Jocelyn Cellars

Beneath Jocelyn House were the cellars.

‘The cellars’ had been converted into changing rooms. The walls were made of irregular shaped, white washed bricks that were permanently dripping.  The floor was made of grey flagstones. Around the edges of each room were rough wooden benches, with coat hooks on the walls above. There were no windows. There were two changing areas: one for older boys and one for younger. There was a room with some urinals and toilets, and a communal shower area.

The place was like a dungeon, with no pandering to comfort.

 I remember showers in there after sessions on the rugby fields or after cross country runs up Tor woods and past ‘Hitlers Teeth’.

Sometimes in the school holidays we would shower in there .

In the showers we would sing a song about the cellars:

“In the Jocelyn cells, where they hang you by your nails,
and the rats play billiards with your balls…
[often the song  would finish there, but sometimes would go on to:]
where your hair grows thick,
and they hang you by your dick…”

{at which point the song always petered out]

Others songs that we sung whilst showering were:

“Hitler, has only got one ball, the other, is in the Albert Hall;
his Mother, the dirty bugger, cut it off, when he was small”

“Whistle whilst you work ;
Hitler is a jerk,
he’s so barmy like Ruth Zagni,
whistle whilst you work”

Hitler’s memory was well and truly alive in 1970s England.*

( Ruth Zagni being the common name that rhymed with ‘barmy’, but she cannot surely have been the only one? Ruth Zagni was, if memory serves, a very talented pianist, one of the mysterious and somewhat aloof foreign musical prodigies who were common at the school. Being musically illiterate, I never understood them.  No doubt Ruth has enjoyed a successful career, most likely blissfully unaware of her role as the subject of the songs of 10 year old schoolboys.)

We sang pop songs too.  In 1976 we sang ‘Under the Moon of Love’ by Showaddywaddy:

“Lets go for a little walk
Under the moon of love
Lets sit right down and talk
Under the Moon of Love..”

In 1977 and 1978 ‘The Darts’ were popular. They covered early US rock and roll hits.  The big songs were ‘Daddy Cool’, ‘The Girl Can’t help it’ and ‘Come back my love’, all songs that were perfect for singing in the showers.

In crueller moods, we flicked each other with wet towels,  rolled into a whip like the barb of  stingray; an accurate shot could cause some pain on a bare leg.

When we lived in Jocelyn, the cellars were physically very close to our kitchen, although in another part of the house. There was a ‘back entrance’ to the cellars that was next to our back door. There was also an old storeroom opposite our kitchen that I think led into the cellars.

When we first moved into the house and for most of my life there, I was petrified by the idea of what horrors took place in the cellars during the night. Often I would wake up and hour or two after having gone to bed, scared by a dream. Mum and Dad would be still up, talking downstairs in the kitchen. I would get up and, race down to them; the two or three seconds in took to navigate the dark stairs down to the kitchen seem interminable, as I had to get down before something terrible emerged from the cellars. Once in the kitchen, where there was light and homeliness, all was safe; ‘I have had a bad dream’ I would say. The dreams were the only thing that could ever cause me to walk down those stairs after dark.

*there will be a future post about the Hitler to explain further.