St Peter’s was located in Panchgani, a hill station tucked away in western India. In spring and summer, the place was bathed in soft focus sunlight, the fields buzzed with dragon flies and swarms of butterflies; and during the long twilight, the gulmohar and jamun turned a golden brown.
In the monsoon, the place was hosed down by torrential rains, and there were years when we never saw the sun for three months at a stretch.
When I first joined that missionary boarding school at the age of eight, in the early war years, it was known as the European Boys High School (EBHS).
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The EBHS could trace its origin to the Kimmins Girls School from where a clutch of boys were plucked and placed in another building by Stanley Heywood, the Bishop of Mombasa, probably because one of the larky lads had been exposing himself!
Years later, when an Assembly had been created it was inaugurated by Sir John Clark, the governor of Bombay. In subsequent years, the other senior members of the clergy dropping in and out of the place, inevitably, the name of the school was changed to St Peter’s.
Legend has it that the word Panchgani was derived from Marathi and meant five villages. Actually there were five tablelands or plateau.
Tableland One which housed the cricket, hockey and football pitches of all schools lay separated from Tableland Two by Tiger’s Leap, named after a remarkable striped cat that was supposed to have leapt 80 yards across the yawning divide in a single spring.
No British boarding school in India was quite like St Peter’s
Besides St Peter’s there were three other boarding schools for boys — Billamoria for Parsis, Anjuman for Muslims and Sanjeevan Vidyalaya for Hindus.
Girls of the Protestant persuasion went to Kimmins and those who practiced Catholicism were sent to St Joseph’s Convent School.
At St Peter’s we were always hungry, because the portions served at meals were very small. The food wasn’t all that bad. We got used to bajara and jawar, because all available wheat was sent to the Royal Indian Army.
However, the moment we were sent the odd fiver from home, we sneaked off to the Lucky Restaurant which was out of bounds and bought a qeema-chapatti or an omelette-chapatti for four annas.
All food parcels were first examined by Ma Hoyle the stentorian matron. Whenever a parcel of two dozen Alfonso mangoes arrived for a student, he would receive only four pieces of fruit, after the teachers had been licking their fingers and smacking their lips for three days. Ma Hoyle would call the student, strike an attitude, look awfully crestfallen and say, “Sorry Sonny, the rest have all gone bad”.
One of the Iraqi students from Basra told the poor chap later, “Next time, ask Mummy to send you a baby cobra and mark the box Fresh Pineapples from Aunt Elizabeth”.
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We received six annas pocket money a week with which we bought stickjaw (made from jaggery and peanuts) or sweetened condensed milk from the school tuck shop run by Garika, a lower order tyrant with a short fuse.
In my very first year, a boy accosted me and some other boys outside the tuck shop and took away what we had bought. An older boy Rex Lynn who became a leading boxer in St Peter’s and later played hockey for England, had witnessed the larceny and told me later that as I had rather long arms and was quite tall, I should hit the bully hard on the nose with a left hook, the next time he came near.
Principal and the teaching staff of the school during the 1940s. —Photos provided by the writerSo the following month when the bully came to collect his taxes, I let him have it with both fists and something snapped inside his nose. The assault was witnessed by Lynn and Peter Scut who later joined the Royal Navy. Lynn then turned to the bully and said, “Just remember our code. We never snitch on a fellow student to the teachers.” The bully with blood on his shirt broke into a fit of sobs and later told the compounder in the sick bay that he had tripped over a hockey ball and banged his nose on one of the walls of the gymnasium. After that he avoided the tuck shop like the plague.
Every student was addressed by his surname and all teachers as Sir. But they had nicknames — Mr Sackett became Sacky, Mr Llewellyn became Lanky, Mr Davis became Davy and Mr White became Chalky.
We had no nicknames for Mr Schwarzenberger who taught French and Mr Deshpande who taught drawing and painting, both of whom shared the record for bending students’ ears. The latter complained to the principal Rev F.W Mckeown that I had been insolent, so I was baptised with three whacks on my buttocks with a cane made from the best Malaysian Malacca, and I kept a stiff upper lip throughout the punishment.
I still liked Rev McKeown. He was upright, always fair and just. What he taught us — was fair play, to always stand up for the underdog and not to hit a person when he was down. But above all, he taught us to be decent human beings. Our motto was Ut Prosim (That I may serve).
When he left the school in 1945 to go back to the United Kingdom, many of the boys cried. Fortunately … his legacy survived.
Almost every boarding school has had a tragedy or two. Willis, who went on a picnic to Mahableshwar had an epileptic fit in the middle of the lake and clutching the oarsman took him down to the bottom.
Chalky’s two Alsatians were badly mauled one evening by a marauding black panther while they were defending his young son, before Chalky brought out his loaded double-barrelled shot gun and blasted the marauder as he tried to flee.
Tragedy descended once again on Mr White’s family when the same boy died of pneumonia. There was a light drizzle in the cemetery as we shivered in our sou’westers, mackintoshes and gumboots; and as the little coffin was lowered into the grave and we all sang the hymn, Abide With Me there wasn’t a dry eye in the graveyard.
There were some interesting characters at St Peter’s. George, who managed the sick bay deserted his wife and seven children and eloped with the wife of a Bombay film producer.
Mohammed Ali Sonawalla was the fastest mammal on two legs in the school and won every race for the seniors until 1945 when Raja Ram Nimbalker carried away the trophy by sprinting 99.4 metres in 10.3/5 seconds.
Henry Fagin manufactured crude pistols from old pipes and shot crows.
Silva Carlos Antonio Fernando Costelliano Hugo of Santiago, Chile won the school singing competition with the Neapolitan Folk Song O Sole Mio. Peter Scutt joined the Royal Navy.
We also had a few fruitcakes. Joseph Joseph Joseph, a full-blooded American Ashkenazi, who was referred to as Joseph Cubed, once got hold of Talal Asad, son of Muhammad Asad, author of The Road to Mecca and Islam at the Crossroads, because he was an Austrian and the author of this article, because his mother was a Prussian from the wrong side of the Polish Corridor, and accused the two of us of sending secret plans to Rommel. Wilmott, a toffee-nosed twit added, “Yea, Sears even shot down the carrier pigeon you were using.”
We went to church every Sunday once in the morning and once in the evening. The boys occupied the aisle on the right and the girls the one on the left. Brothers and sisters met for 15 minutes outside the place of worship and acted principally as a courier exchange service between love-sick teenagers.
One dark night when the moon was given speed by flying scarves of white cloud, a great love story was in the making. But, I’ll keep that for next time.
Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, March 6th, 2016