The Dun Cow Rib Page 13

  I never told anyone about my fears or my dreams. Logic is absent or surfaces but slowly to a child. The terror that she might die was unspeakably private, something I was incapable of uttering for the added and illogical dread that if I did, it might somehow make it more likely. My whole school existence became a dungeon of despair, manacled by those fears, a captive utterly beyond hope. All I could do was bury the terror within myself, a gritted propitiation of silence and loneliness.

  Finally, several months later, we were allowed to go to see her at Frimley Sanatorium. Excitement bubbled inside me until we arrived, then the long hurt of estrangement overcame me with an illogical, withering shyness. She was standing at the door to greet us. I let Mary go first, studying my mother’s face as if I expected her not to look quite like herself. But in seconds it was familiar all over again. Everything was all right, the same smile, the same hug, the same sweet voice, the same scent. The only change seemed to be that she had a walking stick and was a little unsteady on her feet. We spent the afternoon with her in the gardens and had tea with several other inmates in an overheated lounge that reeked of old socks and disinfectant. She gave me a lollipop. Then we left. ‘When are you coming home?’ I asked.

  ‘Not long now,’ she nodded reassuringly.

  11

  The dragon’s den

  My ninth year, 1954, started well but soon spiralled out of control. My mother had come home in time for Christmas at Bartonfield. She seemed much better – that is to say, better than before the operation. She had more energy, so she could do more with us, although she still tired easily and I now know she suffered chest pain, although she never, ever made a fuss about it, accepting her lot not just with stoicism but with the same gritty determination she had declared in her letters from hospital.

  We soon forgot that she had been away at all. She made paper chains with us from strips of coloured paper and hung them all round the house with her glamorous twin, Margaretta, who wore dangly Mexican earrings and smoked Marlboro cigarettes in a long holder, and proudly showed off her new-fangled Zippo cigarette lighter with a click and a zing as it snapped shut. She had married a GI, gone to live in Texas and mysteriously now sported a Southern drawl like Dolly Parton. She came to us for Christmas to celebrate her sister’s recovery.

  When Margaretta and my mother were in the kitchen lost in childhood reminiscences of the Bedouin and their camel trains, I became bored and wandered through to the sitting room. On the mantelpiece I found the Zippo. Flicking it was irresistible. Its enticing zing made me do it over and over again. The benzene flame leapt and flared like a beacon. I held it up and ran torch-like round the room, passing too close to a paper chain. It caught, blazed and immediately broke the chain, both flaming ends falling vertically to the floor. The flames shot up the chains to the beam they were pinned to. I had two fires burning fiercely on opposite sides of the room.

  Panic surged in. I snatched up a wicker wastepaper basket and tugged the flaming chains into it. Then I had a fire raging in a highly flammable basket. Trailing a column of smoke, I ran to the boot room sink and dowsed cold water into the fire still flaring angrily in the wrecked basket. I abandoned it in the sink and rushed back to the sitting room. The beam was black anyway, so the burns didn’t show, but the room was thick with smoke. I flung the windows wide and fanned the door backwards and forwards. But it was no good. The smell of smoke and the absence of the paper chain were far too obvious. It was a miracle I hadn’t burned the house down.

  Mother was cross, but Margaretta, a rebellious maverick by nature and always an ally when I was in trouble, persuaded her it was a genuine accident. ‘Please don’t tell Daddy,’ I begged. We all feared his legendary wrath, capable of lasting for hours. Never violent and never for one moment laying a finger on us, he compensated by raging like a tiger with toothache. If we broke something important to him, either by accident or through carelessness, he would explode pyrotechnically. I once knocked an Anglepoise lamp off his desk and bent its delicate arm. ‘Smash! Smash! Smash!’ He had fumed all round the house, his handlebar moustache twitching like the tiger’s whiskers. ‘All you children ever do is smash my things. If you have to smash things, go and smash something of your own and leave mine alone.’ Mary scuttled upstairs to her bedroom as fast as a frightened rabbit and I shot outside to the pigeon loft, not venturing back until long after the storm had abated.

  Our parents inspired entirely different emotions in us, each to our own marque of filial affection. To me our father was as the splendid sun, distant but fierce, untouchable yet solid and reassuring, a constant presence to be worshipped from afar and a glowing ring of security. Despite all her problems I viewed our mother as entirely other: she was our Terra Mater, the all-embracing mother earth, Venus and Ceres interwoven, in which our roots were nourished, intimate, warm and sustaining.

  My plea had touched an inherent weakness. Mother and I had a history of secrets. I had told her about Twig and the ILY peppermints. She had been deeply indignant – as close to real anger as she ever came – and wanted to pen a sharp rebuke to Twig, but I persuaded her that it might make life even more difficult, and besides, I didn’t want Mrs Warmley to think ill of me. Our little secrets were private intimacies as much to do with her guilt at illness-imposed absences as with my obvious delight in commanding her attention. Her endlessly generous and forgiving nature won through and she agreed not to mention the fire, trying her best to be stern but failing dismally. We ended the afternoon happily making a new paper chain, back in place before my father came home.

  * * *

  The previous autumn Betty and I had ascended to Hampton Down Junior School. Sad to desert Mrs Warmley, we both cheered loud and long to be escaping from the execrable Twig. Hampton Down was a large, fully-fledged prep school, run on English public school principles by a bombastic extrovert headmaster called Bernard Forbes. To his face the boys never called him anything but sir, but behind his back he was ‘Bernie the Dragon’ to just about everyone.

  The school was composed of a large country house of which the south-facing block was the Forbes family’s private abode, with its own gravel drive and neatly mown lawns adorned with several pairs of strutting peacocks – in an unguarded moment I had overheard Mrs Warmley say they complemented his ostentatious personality – and a longer wing to the rear, entered across a broad tarmac quadrangle, the school’s matrix, buttressed by a double rank of barrack-like single-storey timber classrooms and expansive games fields beyond.

  Mother had been allowed out from Frimley so that both my parents could take me to the new school for the first time. Mr Forbes came out to greet us. He was tall with a swarthy complexion, dark hair swept back from a prominent brow and a bellowing voice fit for a town crier. He dressed immaculately in a navy blue blazer above fawn cavalry twills and a white shirt with a brightly striped silk cravat, an invariable uniform of authority we came to know well and which I now recognise as determined power dressing. With a flourish of his hand, he boomed to an older boy by name – ‘John!’ The boy approached. ‘Michael, would you take John off and show him round?’ I was deeply confused. The boy smiled. ‘Follow me,’ and off we went. Mr Forbes whisked my parents away to his private quarters for afternoon tea.

  A little while later I met up with them again and walked to the car to see them off; they were heading straight back to Frimley. ‘Mrs Forbes is very nice,’ my mother said, ‘but I’m not sure I like the headmaster. He’s pompous and very pleased with himself, cocky as a bantam.’ I wasn’t sure what pompous meant, but if she had said it, it had to be true. Along with the enduring image of a bantam cockerel, one I never managed to dispel, I locked it away in my memory bank.

  I didn’t really like being called John. My mother and sister had habitually called me Jay, a familiarity primed with affection, and to Nellie I had always been Jack. When I’d asked her why, she had smiled and sighed with an ancient sadness. ‘Now I should really be callin’ you Master John, but I knows how naughty you
is and that puts me in mind of my brother Jack who never come ’ome from the war, so there, it’ll be Jack, whether you likes it or no.’ Both Jay and Jack made me glow inside, and my grandfather had always called me ‘boy’. I liked that too. Only my father called me John and then only when I was in trouble. Usually I was ‘old boy’ or ‘old chap’, or, persuasively, ‘Look sharp, old thing.’ In my new-boy misery at Hampton House John had been imposed on me whether I approved or not. It sounded formal and threatening in a slightly sneery way. I used to lie in bed in the dark and mutter JOHN to myself over and over, JOHN, JOHN, JOHN . . . until it no longer sounded like a name but just a peculiarly uttered animal noise.

  Betty and the other Hampton House boys had always called me ‘Liss’, which was fine. But I was immediately confused about this other, soft-spoken John with wavy hair and freckles across the bridge of his nose as if he’d been dusted with nutmeg. I was too diffident to ask him why he was apparently called both John and Michael, so I chose to call him nothing at all until I saw his name on a house list.

  Michael John was my first encounter with the Welsh, and a total delight. I loved the gently subtle intonations in his lilting accent and the way he raised one eyebrow when a question loomed – a feat I strove for but failed to achieve. He had been nicknamed ‘Dylan’ after the celebrated Welsh bard who had recently drunk himself to death just as he was being catapulted to global fame. Under Milk Wood was first broadcast that year. Despite being a year older than me, my Dylan was to become a resolute friend. The school was split into four houses. I was in Jefferson, Betty in distant Westerdale, an imposed apartheid from which our friendship never fully recovered.

  It would be a long time before I properly understood what pomposity really was, but I quickly discovered from other boys that Mr Bernard Forbes was both feared and respected in the way that one instinctively views a Rottweiler. He was autocratic and unquestionably in charge. No one challenged his authority, certainly not to his face, and I think that everyone knew that had they done so they would have been summarily quashed. It would be tempting to label him a despot, but that wouldn’t be entirely fair. He was a strong and assertive leader – necessary attributes for a good headmaster – but I now perceive that as so often happens with despotic rulers, even benignly motivated ones, power had inflated his readily susceptible ego. In Bernie’s case he was able to support his unassailable autocracy with the authority of God.

  What we didn’t know back then was that he had very nearly chosen the cloth – had in fact set out on the route towards full ordination into the Church of England. In jumping ship to become a schoolmaster he had spotted a way of combining the authority of the pulpit with a more financially lucrative and flexible career, altogether more fitting for his flamboyant personality. So he had become a firebrand lay-preacher instead, as we very well knew to our yawning repletion in chapel every Sunday.

  Trying my hardest to recount this fairly, if never objectively, I do not think Bernard Forbes was a bad or cruel man; rather, to damn him with faint praise, I would say that he usually meant well. But in common with those who cannot see or admit fault in themselves, he was possessed by that dangerously corrosive self-righteousness which, combined with a headmaster’s supremacy, roughly equivalent to the divine right of kings, made him aggressively intolerant of anything or anyone he didn’t like, raging and ranting like a dragon. An irony that would make me chuckle long after I had recovered from the events I shall soon describe was that his favourite moral text for sermons was on the importance of humility.

  * * *

  Summer and winter, every day started with a bracing cold bath – in and out again in seconds – but we had to submerge completely, head and all, for the count of five. We removed our pyjamas in the dormitory, wrapped a towel round our waists and filed barefoot into the communal bathroom where several baths were pre-filled by a duty master or matron. Prefects and senior boys went first. They threw their towels aside, leapt in, ducked under, held for the mandatory five seconds, and leapt out again, water swilling in all directions. Extrovert boys with something to prove would stay under for longer, sometimes ten seconds, emerging to cheers from friends and derisory boos of ‘Look who thinks he’s a hero!’ from others.

  Some of the seniors were twelve, one or two thirteen years old, about to ascend to public school. They sported what seemed to me to be unnecessarily extravagant genitals topped by a flourish of pubic hair, something I had never witnessed before. Deeply intrigued by this diverting phenomenon I secretly examined myself under the bedclothes with a torch, relieved to find that nothing had changed. I remember wondering whether it would happen overnight or whether I might receive some advance warning of this apparently unavoidable metamorphosis.

  Discipline was focused on a system of ‘pluses and minuses’. A chart on the school noticeboard listed every boy’s name, against which marks were awarded or subtracted every week, a score to be aggregated for the whole term. Plus 8, very rarely awarded, attracted special praise at school assembly; minus 8 was reserved for particularly heinous sins, there in red for the world to see and which meant a summons to the headmaster’s study to be caned – the much vaunted ‘six of the best’ by Bernie the Dragon. When a boy did get minus 8 word quickly travelled round the whole school in a fizz of excitement – mostly, I think, out of grisly curiosity, but there was genuine sympathy too, for the bright red welts across his buttocks, later turning to a grid of purple bruises, would be highly visible at cold bath time. Boys would crowd into the bathrooms to witness the unfortunate victim’s wounds to cries of ‘Crikey! Bernie really laid into you!’ Or ‘Blimey! I bet that stung.’ At the end of each term your pluses and minuses were totalled to reveal the trend in your behaviour.

  A popular spare time recreation was roller-skating in the quadrangle. Good skaters were viewed as an elite. Dylan was an ace. He could skate backwards at great speed, weaving with ease and grace in and out of the melee of teetering less-accomplished boys, chopping and changing to forwards and back again in mid-flight without losing speed at all. I was spellbound by this Olympian skill. I had achieved a respectable competence going forwards, but not the art of reverse and certainly not the flying change. Dylan offered to teach me, a natural generosity of spirit not widely present among boys of prep school age. I flourished under his tutelage, raking in kudos and envy as we flew round the quad together.

  One afternoon I was practising backwards. Dylan urged me on, faster and faster as round the quad we sped. Just then a geography mistress called Miss Mackenzie emerged from the main doors and was crossing the quad with an armful of books. By the time I saw her it was too late. I crashed into her, knocking her over, books flying to the winds. She was understandably furious, pushing me away when I tried to help her up. I apologised profusely, but she was having none of it. ‘You’re a ruddy little hooligan!’ Dylan whizzed up and helped me gather her books. To my dismay, that evening I found that she had given me minus 7. While not quite the ultimate sentence, it was sufficient to trigger a summons to the dragon’s den.

  Above his door there were two lights: one red and one green. Red meant do not disturb, green it was OK to knock. But at eight years old the universality of red and green signals had not really registered in a brain much more receptive to pigeons and moorhens. The red light was on. I pondered the logic: Does it mean go away, or just wait? If it means wait, how does he know I’m here? But I had been summoned – my housemaster had told me I was in trouble and to go straight to the head’s study. Hesitantly I knocked on the door. It flew open. ‘Can’t you see the red light?’ Bernie roared. ‘Wait.’ He slammed the door before I could say a word.

  I waited for what seemed a very long time, while dread pooled in my black lace-up shoes, leadening my legs all the way up to my gut. Finally the green bulb lit up. I knocked again. ‘Come!’ The big room was furnished like a sitting room, with leather armchairs and a sofa, a large leather-topped desk across the corner and a huge bookcase against the wall.

 
‘You wanted to see me, sir.’

  ‘Yes, I did.’ He rose from his desk and stalked to the window. Staring out over the lawn with his hands clasped behind his back, he asked, ‘Are you aware that you hurt Miss Mackenzie very badly? She could have easily broken an arm or a leg.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I said I was sorry, sir. It was an accident.’ Past him I could see a peacock parading its glowing iridescence across the lawn.

  ‘It was not an accident. It was utter self-indulgent carelessness and a total disregard for other people.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to, sir.’

  He spun round to face me. ‘Are you aware that if Miss Mackenzie had given you minus 8 I would be bending you over that armchair and giving you six of the best with that cane?’ He pointed to a stout cane knuckled like bamboo lying across the corner of his desk.

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘Let this be a lesson to you. I will not tolerate such behaviour again.’

  * * *

  When we broke up for Christmas, we always headed straight for the Manor House for my grandfather’s birthday on 19 December, a ritual attendance required at the beginning of the Christmas holidays. As soon as we arrived I would rush to find Nellie in the kitchens.