude. “I pity the poor horses in weather like this … TIME, RUNS AND SHOWERS!” Just once, the famous phrase fell flat, when she was invited to add a little authentic colour to one of our Talent Night skits. She was game, but got stage fright and it came out very muted. Any one of us could have done it better.
On my first evening in the West Wing, after supper, Miss Travers taught a few of us to play Mahjong. The next evening she saw me at a loose end. I thought we might have played Mahjong again. Miss Murdin, Mr. Christie and Mr. Marshall had all done their best to keep us occupied in our leisure time. After a while, Miss Travers decided it was time for a word in my ear. “I don’t know if it is clear to you that Mr. Carter and I” – Mr. Carter was her assistant – “don’t go out of our way to entertain you. Isn’t that so, Mr. Carter?” “Yes, Miss Travers”. Actually, this was not unreasonable. We were now aged eleven upwards and it was time for us to learn how to fill our time by ourselves. I have to say that, though she did not suggest how we passed our time, once we found something to do she was always ready to encourage us and to let us talk to her about it. She showed great interest in things she did not know about. Since these seemed to amount to practically everything except horses (or was she pretending?), she made a good listener.
True to form, when she took us out for a day at half-term we were pretty well left to roam around, but not to choose our own venue for lunch. Other staff would take us to a café and feed us out of the meagre allowance Caldecott had provided per head. I suspect they made up any difference out of their own pockets. Miss Travers took us to the restaurant of her choice, handed us the cash and let us get on with it. It was always a Lyons Corner House. She would have smelt one out in an Amazon rain forest. We used to joke that she had shares in Lyons and it may have been true. She certainly dabbled in stocks and shares and studied the economic pages of “The Times” every day. Lyons Corner Houses were not the Ritz, but there were places where our allowance might have bought a little more. Untroubled, Miss Travers sat in splendid isolation, eating her selected repast with immense satisfaction.
It was a half-term outing that witnessed one of the few overt political gestures of my life. It must have been 1964 and we had been caught by the fever of the newly elected Labour Government. It is difficult today, as we look back on a period of strikes and economic crises, to remember just how great expectations were. As we were released in a car park in Maidstone, we saw a sticker on another car that said, “Don’t blame me, I voted Conservative”. Solemnly, we lined up and spat on it, one by one.
A drive with Miss Travers was a unique experience. Most drivers strike up a conversation with their passengers. A few stare morosely at the road ahead. Miss Travers treated her car as a thoroughbred horse, all the better for a little human encouragement. “Come on, little car … whoa! … round the corner … up the hill … well done, little car …”
The finest expression of Miss Travers’s predictability came when you needed a serious talking to. She usually chose the laundry room and you sat opposite each other on wicker baskets, hers creaking ominously under her considerable weight as she swayed to the rhythm of her words. In the first part, the public school adjectives rolled out sonorously. “That was a really rotten thing to do … A nasty, unkind, mean and rotten thing to do”. Later on, her tone became plaintive. “Now why did you do a thing like that?” Together, it seemed, you and she would search your soul and weed out its guiltier portions. But before you had time for much introspection, the tone was changing, Miss Travers’s face grew pink and the laundry basket reacted dangerously. The explosion was imminent and was stunning in its impact. “And if you do it again, you’ll go on a PENALTY RUN and a BIG BOY will take you”.
The penalty run was another importation from Gordonstoun, I believe. Instead of the whacking you got in most other schools, you had to run behind a bicycle. The distance was calibrated according to the gravity of the offence. In extreme cases, you went to the Downs and back. The “big boy” was a Permanently Privileged Uniform. Senior boys and girls were “Uniform Boys” and “Uniform Girls”. They wore a rather drab uniform – a grey pullover and a blue flannel shirt if I remember rightly. Each week a select number who had not been late for meals, been caught smoking behind the Wellingtonia tree or been cheeky to Miss Leila, were named “Privileged Uniforms”. They had a slightly later bed time. A very few, very “good” boys and girls of the most senior age were named “Permanently Privileged Uniforms” – any other school would have called them Prefects. They had no official bed time and were allowed tea instead of Camp Coffee at breakfast time. On the debit side, they sat out at the front at Meeting as “Heralds”, on either side of Miss Leila and Miss Dave, and took part in the reading of the Charter. They duly threw their weight about with their juniors, as prefects will, and the boys had the task of invigilating the runs and showers, instead of doing them themselves, and taking the penalty runs*. A few sadistic ones expected their victims to run like Roger Bannister. Others slackened off as soon as they were out of sight of the house, stopped for a fag or two then made a pretence of running their charge back.
Miss Travers also taught riding. I had just one lesson. I recall Miss Travers walking beside me, saying, “Up, down, up down, up down”. I forget what happened after that, but it was mutually agreed there was no point in continuing. Miss Travers was a time warp, but she was not unkind and she knew her job. I find I remember her more favourably than not.
She had a series of assistants, none of whom lasted long. I believe Joe Marshall’s first Community posting was in the West Wing. From my years, I remember Derek Carter, Mr. Maslin and Mr. Cowling. Of these, Mr. Carter was the least pleasant, but perhaps the most effective. I remember him principally for his beard, his brusque manner and his ferocious driving. If you heard, from the other side of the House, the tyres of the school van scream as it negotiated the corners between the Junior Study playground and the horse enclosure, it meant Mr. Carter was at the wheel. He once chauffeured Miss Leila and was thereafter forbidden to drive the school car. Miss Dave would have banned him from all Community vehicles – “I’m convinced he’s not safe” – but someone had to ferry the kids back and forth. We had a hair-raising return from a camping week. Mr. Maslin and Mr. Cowling were both nice people and we took advantage appallingly when Miss Travers was not around.
* Barry Northam has pointed out that the senior boys who supervised the runs and showers were required to get up early and have their own runs and showers first. However, Barry’s years at Caldecott ended just as mine began and Gerald Moran has confirmed that by the time I entered the West Wing any such obligation, if theoretically still in place, was widely evaded. Gerald also points out that the runs and showers were not necessarily supervised by PPUs but by any older Colt House boy judged sufficiently responsible to do so.