The Man Within My Head by Pico Iyer

bears with them to their beds. But, wise to the dangers of life in the trenches, I took along only a stunt bear, so that the creature I really cared for could remain safe at home, out of view.

    S chool House was, of course, the name of the building where Graham Greene lived, too, both as a student at Berkhamsted and, in holidays, as son of the headmaster; the name itself might have stood for the universe of his fiction, where even in their forties, Old Boys are putting on the ties of schools not quite their own, reminiscing about faraway teachers, even urging other alumni, met at the club in West Africa, to send reports or love poems back to the old school magazine. In Greene’s day, the names of students newly fallen in war were recited every day in chapel (the two hundredth to be killed, by a horrible irony, was called “Dear,” the five hundredth “Good”). In our day, the war was long behind us—Empire had been seriously wounded in the First War and then killed off in the Second—but tall memorials stood above our playing fields, with the names of the dead all around them, and everywhere we turned were plaques and poppies.
    On Sunday afternoons hundreds of seats were laid out in School Hall, so we could watch
Zulu
and
The Bridge on the River Kwai
and learn about what loyalty to king and countrymeant, and how to suffer silently; on Saturday afternoons, a teacher read to us from
Esprit de Corps
and
Stiff Upper Lip
, Lawrence Durrell’s stories of life in the Foreign Office, to prepare us for our own detachment abroad. We had to run through a long line of freezing cold showers every morning at dawn, though, by some topsy-turvy logic, the number of warm baths we could take was limited to two a week and had to be overseen by young female Matrons.
    In chapel we sang, “There is a green hill far away,” and I thought, inevitably, of our house, now painted yellow, on the ridge in California, on the far side of the world; on the last day of every term, just as my mother and her friends had done at Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay, we all but shouted out William Blake’s lines about building a new Jerusalem in “England’s green and pleasant land.” When I was allowed “out of bounds,” occasionally, to buy sweets from the shop round the corner from where I’d grown up, it was to think of the dentist down the road, in the same street where Graham Greene’s wife and children lived. The name of our school magazine was
The Draconian
.

    O nce a year, perhaps, through an elaborate lottery system, each of us had a chance to win the ultimate prize: freedom from school lunch. If a letter was chosen close enough to the “I” in “Iyer”—I can remember even now the sensation of crowding around the magic box in the room lined with lockers—I was given a small paper bag and told, at 10:40 on a Sunday morning, that I didn’t have to show up again till dinner at6:15. Inside the bag was a small packet of potato chips, a Penguin chocolate bar, an apple and a 6½-ounce bottle of Coke. Fully aware of how special a luxury this was, I ran upstairs to my room, searched around for the compass in my pencil box, jabbed a few holes in the rusty bottle top and proceeded to sip the elixir through the pinpricks for the next four hundred and fifty-four minutes.
    Outsiders would seldom understand why we would later, with complete sincerity, call our years at school the best days of our lives. But we were situated within a very clearly ordered universe, in which an omnipotent authority determined everything. Every tiny pleasure felt earned, legitimate, and we always knew exactly where we stood. We were learning how to live with other boys, how to work with them and give them space, how to gauge their secrets as spies (and novelists and priests) do; our regimental comrades, as they quickly came to seem, would remain our closest friends through life, even if we couldn’t always tell how much we knew them (or they us).
    The