21. Michael and Rosemary Clover
I shall have more to say about Mr. Clover later. I record here my few personal encounters.
Firstly, on the football field. This is an improbable place for me to have an encounter with anyone, but an afternoon of football per week (cricket in the summer) was inescapable in the junior school and, in my first weeks, it was Mr. Clover who took it. His role was referee and coach combined and he seems to have decided that, if I was unlikely ever to kick the ball, I could at least get a bit of exercise. So, for the whole game, he held me by the hand and made me run up and down with him. He seemed to run like the wind.
It also fell to me to sit at his dinner table. He was firm and reasonably tolerant, but there were limits that I comfortably exceeded. Once, half-way through the meal, he sent me up to my dormitory and then, when the meal was finished, lectured me as he pulled my trousers down, put me over his knee and spanked me extremely hard.
If I appear to have made him out as a fiend, he was actually very popular. In the course of life, though, I have become suspicious of people who are popular and show by their very demeanour that they know they are popular. It is often the demeanour that convinces people, in the first instance, to love and admire them. Disillusion follows, but may be slow in coming. We had a professor at Edinburgh University who had the smile of the Cheshire Cat. He was every inch the popular, well-loved professor, until he bored the pants off us with his lectures. As I say, Mr. Clover was popular, and for many remained so. He was great at the things most children like: sport, expeditions, parties and so on. I did enjoy our afternoon out, in his blue and white Bedford Dormobile, to Hothfield Common. So why am I doubtful?
Being great at organizing the sort of things that most children like is fine, but what about the children that do not like some of them? I think his idea was that, if you did not like these things, then you ought to, and it was his job to make sure you did. This ran counter to Miss Leila’s insistence on seeking out the individual talent in each child. I admit that it was right to push me to join in more, but throwing standardized solutions at me was, and is, the way to get the worst out of me. However, I did not really see much of Mr. Clover – and I remember his wife only as a face sitting at the far end of the dining room. He was running a separate unit at The Paddocks, at that time his own property, and left halfway through my first term, though he continued to turn up, unpredictably, to organize parties and the like.