Half-Sick of Shadows (10 page)

The Alf Years

7

Whitehead House and the Monstrous Head

We disembarked at a small but busy railway station and lugged our suitcases to school, a red-bricked cluster of buildings less than one hundred metres from the station, which reminded me of the photograph of a canned soup factory in the encyclopedia. We switched our suitcases from right hand to left and back several times along the way, and Gregory told me to hurry up. Inside the green-painted iron railings bigger boys than me, in various degrees of fear and bemusement, came, went and lingered. Parents, having delivered their darlings, loitered comparing notes with other parents because the rain had stopped and they could. Cloud parted and the sun shone through. Gregory, like the rain, stopped, and I did too, on his heels.

‘Ask for the assembly hall,’ he said, pointing me at a doorway with pillars that looked like an open mouth with teeth.

I panicked. ‘Who will I ask?’

‘Have you got your letter?’ I panicked harder. I thought Gregory would stay with me until I knew what to do next. Obviously, I was wrong. ‘I go that way.’ He nodded towards a building in shadow with many black windows that must have been the senior school.

I released my suitcase and fumbled in my pocket hoping I had lost the letter. Without it, they might send me home.

‘Here it is,’ I said dejectedly.

‘New start, young lad?’ The speaker, a wrinkly man wearing overalls like Father’s, lifted my suitcase and I panicked all over again. ‘What’s your name when you’re at home, then?’

‘Edward Pike.’

‘Like a fish, eh? You come with me, Edward Pike. Uncle Bob takes care of handsome little buggers like you.’

I turned to Gregory for help, but saw his suitcase and heels retreating towards the dark building. I almost ran after him, but the wrinkly man stole my suitcase and I ran after him instead, calling, ‘Excuse me. Excuse me,’ and getting no reply.

‘Here we are,’ he said, setting down my suitcase in a large, busy vestibule with a marble floor. ‘Now, anything you need to …’

Next thing I knew, I lay flat on my back with a thermometer in my mouth in a quiet room with a high ceiling. A woman wearing a hat watched over me. She looked at the watch on her wrist and took my pulse. A nurse! Seeing my eyes open, she said something too rapidly for me to unscramble the words. Whatever they were, she said them in a kindly way that reassured me. ‘You had a funny turn,’ she added, ‘but nothing to worry about. You’re fit as a fiddler’s bagpipes.’

Tears formed a lump in my throat that wanted to surge into my eyes. I think the thermometer pinned the lump in place. ‘I want to go home,’ I told her with the thermometer still in my mouth.

‘Everybody wants to go home on their first day. This is your home now. You’ll get used to it. While you’re here, I might as well do your medical. What’s your name?’ She took out the thermometer, gave it a wipe and put it in a breast pocket without looking at it.

‘Edward Pike.’

‘Right, then, Edward Pike.’ She drew a curtain on wheels round where I lay. ‘Looking forward to school?’

No. ‘Yes.’

She grabbed the elasticated waistband of my trousers and began pulling them down. ‘Work hard and you’ll soon be a brainy little fellow.’ My underpants got stuck, so she went back up and pulled
them
down too. I felt unusually but not unpleasantly exposed. ‘Let’s make sure you’ve two of everything.’

I thought she meant arms and legs.

‘You poor soul. You must be frozen. Can you feel that?’

‘Yes,’ I squeaked.

She fiddled around with her nursing duties until content that, in line with expectations, I possessed one of the thing God designed singular and two of everything else.

Declared alive and in full possession of all my bits, I let Nurse help me up with my trousers and off the gurney. She took me by the hand. ‘You’ve missed the induction,’ she said. ‘But forget about that; it’s all been seen to. Come with me and I’ll get you sorted.’

Nurse marched me along corridors and up stairs. I ran to keep up as a dark world spun by on a waft of schoolboy smells.

‘Here we are. This is your dormitory. It does the job even if it’s a bit more rough and ready than you’re used to at home.’

I was too distressed by the presence of eight beds to care whether it did the job – or any job. After introducing me to my dormitory, Nurse took me to meet my teacher and classmates.

Miss Walker was tall, broad and deep, and wore spectacles with thick frames. She directed me to a desk at the rear of the class and said it was mine. She left me there. As I watched her expansive posterior walk away, I thought how dreadful it would be if she sat on me.

After calling the register, Miss Walker gave each of us a small carton of milk and a straw. I’d never drunk milk from a carton before. I’d never seen a straw, and only knew what to do with it by watching the others. She said we could talk amongst ourselves and get to know each other. I, however, held my tongue and got to know no one.

I didn’t know anything about evolution at the time, but instinctually I knew that the other boys were lesser and more base than me. All but one fellow, that is. I would come to understand that if I
stood
apart from the others by two steps, Alfred Lord stood apart from me by four steps and from the others by six. At that time, I didn’t know him well enough to call him Alf. In fact, I didn’t call him anything, because we didn’t speak for a year or more. Alf was, somehow, mysteriously, different – although the word different does the degree of his differentness a disservice.

On my first night at Whitehead House, I buried my face in the hard pillow and longed for Sophia. My broken heart bled tears. I imagined Sophia’s face. Happy to remember what she looked like, I wished I could magic her there to snuggle beside in bed. I would wish and bleed tears tomorrow too, and the next night, and the next. I tried to weep quietly so no one would hear. But they did hear. And I heard the occasional weep from one or other of them. Weeping intensified until the dormitory vibrated with a symphony of tom cats.

One day, I dared to ask Miss Walker for an envelope so that I could write a letter and send it home to my sister. To my surprise, she said, ‘What an excellent idea,’ and gave me one. I wrote my letter to Sophia, sealed it in the envelope, addressed the envelope to The Manse, off The Road, near Bruagh, and posted it in the postbox outside the seniors’ building. Unfortunately, I forgot to add a stamp.

Before we left Bruagh, Mother told Gregory to look after me. She made him promise. And he did. Some chance! Gregory never had the slightest interest in looking after anyone except number one. If he saw me around school, he must have ducked out of sight before I saw him. I think my existence embarrassed him. Unintentionally, however, he did me a favour when he exaggerated the awfulness of life at school. School was indeed bad, but not as bad as he made out. It was dreadful, but not quite awful, unless dreadful is worse than awful. Perhaps it was just horrible, which has always seemed, to me, less bad than either awful or dreadful … It was pretty damn bad, but I lived through it, so it couldn’t have been as bad as all that.

Mid-morning we got tea, or milk if we preferred and it wasn’t off, and a biscuit – not a custard cream or a jammy dodger, just a plain, edible, more or less crunchy thing, rectangular or circular but always uneventful, which the word ‘biscuit’ accurately describes. Lunch and dinner were … ‘dreadful’ comes immediately to mind. However, ‘necessary to stay alive’ comes to mind too. As does ‘made me feel ill’. Cook boiled the potatoes and vegetables until they were an unidentifiable sludge. The meat portion looked and tasted something like mid-morning biscuits, and that didn’t seem right to me.

My new world of rowdy schoolboys, smelly dormitories and echoing corridors spun and made my head spin with it. I would have fled, but where would I have gone? If I’d walked all the way to the Manse, Father would have taken his strap to my legs, then turned me round and sent me back. Christmas! If only I could survive until Christmas! At Christmas I could go home until the new year.

Thank heavens for Nurse, who gave me treatment in her office daily. After two weeks of school food, my bowels were stationary for four days in a row and my stomach felt wrong. At the Manse, Mother used medicine to get my bowels moving, and I expected Nurse to do the same. Instead, she rubbed ointment on my private parts, and poked her oily finger into my most private part of all. I concluded something amiss, deviant, and possibly illegal about Nurse’s prescription, but not until a year or two later, and it was all oil under the bridge by then. Not that I would have complained. I liked Nurse and her over-curious hands. I liked her a lot. Her prescription was odd but not unpleasant, and it got my bowels going again.

Then, like having eaten too much chocolate, she said I no longer needed to see her. Being banished by Nurse came as a disappointment similar in kind to, but infinitely weaker than, my disappointment at parting from Sophia. ‘No more ointment?’ I asked Nurse. She told me to go behind the screen and drop my trousers, and she would rub some on one more time for good measure.

Although Nurse said I could return to her office any time I wanted
seeing
to, I knew she was only being nice to a new boy. Undoubtedly she did the same for all new boys. Abandoned, I could do nothing about it. I could do nothing about anything, apparently. School demanded passivity; I must do as instructed. Therefore, I went wherever whichever master pointed whenever he pointed, and performed whatever tasks were asked of me.

In the course of daily bullying, I taught myself the trick of how to hurt without crying. The trick involves teaching yourself to see the world in a special way. You teach yourself how to see it that way by constantly looking at it that way. To hurt without crying, you must constantly look at the world as if everything in it is in it to hurt. The world exists to hurt you. Therefore, hurting is natural. If, one day, the world stops hurting you, then something’s wrong. The pay-off is that hurting makes you strong and wise, wiser than those who hurt you.

Another way to stop yourself from crying is by thinking of the funniest thing imaginable – for example, your tormentor naked but for women’s bloomers. This short-term solution has no guarantee of success. It worked best for me, for a while, when the bloomers in question were Granny Hazel’s.

If no teachers were awake enough to take assembly, Mr Mulholland did the bible reading. Afterwards, he made announcements about forthcoming events, and drew our attention to old problems and new rules designed to overcome them. Mr Mulholland called the playground the quadrangle. A major quadrangle problem involved balls and broken windows.

‘You may spend morning break and the greater part of lunch hour outdoors, getting fresh air and exercise in the quadrangle. However, ball games in the quadrangle are no longer permitted. Off the playing field, boys and balls, when combined, are a recipe for disaster. Off the playing field, no boy should be seen in possession of a ball.’ I noticed several teachers trying to contain laughter, but did not know why. ‘The ball’s size is irrelevant. Large balls, medium balls, tiny
balls
: they’re all banned. Only on the playing field may you play with your balls. I trust I’ve made myself clear.’

Boys groaned. But not me. I would have been even more pleased if running, shouting and fighting were forbidden also.

While other new boys made friends and formed cliques, I remained alone, doing homework and reading books from the library. I would have welcomed a friend or two, but I did not give out the kind of aura that attracted others to me.

I hoped life at Whitehead House would improve. No such luck! The classroom had a broken window and radiators made of ice. Wind and spits of rain blew through the window. I was used to cold, having lived in the Manse, but other boys were not. I warmed my pyjamas under the pillow and retrieved them at bedtime frosty. My popularity increased slightly, and only for a couple of days, when I introduced the trend of wearing my pullover over my pyjama top in bed. Most nights, I sat in bed shivering with my socks on, the sheets up to my ears and my knees clutched to my chin.

Breakfast was not the wallpaper paste gruel Gregory warned me about; it was wallpaper paste porridge – a totally different thing. Much lumpier. Having survived breakfast, we gathered in the assembly hall to sing a hymn, say a prayer, and have a half-sleeping teacher drone to us from the bible. We sang ‘Jesus Loves the Little Children’. But if Jesus really loved the little children – and I qualified as one of those – why did he allow adults to treat us so poorly? And what about the prying, tumbling, rough and tough, loud and foul boys? Many of them – maybe most of them – reserved no space in their brains for thoughts of God and His foibles. Though Godless, they shivered no more or less than I did, and seemed to accumulate more vivacity from and for life in a single day than I had in my lifetime.

The truth soon dawned on me: God was optional.

Father would have been appalled.

A senior boy came and spoke to Miss Walker. ‘Pike,’ she called from the front of the class. Everybody looked at me. ‘Mr Mulholland wants to see you … Now! Now! Off you go.’ Outside the classroom, wondering if I should follow the senior boy, I did. He led me to Murderous Mulholland’s office.

I must have been ‘in for it’ for having fainted on arrival.

Walking the long corridors on weak legs, I wondered how I should knock: two knocks or three, hard knocks or soft, fast or slow.

I didn’t have to knock at all; his door lay open.

The senior boy departed.

The headmaster, far from being eight feet tall, topped a few inches over five. Murderous? Based on first impressions, I thought not. His nickname, I discovered later, was Blinky because he blinked a lot. Gregory would end up in Hell. Father said that’s where liars went. Blinky Mulholland, standing at the visitor’s side of his desk, reading something on it, looked like someone stuck at one down on a crossword puzzle. Noticing me on the threshold from the corner of an eye, he swung round too jovially for a headmaster. Not that I knew much about headmasters, but surely they were supposed to be demonic. Not that I knew much about demons. Father had mentioned them, in the context of constipation, but not in detail.