Fear to Tread (2 page)

“Well, yes, Mr. Wetherall, there is. It’s Sammy.”

“Hullo, what’s this?” He came out of the clouds with a jerk. A thing to do with boys could be important.

“He’s been in trouble with you lately, I know, Mr. Wetherall. But it isn’t really his fault. It’s that new master. He was quite all right with Mr. Rollinson, but—”

“Look here,” said Mr. Wetherall. “I can’t have this special pleading. If Sammy gets sent up for anything, I shall hear about it from him. Besides I haven’t seen him here for some time.”

“You’ll be seeing him,” said Miss Donovan.

Left to himself Mr. Wetherall picked up his pen, started to write such a letter as would deflate, without irritating Mr. Turvey, then put his pen down again and looked out of the window.

Creak of double doors, seven short and rather nervous steps along the passage.

“Come in,” said Mr. Wetherall.

It was a boy of fifteen. The hair which might, in Miss Donovan, have been described, at a pinch, as auburn was here unblushing carrot.

“What is it, Donovan?”

“I’ve got a book, sir, from Mr. Pelley.”

“Oh, dear,” said Mr. Wetherall.

It should be explained that (unlike our great public schools in which, having paid a great deal more money, a boy is privileged to be beaten by almost anybody older than himself) in most state schools, the headmaster enjoys a monopoly of this form of punishment. If a form-master wished for a boy to be so dealt with he entered his name and offence in a book and sent the boy with the book to the headmaster; who attended to the matter and recorded the result in a further column. These rather incongruous civil service trappings did nothing to allay Mr. Wetherall’s distaste for the barbaric rite which followed.

“What is it this time?”

“Impertinence,” said the boy.

“Yes, I can read. I’m asking what actually happened.”

“Well, sir,” Donovan charged his lungs with a deep breath, “Mr. Pelley said something wasn’t cricket and someone asked him what it meant and he said that cricket was the most important game in a school and if you said a thing wasn’t cricket you meant that it wasn’t done and I said cricket wasn’t the most important game in this school by half boxing was and he said that in any decent school cricket was the game that mattered and I said well cricket’s a cissy game what’s the good of being able to play cricket if a chap came up in the street and tried to take your girlfriend away and then,” concluded the narrator putting his finger unerringly on the real heart of the offence, “people laughed.”

“I see,” said Mr. Wetherall. (Curse Pelley and his old school tie). “It doesn’t seem perhaps a very serious offence” (got to back the man up all the same, very young) “but it was certainly impertinent. I think, in the circumstances, I’m going to set you enough work to keep you busy after school, during sport time. Tomorrow’s a games day—”

Alarm flared.

“Not tomorrow, sir.”

“What—oh, it’s the boxing tomorrow, isn’t it?” Considering the nature of the offence, it would have been very fitting to deprive the boy of his boxing, but he knew himself to be incapable of such chilly logic. “Very well, on Thursday then.” He made a note in the book. He was quite aware that he was being weak. “And look here,” he said. “I don’t want any more of this. You’re coming up here a lot too much. You’re growing up now. You’ve got to think before you say silly things. Next time you’ll get hurt—”

“Yes sir,” said Donovan cheerfully. Next time was a long way ahead.

It was a warm October day and even the brick and mortar of S.E.17 responded grudgingly to the ancient magic. The South Borough Secondary School for Boys is in the middle of the quadrilateral formed by the Old Kent Road, the New Kent Road, the Camberwell Road and Peckham High Street. It is a square half-mile which is almost indescribable because it lacks the first element of description, which is character. It is made up of two or three hundred streets of uninspiring houses; seven churches and twenty-seven chapels; two very small open spaces, created by some bygone town planning enthusiasm and a dozen larger ones opened up by the German Air Force, but even these are subdued to the general pattern of uneasy neatness; the rubble is stamped flat, the yellow bricks are piled into neat heaps. It is an area which lies in the middle of things greater than itself but takes nothing from them. The Old Vic Theatre on the north, the Oval cricket ground on the west, the roaring goods yards of Bricklayers Arms and Crossways and the passenger stations at Waterloo and London Bridge. In this depressing arena, the only arteries of life are the High Streets, where the blood flows red from chain store to chain store; where the social centre is the butcher’s queue and the spiritual temple is the Gaudeon Super Cinema. Away from the High Street the splashes of colour are pubs, late and lonely flowerings in reds and greens and golds.

Mr. Wetherall made his way to the Old Kent Road and boarded a No. 53 bus, going south. Twenty minutes later he got off at the stop after Deptford Broadway. He was on the fringes of Blackheath. Not Blackheath proper, which lies at the top of the hill, around the open space, but near enough to it to put it on his note-paper. Postally Brinkman Road was in Blackheath, if spiritually in Deptford.

The Wetheralls leased the top floor of No. 20. The house, which had suffered sub-division in the thirties, was owned by a doctor, and though he was twenty years retired from active practice, a faintly antiseptic smell still clung to the lower floors. Above the doctor lived two Japanese. Above the Japanese, the Wetheralls.

Immediately Mr. Wetherall got home, he knew that something was amiss. Alice Wetherall was in the kitchen, her hands folded and her lips pursed.

“It’s too bad,” she said. “Major Francis’ food parcel hasn’t arrived.”

“Oh, dear. Perhaps it’s lost—”

“You know how regular he’s been. When it was a week late I began to wonder. I wrote to the railway on Friday. This came this morning.”

It was hardly a letter. A printed memorandum. “Unable to trace the package in question – was there any proof of posting? Admit no responsibility.”

“It doesn’t look very helpful,” admitted Mr. Wetherall. “I might ask Major Francis next time I write. It’s rather awkward, though. Supposing he had decided not—”

“It’s been stolen,” said Mrs. Wetherall.

“Stolen?”

“By those railways. Didn’t you see that bit in the paper last Sunday. No. It was the Sunday before. About all the parcels they were losing. Food parcels chiefly, and cigarettes. Why should they be allowed to? What do we—what do we pay our fares for?”

He thought for a moment she was going to cry.

“Never mind,” he said. “I expect we can manage. We’ll have a meal or two out for a change. Why don’t we go to Luigi’s tonight?”

“I’ll think about it. Come and get your lunch before it gets cold.”

“That’s to say, if the journey won’t be too much for you—”

“Now don’t you fuss,” said Mrs. Wetherall, more cheerfully. She had, of course, been fussing herself, but like most women, found instant solace if she could accuse someone else of it. “It’s the principle of the thing that upset me. It’s
our
parcel. Why should they be allowed to steal it? Can’t we do anything about it, now they’re nationalised?”

Instead of attempting to unravel this tangled piece of logic, Mr. Wetherall said he would ring the police immediately after lunch.

He knew that he was not at his best on the telephone. He was very slightly deaf, and was apt to get flustered. The sergeant in charge of the station was plainly neutral. He was not obstructive, nor was he helpful. He took particulars. He spelt Mr. Wetherall’s name wrong, then got it right, then got the address wrong. He, also, wanted to know if there was any proof that the parcel had been dispatched, and when Mr. Wetherall had to admit that there was not, he lost most of his remaining interest. He said he would do what he could. He added that he was afraid there was a lot of pilfering on the railways.

When Mr. Wetherall was on the point of leaving the house (it would, in many ways, have been easier to have his lunch at a restaurant near the school, but with his wife in her present condition he liked to get back as often as he could) he remembered their plans for the evening.

“I’d better meet you at Luigi’s,” he said. “I’ll have to go straight there. Ambler’s ill again, and I’ve got to take his drawing-class this afternoon. That’ll mean putting off my specials until after tea, so I shall be late anyway. I’ll see you there at seven.”

“Do we want to go to Luigi’s?”

“Why,” said Mr. Wetherall, surprised. “We’ve always liked the food there so much. Do you want something a bit more classy?”

“Silly,” said his wife. “It’s only that I heard the other day – I think it was Mrs. Ormerod. She was saying that Mrs. Lewis told her – something about the food not being quite clean.”

“I’d rather believe my own eyes,” said Mr. Wetherall mildly, “than something Mrs. Ormerod said to Mrs. Lewis.”

“Well, I always thought it was very nice, too.”

“Luigi’s let it be, then. If you observe so much as a single cockroach in the minestrone, we can always go on somewhere else.”

“Don’t be horrid,” said Mrs. Wetherall.

There are people who cannot draw. Mr. Wetherall was one of them. In a way this was odd, because he had a good appreciation of line and an eye for the beauty in unlikely places. It was his execution which was hopeless. He often wished that the training he had received, a scrupulously careful training which had covered every conceivable subject from Bible study to eurythmics, had dealt with this important matter. For he was convinced that it was important. For one thing, the boys enjoyed it, and that was half the battle in any school subject. Futhermore he was certain, in an instinctive way, that it did them good.

His usual solution to the problem was to announce that the hour would be devoted to free inspiration, then to allot a suitable subject – (the choice was not easy. He still remembered some of the unfortunate results when he had asked the senior class to exercise its imagination on the subject of a Pig in a Poke) – and leave them to it.

That afternoon, after some thought, he selected “A Street Accident” and retired to the master’s desk to correct history papers.

For half an hour there was silence, broken only by some hard breathing, the scrape of feet, and the squeak of pencils. Red crayon seemed to be in demand. At the end of this time Mr. Wetherall climbed to his feet and toured the class-room to give an interim judgement on the results.

In the back row, somewhat to his surprise, he found a boy with an untouched sheet of drawing paper in front of him. It was Crowdy, a quiet creature, whom he liked; according to Mr. Ambler, something of an artist.

“What is it?” he said. “No inspiration?”

“I was just wondering, sir,” said Crowdy, with a blush, “what a car would look like upside-down.”

“Why not draw it the right way up, and then turn the paper round.”

Crowdy looked up with faint scorn and said: “I didn’t mean resting on its back, sir. I meant the moment it hit the road, after being turned over. Why, the wheels might still be spinning – like this.”

He picked up the pencil and quickly drew four or five lines. Thinking it over afterwards, Mr. Wetherall was prepared to swear that it was not more than five. And in front of his eyes an accident was born. He could see at once what must have happened. The car, cornering too fast on a greasy road, had turned, first on to its side and then right over. He could see by the crumpling of the coachwork and the distortion of the body how powerful the impact must have been. The drawing was foreshortened and the nearest wheel, unnaturally large, was spinning; it was actually spinning in front of Mr. Wetherall’s eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I see what you mean. I should go on with that. It looks very promising.”

He walked back to his desk aware that, in a small way, the thing might have happened which every schoolmaster dreams will happen to him. That he may be privileged to act midwife at the birth of genius; to watch the infant Keats scratching his fingers through his hair and his nib through his first halting sonnet; to listen to the stubby, chilblain-covered fingers of the young Beethoven stumbling along the octave. It is the most intoxicating thought a schoolmaster can have. Mr. Wetherall felt partially intoxicated as he went back to his desk.

He made one more round, towards the end of the hour, and commended several of the more dashing efforts. They were none of them lacking in incident. In one a fire brigade had become involved with a squadron of tanks. In another a lady had been cut completely in two. Crowdy had blocked in a little background, but had done nothing much else to his sketch. It was entirely in hard pencil, in line, with no shading at all.

“Cleanly sir, you went to the heart of the matter,” he found himself saying as he collected the drawings and dismissed the class.

That wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t “heart of the matter.”

“Cleanly, sir, you went to the core of the matter.”

It was a poem by James Kirkup in some paper or literary magazine. Mr. Wetherall had a good visual memory, if he cared to use it. Sometimes for a bet, he would read once, and then repeat, a whole paragraph of prose. More often it was scraps of verse that stayed in his mind.

This came now, out of its pigeon hole.

“A calligraphic master, improvising, you invent

The first incision, and no poet’s hesitation

Before his snow-blank page mars your intent:

The flowing stroke is drawn like an uncalculated inspiration.”

That was right. That was absolutely right. No hesitation. No fumbling. “An uncalculated inspiration.” Come to think of it the poem was not really about drawing. It was a description of a famous surgeon, in the theatre, performing a difficult operation. But the simile was just. As Mr. Wetherall looked at the clean lines of the sketch he felt an inner certainty that the hand which had drawn them must one day claim recognition.

Then his practical sense asserted itself. Crowdy would be sixteen at the end of the summer. The next step was therefore important. After some thought and a hunt through a well-used address book, Mr. Wetherall took up his pen and wrote: