As Headfort prepares to celebrate its first half-century I find myself surprised by the realisation that the school was less than fifteen years old when first making an impression on me in the early 1960's.
I had already spent seven years at Headfort before joining Miss McCormack's First Form in the autumn term of 1965. Names and deeds were already familiar, material of daily conversation in the red-bricked house beside the kitchen-garden; faces recognised from hot summer days on the boundary, and cold winter afternoons on the touchline. The school was a mere teenager, but you would hardly have guessed it. Dynasties were already in place, Cleshams, Newells, Searles.
Traditions and legends had accumulated, and as far as a seven-year-old was concerned the school might very well have existed for centuries. Routine was firmly in place. Morning-walk to the first arch, where you would chisel away at the rock with "lucky-stones"; then Prayers, Ballroom for the Prods, RCs banished to unknown location, possibly in the basement. Went there by mistake on one of those first mornings, and heard Jim McAleese leading a charge of Hail Marys. Sounded much more fun than Boss Wild's solemn collects, but my heresy was discovered. In the summer Wild supervised P.T. on the Lawn at morning-break, a bit of Dads' Army about it, but no laughing matter at the time. On warm evenings he would oversee swims in the river, upstream from the New Bridge. He was at the height of his powers then, and often seemed an austere figure. Not many challenged his authority, and Christopher Bective's sporadic appeals to his father's status as lord of the manor were embarassingly futile.
Wild inspired a blend of fear and respect, but the other pillar of the Headfort establishment, Bill Stuart-Mills, commanded affection. Physically frail, he was an intellectual strongman, rigorous but deeply compassionate, the school's great academic treasure. He began a long battle against cardiac-illness in the latter years of the decade, and I like to think that our love for him helped to sustain his courage.Other characters came and went; some of their own volition, others booted or hounded out; habitual prep-school chancers of the Decline And Fall type, a few endearing eccentrics, several splendid incompetents, one or two monsters. Below stairs, a double-barrelled housekeeper ran a reign of terror. Upstairs, Dorothy Brewster, "Tick-Tock", battled rather helplessly against the hordes. A kindly woman, she retired prematurely and struggled on for years against the effects of multiple sclerosis.
Bill Kirwan, odd-job-man supreme, cut the grass and tramped dank corridors with buckets of coal. I remember his unsubtle attempts to extract racing tips from well-connected young gentlemen, of whom there were many, Dreaper, Moore, de Burgh, McCalmont, O'Brien, amongst them. Plenty of future winners there. Miss Thompson had charge of the Second Form, in the basement room that would later become the small dining-room. She became reluctant to teach me history after I told her that Robin Hood was not history but legend, and that I was sure my father would agree. I was probably insufferable, but fear of my father was doubtless a key-factor in persuading people that it would make little sense to beat me up. The shadow of bullying was in the background, tales of awful initiation at the hands of the dreaded "Grubb gang", but I was insulated against that aspect of school life. The odd jibe made me blush uncontrollably, but I don't recall any lasting hurt.
My father, who kept the racing-community in touch with news from the outside world, coached the two major sports, cricket and rugby. We called them "games", and the term "coaching" was not in use. Though into his 40s, Jacko, as he was then known, was not long out of his rugby-playing career, and was famously fit. In both sports he had charge of some good teams and some indifferent ones. Generally he made good use of limited raw-material, and seldom failed to spot the odd individual who would go on to make the grade at public-school, and occasionally beyond. The use of christian names was still banned, but my father had a habit of foreshortening surnames, "Apples" for the Aprahamians, "Tot" for the Tottenhams, and so on. Up to around 1967 tennis was still played on red-sanded courts in the Pleasure-gardens. Squash had a burst of popularity as Jonah Barrington began to make headlines. Bicycles were not permitted, though an exception was made for one boy, John Skrine, a victim of polio. Freedom was most easily obtained by the riders, who had access to tracts of the estate under a succession of mistresses, of whom Jill Fisher was easily the most popular and effective. The school's scout troop was in terminal decline. Boxing was still an option, but seldom exercised. There was a shooting-range, occupying the site where the science-lab was built before the end of the decade. A small round plastic swimming-pool was put in place below the ha-ha around the mid 60s, and the skating-rink was constructed around the same time. The "Ship", beside the fourth-game pitch, was a popular social venue, and the woods, forbidden territory, were colonised from time to time. "Raiding the garden" was a summer pastime for the daring, marbles and conkers, respectable occupations in season. Airfix models were a status-symbols, and pencil-cricket featured the likes of Dexter, Cowdrey and Sobers. The outside world seemed a long way off. We seldom saw television. Bizarrely, Dixon Of Dock Green was a Saturday-evening treat. Wild must have seen it as a morality-play. Ev'ning all.
I have one clear memory of a specific occasion when the television was called into service, and it says a lot about the Headfort of those days. We assembled in the old library - red chairs in front for prefects and other heavyweights of the community - to watch Churchill's funeral. In retrospect, that solemn, stately farewell could be seen as an elegy for a lost world. It was a world which Headfort, in its infancy, had distantly aspired to join. The Headfort of the 60's still had a curiously colonial air, out of tune with its Irish surroundings, and people were only half-joking when they said that Wild saw it as an outpost of Empire.
Meanwhile, in public-schools across the water, old Headfort boys, many of them not much older than us, must have had some contact with "the swinging sixties", the era of Carnaby Street, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Hallucogenic drugs, free love, anti-Vietnam War rallies, the student radicalism of Paris 1968, Headfort was far away from all that, but was not immune from the social changes of the decade. Absolutes of discipline and behaviour began to dilute, and a degree of informality trickled into the life of the school.
The curriculum was beginning to change too, and by the time I reached the form which was quaintly known as The Remove "new maths" had arrived, replacing the old strands of algebra, arithmetic and geometry. Science came late in the day to Headfort, and was treated none too seriously until Peter Bamford arrived, initially as assistant to the ill-tempered Archdeacon Giff, around 1971.
In most subjects the emphasis was still on individual advancement rather than any sense of collective achievement, and the artistic life of the school was subdued to say the least. I remember a series of excruciating Christmas concerts, in more than one of which I recited Eliot's Journey Of The Magi in suitably declamatory tones. Drama was almost unknown until John Leyden came on the scene in 1970. Music was taught with zeal by Kate Stuart-Mills, but was hardly a feature of school-life. Art was vaguely considered as something for girls, of whom there were none.
If this gives an impression of a barren educational landscape that would be unfair. For my part, Bill Stuart-Mills made up for a lot of deficiencies, and I know that others will recall him with a similar debt of gratitude. He gave me a love of learning and a facility for languages, sharpened my critical instincts in a host of ways, and taught me much about honour and honesty, some of which I hope may have rubbed off. My father, in the classroom as much as at home, cultivated my interest in the past, and in people and places. Tom Day and, later. Colin Stoupe, an enthusiastic Northern Irishman with a passion for Hemingway, helped to stimulate an early interest in literature. Day, whose initials were TA, was very tall, and was the bearer of one of the more ingenious Headfort nicknames, "Tadpole".
Writing this has brought back a torrent of memories, and for some reason one image keeps coming back. It is the last evening of a summer term. I could not be sure of the year. It may well be 1965. On the circle in front of the school I am sitting beside two older boys, Starling and Cocksedge. They are leaving the school. The thought strikes me that I will never see either of them again, and I have to fight back tears. Perhaps I was just beginning to realise that Headfort was a very small place in a very large world. My own time there would just as surely come to an end too, but in one way or another I would retain an involvement with the place for more than 30 years. Many of the more lasting friendships which I made there date from after my time as a pupil, but I find it hard to look back on Headfort's past with anything other than a sense of nostalgia. For me it was home, as well as school, and as an only child it gave me the embrace of a surrogate family. I never did see Starling or Cocksedge again, but like so many others they will always be part of that family.