A Portrait of a Boy

This portrait of a young prep school boy was taken some time in the late 1950s when he was perhaps eleven. He's dressed to reflect his class and his time - tweed jacket, grey, v-necked tank top, grey cotton shirt and school tie. In his jacket buttonhole he has a T-bar at the end of a chain which attaches to the pocket watch which is in his breast pocket along with a small notebook. Also pinned in his lapel is a Robertson's jam gollywog, one of a small collection he has of which he is rather proud. His hairstyle is military, short back and sides and longer on top, and his ears are pink, which isn't surprising as.... 

....it's a bitterly cold day with almost six inches of snow on the ground.

That it's cold and snowy makes no difference to what he's wearing - with the exception of the tank top he wore exactly the same clothes the previous summer, although the wellington boots would only have been worn on wet days and for walks across muddy fields.

It's a continuing mystery to him that they have to wear shorts. In summer they were fine but in winter they did nothing to keep him warm. It was a relief when he moved on to public school that they all wore long trousers.

The picture was taken in morning break, after the boys had collected two sweets and a half slice of white bread, thinly smeared with margarine, from the school dining room. He is rather looking forward to the afternoon as they can't play rugby so the whole school will be involved in a 'wide game', with two teams each defending a fortress built on a knoll around which various treasures are hidden that the opposition has to find and carry back to their fortress.

He's become accustomed to being chilly through the day - the school's central heating is inadequate - but he hates the nights as he is so cold. His bedcovers are a cotton sheet, a thin, grey, ex-services blanket and an almost-as-thin eiderdown. The dormitory has no heating, a window is always open, and it isn't unusual to find the water frozen in the handbasins when they rise in the morning.

One of the masters took the photograph and gave him a print, which he stuck into the album his mother gave him when he first went away to school. He's grateful to the master: this is one of several small kindnesses he did to the boy.

Over sixty years later the boy looks at the picture and remembers those times as amongst the unhappiest of his life. He is surprised that the boys survived them so apparently unscathed; or perhaps they didn't.