What Does This Button Do?: The No.1 Sunday Times Bestselling Autobiography. Bruce Dickinson
I was never too sure why I ended up in boarding school. My parents kept asking me if I wanted to go, and my immediate instinct was, Anything to get out of this place. So I smiled and passed the crazy exams, and sat the IQ test and did the interview. The only part I remotely enjoyed was the IQ test because it was interesting and there was nothing you had to remember by rote. You only had to do your best. In early summer the letter arrived. I had passed: here are the uniform restrictions and please pay lots of money.
Oundle was, and still is, a small market town near Peterborough in the rolling countryside of Northamptonshire. Nestled in a bend of the sleepy but often disobedient River Nene, it sits on a mound above the flood plain. Fotheringhay Castle is a couple of miles down the road, along with its associated church, and the whole area is steeped in English, as opposed to British, history.
Half the town was occupied by the school. Most of the old buildings were either school rooms or accommodation, and the Worshipful Company of Grocers of the City of London founded the whole enterprise in the sixteenth century. The hub of it all was a faux-Oxbridge quadrangle with pillars and porticos, grand marble balustrades and architecture to remind you of your place. That is to say, small, ignorant and insignificant.
Hundreds of alumni hung on boards at every turn in the quadrangle. Rugby, fives, athletics, Classics, mathematics and all those boys whose names never got written down until they came back in body bags as dead heroes from two world wars. There were quite a few of those.
I still didn’t know why I was here. It got me out of the house was my best guess, and I must have proved something by passing all the wretched exams. One reason, though, could have been that my aunt was the cook. There was no clear logic to this, and even I was confused as to the relationship between school dinners and academic excellence, but there was some suggestion that life might be easier for me if people knew that my aunt cooked the school meals.
No one in my family, from any branch of it, had ever been to a private school. My father had been denied a place at university after getting into grammar school because Ethel could only afford to send one son out of four to higher education. Stewart was the eldest, so he received the college education.
Dad never forgot that.
My sister was to go down an entirely different path, leaving school with few academic qualifications and taking a long, hard road, virtually self-taught, to becoming one of the world’s leading show jumpers. When I was dragging my 19-year-old arse around East London playing pubs to three people, my 14-year-old sister was debuting a horse she’d trained herself in the Horse of the Year Show at Wembley Arena.
So, at the age of 13, having left Sheffield, I began a process of disengagement from family, and involuntary alienation from the human race, at least for a couple of years. It is hard to say, even in hindsight, whether there was a net gain or loss as a human being.
Academically, there is no question that the hothouse environment pushed up the less able and enabled the truly talented to excel – with the odd possible exception. I remember myself being stolidly average, but memorable for a variety of other reasons.
All boys were assigned to a house, around 50 or 60 strong, and this served as their tribe. Everything about the place was competitive. There were inter-school competitions, inter-house competitions and intra-house competitions. No stone was left unturned in the search for winners. If you weren’t a winner on the sports field, you might be a winner as an academic. If not as an academic, well, things got a little stickier – perhaps Oundle was not for you.
My house was called Sidney, and it had a grand mock-Georgian façade with a sweeping gravel drive. It backed onto acres of rugby and cricket pitches, and was miles away from the school classrooms. To this day I walk at breakneck pace everywhere in mortal terror of being late for English Lit. I covered, I guess, about five miles before lunch with an armful of textbooks. Nowadays, it’s probably hoverboards and iPads doing the hard work.
One of the first things to strike me, before the whips, chains and blunt instruments (more of that later), was a most-illuminating bout of salmonella poisoning. Along with red lipstick and beehive hairdos, you can add fish pie to the chamber of horrors that haunts me to this very day.
My auntie Dee attempted to kill me, along with 20 of my house mates, and a sharp piece of microbial detective work traced the offending pathogen back to a serving spoon. Those unlucky enough to take the left-hand path (fun though it might seem for witches) in the serving line were struck down by Pasteur’s revenge. Those in the right-hand queue suffered no ill effects. The stomach cramps began three hours after ingestion of the emetic fish pie. Shortly afterwards I was admitted to a ward to join my similarly stricken schoolmates. For three days stuff erupted from every available orifice. The lyric ‘And I filled them – their living corpses with my bile’ from ‘If Eternity Should Fail’ didn’t require all that much imagination.
We were kept rather busy with sport. Being no good at it meant being designated ‘pathetic’. Being good at it meant you walked on a small cloud and were infallible.
The school had innumerable rugby teams, and had a boathouse with eights, fours and sculls, plus cricket teams, shooting teams, tennis, squash and the somewhat obscure but popular game of fives.
Before being allowed to go in a boat of any description, children underwent the ‘boat test’. In the Middle Ages witches underwent a similar ordeal. It involved being dressed in army boots, jeans and a thick wool army sweater, and then being chucked in the river.
A road bridge over the River Nene served as the vantage point to observe the drowning of the adolescent witches. Victims were picked up and tossed into the freezing water, and had to swim 25 yards or so without drowning. Imagine how much I enjoyed that. I was regarded as being a possible rower, so I had a discreet second attempt, and a third. I think they would have just carried on until I drowned, so I gave up breathing, thought of my baptism and swallowed a lot of water before finally being fished out by a boat hook. The practice was discontinued shortly thereafter, when dead cows were found, infected with some horrendous bug, floating bloated upstream.
I was, of course, bullied, and as before in my previous school I didn’t back down, change my opinion or shut up. So, two years later, a bit of a fuss blew up, parents were called in, pupils were suspended and then it all petered out. But for those two years life was average-to-middling hellish.
We slept in dormitories, army-barrack style: cold giant windows with no curtains, and two lines of iron beds; a thin mattress on a chipboard base, a couple of blankets and cotton sheets. There was no privacy, no locks on drawers, and it was communal baths and washrooms. Things got interesting after lights out. After the teacher had left, the senior boy would wake me up. Half an hour later, a crowd would gather round. He was around 18, a big lad. He had a pillow wrapped into a tight ball.
‘Time for your lesson, Dickinson. Defend yourself,’ he’d say.
Not exactly Queensberry rules, and not much you could do about it, except build a reservoir of rage and anger. Often, my bed was pre-soaked or covered in eggs, or my personal kit was covered in washing-up liquid, or any number of petty infractions of personal space.
By year two I was pretty fucking angry. Rugby didn’t even touch the beginning of my rage, and I quite enjoyed rugby. Believe it or not, I was a prop, and as others got bigger but I did not, I was variously a hooker (not enjoyable), scrum half (not very good) and I finally settled down as a flanker, or wing forward as it was in rugby pre-history.
My sidestep was the Army Cadet Force. Sure, there was a hierarchy, but oddly the regime wasn’t directed mindlessly against me. It was the same bullshit for everyone. We had 400 in our cadet force, and I progressed rapidly through the various ranks, until one day I found myself being promoted to the exalted rank of under officer.
There were only two of us, and the other was one of my few close friends at Oundle, Ian, who went on to be a lieutenant colonel in the Highland Regiment and served in some pretty hairy locations. The last time we met, after 25 years, was in a grubby hotel in Jeddah. I was a captain flying a Boeing 757 chartered by Saudi Airlines during the Hajj and he was in charge of the Saudi National Guard.