We are in the autumn of 1975 and my father, now for several years completely blind, has been invited to attend a regional Prep School Heads' Dinner. Naturally he needed a driver and a guide, offices which I was happy to fulfil but which carried some testing responsibilities. Father, a diabetic for almost forty years, had taken insulin via injection throughout that time and then, on each occasion, had to consume carbohydrate within half an hour. He still did the actual injection for himself but required a companion to fill the syringe -- and here's the rub -- from two separate mini bottles of different liquids.
As we crouched over a basin in the said facilities and father lowered his trousers ready to do the deed for his thigh was the customary target for this particular operation, I was concentrating intently on the syringe with my mind wandering momentarily as the background remorseless and tuneless gurgling of the urinal intruded. With father, a biblical scholar beside me, I was prompted to remember one of his favourite quotations from the Old Testament story of King Naaman who, suffering from leprosy, was told to go and wash in the River Jordan seven times. The reluctant king responded [ according to the King James version ]: ' Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? ' There's a good deal in that incidentally to help with understanding middle-eastern developments in the past seventy years but, at that crucial moment in the Ship Hotel, syringe loading was temporarily halted as the door of the facility swung open and another besuited gentleman, presumably also a guest at the dinner, entered.
On seeing, especially in the context of an Incorporated Association of Preparatory Schools schools function, one later middle aged man with his trousers down and a younger gentleman holding a syringe intently up to the light, he simply uttered ' O my God ' and fled down the passage, possibly to inform the authorities that there was at the very least a dose of mainlining taking place in the loo.
There was no time to be wondering what might happen next as I had lost concentration. The solution from the first bottle had shot up into the second, rendering the whole operation not only a failure but a disaster as the second bottle was thereby contaminated. Father fortunately carried a spare supply but I was conscious, as we repeated the operation, that another error would result in, at the least, a trip to the local A&E department. Father remained totally and extraordinarily calm throughout and we made it satisfactorily to the obligatory hunk of bread and butter well within half an hour.
The next occasion on which I found myself needing to concentrate in a similar way was at Balliol College, Oxford, where father had had a distinguished and rewarding student career in the 1930s; his son just the opposite in the 1960s. This was a dinner in 1984 to celebrate the success of the College rowing VIII going ' Head of the River ' thirty years earlier when father had been one of the crew's coaches. This time the jabbing was effected satisfactorily and we took our places in a really attractive small dining room, where fifteen years earlier I had run into a degree of trouble [ the only degree I did achieve there ] as a postponed delinquent for dancing on one of the highly polished and extremely valuable tables.
However, now feeling thoroughly adult and responsible, I looked at the menu and noticed that father was in fact the Guest of Honour and would be making the main speech after dinner. I knew that, for whatever reason, he was unaware of this so I waited until he had consumed a potato or two, then I informed him. As usual he was quite unfazed by this information which he admitted was news to him and he simply asked me to read out the list of those present. Having then chatted at ease with his other neighbours for an hour or so, he was called upon to speak. Apart from any I may have made myself, I have heard a surfeit of speeches both in person and on the radio / television but I can with confidence say that this was the most remarkable that I have witnessed and appreciated. With no preparation, no sight, no notes and no ability to sense the environment in which he found himself, father delivered a fifteen minute oration covering the College, his memories of fifty years before, his recollections of the young men [ now in their 50s ] in the college VIII of thirty years previously, including incidents and anecdotes which occasioned much merriment.
The speech was delivered with humour, feeling and a touch of self-deprecation and I was stunned. Aged thirty six, I realised at that moment if I was to climb any higher up the educational ladder, I had better work out what this public speaking thing was all about. I owe so much to my father for showing me how; it was something of a life shaping occasion in a most elegant small room.
I shall stay in the family way, skip a generation and move to February 2002. The Gordonstoun Colour Bearers [ Prefects ] were determined, rightly, that their female members should have a meaningful clothing equivalent to the male tie, something that could be worn with pride as part of the ' going out ' uniform and be a possession of pride for always. After much discussion my good friend and Deputy Head, Chris, and I felt we couldn't play the Health and Safety card, so often and so expertly employed by my colleague to prevent or delay almost any innovation and we were persuaded that the best, indeed the only, solution were tights, proudly sporting the school colours. The Guardians [ Head Girl and Boy ] and I were detailed to do some research and come up with an appropriately stylish recommendation. As the meeting ended, this trio took up position behind the Headmaster's computer in a darkish corner of his rather grand office.
On learning that the task ahead involved browsing through many sites depicting every variety of ladies' underwear, the male Guardian took off, his departure hastened by his sharing the same surname as the Headmaster. So I was left with Mia and together after a couple of hours of detailed research we came up with an outlandishly suitable solution. Mind you, it did occur to me afterwards to wonder what a School Inspector, paying an unannounced visit, might have thought had they stumbled across the Headmaster in a shadowy corner of his office, with a seventeen year old female pupil alongside him, looking intently at images of scantily clad young women. I am sure however that Mia, if asked now twenty years on, would declaim confidently that she had benefited from this profoundly educational experience.
This episode has been much in my mind of late, especially during a period of lockdown, when I was religiously staying at home but found myself in need of new underwear. I cruised ceaselessly through appropriate websites and eventually discovered a brand of pants bearing the name Sloggi [ not to be confused I kept reminding myself with the poor gentleman who met an untimely end in the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul ]. I ordered the goods and since that time Sloggi and I have enjoyed an intimate and highly satisfactory relationship. However the price to be paid is the curse that whenever I switch on my laptop, even now two years later, scantily clad young folk flash across my screen, sometimes pausing there while adopting the most suggestive of poses. These bronzed, nubile creatures, displaying much curvaceousness above the waist if female and much bulginess below if they are the opposite, can be a cause of distraction and embarrassment if others happen to look over my shoulder. Must I live with this for ever?
I was extremely naughty at prep school, so naughty in fact in the dormitories, causing endless frivolity and chaos that I was incarcerated in a single room to prevent my disturbing and perverting my peers. Accompanied only by a book and a photograph of my mother; looking back she was certainly strikingly attractive in her fortieth year, I was afforded the time to see certain previously hidden aspects of the lie of the land. This was important when a few years later the time came for me to take the Winchester College Entrance Exam, all broadly within my competence on a good day except for the Greek paper. Theoretically I had been studying the subject for two years but really I hadn't as our endeavours were limited to wading through the exercises in Hillard and Botting and I had a predecessor's script from which I simply copied the answers.
But now, in the early summer of 1960, the day of reckoning had arrived. I would score virtually nothing unless I could get my hands on the Greek paper in advance. I had noted that Bertie Sims, the Headmaster, arrived each day from his house in the grounds carrying the papers so I had to get in there somehow. I have always been a physical coward but did not at that stage mind the occasional dare. I therefore watched the Headmaster's House carefully during the afternoon and, as soon as I saw Mr and Mrs Sims take off in his characteristically sedate Rover 90, I whizzed in with cat like tread [ front door fortunately left unlocked ], found his study, rifled through his desk and -- eureka -- there was the brown envelope containing the Greek paper. Through the night I sat up in the loos [ hence a somewhat ponderous tale qualifying for this blog ] looking up and jotting down the right answers. By 6am my work was done. I knew I could not effect a second break-in so I placed the question paper in the cupboard of the Headmaster's study in the main school building. At 9am or a little later in fact and slightly behind schedule, Bertie arrived huffing and puffing and, after a search in all possible places, found the missing paper. I feared in retrospect [ some years later ] he might have thought his mental faculties were deserting him but he was quite a tough old boot and probably could have coped with that. I achieved a respectable mark but then came deservedly unstuck at Winchester College when it was discovered that I knew little beyond the alphabet but the small room had certainly helped me make it through the night.
To restore some positive perspective to this catalogue of superficial woe, the most significant small rooms I have seen were two circular tin sheds, each no more than eight feet across, in a part of Nairobi where you should never walk alone. In the mid to late 1950s, as Kenya lurched towards independence, a colonial civil servant, Geoffrey Griffin, decided he must do something about the homeless, poverty stricken, crime orientated, vulnerable street children whose number was legion and increasing. He therefore took twelve boys off the streets, housed them in the tin sheds and educated them. Time passed, the British left, Kenya changed but Geoffrey Griffin kept going. By the time I first visited Starehe Boys Centre in 1996, there were over 1200 children in the school, appreciating the educational principles of Kurt Hahn and producing some of the best public exam results in the country. Funded by charities, equipped largely with resources discarded by British schools, Starehe has a culture and an environment that would make every aspiring school envious. For any of us who might delude ourselves that we have contributed anything towards the education of young people; we should look at Geoffrey Griffin and realise that perhaps we didn't do so much after all.
Bedrooms can also be hotbeds of discomfort. Arriving in Rome for the first time [ attempting to sound as if I have been a regular European traveller ] for the rather unusual purpose at the age of eighteen of acting as au pair boy to my Housemaster's three small children, I lay in the August sun all day expecting to be at the end of it as beautifully tanned and bronzed in true Love Island style. Instead, without also the aid of any creams or lotions, my lily coloured torso acquired a violently scarlet hue and put me in grave discomfort. The next day was spent lying on the floor of an airless bedroom while a menacing hornet buzzed around the light fitting, occasionally sparing itself from this important activity to conduct a dive bombing raid in my direction. It was then I decided that Frinton or Guernsey were as far as one needed to go for the best of holidays.
Four years later, having terminated rather rashly my student relationship with Oxford University, I found myself working at St Wilfrid's Prep School in Seaford, Sussex, where I went on a temporary basis for ten weeks and stayed for ten years. The terms and conditions were designed, somewhat unsuccessfully, to curb petulance and encourage planning, as I was paid £15 a week and given a bed in an expanded airing cupboard on the top floor, lined with pipes hotter than anything Shadrach and his mates had to contend with in the burning fiery furnace. I am sure it was really the making of me, as indeed it certainly was for the senior boy deputed to go round the house in the early morning rousing the troops which, as a good scout, he effected with the shout ' Wakey, wakey, rise and shine; you've had your sleep and I've had mine '. It is oddly perverse that such experiences persuaded me that schools were where I longed to spend the rest of my life.
This less than comfortable resting place was rather more relaxing than the even more sparsely appointed boudoir in which I had spent a night earlier that year of 1969. When as an undergraduate student I had eaten and drunk [ particularly the latter ] with no thought for the morrow, I was one of those who was neither violent, noisy, unwell or entertaining [ heaven forfend ]; I just simply lay down wherever it might be and went to sleep. Quite often this was on the floor of a man called Nick who gained several rowing blues and later caused a stir by changing his gender [ or is it his sex? ] while a senior member of staff at a leading independent school. However, that night I managed to leave Nick's room and drift or stagger a little way down the Banbury Road. The monstrous mass or mess of concrete and glass that was, and sadly still is, the Department of Engineering Science had just been completed and, as its lights were beaming down all too piercingly, I found I needed to locate a piece of soft ground to drop off.
The owners of the property where I came to rest phoned the authorities who kindly moved me on to the pavement where a charge of ' Being drunk and incapable on the Queen's highway ' would become a lesser offence. The night that followed in the matchbox of a police cell with just a bucket and a wooden bench was punishment enough but the next morning I was up in front of the magistrate. The Dean of Balliol College, Dr Frank McArthy Willis Bund [ verging on an Evelyn Waugh name, never mind the person ] appeared and gave glowing testimony to my impeccable character. This was as unexpected as it was untrue and we had never met nor had dealings. I subsequently learnt that he had been at the college for forty years and had known my father in the 1930s; he was probably confused as to which Pyper he was talking about. In any event I was £5 the poorer at the end of the day.
Up, up and away in my beautiful balloon -- does a basket thereto attached count as a small room? Good; we were all in Kenya in the summer of 1999. Jenny and I had been doing the prizes at two delightfully old fashioned prep schools, including Pembroke House run by an entertaining and relaxing Headmaster called Alan. His Chair of Governors was however still lurking on the Victorian spectrum; he believed all young people should be flogged for every misdemeanour and he told a particularly inappropriate joke to the assembled parents about the personal habits of himself and his wife when they woke up of a morning. But he did also run the largest safari balloon company in the country and offered the five Pypers a free trip. Having failed to become airborne on the first attempt and been bumped horizontally and terrifyingly across the rough terrain for a considerable distance; twenty four hours later at 6.30am we enjoyed a thoroughly smooth take-off. Gliding noiselessly at whatever height it was, we looked down on the Maasai Mara, its wild beasts, its colourful flora and fauna, its endless heat and its perfect peace. It was an other worldly sensation -- greatly to be recommended if you can get it for free, especially if you are offered a champagne breakfast on touchdown. I do not remember much about the journey home.
I do however harbour a strong memory of a crisp November morning several years earlier in 1990 during our first autumn half-term at Gordonstoun. A neighbouring landowner, Robin, offered us a flight in his Tiger Moth, a most handsome beast and expertly maintained for short journeys from a grass landing strip adjacent to the School. It was a real Biggles experience with leather skull cap, goggles and a ride open to the elements. The balloon was a non-terrifying experience but the flimsy if elegant bi-plane was rather different. The view over the Moray Firth and the surrounding hills was nothing less than thrilling but when a loop-the-loop manoeuvre was suggested [ I had no choice as Jenny had already done hers ],I was gripped by panic, anticipating, then experiencing, hanging however momentarily, upside down strapped in by a harness not very different from a car seat belt but fifty years older. We survived and I enjoyed several helicopter rides on sundry occasions thereafter but managed to avoid the positive response to invitations sampling the RAF Tornado experience. Perhaps an open air cockpit is the most frightening of small rooms for us cowards.
In this irritatingly un-chronological catalogue may we return to 1979 and the departure from St Wilfrid's School, already mentioned. I had felt rather important in the previous year -- Assistant Head and Housemaster at the age of 31 as well as expert in basic Latin grammar, coach of the under 10s cricket side and consumer of a regular supply of spotted dick; a glorious lot in life. Yet I did feel the odd twinge of adventure and then Jenny appeared on 5 August 1978 and we spoilt it all by saying something like ' Shall we get married? ' Actually we were just in the middle of the marriage proposal conversation one evening in the boarding house; I was drawing an explanatory diagram [ still in existence ] when the fire alarm sounded somewhat unsympathetically and Matron Sheila was at the door bursting with enthusiastic efficiency and checking that I was ready to play my part in the previously arranged drill which had somehow slipped my mind. The spell was broken; Jenny had to evacuate secretly and hide in the hedge on the other side of the road; the fire practice was satisfactorily completed; the interrupted ' Let's get married ' conversation was whistled through at express speed without emotion and Jenny had some inkling what spending the next thirty years in boarding schools might mean.
But these years were not to be spent on the Sussex coast; we decided to go for the challenge of a new beginning and move up an age group. With characteristic conceit I imagined it would be straightforward to get a job -- I was after all what my mother was wont to call ' God's gift ' to whatever I might be doing -- and I gave notice to leave without having any hint of future employment elsewhere. This was silly and precipitated five months of negative responses to the scanty number of positions advertised. So early in 1979 we began the long process of writing to all -- approximately 250 in number -- HMC Heads offering myself for whatever might exist. This was of course at a time well before word processors and photocopiers so Jenny who, unlike me, could type properly was busy through many long winter nights churning out tediously dull begging letters and CVs.
I was offered three interviews for our pains; by Michael Mavor, recently appointed Head of Gordonstoun, who took one look at me in Brown's Hotel and decided not to proceed; a step which elicited a Daily Mail headline ten years later ' Reject gets Gordonstoun '; by Brentwood School who offered me a straightforward History teaching job, which would have been a challenge but it was immaterial as before we had passed the gates on the way out, Mrs Pyper declared this was not the one; and by Alan Tammadge at Sevenoaks School. He happened to have an array of bits and pieces: Assistant Registrar [ a new post to deal with burgeoning admissions ], junior Latin teaching, arts festival administration and general office management. This potpourri seemed almost tailor made and despite the Head noting on his interview sheet: ' Good but is he too bluff and hearty? ' [ as I discovered a year or so later when I was 'tidying' his desk ] he offered me this non-existent but perfect job. We were very excited.
We had accommodation out in the country of the Weald, a flat over the garage of a retired school governor. With every version of birdsong, cows at the window and views that really made you stop and stare, it was idyllic until the winter came to an abode where the only form of heating was a brace of smelly paraffin stoves. Going into school two weeks before term started I was surprised not to be working in the thick of it but was given a far from energising little hideaway near the back door of Claridge House, the main admin building with lavatory glass in the window preventing any contact with the outside world. I was razor sharp in my keenness to toil and to impress but there was nothing to do. I soon realised that I had been employed to provide relief to George, Registrar and Office guru but he was so pressurised he had no time to talk to me. He knew more about the School than anyone [ and the most generous hearted of people ] but could not or would not let go and was making himself uncommonly tense in the process.
On about day five I was doodling at 8.45 am, to be surprised by the entry of the person who really ran the School, Liz the Headmaster's Secretary [ in days before such folk were blessed with the title of PA ]. She told me that I was summoned immediately into the Headmaster's presence; was this a cause for concern or excitement? The answer was both but particularly the former as Alan Tammadge told me that very sadly George, the boss whom I had hardly met, had suffered a major heart attack and it was not known when he might return. I was to assume his full portfolio of responsibilities in the mean time and that wouldn't be a problem, would it? So that was it; from nothing to Senior Management Team [ provisionally ] in one easy leap without trying; from the small office to the palatial setting overlooking the garden down to Knole; from no job to two jobs and of course, as was customary in a gentleman's institution, salary was not mentioned. I was petrified as I addressed my first Staff Meeting, keen to disguise my total lack of knowledge about anything at all from 120 colleagues all infinitely more intelligent and experienced than I, with quite a few not unhappy if I was to trip myself up along the way.
I just about managed to avoid that. George sadly never returned to proper health so my position was confirmed; under the new Head, Festival manager became Festival Director and Housemaster was thrown in as well [ I did turn this post down twice; the last time I expressed any sort of humility ]. It was all a truly first-class preparation for what was to come when I got into the seat of direction at Gordonstoun and how fortunate I was to encounter two Headmasters who took a gamble and said ' Get on with it '. I don't remember ever again entering that small room by the back door with lavatory glass.
When I embarked on these blogs I promised myself that they would not develop into an autobiography or a memoir [ is there a difference? ] because that inevitably involves talking about close family of several generations and they might not welcome a spot in this dubious limelight and because my life has not been sufficiently interesting or significant. But this I will say now that all has almost been said and done, my years at Sevenoaks School, first just with Jenny as newly weds and then in Johnsons boarding house as our three children arrived were without doubt the happiest days of my adult life.
Arriving at Gordonstoun eleven years later, the Head's office space, known with an appropriate hint of grandeur as the ' Founder's Room ', seemed vast in comparison with anything known before but mundane duties ensured, I hope, that pomposity was reined in and a sense of proportion maintained. The autumn of 1992 found us making our first overseas marketing sortie; we were on our way to entertain the contacts in Hong Kong.
Except we weren't on our way as, having flown south from Scotland, we spent an afternoon with friends in London and, en route in their car to Heathrow, I realised that I had failed to bring our passports. Time was short; I managed to get a colleague to burgle our house at Gordonstoun, find the passports, transfer the relevant pages by Fax [were those the days?] and to send on the original documents by courier to Hong Kong. With the almost illegible copies we attempted to get through security at Heathrow Airport. They weren't keen to let us fly but eventually relented, insisting there was no remote possibility of our being allowed to disembark and enjoy the delights of the Hilton Hotel in Hong Kong.
We took a chance on it and, sure enough, the plane had barely come to a halt on the Hong Kong runway when burly officials entered the plane, selected us for urgent treatment and led us off to a small forbidding room, as sterile as a dentist's theatre of operation. Hours of investigation and interrogation by the officials and general pleading by us proved fruitless and our hosts, safe from any accusation of being deemed a barrowload of softies, were not to be moved unless something more concrete and authentic by way of identification was produced. On the umpteenth search of her possessions Jenny came across her pass to the ' Elgin Fitness and Fun Club '; this surprisingly proved acceptable and she was in! At that time in my life of weighty responsibility I was attracted to neither fitness nor fun so I was excluded from any feeling of relief and could only muse with embarrassed dread as the time of our first reception of parents and significant others was approaching.
The Headmaster who came to Hong Kong without a passport felt increasingly small so the pleadings and rejections continued; the entire contents of my wallet were spread out for all to see. And there, lurking with the miniature pictures of one's children that we carry with us but rarely look at, presenting itself deferentially was the family season ticket to Drusilla's Zoo and Country Park. I explained to the exhausted officials that this was the most exclusive club of its sort in the UK and they really ought to know all about it. They were impressed -- or more probably wanted to get off for their tea; we were released from our most airless and threatening small room. We were global travellers thanks to Drusilla's and the Fitness and Fun Club.
Seven years later I found myself back in Hong Kong with the aforementioned Chris, the cream of humanity and the most effective of school Senior Leaders or Managers as we had just started to call them then. We had been on the road for ten days; for the sake of the School had consumed everything that walked on four legs as well as snake; we had visited the largest chicken farm in China [ six million birds ], right in the north in conservative Dalian where my camera had been confiscated at 6am at gunpoint as I tried to film a shackled chain gang in ancient Mao style uniform; we had visited Murphy's Pub in Shanghai to remind ourselves what the rest of the world was like; and in Guangzhou, thanks to Chris's brilliant skills of presentation, we did our intended business and signed up twenty plus young Chinese students for immediate entry to Gordonstoun. We did not make a song and dance about it at the time but without this substantial and welcome intake, the School would have been in considerable difficulty in 1999-2000.
In any case our duty almost done, Chris and I were sitting late at night in a hotel lounge in Hong Kong. There were three ladies in the room, probably in their late 20s and heavily made up in a somewhat suggestive way, and I knew what their game was likely to be. However, Chris as the most polite of folk and the most accomplished I know at engaging others in conversation, could not resist his instinct to move towards the trio rather than setting himself firmly in a negative posture. As their approach became ever more propositional, I verbally advised Chris to desist, tried to signal what sort of game we were now in and headed off, stage right, with him following, possibly confused.
The ladies were on their night shift,
But Chris just could not get their drift.
They started to creep;
I begged 'Please just keep
Your head down and make for the lift'.
With his new found friends in hot pursuit, we did just make it to the lift and got the doors sufficiently shut to say ' Good night ' as if we meant it. Never have I been so relieved to find myself in one of those stifling, sterile small rooms of the upwardly mobile variety.
I could go on ... and on ... about small rooms. Gandhi's great-granddaughter showing round the house in Delhi where my true hero was assassinated is with me for always; a life questioning moment in the spiritual presence of humble greatness. There is no real time either for Fromond's Chantry where we attended Chapel during our first year at Winchester; exquisite but blocking the line of vision across the even more beautiful cloisters; nor for St Oswald's church, Widford, approachable only by foot, with the dubious Mitford family at rest close by but not too close fortunately; nor Lullingstone Church in Sussex, so small it doesn't really qualify even as a room; and the Michael Kirk at Gordonstoun, deeply admired by some but treated with a degree of reserve by me as the presence of death was never far away [ hardly surprising as it was designed as a mausoleum ] until the totally joyous day of Sarah and Tom's wedding dispelled my doubts and is now deeply loved by me too [ if we're still allowed to say ' me too ' ].
The rooms of Roman dwellings, at least the sort that survive at floor level in the UK today, are not as extensive as one might think. I became fascinated by them when I found myself teaching an Ancient History course in the 1970s and we made an annual pilgrimage to the Palace at Fishbourne outside Chichester. Then I heard that the Woodchester mosaic was about to be exposed. This breathtaking work of art comprising one and a half million stone pieces, covering an area of 2209 square feet, had been discovered in perfect condition in the late 19th century. It lay, and still lies, on private land with the owner not keen to do anything about it, apart from having cattle meandering at ground level, several feet above it. Under pressure, successive landowners have allowed it to be opened up for a limited period and then returned to its subterranean tranquility until the next time. In 1973 it was revealed in its extraordinary splendour and beauty and I was one of 140,000 fortunate visitors to see it and gasp in admiration. It was then covered over and the local villagers, supported by the authorities, claiming that the occasional invasion of mosaic buffs caused so much chaos locally, it should not be displayed in future. And forty nine years later it has not seen the light of day again and there are no plans that this should change. It may be a little large for a conventional ' small room ' but it is the most beautiful floor you could see so, if it is ever opened up in the future, be there!
There is no time to talk about the Second World War pill boxes [ look out posts ] dotted along the Sussex coast, exciting small rooms for the playing of less serious war games in the 1950s. The degree of surprise was complete when, many years later, we discovered their replicas along the coast of the Moray Firth [ danger of invasion from Norway ]. They remain as quite a useful reminder of someone's inhumanity to someone else.
Nor is there time to consider the small ' rooms ' you sometimes find as part of garden designs in places like Hidcote and Great Dixter. It was a very good friend, Nicky, who first showed my philistine self that flowers, plants and shrubs were significant attributes in a civilised society and in retirement I have so enjoyed visits, tours and walks; as uplifting as the wilderness and the wide open spaces.
And that leads me to a final thought for I hear you thinking and wishing you could nudge me ' Enough of these blessed small rooms '. So let us instead turn to the wild countryside that is the north of Sutherland, the very top of Scotland in fact, not far from Cape Wrath, and the beaches and dunes near the village of Durness where between 1997 and 2004 we spent many very happy holidays staying in the house of friends.
And on this October day, as the five of us plus two dogs, strode over hill and dale with the wind slicing through whichever inadequate garment it was and the sand swirling to sting our eyes [ great holiday I hear you thinking ]. While our faithful labrador, Dickin, never left our side, his more adventurous cocker spaniel brother, Barty, took off and disappeared as only that breed can. Mildly, and only mildly, concerned we pressed on, whistling and calling, but to no avail and the going became increasingly tough. As each mini-summit appeared we tried to work up hope and enthusiasm until we scrambled over a series of challenging hummocks and behold, there it was. It was not Barty but stretched out in a line in front of us at about 200 metres distance what looked and seemed like at least a battalion of armed soldiers in full combat kit. A helicopter lurked behind them and many motorised vehicles were dodging about. We had clearly walked into the middle of an army exercise.
Pulling myself up to my authoritative but really rather average height, I advised the family to advance slowly. When we were only about a hundred metres distant and did not seem to be in mortal danger, we stopped and I shouted ' I am so sorry; we seem to have trespassed unintentionally but we are looking for our small black dog. Have you seen him and may we come through? '
There was a brief silence. Then from the middle and the front of the British army's finest a voice came back clearly ' That's quite alright, Mr Pyper, we have not seen your dog but please come through '.
Well that was it. For a fleeting second the expression on the faces of all our three children changed to a combination of stunned, profound and respectful surprise. ' Dad had been mentioned by name, hadn't he? Perhaps he isn't a complete dickhead, an absolute Wally after all. ' However, the expressions and the thoughts were but momentary and the normal service of scepticism [ particularly potent if your father is also your Headmaster ] swiftly returned and has been firmly in place for the next twenty years. The young officer was called Charlie and recognised my voice from Sevenoaks School where we had encountered one another fifteen years before. He is now a Lieutenant General and Chief of Joint Operations for the British Army.
Barty was found safe and well and some of us have continued to appreciate both the seclusion of the cubicle and the freedom of the plains.
12th April 2022
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