Pilcrow (52 page)

Whatever the quality of the school celebrations, I wasn’t going to miss the fireworks at Trees, and the only festival my family did consistently well. Since the triumph of Fun with Gilbert, my Bible had been
Chemistry Experiments at Home for Boys and Girls
by H. L. Heys, MA (Cantab). It was first published in 1949, making it my exact
contemporary
. I loved even its epigraph, which tapped into my hunger for primary experiences: ‘
Why,’ said the Dodo, ‘the best way to explain it
is to do it.
’

Even better was the passage which read: ‘A recent Annual Report of His Majesty’s Inspectors of Explosives announces a large increase in the number of accidents caused by the illegal manufacture of
fireworks
.’ A whole career path opened up in front of me, bathed in a flickering chemical light. It was obviously just the job.
This is Inspector Cromer of HMIoE. I’m afraid I must impound those home-made Roman Candles. They will be disposed of in controlled explosions by properly
trained personnel
.

We know what we’re doing.

I still wasn’t allowed to light fireworks or handle sparklers, and I suppose I can see the sense of that. Things that have to be done at arm’s length come too close.

The only dissident at those festivities was Mum, who turned into the personification of a damp squib. Once she said, after what had been one of Dad’s best displays, ‘I really don’t know why your father bothers. The Queen has the best fireworks – I thought everyone knew that. He’ll never even come close.’ She took a sort of pride in missing the point.

Gipsy would howl from the kitchen, not so much because she was scared of flashes and bangs as because she felt abandoned by her
people
, though able to smell them strongly through the door. Solitude is what dogs never get used to, though they put on brave faces.

Peter and I made lists of fireworks and marked them out of ten. We ranked them by a definite system.

The brand names of fireworks had an appeal distinct from the products themselves. There was a thrill in even the plainest: Standard. Then there was Brock’s, with its overtone of badgers. I never felt quite the same about Astra fireworks, though, after I learned they weren’t the Air Force’s own make – the RAF motto of
Per Ardua ad Astra
was inculcated very young in a household like mine. Then there was Pain’s. I thought that the name must be some sort of message. It was spelled differently from Payne, our neighbour Joy’s name, but I had the sense that a similar hint was being dropped. Once or twice a glazier’s van came to the Castle, with the motto
Your Pane is Our
Pleasure
painted on its side, which may also have been significant. I tried to turn the pain in my joints into firework patterns, bright tracings against a background awareness like dark velvet, to go
ooh
and
aah
rather than
ow
and
yikes
and
make it stop
.

There was a separate set of ratings based on pure performance. Half our marks went for colour and half for sound, and there were bonus points for variability – doing unexpected things such as splitting off, changing colour, going from being pretty to being noisy, or starting off noisy and subsiding into prettiness. Brock’s were the tops – plenty of good colours and the best bangs. Standard were perfectly respectable fireworks, though at a level below Brock’s. Peter and I gave Pain’s the thumbs-down. The colours were so poor and bleached. They were anæmic – a potent word from my memories of CRX. They needed iron injections in the bottom and lots of spinach in their diet.

One year our neighbours the Paynes attended our firework party, and contributed a massive piece (at the top of the entire Pain’s range) called an Air Raid, which needed to be nailed to a tree. The rumour ran round the party that it had cost £5 3s 8d. It came with an
instruction
leaflet suggesting that you might like to run indoors after
lighting
the touch paper. For the adults it must have been like re-living a bit of the War. I’m surprised they didn’t start looking around for an Anderson shelter.

The ‘Air Raid’ scored full points for noise, but Mum had hustled us indoors, so we could hardly assess it for variability or for colour. In the absence of direct evidence, I had to assume that the Pain’s colours were as drab as ever, although it earned a few points for effort. (I knew from school that marks for effort were always insulting.) I hope this cocky dismissal of an expensive present didn’t get back to the Paynes.

I was an older creature now than I had been when Miss Krüger had ruled CRX with her terror. Now I understood that cruelty was not an official part of education, even in a disabled school. I began to wonder if I could mention Judy Brisby to Mum without breaching the schoolboy code – Judy Brisby and what she did.

She liked to demonstrate what she called ‘nerve punches’,
agonising
blows to the upper arm which left no mark. She gave one to a very strong boy called Terence Wilberforce (who had slight polio in one leg, I think), and told us with quiet pride that it would go on being extremely painful for a full two weeks. She also said the boys who learned to take it from her would in time be taught the proper
technique
for delivering such punches. Then they could find others to practise on. I don’t think anyone took her up on the offer to join a prætorian guard of nerve-punching thugs. Toadying could only go so far, and beyond the occasional piece of cold toast from her breakfast entitlement, Judy Brisby had nothing whatever to offer.

Even her nerve-punch technique wasn’t as perfect as she made out – she left a dark mark on Terence’s arm like a tea-bag. Terence called the mark ‘PG Tips’, but it took all the bravado he could muster, and he flinched if he thought anyone was going to touch it.

Judy Brisby seemed to have the confidence of the school
authorities
, but I’m certain there were staff members who realised that
something
wasn’t right. I remember dear Gillie Walker, who had a very sunny disposition and used to rush into my arms and call me ‘Darling’, saying to us in an undertone when the subject of Judy Brisby was mentioned, ‘I don’t know how you boys tolerate her.’ Looking back, I would say that darling Gillie, though the nicest of the nice, was far from being the bravest of the brave. We shouldn’t have had to tolerate Judy Brisby. There was nothing to stop Gillie reporting her, unless the rules against telling tales were as strict among matrons, those brooms promoted from splinters, as they were among the schoolboys they were supposed to protect. Even when it came to denouncing a sadistic colleague.

In the end I said nothing to Mum. I wasn’t strong like Terence Wilberforce, and I took some comfort from that. With her medical training Judy Brisby must surely be able to understand the risks. She wouldn’t dare to give me a nerve punch because it would kill me. On the other hand she gave one to Trevor Burbage (the human suitcase) once, saying calmly, ‘Let that be a lesson to anyone who wants to write letters to their parents about how mean certain people are.’

Judy Brisby’s campaign against Roger Stott’s bed-wetting wasn’t helping him to break the habit. Of course it wasn’t meant to. Having made his problem worse she referred him up the power structure, and turned the headmaster into the executive arm of her cruelty.

My feelings for Ben Nevin contained no element of fear, unless awe is by definition the benign form of fear, but my perception of my other secret lover Alan Raeburn became clouded over. The Board of Education, that innocent, sinister object, to be seen on his desk or protruding from his back pocket, began to pose a threat, and my knowledge of its origin in the Ellisdons catalogue wasn’t enough to protect me from fantasies of disaster.

Now at Judy Brisby’s bidding Raeburn was warning Roger Stott that if he didn’t snap out of that dirty habit double quick, it would be time for extreme measures. The Board of Education would be
convened
on his backside.

A few bed-wets later Roger was told to go to the Headmaster’s office, to be given a lesson he would never forget. A small group of us gathered quietly nearby. The noise of the whacking coming from the office was terrifying, and when Roger came out, he had tears
streaming
down his face. He couldn’t say anything, and his bottom hurt so much he couldn’t sit. He just went off somewhere by himself and cried for a long time. I felt very forlorn and wished there was
something
I could do for him, but I had no help to give. I was also
terrified
that even if this beating ‘cured’ him, it might somehow bring the habit back to me. I wasn’t wrong. Nocturnal enuresis came back from the past to torment me for a period after that.

This was like a death sentence for me. I had seen what had been done to Roger, and I knew that my own body was very fragile. I
didn’t
see how it could survive that level of corporal punishment. So the you’re-going-to-die feeling, which I thought I’d left behind at CRX, of Death Bed and Vera Cole all lumped together, came back to haunt me again.

I needn’t have worried. Raeburn had telephoned Dr Ansell at CRX to ask if he could beat me in the same way as he beat everyone else – which was very decent of him – and she had said, ‘Not under any circumstances.’ So I was exempt, though I didn’t know it at the time. Raeburn had wanted Ansell to rubber-stamp the Board of Education, but bless her, she wouldn’t do it.

The next boy to be called up for a beating was James O’Brien, another asthmatic AB but a very different kettle of fish from gentle Roger. I think he was from Irish gentry. He never had less than £20 in his pocket, a staggering sum. There was another boy, Jeremy Fraser, who got a letter from his mother every two weeks with a tenshilling note in it. That was affluence enough by our measure. Julian Robinson did the sums in his head and announced that this added up to £3 per term. I went dizzy at the thought. Jeremy Fraser was rich all right, but James O’Brien was stinking. Rolling in it.

He even had a job all ready for him when he left school, working for his father. James was a rather cocky boy who showed little respect for any of his teachers. He had no fear of Raeburn and his Board of Education. He even laughed at Raeburn in his study, who beat him until the Board broke. Raeburn said it made no difference as he had a spare, but we all reckoned he was shaken by what had happened. James became a hero, not perhaps for the best of reasons.

Still, it gave me some comfort to know that the Board couldn’t duplicate the
Fantasia
trick known to matrons and enchanted brooms. Reconstituting itself full-size many times over from the splinters.

Not long afterwards Raeburn had an accident. He fell over and took a nasty knock. Subsequent investigation revealed that his sticks had been sawn apart and then carefully glued together to make a seamless join. The co-principals rattled their sabres and put it about that this was a dirty low-down rotten snivelling cowardly thing to do to a man who couldn’t walk properly. They were confident that the perpetrator would be unmasked in short order by a boy with the proper loyalty to the school and its co-principal.

We didn’t sit down and discuss how obscene this suggestion was, that we were expected to expose the saboteur of canes. Its vileness was glaring. The Board of Education was no respecter of disability, it had landed low blows on our flesh, and now we were expected to take the witness stand on its behalf. There were those of us who personally couldn’t stand James O’Brien, but we didn’t have the slightest
intention
of exposing him. No one came forward. Nothing could be proved anyway, and we showed how well we had learned our lesson about not telling tales. We had been indoctrinated, fully absorbing the ethos of the school. Closing ranks was all the loyalty we knew.

I felt a little sorry for Alan Raeburn, all the same. My love was still there under the layers of UHU glue, even if it was always ebbing and flowing between him and my other secret lover Ben Nevin, but now I felt ashamed that I had ever wavered in my devotion to this man with the blue-grey eyes who had told me secrets about the gods of Olympus and trusted me to be discreet. His lack of popularity made me feel that it was a duty for me to stick up for him, if only in my mind.

The winter of 1962–3 was one of the coldest of the century. The temperature didn’t rise above freezing for months. Yet I don’t
remember
the Great Freeze as being any worse than other winters at Vulcan – in fact it was rather more endurable. We heard a lot about extreme conditions. Birds for instance were starving to death in their
hundreds
of thousands. It’s just I don’t remember it being any colder. It wasn’t that I had become used to low temperatures. Heaters were found for the dormitories (they didn’t reappear the following year). Even Judy Brisby suspended her habit of pulling the bedclothes off every boy, not just the one whose turn it was to be washed first. No heating was possible for the lavatories, of course, but a stricter régime of watchfulness was instituted, so that there was no chance of a mishap. It wouldn’t be good for the fund-raising that was such a
perpetual
headache for Raeburn and Miss Willis for a severely disabled thirteen-year-old such as myself to be found frozen to death on the lavvie, knickers at half-mast round his blue and useless ankles,
rigor
mortis
subtly replacing
rigor vitæ
. Not quite the pretty tableau at the end of Hans Christian Andersen’s
Little Match Girl
. I still think the coldness of the Blue Dorm lavatory in winter was an absolute beyond the understanding of Kelvin. Weather conditions, extreme or mild, had no power of addition or subtraction there, though the
temperature
had a moral aspect. Biggie when she entered could raise it ten degrees.

In all weathers we had fire drill, but that was lovely. It catered to my need to be held. Raeburn and Miss Willis took the risk of fire
seriously
, as was proper for those in charge of a large old building full of boys who couldn’t save themselves. There was a fire escape running from a room in the north-west corner of the Castle, and alarm bells at each corner. My love of fire was close to unconditional, but stopped short of a desire to be burned alive, so I would have taken part in these disaster rehearsals willingly enough in any case. In fact fire drill was a treat rather than a labour, thanks to the large chute that ran from a first-floor door at the south-east corner of the building down onto the lawn.

The more able-bodied boys would simply throw themselves down the chute, howling with pleasure, to be caught at the bottom or land on piles of cushions. On one occasion a nervous boy hung back,
perhaps
frightened by the howls of those ahead, and clung so tightly to the top of the chute that Raeburn had to detach him by main force. In the event his shrieks of distress had changed, by the time he was
half-way
down, to screams of joy.

Those of us who were more disabled would ride on the laps of teachers, deafening ourselves and our companions with excited noises as we rushed downwards in the dark to the small circle of light at the bottom. In the event of a real emergency I imagine the staff would be expected to re-enter the building, if possible, to help a new batch of disabled boys to reach safety, while those already rescued grumbled about the unfairness of grown-ups having extra turns.

With my luck, I tended to go down the slide on the laps of people I didn’t care for, so that the joy of the sensation was diluted by
resentment
of the company. More than once it was Mr Lewis the history teacher who was my fire-drill partner. He was so bony it was like going down the chute on an iron bedstead. What I wanted more than anything else never happened – for Ben Nevin to take me on his lap and plunge with me down the chute. If it had happened, I would have been very tempted to die of happiness before we reached the bottom. As Hindus know, the last moments of a life affect the beginning of the next – it’s not a full stop, hardly even a comma, the sense runs on – and with such a death I’d have a head start on the next go-round, or would be promoted to bliss without the chore of further flesh.