THIS is a story about that grey area between fiction and fact. It is about the tense sexuality in the most prominent of British boys’ schools that occasionally leads teachers to abuse the trust vested in them; and it is about the impressive ability of such schools to suppress for years any wider knowledge of such abuses. Most of all, it is about the extraordinary power of rumour – embellished, perhaps, and frequently inaccurate – to keep such incidents alive.
Recently Penguin published New Boy, the first novel by a 25-year-old television researcher called William Sutcliffe. The book is set in a pushy independent school for boys in the green belt just outside north-west London (motto: “Serve and Obey”).
The school is remarkable for its domination of the Oxbridge entry league, its obsession with rugby and A grades, its headmaster’s edict demanding “rigid-sided bags”, and – as the book’s narrator Mark gradually reveals – its atmosphere of both latent and active homosexuality.
We learn of Robert Levin, notoriously said to have tossed off Jeremy Jacobs in a jacuzzi; of the rugby team’s strange proclivities; of the penis symbols which appear all over the school; and of various married male teachers “who touched and eyed up little boys but did their bit for the school’s sporting life”. More ominously, we also learn of one middle- aged male music teacher who is forced to resign after a boy presents a tape of unusual goings-on while on a sailing trip.
The book earned some encouraging reviews and picked up a healthy number of sales. But then something happened that publishers usually only dream of:the novel became the intense focus of telephone calls across north-west London – or, more particularly, among the teachers and pupils, past and present, of a pushy independent school for boys in the green belt just outside north-west London.
They set about giving the novel the close textual analysis they had last practised on L’tranger or Macbeth.
Sutcliffe, as it transpired, had spent seven years, not all entirely happily, at the Haberdashers’ Aske’s School for Boys in Elstree, Hertfordshire (motto: “Serve and Obey”). Mark, the novel’s protagonist, bears more than a passing resemblance to Sutcliffe, whose exaggerated Jewish looks, he confesses, make him “an anti-Semite’s dream”.
And, most extraordinarily, the book appears to include a number of characters and incidents that were familiar, if not legendary, to those who had attended Haberdashers’ at around the same time.
One former staff member certainly resembled Mr Gaskin, the book’s maths teacher, who “took every opportunity to grope his students”. A female teacher did open up rather too incautiously to her sixth-formers, and left the school soon afterwards. And then there was the unexplained mid-term disappearance of a middle-aged male teacher after details of a damaging tape-recording became widely known.
According to New Boy, “a member of the music school staff had been taking his favourite pupils, generally blond and blue-eyed, on sailing holidays”, until “one particularly angelic fourth-former turned up in the headmaster’s office carrying a tape”.
The boy claimed to have have made a secret recording of the teacher playing a “hypnotism game” with him, asking such questions as: “Do you like sexy videos? Are you capable of producing semen yet? Do you like playing with yourself?” The teacher, in the book, then simply vanished from the staff.
Now, according to north London rumour, a teacher did leave the school suddenly in mid- term, after just such an incident. As Sutcliffe now recalls from his schooldays, “He suddenly vanished in the middle of a term, and not a word ever leaked out to the press.”
There had, says Sutcliffe, indeed been a tape. To schools such as Haberdashers’, which live on their reputation, any hint of bad publicity can be extremely damaging. When I sought to discover whether it recognised the unnamed fictional school as Haberdashers’, I received a message that, regretfully, no one would be able to help with this article.
Sutcliffe himself is cautious when asked whether his story should genuinely be labelled fiction. “I don’t know … that’s when I start reaching for my libel handbook. It is a fiction, but a very accurate satire of a certain place at a certain time. There are definitely certain uncomfortable truths it brings to light.
“But,” he says carefully, “the school is very much unnamed in the novel.” He admits that a large number of the book’s characters and incidents would be familiar to Haberdashers’ scholars of a certain era.
“Nervous breakdowns were quite common among the staff, as in the book. One very overweight teacher started a fitness programme and was visibly slimming week on week. He then just vanished. And was never mentioned again.”
To Sutcliffe, the book serves to highlight the repressed homosexuality in a school such as his. “There’s a clich about public schools, with Rupert Everett types and floppy-haired Hugh Grant lookalikes snogging and fondling in the boats. These kinds of independent schools are very different, but there is a massive homosexual context. Look at the obsession for rugby, a very homoerotic sport. Boys quite blatantly love the physical contact, flicking wet towels at each other’s private parts in the showers.”
The school has, however, still to give Sutcliffe its own verdict on his version of events. He awaits it with interest. “I’m still waiting for the school to send me a detention,” he says. “Or maybe some lines: `I will not write scurrilous novels …'”