Simon Carr: Public school gave me the worst days of my life - and the ideal comprehensive education

Mr Edwards made one of us climb out of the window and stand in a nettlebed for being stupid

"Forty years on growing older and older," the song goes, "shorter in wind as in memory long." It's early Leonard Cohen, isn't it? "Feeble of foot and rheumatic of shoulder, what will it help us that once we were young."

Today, I am going back to my old school for a reunion. Our school song (the above belongs to Harrow) was extremely stupid. It began: "The Romans were a knowing race (Vivat Haileyburia). They built a road down to this place (Vivat Haileyburia)."

Looking back from 40 years away it's clear that they were the unhappiest days of my life; I enjoyed them in many ways.

When I arrived from my little prep school in the mid-1960s, it was like travelling from a provincial village to the regional capital. What noise. What people. It was entirely bewildering. You couldn't tell the college prefects from the masters. The head of school was allowed to be married and to wear a moustache. His fellows were tall, groomed, umbrella-carrying and ostentatiously well dressed. One of them spoke to me in my first two weeks. (I went a little light-headed.) He said: "You don't call me sir. My name is Bulmer."

We all wore detached collars (semi-stiff). We slept in long dormitories, 50 beds in two rows separated by white, rather Regency partitions. We were inducted into the school regime via a Governors' Test. We had to learn all the houses, the house ties, the names and nicknames of the housemasters, the number of blades of grass in Quad and the tiles on Trevelyan's roof (trick question).

The penalty for failing this test twice was to be beaten. The cane was surprisingly long, and in the hands of a batsman-hero, it had the power to lift you off your heels. The shock, and more particularly the pain, affected your whole being; it was like being in a car crash. Four cuts were endurable because you didn't really feel the first two. (It's like being shot, when your whole nervous system closes down in outrage.) But six of the best, as the cheerful phrase of the day had it, they were unimaginable to the modern sensibility.

The masters ("beaks") had more freedom than teachers today. Mr Edwards ("Basil") made one of us climb out of the window and stand in a nettlebed for being stupid. Later, he gave us the equivalent of an art history A-level in between teaching English texts. I don't think you can do that these days, with lesson plans divided into 10-minute sections. Basil would sometimes spend the first 10 minutes of a lesson opening his mail and glaring at it.

We were all on library parade one day, under the neo-classical façade. Four hundred boys being drilled by the geography master. His weak voice came fluting down the lines and we sniggered, or turned the wrong way or fell over inventively. Then he got seriously annoyed and we all tried to please him because he was popular in his ineffectual way. As his voice reached us we came to attention. It sounded like an African drum solo.

Then RSM Ludford came bristling into view. Four fingers angled precisely on his marching compass (the thing that measured the length of an infantryman's proper pace). As soon as he stepped on to the parade ground we were aware of him, the swing in his arm, the quivering energy in his stride. He was furious. He marched along the front of us, wheeled on to the geography master with the most aggressive salute we'd ever seen (boy-yoy-yoynngg!). He dismissed the geography master, wheeled on us and screamed something no one understood. But our feet came together in one sound, in something I later recognised as the dense structure of a firing squad.

It was (and remained) my only experience of a collective sense, welded into one many-headed monster by the power of his voice. I understood why people went to war, or attended rallies in Nuremberg.

Was it a good thing? It was, in its way, an ideal sort of comprehensive education. For a start, the school was the right size - about as large as the House of Commons. There were some very stupid boys in the lower streams - many of them now solicitors. There was selection by common entrance, it's true, but the system would have worked as well with any random cross-section. The culture had the power to make and remake you. The attention you received, unwelcome at the time, was very persistent.

The masters knew you were good at something. (Everybody is, they comprehensively felt.) They took great pains to find out what it was - and then they made you do it. There was no hiding place. You were harried into it - art, singing, carpentry, metal work, squash, fencing, debating, boxing, rucking, acting, reading out loud. And because there was so much done, there was a place for more or less everyone, even myself (Dadaist, aesthete, multi-dimensional idiot).

Dr Arnold (who invented the modern system back in the 1840s) had a strict order of educational priorities. First: religion (or "values" as we now say). Second: gentlemanliness (in modern English, "character" or "socialisation"). Third: scholarship. We mocked it then (Alan Bennett's line: "We don't set much store on cleverness at Albion House"). But those priorities in that order are the modern, educational norm even now.

The stress of those years was appalling for the authority figures. But they took us on (Us! The Dadaists, aesthetes and multi-dimensional idiots!) and, of course, they lost. We crushed them, for better and worse, like cockroaches. It wasn't for lack of power they lost (remember those three-foot canes) but for want of charm. Sergeant Major Ludford's success demonstrated their failure. He was ex-regular army, small, bristling, exuding a vast sense of confidence and terrific ferocity on rare occasions, as required.

He approached me one evening in the Armoury's half light among the smell of oil and wadding. I was on a charge. "Simon," he said. Nobody had called me by my Christian name before. "I like you." There was a pause while he considered me. "You're a rebel," he said. "I'm a rebel. I've been a rebel all my life." And from that moment I did anything Sgt Major told me to.

Is that the lesson? If you take a close, personal interest in people you can get them to do almost anything you want. Yes, the ideal comprehensive education. Maybe all schools should be public schools. (No letters, please.)

Simon@simoncarr.co.uk