5. Mogg's Bakery and Jack Blandiver's Clock



 

Wells, Somerset; copyright Ian Rix 2005, licensed for reuse under Creative Commons Licence

Proust had his Madeleine cakes. I had Mogg's.

From the age of nine I was a boarder at Wells Cathedral School in Somerset, an experience that among other good things gave me a love of choral music sung within large high spaces. Drifting on a sea of memory lapping around my nine years at Wells, up pops Mogg’s Bakery. Mogg was a dayboy at school whose family ran a bakery in the High Street that sold a tart-shaped cup cake, the cup a semi-soft biscuit soaked in honey, the filling a marzipan butter cream sealed under a hard smooth top of lemon, strawberry or chocolate icing. Lemon was my favourite.

I almost sold my soul for that cake, desperate as I was to inveigle an invitation to join my housemaster’s Sunday soirees at which I had heard, to my chagrin, cakes from Mogg’s were regularly served to his coterie of favourite boys, along with Bach, Corelli and Isaac Stern. I will call him Mr Crabtree. He taught maths, listened in rapt devotion to classical music and roused his favourites for morning chapel by fondly tickling them beneath the blankets. He was a server at the cathedral and, dressed in scarlet gown, starched white surplus and ruff, carried the cross at the front of the processing choir at evensong flanked by his candle-bearing acolytes, Michael Skinner and Michael Watts, similarly clad in the scarlet and white symbolic of the blood and body of Christ. In these proceedings, to my mind, Mr Crabtree and his angelic Michaels displayed an unctuous piety, my distaste fuelled by the knowledge of their imminent partaking of Mr Mogg’s cakes in the cosy warmth of Mr Crabtree’s rooms while I was left in the cold dayroom to play table tennis with my friends.

Sometime later Watts was expelled along with Hedges. Neither of them returned after the Lent half term. We were not told why and left to grubby speculation in the whisperings of changing rooms and the lewd graffiti of toilet walls. Two boys less likely to be linked we found it hard to imagine. Watts was musical, a chorister whose voice had broken, a gangly boy from Chislehurst in Kent who hated sport and was banished to right back in hockey teams to hide his hapless skills. His father had been killed in the Normandy landings and his elegant socialite mother picked him up on parents’ weekends in a much admired 1938 cream Lagonda Drophead Coupe with a running board and British Racing Green upholstery. Hedges was a weekly boarder from a farm in the Mendip Hills, a stocky Fordson tractor lad whose fearless tackling as our first fifteen fullback was greatly missed.

I have other reminiscences of schooldays and of boys who only have surnames, names on labels stitched to each piece of clothing by painstaking mothers. Steer, who objects to me calling him a native and smacks me in my smart-arse mouth when I explain he is a native of Bristol. Fear, who falls over in the playground during our lunchtime soccer game and dies. Crane who, as a ten year old, keeps a pin-up photograph of Heddy Lamar in his bedside locker until, distressed by my puritanical self-righteous goading that he must love Heddy Lamar more than his mother, he tears it up tearfully. Poor Hoskins unmercifully bullied and provoked to fight and lose in the depths of the boiler room; little wonder I thought Lord of the Flies was a documentary. Surnames and nicknames. ‘Stinker’ O’Halloran. ‘Kipper’ Herriman. ‘Brat Thompson’, ‘Squirt’ Stephens. Only in insults do we acquire an identity of our own.

I remember the rituals of school life. Taking my pullover, shirt, tie and vest off in one piece at night in order to enjoy extra minutes in bed in the morning before being chased into the showers and speed dressing for chapel. Cajoling the school barber on his monthly visits for a surreptitious look at his rubber Scotsman doll, which he squeezes between thumb and forefinger to make the kilt jump up and an erect pink penis pop out. Saving the cardboard milk bottle tops from my daily ration and flicking them competitively at the wall - nearest to the wall wins - to add to my cache. The endless round of clubs and sports and games to keep us out of mischief. Proud speech days and a shelf-full of books each with a school crest embossed on the cover and a citation on the inside – the first, T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone, ‘Junior School Prize for General Work, Form III, 1950’, signed by the Head Master, A. F. Ritchie, Prebendary Alistair Ferguson Ritchie, headmaster from 1924, who I discovered later was, under the pseudonym AFRIT, a man of some considerable importance in the history and development of cryptic crosswords. Subsequent prize books were signed by AFRIT’s successor, F. G. Commings, who comes to Wells from St Paul’s School in London, the school attended by Samuel Pepys, and has been one of Orde Wingate’s Chindits in the war.

I have kept two books about Wells. The older is The Story of Wells Cathedral by Richard Malden, ‘sometime Dean of Wells’. It has an inscription inside the front cover, ‘John S Deeks with all best wishes from A. C. Tarbet, Wells, July 23^rd/’58’, a gift from my former housemaster to mark my leaving the school. The more recent is a historical guide to the town, published in 1990, a birthday present to me ‘With much love and many happy returns from Mum.’ Clearly I was expected to retain fond memories of my school days there, and do, by and large. I was a bright kid and good at sport, the ideal recipe for a happy boarding school life. It’s only looking back that I recognise how emotionally deprived I was and what a hopeless grounding an all boy’s boarding school is for coming to grips with the other half of the world, the feminine half. I suppose all the boys vied in our different ways for the attention of the younger and prettier of the matrons at the school, or of the headmaster’s teenage daughter or the eighteen year old bride of our housemaster, craving some mothering. From my nine years at the school I have only one recollection that touches that emotional hunger. A few of us were privileged, as sixth form students in English, to travel periodically with the headmaster and his wife to Stratford-on-Avon to see performances of Shakespeare plays there. Travelling back late at night I fell asleep in the back of the car cradled in the arms of the headmaster’s wife. It seemed a magical place to be. But that is it. Nine years and that is it. It appals me now to think of such emotional deprivation.

Wells Cathedral has one of the oldest clocks in England. It is six feet four inches in diameter and records not only the minutes and twenty four hours of the day but the days of the month and the phases of the moon. It is first mentioned in 1392 when the sum of ten shillings a year was assigned to its keeper. When Mary and I visited Wells in January 1982, seven weeks before her death. she recorded the clock on tape. There’s a whirring and clunking sound as the clock prepares to strike the hour, a sound as familiar to my memory as Mogg’s cakes and Mary’s voice: 

“There’s this little mechanical man to the right of the clock kicking a bell with his heels. The clock’s going to strike. That’s the sound of the horsemen. The clock’s striking twelve… no eleven…these little knights on horses have come out of their castle above the clock… they’re going round knocking each other off their horses, then getting back on, doing it again. Eleven times. Cute as.’

Memories lapping memories.

There is more organ music on the tape, then the sound of the cathedral bells and our laughter. What strange chance journeyings we embark upon. And still that clock is marking the minutes and hours, the days of the month and the phases of the moon, and Jack Blandiver is kicking his heels to sound the quarters of the hour, and the horsemen are striking each other down and courageously jumping back into the saddle to repeat the course.

[some of the names in this piece have been changed]