A Javelin for Jonah (2 page)

Hamish digested this information and that evening communicated it, and his observations, in a letter to his mother.

“I think I am going to enjoy it here, dearest mamma. We are very beautifully situated, high up and with a view, I am told, over five counties. The house is large and finely furnished and only the staff and the women students live in it. The men sleep in huts called halls. These are dotted about the grounds, which are well-kept and spacious. Emphasis is on sport—mostly athletics and swimming in the summer, and we play both codes of football, with hockey and lacrosse for the girls, in the winter. The food is above praise and the students have the same to eat as we do. There are ten of us, including the Warden, seven men and three women. The chief of staff, known officially as the Dean and to everybody as Henry, is a very decent sort, and I think I shall get on pretty well with the others. Two of the women are young and seem to be popular with the students. The third is a most fearsome old battle-axe with whom, of course, I’ve fallen deeply in love. It’s reputed that she beats the women students when they don’t please her, but that, I fear, is apocryphal, much as I should like to believe it, for the majority of our girls—God bless them!—strike me as hussies.

“I am put down to take French and German and have offered Russian and Chinese as well. I have only two lectures a day and no supervisory duties, but we are all expected to help coach athletics and swimming. We have two splendid pools, one outdoor, the other under cover. The students do pretty much as they like—I mean they don’t have to attend lectures— but they are not allowed cars or pocket-money. However, as we are miles from anywhere, they seem to take a philosophical view and sweat so hard that the standard of athletics, I am told, is surprisingly high. We have a match on Saturday against the Squadron Club; so that will give you some idea of our quality. Besides, I’m told, though I haven’t seen it yet, the Warden’s cupboard is festooned with the most fantastic array of sports’ trophies you ever saw. He must be the Lord High Pot-Hunter of all time, and the students have picked up the habit, I suppose.”

“Yes, indeed,” Henry had agreed when this was mentioned. “Of course, all the silver gets put behind bars every night. We may love our students, but we don’t trust them. I’m not sure that this withdrawal of all pocket-money is such a good idea, you know. They are not even in a position to earn any, either. It must be a frightful temptation to whip a solid silver cup and flog it to a fence and have a beano on the proceeds. Anyway, look after your own things and don’t leave any money about. I don’t say you
would
get it swiped, but it’s better not to offer any chances. I suppose Gassie didn’t show you his stock-cupboard with all the loot in it? If not, there’s no doubt he will. It’s the pride of his life. He’s got some obsessive ideas about encouraging the students, you know. Actually, I think he wants to put on a sentimental, proud father act when visitors come, but he may be sincere enough, so I mustn’t be uncharitable. Anyway, in this trophy-cupboard he also keeps the sports-gear worn or used by students who’ve made college records. You can imagine the sort of thing: four pairs of spikes worn by the team who put up the fastest-ever time in the sprint relay; Pong’s shot which brought us a special cup in 1966; Long’s discus; Wong’s javelin; Bong’s hammer, which went so far that it nearly took the head off the Lord Lieutenant; the high-jump bar which Mong cleared at six feet seven in 1969, and Song’s bamboo pole with which he made the record vault before glass-fibre poles came in and catapulted the world record to over eighteen feet. Well, you can imagine the kind of thing, as I said. He’s even got the track-suit he himself wore in the days of long ago when his University, for which he was reserve in some dim event or other, beat a weak A.A.A. team and got a match against Oxford or Cambridge—I forget the details. Get him to tell you all about it. He loves the story.”

“Good Lord! Was
he
ever an athlete?”

“Of some sort, no doubt. That’s why we go all out for athletics here, and make academic work an also-ran.”

So far as academic work was concerned, Hamish found that the first of his lectures was to prove a trial of strength between himself and the alumni. From various senior-common-room warnings he had received, he was not unprepared for trouble and he was willing enough, although not eager, to face something of a show-down before he was accepted by the students. He walked into his handsome lecture-room on the first floor of the mansion—each lecturer was allotted his own lecture-room to which his students came or not, as they pleased—and found it crowded. He walked to the dais, glanced at his audience, said, ‘Goodmorning, ladies and gentlemen,’ and placed his lecture notes on the desk.

“What’s your name, bugger?” asked a youth in the front row.

“Well, not that,” Hamish replied. “I will tell you what it is at the end of the session. My subject this morning is Jean-Paul Sartre. I shall speak entirely in French and when I have finished you will write in your notebooks, in either French or English, the gist of what I have said.” He glanced over his notes and began to utter. So did the students. They kept up a continual low murmuring all the time he was speaking. When he paused, so did they. When he resumed, they did the same. Hamish carried on his discourse without raising his voice. At the end of a quarter of an hour he stopped, smiled and said, “That’s it, then. Ten minutes to get down what you can remember.” He seated himself. The students began to write. He wondered what was going down in their notebooks. At any rate they had ceased to mutter. All appeared to be extremely busy, although he had no illusions about the sort of thing which was probably being written, for now and again there was a smothered guffaw as one student showed another what he had put into his notebook.

The first climax came fairly soon. The youth who had asked him his name came out to the desk and said, “Please, sir, what’s the French for… ” (an unprintable word even in these days). He spoke loudly and clearly. The group looked up interestedly. One of the women students tittered. Hamish rose to his feet and picked up a piece of chalk as though he was going to write on the blackboard. Instead, he dropped the chalk, seized the student by the collar, swung him round and kicked him half across the room.

“That’s the French you are asking for,” he said pleasantly, “and, if you can’t spell it, perhaps I can be of further assistance.” He looked at the class. “Does any other gentleman require help?” he asked quietly.

“Yes, I do,” said a hulking young man at the back of the room. “You’ve hurt that poor boy. I demand satisfaction. I don’t like to see you hurt that poor boy.”

“Oh, are you the champion of the oppressed?” asked Hamish, measuring him with his eye. The young man, who appeared to be among the oldest and was certainly the biggest of those present, stepped out from the ranks and came towards him. Without further speech he swung a heavy fist at Hamish’s head. Hamish avoided it easily, put his left fist with a sharp jab into the man’s brightly-coloured shirt-front and then clipped him under the jaw with his right. It was not, and was not intended to be, a knock-out blow.

“Hey!” said the man, blinking. “How did that happen?”

“Come again, and I’ll show you.”

“Right,” said the fellow. He grinned good-naturedly. “In the gym, though, and, I think, with the gloves on.” He returned to his place. The youth whom Hamish had kicked limped out of the room, no doubt (thought Hamish) to confide his troubles to the Warden. Hamish seated himself again. He felt certain that his own troubles were by no means over, but he felt also that the preliminary skirmish had gone his way. He had no intention of allowing anybody to read out the scurrilous stuff which he was quite sure some, if not all, had put into their notebooks. Instead he said, “I shall now translate my lecture for you, so perhaps you will correct your own work and form your own opinion as to how much of the lecture you understood.”

There were no more interruptions. When he had finished, amid what he thought he recognized as the brooding silence which precedes a thunderstorm, he wrote a short vocabulary on the blackboard and braced his shoulders against the missiles which he more or less expected would be thrown at him once his back was turned. These, singularly enough, did not materialize. Turning again to the students, he remarked in a quiet tone, “Some of you may care to use some of those words in your essay. The subject is
Mémorial d’un Gladiateur Romain
. Needless to say, the work is entirely optional, as I understand is customary here, but I shall be happy to mark anything sent in.”

“So what
is
your name?” asked one of the women students.

“The Warden has suggested that I answer to the name of James, mademoiselle,” replied Hamish.

“Come up and see me sometime, James,” said the damsel, who appeared to be about eighteen.

“I suggest you wash your face and comb your hair before you issue your invitations,” said Hamish. “The class is dismissed.” He stood in the doorway as they clattered out and, waylaying the large student, said to him, “And what’s
your
name, may I ask?”

“Richard,” he replied. “In other words, Dirty Dick, so you’d better look out. You won’t catch me napping again.” But he grinned amiably as he spoke.

“Fine. We meet at Philippi, then. Let me know when you can spare the time.” Hamish gave the young man a friendly clap on the shoulder and they walked out side by side to the college canteen.

T
wo circumstances made life at Joynings, so far as Hamish was concerned, very much simpler and easier than he might have expected. One was the lack of brotherliness among the men students to which Henry had referred. They were prepared to sabotage, more or less effectively, lectures which did not please them, but of physical ganging-up against authority there was little sign. The second circumstance was that the promised set-to with the gloves between Hamish and his hulking challenger had resulted in a spectacular knock-out by Hamish, followed by a cheerful, unembittered relationship with the defeated Richard which Hamish found undeniably helpful.

Richard, he learned later, had been expelled from his school for half-killing an unpopular sadistic prefect. He was now twenty-one years of age and had been at Joynings for four years, during which time his size, weight and strength had brought him to a position of leadership to which his other attributes scarcely entitled him. Hamish, bit by bit, learned the case-histories of a good many of the men-students. By no means all of them were discreditable, he thought.

Miss Yale, the senior woman lecturer—the battle-axe to whom Hamish had referred in his letter home—was more reticent about the women students, but these, with no encouragement from him, told Hamish more about themselves than he ever learned from headquarters. They also made overtures to him which so young a man might have found embarrassing but for the fact that Hamish had a fund of common sense and a robust sense of humour inherited from his mother, a useful streak of Puritanism which came to him from his father, a trick of summing-up people and situations which Dame Beatrice, his mother’s employer had taught him, and (possibly the product of all these) a superb self-confidence which was all his own and which, by the unreflecting, was often mistaken for arrogance.

With all his colleagues he got on reasonably well, although his preferences were for Henry and the redoubtable Miss Yale. That formidable middle-aged Amazon could beat him at golf (there was a links twenty miles from the College) and was, he discovered, an ex-county champion at throwing the javelin and, but for unfortunate family affairs which had prevented her from appearing at final trials, a near-certainty for an international vest in those Dark Ages before Hamish had been born.

The match with the talented Squadron Club was lost by Joynings, a circumstance moodily and unfairly related by the losers to the non-appearance of their first string in the shot— the youth put out of action by Jones. To those who expressed their views to him, Hamish pointed out, logically enough, that even if Derry, the athlete injured by Jones, had taken part and had won his event, the result of the match would have been unaltered. The College still could not have won a match which was decided on an aggregate of points.

He himself was mostly engaged in coaching swimming, but he soon found that, except for Jones, who seemed to be odd man out in most of the College activities, there was a cheerful spirit of give and take among the members of the senior common room and that he could always call upon somebody to act as starter or hold a stop-watch or even watch over a nervous learner while he himself was engaged with the more talented and further advanced of his flock.

Henry he had liked from their first meeting, but naturally, at his age, he had more in common with the younger men. There was an ex-Cambridge Blue named Martin, who was second coach under Henry for the javelin, hammer, discus and shot, and a slightly older man, whose age was still well under thirty, who was the coach for the jumps; he was called Barry, for, by Gascoigne Medlar’s ruling, nobody was known by anything other than his first name. There was also a member of a provincial but famous athletics club who coached all the running—not a favourite series of events at Joynings, as it happened, so he was only a part-timer at the College. He retained his amateur status by acting nominally as a lecturer in science. He talked with a Midlands accent and was named Jerry.

Except for Medlar himself, the only other man on the staff was Jones. The men’s gymnasium was his province, but he had a rooted dislike of hard work and had formed a habit of leaving his charges to amuse themselves while he himself came out on to the field or the running track and watched other people’s efforts, particularly where the women students were at practice. These loathed him; the men students, on the whole, despised him.

There were only eighteen women students while Hamish was at the College and their guardian was the redoubtable Miss Yale. She also helped with athletics coaching, and in addition to her there was a full-time instructor for dancing and gymnastics (an extremely beautiful young woman named Lesley), and a part-time coach for diving. This was a bouncing, enthusiastic girl named Celia, who spent three days a week at Joynings and the rest of her time as a swimming-instructor at the public baths in the nearest town.

After his first full house, Hamish began to find his lectures less and less well-attended until, by the third week, his regular audience was reduced to four. It consisted of the burly Richard and three girls. Richard remained faithful, not because he wished or intended to receive instruction in the tongue of Racine, but in the interests, as he saw them, of propriety.

Asked one day by Hamish, towards whom, since their scrap in the gymnasium, he had assumed the attitude of a protective father-figure, why he bothered himself to attend classes in which, it was clear, he took no interest whatsoever, the hulking youth replied, “You’re not safe with those types who sit in at your lectures, Jimmy-boy. Straight off the streets, those beazels.”

“Only two of them,” Hamish said gravely. “The other one wants to learn French.”