12. The Colt House 2: Joe and Edna Marshall
Mr. Marshall therefore took over a Colt House where Mr. Griffiths exerted a sort of mortmain. He started by convening what he called, in his Liverpool accent, a “discoossion” – the pow-wow days were over, at least in name. He told us that he had the reputation of being “easy-going. But there’s a big difference in my books between easy and easy-going”. He recognized that the Griffiths regime had been one of strict discipline “and, if you think back to the days of the dear old Turners, you’ve all benefited from it”. He then proposed to begin by watching our routine, to see how it worked, before deciding what changes needed to be made.
Left practically to our own devices, we divided into defenders of the Griffithsian faith and upholders of “anything goes”. Since my Senior Study memories of Mr. Marshall were not good, I tended to the former camp. There were not many of us. The general preference was to demonstrate, not the routine Mr. Griffiths had instilled into us, but the one we would prefer to have. The result was that, by the time Mr. Marshall realized a certain input from above was needed, he had completely lost control of the situation and never regained it. By the end of his first year Gerald Moran, very far from an admirer of Mr. Griffiths, had to conclude that “he may have been a bastard, but he had some of the right ideas”.
A morbid sensitivity to unfavourable comparisons, real or imagined, between Mr. Griffiths and himself coloured much of that first year. “We all know you’re a Griffiths boy”, he said dismissingly to Kendall Strout. He was, but did it help to make it a personal issue? Kendall made much of the fact that he had to turn lights out that other people had left on and close doors that other people had left open. “I didn’t have to do that last year”, he said untactfully. “I thought that was coming”, said Mr. Marshall. “You’d better go to bed”. All this business about turning lights off and closing doors was, according to Mr. Marshall, “a load of bloody rubbish”. He seemed to leave lights on and doors open deliberately, as if every wide open door was a victory against Mr. Griffiths. There was more than formality involved. If the door at the end of the common room was left open, you could see down the corridor past the single rooms (for the older boys) towards the dormitory. Anyone emerging from the shower to go to his room or to the dormitory, with maybe only a towel round him, would therefore be in full view of the common room, to which the senior girls were increasingly welcome guests. I protested this fact to Mr. Marshall and was told to “bloody well shut up”.
Considering that, in my Senior Study days, Mr. Marshall had washed my mouth out with soap for bad language, there was a certain irony to his increasing use of the word “bloody”. It came out first when he had failed to silence a bunch of us at one of his interminable “discoossions”. The shock tactic worked, so he used it again. And again. By the time I left, he hardly said a sentence without a “bloody” in it. Since these words are effective in inverse proportion to the extent to which they are used, this got him back to square one. Early on in his swearing career, he let fly a “bloody” in the presence of Miss Travers and Miss E. Aware that some sort of explanation was needed, he turned to them with a confidential leer and said “I knew that would shut them up”. Miss Travers and Miss E exchanged looks of speechless horror.
One time bomb was probably not intended. We were on our annual camping week in the New Forest - this must have been in 1968. I was wandering alone one evening when I thought I saw some familiar figures in the dusk. They were Mr. Griffiths and “the wife”, with a small group of boys, also on half-term camp in his new job. Heedful of Mrs. Robson’s advice about “Mr. Long-Nose”, I quietly withdrew, but by the next evening someone else had found out and for several evenings a few of us spent more time round Mr. Griffiths’s fire than our own, returning only for our supper. Another of those things that Mr. Marshall thought “a bit bloody much”.
The following year’s camp in the New Forest is memorable to me only for the fact that I returned early. It teemed with rain from the beginning and Brian Cassidy, a boy with a strong athletics record but recurrent bronchitis, began to suffer badly. I had brought my notes for “O” Level revision with me and it was obvious that my dreams of swotting them up while lying blissfully in the sun were not going to be realized. Together, we decided to approach Mr. Marshall with a view to returning to the Hatch. Mr. Marshall was surprisingly sympathetic and we were soon on a crowded train. Our decision to go halves in the taxi fare from Ashford Station to Hatch may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back with Miss Dave who, seeing us descend in royal style in the front drive, gave us a look that could have killed. “You’re NOT welcome”, she declared, adding “I’m not going to open the Colt House, you’ll have to sleep in the West Wing”.
After his first year, the Griffiths effect began to work off, but the atmosphere remained heavy. Sarcasm and petulance were Mr. Marshall’s fallbacks, accompanied by allusive phrases such as the favourite “It’s a bit bloody much” and “There’ll be hell to pay if it happens again”. Often he would sit for a whole evening in sulky silence, back to front on a chair with his legs astride. And as Jane Abbey said pointedly some years after he had left, “None of us had the faintest idea what it was all about”. Alternatively, the morning would begin with a “discoossion” that in other parlance would be called an argument, usually with Leonard Daley. I actually came to like Leonard very much in my last year, but he wanted to act “hard” and he and Mr. Marshall were like red rags to a bull. I got dragged in because Mr. Marshall would usually call me as things reached a climax and tell me to go and get Mr. King. The duty fell to me since I had just been appointed a P.P.U. Coincidentally, the P.U. system had been abolished along with runs and showers and other pleasantries, so no one, including myself, really knew if I was a P.P.U. or not. I got the coveted different pullover and sat out in front during meeting. Other privileges were not withdrawn but eroded, since everyone else had them too. But it did fall to me to fetch Mr. King in emergencies and he came down and tried to strengthen Mr. Marshall’s side of the “discoossion”. On one occasion, though, it was Mr. King’s day off, so I was instructed to fetch Miss Dave. I wish I had been a fly on the wall. That evening, Miss Dave called me to her after supper and said, “I just sat on the bed while they argued until they got tired of shouting. After that, they were willing to discuss quite reasonably. Leonard goes off the deep end and so does Mr. Marshall!” Some years ago, when I was back for a visit, Mr. King said to me in wondering tones, “Leonard Daley has no criticism at all of Mr. Marshall’s treatment of him”.
My P.P.U. experience calls for further reflection and, since it took place in Mr. Marshall’s Colt House, this seems to be the best place. As I have already remarked, P.P.U.s were what other schools called prefects and incidentally, and to my chagrin, I was never appointed a prefect at Ashford Grammar School. Past sins there evidently cast their shadows. Caldecott was at least ready to allow that it had made a responsible young man of me.
In my earlier days at Caldecott, P.P.U.s played a conspicuous role and some of them certainly derived much pleasure from throwing their weight around – one such, unsurprisingly, became a policeman. Now it was my turn, but was I really a P.P.U. at all and how should I act? Uniforms were out and Privileged Uniforms, that weekly reward for good conduct, had gone with them. A Permanently Privileged Uniform was therefore a logical absurdity. “We don’t have that system any more”, came the cold rebuttal when I attempted to impose a little order in an unruly Colt House with no staff in sight. I had no clear answer to that. Maybe if I had been a natural bully it would have been different. There are those who can breeze into a situation and assume command with such an air of entitledness that people take them at face value. I could never do that. I have at various times in my life taught English to quite large classes of adults, coordinated language courses and set teaching programmes. In the musical world, from university onwards, I have occasionally found myself conducting choirs and instrumental groups. When I collaborate as a pianist with other musicians, I often slip into a dominant role. I seem to manage these things well enough, though nobody ever suggested I should have been a conductor not a pianist. The root thing here seems to be that I was appointed to do these things, or circumstances conspired so that they were expected of me. Faced with a situation where the mildest attempt to act like a P.P.U. of yore was rejected because “we don’t have that system any more”, I resolved that, if I were asked to undertake some duty, I would do it. If not, I would just quietly get on with my own things which, what with music and studying for A-levels and reading, were quite enough.
Apart from sending me to fetch Mr. King (or Miss Dave) when the going got rough, Mr. Marshall did evolve one duty on me. This was a sort of second call in the morning for boys in single rooms. Now that runs and showers were off the menu, Mr. Marshall would call us in the morning and leave us to wash and dress. As late arrival at breakfast became the norm for Colt House boys, it grew evident that those who could, in the shelter of their single rooms, simply went back to sleep, myself included. Mr. Marshall therefore killed two birds with one stone by yanking me out of bed to do the rounds of the other single rooms and check that people were getting up. “Time to do your duty”, he would say. This called for some tact. One boy not only got up immediately after the first call, but showed extreme irritation at getting a second call from me. I decided he could be trusted to get up without any further pushing. Others yawned loudly and ostentatiously and needed a certain amount of cajoling to get them out of bed. Leonard Daley was an almighty heavy sleeper. Not only did he frequently go to sleep with his radio blaring out the latest hits long beyond midnight, compelling me, in the next room, to creep in and turn it off, he required much shaking and a few gentle blows before he showed signs of life, other than heavy breathing, in the morning. I must say, he was at his nicest when he finally woke up and, when I left, he said he really wished I was not going.
Just once, I tried to find a friend in Mr. Marshall. A problem had been worrying me so that I got no sleep. I decided to try confiding in Mr. Marshall so, when he came to wake us up in the morning, I began to tell him. “Not now”, he said petulantly. I took my troubles to Miss Dave, who was sympathetic as ever, and afterwards told Mr. Marshall what we had decided. “There was nothing else you could do, was there”, he said coldly.
I passed on Mrs. Marshall when I wrote about my Senior Study experiences, because she took no part at that time. By now they were living (with two young children and a cat) in the staff flat at the end of the Colt House and she became more involved*. She was mild-mannered, far from eloquent and could seem cold and distant. But nor was she petulant and sarcastic like her husband and seemed clearer in her ideas. Though not really a natural for such a job, she was the more effective of the two.
I have been hard on Mr. Marshall. I know he had his admirers and there were moments when his sense of humour came back and he could be lively and entertaining. But we tend to select our memories instinctively. When I think of Mr. Marshall, it is the negative aspects that come to mind first. Recalling his positive side requires a conscious effort. Conversely, in spite of all that can be said against Mr. Griffiths, the first image that comes to mind when I think of him is a positive one. It was said that Mr. Marshall was a sick man, though I do not know what he suffered from. I do remember him as basically a nice, decent person who wanted to do a good job, but he was the wrong man in the wrong place and failed in all that mattered. I should be only too pleased if someone who feels differently set down more positive memories.
There is an unfortunate pendant to this. Mr. Marshall left in 1973 and took a position in a residential school on the Isle of Man. That much I already knew. He was subsequently convicted, in 1992 and 2022, for alleged cases (which he denies) of sexual assault and child abuse during his period there. When I first saw this, I hoped for a case of homonymy, though place, time and profession all pointed to Caldecott’s Joe (Joseph Henry) Marshall. I have had confirmation that this is the same man. It is disconcerting to discover that, for several of my formative years, I may have been under the charge of a highly unsuitable person. I can only say that my memories of Joe Marshall as related above are truthful and omit nothing. He made no inappropriate advances towards me and no hints or rumours reached me that he did to others. I prefer to believe that, for whatever reason, he became a totally changed personality after he left Caldecott.
* Gerald Moran points out that by January 1968 the Marshalls had a boy and two young girls (I do not remember the third child, nor do I remember any of their names). They had previously been in the flat from autumn 1962 to July 1964.