Paul Thomas: Stain on the old school tie

High school reunions are very much part of the sentimentalised American way of life, with Halloween, snowmen and white picket fences.

They've never appealed to me. Most boys in my year at Kings College signed up for the Old Boys Association before they'd even left. After five years there I had no appetite for organised nostalgia and less for having my pockets regularly picked for contributions to the next status-symbol building project.

So when my oldest friend rang to say there was to be a 40th anniversary get-together of our intake, my immediate instinct was to invent a binding obligation.

There were some old schoolmates I wouldn't mind seeing again but they could be counted on the fingers of both hands and, anyway, there was no guarantee they would turn up.

In effect I was being asked to pay for the privilege of socialising with people I'd spent 3 1/2 decades trying to avoid and with whom I'd have less in common now than I did then - and that's saying something.

But my friend refused to take bugger off for an answer. A few weeks later he tried again, using all the powers of persuasion that have landed me in so much trouble in the past.

I reconsidered. One way or another, I thought, it would be good for a laugh. It would be a one-off, never to be repeated, and if I could get a column out of it, the costs would be tax-deductible.

Besides, whatever real or figurative scars Kings inflicted on me, I'd long since settled the score. It seems to be taken for granted that Prince Albert College, the Auckland private boys school which features in my novel Old School Tie, is Kings in the thinnest of disguises. Prince Albert is a hotbed of perversion and criminality, up to and including murder, presided over by a certifiable lunatic, but no one associated with Kings has ever held this lurid portrayal against me. Several of my old teachers have in fact admired my perceptiveness.

So I went. Can there be an eerier experience than encountering a distinguished-looking middle-aged citizen who, when you last saw him, was a semi-housetrained delinquent with iridescent acne?

In Old School Tie I wrote of a 40-something couple embarking on an affair that "neither suffered the disappointment which often attends the sexual experiences of the no-longer-young - the discovery that artful outfitting and tailoring have concealed slackening muscles, subsiding flesh and coarsening skin".

Fully clothed, the class of 65 didn't scrub up too badly. There was the odd gleaming dome and double chin and a few blokes seemed to have shrunk but there was only one guy I wouldn't have recognised in a month of Sundays.

The tone was conventional but not stifling.

The presence of wives was obviously an inhibiting factor but when the opportunity arose marital histories were quietly exchanged. Interestingly, the teenage heart-throb who went through the prettiest girls in the eastern suburbs like Attila the Hun on Viagra has been married to the same woman for 25 years, while certain others, who didn't distinguish themselves in the social sphere, have gone through more wives than sets of golf clubs.

It seems there's something to be said for sowing your wild oats.

The token bohemian with his ponytail and recently acquired Brazilian wife was the object of indulgent affection and perhaps a touch of envy. An apparently stitched-up fellow told an excellent joke involving bestiality. The Deputy Prime Minister of Samoa, a politician with literary aspirations a la Benjamin Disraeli, seized the opportunity to plug his debut novel.

As you'd expect, sporting matters got a lot more air-time than academic achievements and there was much back-slapping over pranks and scrapes and outbreaks of unruly adolescence that generated hysteria at the time but now seem as quaint as bicycle clips.

And after dinner there was a sour helping of here-and-now reality. While having a fag for old time's sake outside the pavilion - this was, after all, where we learned to smoke - I discovered that moves are afoot to turn the cricket oval into an artificial hockey pitch.

During my time in England I played in some of the loveliest settings imaginable so I think I know a special cricket ground when I see one. In this country, self-contained cricket ovals are as rare as genuine fast bowlers who can remove their sweaters without needing six months' rehab.

Perhaps the people who now run the school don't attach much importance to aesthetic considerations or the memories of generations of boys who enjoyed a moment in the sun on that field of dreams. Perhaps they see their role simply in terms of ensuring that Kings offers state-of-the-art facilities commensurate with its fees.

But if they can wipe the oval off the map, how much of the heritage that we old boys are supposed to treasure is in fact sacrosanct?

If the answer is none, then last weekend was, in its amiable, beery way, a form of wake.

* Paul Thomas is a Wellington writer.