The Complete Pratt (24 page)

Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. The answer was so simple that he couldn’t believe that he had been too stupid to see it before. There was no need of any grocer from Abergavenny here. He had himself. He would mock himself before they did.

He began to call himself ‘Oiky’. ‘Shut up, Oiky,’ he’d say, or ‘Come on, our Oik.’ One day, at dinner, he convulsed the table by gazing at his plate and saying, ‘It’s months since I ’ad rat.’ For years he had envied comedians their catchphrases. Now, he had one of his own. It was a good ’un and all. ‘It’s months since I ’ad rat.’

That term, Henry discovered that he was as bad at rugby football as he was at cricket. He never once managed to repeat the successful tackle he had made on Pam Yardley. When he kicked the ridiculously shaped ball, he never knew where it would go. He even managed to achieve the near impossible by slicing it over his own goal-posts. Everyone collapsed with laughter, even Mr Lee-Archer, the referee, who wasn’t sure whether you could score an own dropped goal at rugby. Henry stood there, looking sheepish. As the laughter died down, he knew that it was time for him to use his catchphrase.

‘It’s months since I ’ad rat,’ he said.

It went down like a plate of cold sick. Why? Why?

Because it was inappropriate! Brilliant though his catchphrase was, the opportunities for its use were too limited.

He needed something of more general application.

A catchphrase must be ordinary. You couldn’t imagine Oscar Wilde touring the halls and producing loud laughter every time he said, ‘Fox hunting is the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable.’ A witticism constantly repeated becomes a stale witticism. A catch phrase is, ‘I won’t take me coat off. I’m not stopping,’ or ‘It’s agony, Ivy.’

Henry’s came out by accident after he’d put his foot on the edge of his porridge plate while clambering to his place over the top of the bench. The plate tilted, and his portion of porridge flew through the air, like a slightly soggy discus, into his face. When the laughter died down, he said, ‘E, by gum, I am daft.’ It fitted him. It was comfortable. It was his. It was appropriate on all
occasions
. He was Henry ‘Ee, by gum, I am daft’ Pratt.

In the Christmas holidays, Uncle Teddy and Auntie Doris gave him a model railway, and he began to sample the delights of regular cinema-going. In the Easter term he discovered that he was as bad at hockey as at cricket and football. Mr Trench returned, having made an amazing recovery. He was helped by the fact that the boys never mocked him. In their eyes, a schoolmaster who ran naked through the woods had a certain heroic quality about him. Henry was past page fifty of Keats’ ‘Endymion’ now, and if his French was a trifle sketchy, he could no doubt have had a shot at a simple appendectomy, had the need ever arisen.

One day, while Mr Hill dozed, Henry tried not to meander while reading why rivers did. So effective was he in this effort that once again he didn’t know that Mr Noon was in the room until he received his old chum, the clip round the ear-hole.

‘Why didn’t you stand up when I came in the room?’ said Mr Noon.

‘I didn’t hear you, sir,’ said Henry. ‘I was concentrating on my work.’

‘Nonsense, boy, you were in a brown study,’ said Mr Noon.

‘No, sir. I wasn’t,’ said Henry.

‘Come and see me in another brown study at the beginning of break,’ said the headmaster.

‘That’s not fair, sir,’ said Henry.

‘Tut tut! Tut tut!’ said Mr A. B. Noon B.A. palindromically. ‘Not fair, eh? We’ll see about that.’

In the break, Henry made the long trek to the headmaster’s study, past the burgeoning sweat of rissoles, through the green baize door, past the acrid common-room fug.

‘I really didn’t know you were there, sir, because I was working so hard,’ said Henry.

‘I don’t accuse you of lying,’ said the headmaster. ‘I merely say this. If you are lying, you deserve to be thrashed. If you aren’t, then your thrashing will be unfair, and that will be an excellent preparation for life, because life is unfair, and it would be unfair of me to give you the impression that it isn’t, so I shall thrash you anyway.’

Mr Noon gave him six of the best.

‘Thank you, sir,’ he said.

Back in the dorm that night, a bit of a hero because of his unjust thrashing, having shown his weals to the admiring throng, Henry was asked by Bullock, ‘You’ve turned out not to be too bad a chap at all, Oiky. Are you honestly Labour?’

‘Yes,’ said Henry.

‘Why?’ said Bullock.

Now this was a shrewd question. Being Conservative or Labour didn’t really have anything to do with politics. It was simply what one was. One was either Oxford or Cambridge, and similarly one was either Conservative or Labour, except that one was never Labour. Henry had accused them of being Conservative because they were sheep. Was he himself any better?

‘Come on, Oiky. Why?’ said Price-Ansty.

‘I just don’t think it’s fair that some people should have so much more than others,’ he said. He thought it sounded pretty lame, but it was the best he could do.

‘They’ve earned it,’ said Bullock.

‘Not always,’ said Henry. ‘They get left it.’

‘Their people earned it,’ said Gerald Lush. ‘You Labour chaps want to take everything away. That’s what my father says anyway.’

‘Don’t you think there are working-class people capable of earning it?’ said Henry.

‘Of course I do,’ said Price-Ansty. ‘My father said that some of the working-class chaps in his regiment were jolly intelligent. He was quite surprised.’

‘We’re not getting at you, Oiky,’ said Gerald Lush. ‘You’re pretty clever.’

‘For an oik,’ said Bullock, and everybody laughed.

Henry grinned too. Not as much inside as outside, perhaps, but if you grinned externally at a thing often enough, you did find that the internal pain began to ease.

By the end of his life at Brasenose, it was really quite tolerable. Nobody really seemed to hate him any more, except Tubman-Edwards, and he hated everybody.

Uncle Teddy and Auntie Doris were as brown as berries when he got home. He went to see Yorkshire play cricket twice and saw the first home games of Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield
United
. They took Cousin Hilda to Bakewell for tea, and Henry discovered that the greatest author in the world wasn’t Captain W. E. Johns after all. It was a woman! Her name was Agatha Christie. He went to the pictures twice a week. You could forget all your worries there. You could even forget that before long you were going to Dalton College, and the whole painful business of beginning again was going to begin all over again.

THERE WERE SIXTEEN
wash-basins round the walls and eight more in the middle of the room. On the floor there were slatted wooden boards. Beyond the wash-basins there were four large, heavily stained baths. The showers were downstairs, beyond the changing rooms. Such were the washing arrangements in Orange House, in Dalton College, in Somerset, and washing was still very important to Henry in the autumn of 1948. So diligently, with what thoroughness and vigour, did he ablute himself that he suddenly realised that he was all alone in a deserted wash-room.

A prefect poked his head round the door and said, ‘Get to bed, you. It’s past lights-out.’

He went out into the long, bare corridor. It was very dimly lit by a night-light at the far end.

He entered the dormitory. It was pitch dark. He knew that his bed was the third on the left. He felt his way round the walls. He edged past the first bed, walking very slowly, his left hand stretched out in front of him, his right hand clutching his towel and washing bag. His left hand connected with the second bed.

‘Is that you, Badger?’ whispered a voice from the second bed.

‘No. I’m Pratt,’ whispered Henry.

‘Are you good-looking? If so, hop in,’ whispered the voice from the second bed.

Henry moved on as fast as he dared in the impenetrable dark.

‘Shut up, you blokes up that end,’ shouted Hertford-Jones, the dorm prefect. ‘Some of us want to get some crud.’

Henry edged his way round the third bed, and got in as quietly as he could.

‘Get out,’ yelled the bed’s occupant, as Henry snuggled up against him.

‘Shut up, Perkins,’ shouted Hertford-Jones.

‘No, honestly, Hertford-Jones,’ said the one who must be Perkins. ‘A raging homo’s just got into bed with me.’

‘Send him over here,’ said another voice, and there was
laughter
.

The dormitory was flooded with light. Henry was edging away from Perkins’s bed, crimson with shame.

‘I thought that was my bed,’ he said, looking round desperately. Every bed appeared to be full, except the end one, and that must be Hertford-Jones’s.

‘I know moral standards are declining, but honestly,’ said Perkins.

‘Which dorm are you in?’ said Hertford-Jones.

‘South Africa,’ said Henry.

‘This is New Zealand,’ said Hertford-Jones. ‘You’re in the wrong bloody dorm, you cretin.’

Henry edged his way out.

‘See you later,’ whispered the boy in the bed next to Perkins.

Henry closed the door of New Zealand carefully and groped his way down the corridor, away from the night-light, towards South Africa.

It was pitch black in South Africa. He felt his way carefully past the first two beds, still clutching his towel and washing bag. He was sweating freely. He might as well not have bothered to wash at all.

He found the third bed. This time he explored it with his hands before getting in.

It seemed empty.

He clambered into bed.

His feet touched something soft.

He screamed.

South Africa dorm was filled with blinding light, and alive with protestation.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ said Nattrass, the dorm prefect.

‘There’s something in my bed,’ said Henry, pulling back his bedclothes, to reveal a dead thrush.

Nattrass came over and examined it.

‘It’s a dead thrush,’ he said. ‘Who did this? Bloody little savages. I suppose nobody will have the guts to own up.’

Nobody spoke.

‘What’s your name?’ Nattrass asked Henry.

‘Pratt,’ said Henry, knowing that laughter would follow as
surely
as birth follows womb.

‘Chuck it out of the window,’ said Nattrass, and Henry picked up the horrible, lifeless bird, trying not to show his revulsion, trying not to catch its dead eye. The dead thrush at Brasenose College had been a song thrush (
Turdus philomelos
). This was the substantially larger mistle thrush (
Turdus viscivorus)
. He hurled it far into the mellow Somerset night.

‘Sleep on top of your sheets, Pratt,’ said Nattrass. ‘I’ll get matron to change them tomorrow. Right, lights out. The fun’s over, you bloody savages. Let’s get some crud.’

The room was plunged into darkness, and Henry was glad of it, for he was on the verge of tears.

He lay on top of his sheets, reflecting on his somewhat unfortunate first day at Dalton College. Seeing that he was getting nervous about arriving at yet another new school, Auntie Doris had decided that he should be driven there. Uncle Teddy being too busy, she had driven him herself. On both his trunk and tuck box she had put sticky labels, which said ‘H. E. Pratt. Orange House. Dalton College. Dalton. Somerset.’ Henry had objected, on the grounds that the luggage was unlikely to go astray in transit while in the boot of their own car.

It had been a long drive to Somerset, and Auntie Doris had got lost twice. Eventually they had reached an attractive little stone-built town, and there, unmistakably, was the school. Auntie Doris had driven up to the gates. Henry hadn’t been able to lift his trunk out of the boot. Auntie Doris had asked a passing seventeen-year-old to help them, and Henry had felt mortified about the labels, which would surely strike the seventeen-year-old as ridiculously fussy.

‘Dalton College?’ the seventeen-year-old had said.

‘Yes,’ Henry had said.

‘This is King’s School, Bruton,’ the seventeen-year-old had said, not without a hint of amusement.

Henry had put his tuck box back in the boot, and they had driven on. Auntie Doris had said, ‘You see. It was lucky I labelled them. I might have dropped you at the wrong school and driven off.’ He had got into a lather because they were going to be late. And when they had at last found Dalton College, it had been to
learn
that Orange House was not actually on the premises. It was a large, rambling, three-storied, purpose-built, late-Victorian mansion on the edge of the town. By the time they had found it, it had been seventeen minutes past seven. Forty-seven minutes late! He had found the greatest difficulty in restraining himself from bursting into tears.

The porter, Gorringe, had tottered out, gasping for breath, his arms long, his legs bent, deformed by long years of carrying the trunks of the young gentry. Gorringe had grasped one end of the trunk and Henry the other. It had been extremely heavy, containing as it did the large number of clothes demanded by the school. Cousin Hilda had insisted that she sewed on the Cash’s name-tapes, announcing that each item was the property of 287 H. Pratt. She had sniffed as she sewed one onto his jockstrap.