by Bart Casey
This was going to be a herculean task, he thought, looking over at the pile of papers still in the shopping bag, but he realized the best thing he could do was make an inventory of the trove so at least there would be a listing of everything before it fell into the hands of “experts.” Even his somewhat crude record would offer protection from some of the papers going missing when the trove was out of sight. After all, the temptation to steal something so rare might be irresistible to a lowly paid clerk given such a job. Who would know? In that sense, his inventory would be a worthwhile contribution to the vicar’s discovery. Stephen picked out some pages to photocopy at school tomorrow. As a first step, he thought it would be safe enough to send those off to his paleography professor at Oxford, Doctor B. H. Rowe. Rowe was an expert interpreter of old documents, as well as a pompous ass. If he learned anything from Rowe, Stephen thought he might then send a few pages to his old friend, Soames Bliforth, a college classmate who ran an antiquarian bookshop in London. Soames had been the star student when they were studying the classics and English together. He could probably decipher them in a fraction of the time it took Stephen, and also might know something about the papers’ rarity and current market value.
Stephen then began one more translation on his own. Two gin and tonics later, he fell asleep in his chair.
Stephen was headmaster of St. George’s, an independent prep school for boys aged four to thirteen. From its main entrance, you could see only high gray stone walls, dense overhanging tree branches, and a darkened brass name plate. Once you ventured a few yards inside the front gate, you got a glimpse of the forbidding tower on the main building, perched on four stories of red and orange Victorian brick. Walk a bit farther on the crushed stones as the drive wound around and the lower floors presented themselves more invitingly, with large bay windows and flowering window boxes. Keep going and a wide stone staircase would lift you up through the gray stone arches and oak doors into the school itself.
Inside the lobby, you’d be in an almost holy space, more like church than a school, with light filtering through lead-paned windows to richly arched and vaulted ceilings. On the walls the names of former school captains shone like the war dead in gilded gold letters cut into the boards.
But to feel the life of the place, it was better to come onto the school grounds from the back, leaving the bordering residential streets via one of several narrow beaten pathways that ran between the stucco houses onto the school playing fields.
From the edge of the property, you’d see twenty or more acres of green lawns with occasional ancient trees circling the school. There, looking across to the graceful old main building, the boxy three-story classroom addition, and the brand-new combined gymnasium and indoor swimming pool tacked on behind, you could sense the open and generous spirit of the institution.
This Thursday late afternoon in September, three days after Stephen started sorting through the Vavasour papers, bright sunshine was turning toward twilight under a deep blue sky dotted with clouds. The sun was still hitting the tops of the school and houses but had gone for the day from the rich green turf, trimmed and rolled by the groundsmen in a pattern of alternating light and dark swaths. There was an almost magical lushness to the scene.
Stephen was working with some of the boys to help size up the next year’s school cricket team. Starting in October, they would train through the winter—the difference, Stephen had learned, between a winning spring season and a losing one.
Fifteen of the twenty or so boys invited by mail weeks before were here for this optional practice. First, some jogging to get a feel for their fitness; next, simple throwing and catching; and then an hour of practice hitting and fielding.
Mister Bellamy, the senior maths master, saw them all from his study and came out to watch for a while. He was always astonished when Stephen did something like this, something clearly over and above the normal responsibilities of any headmaster. But it was just like Stephen not to delegate, but to do the extra thing himself. And how many of the masters could actually get boys to show up at school a week before summer vacation was over?
Two and a half years ago, Mister Bellamy remembered, virtually all of the staff were skeptics of the young man thrust suddenly into the role of headmaster and were dusting off their CVs and preparing to go looking for jobs. Stephen’s father, Stephen White Sr., the prior headmaster and owner of the school, died that March in a horrific car crash. His wife, the headmistress of the junior school, was driving with him and lay in critical condition at the local hospital for weeks before recovering in late summer.
As a confidant of Stephen’s father, Mister Bellamy knew the school was in difficult financial straits. Mister White had even taken out a home mortgage to secure the payroll for the coming year. Enrollment was down to 300 boys from an old high of 420, the physical plant was deteriorating, academics were slipping, and athletics lackluster.
However, instead of winding things down, young Stephen rode in on a white horse and, by god, turned the whole place around. At first, some old drudges didn’t think it was appropriate to be answering to such a young head, and indeed a few were soon gone. Stephen even had to triumph over his recuperated mother, who returned to work and started fighting him on virtually everything. But he stayed firm, without becoming angry, and just kept taking her through the disastrous state of the school’s finances if they continued along the same path. He wore her down very shortly. She decided to retire and leave it all to him, moving down to the family’s cottage in Devon, which was nearer her two girls and the grandchildren anyway. All that seemed to settle down nicely, and now his mother seemed back in his cheering section during her few visits back to the place.
And so the changes started to take hold. Stephen broke the gender barrier for teachers by bringing in Mrs. Hegarty, a young Russian woman and language wiz, to be the new French teacher—and to add a new language class, teaching her native Russian as well. He lured one of his old college friends from Oxford to head up the sciences offerings—a real scientist, for god’s sake. Stephen coached the boys himself to win the Schools County Cricket trophy. Using that astonishing win, he then breathed life into the alumni association by coaxing the old boys to contribute to his expansion fund, with the result a new gym and swimming pavilion that opened last year. And now he had just concluded a merger with St. Anne’s, the local girls’ school, and the girls would be joining the boys in classes this year.
When that all starts, Mister Bellamy thought, we’ll be up to over 500 boys and girls enrolled in a very modern coeducational enterprise. And the boys improved their scores in the examinations for entrance to elite public schools by attending extra classes in Stephen’s new cramming program. Last year we sent three to Eton and Harrow, he thought. For god’s sake, we even have a waiting list.
Mister Bellamy smiled to himself and went back inside, glad to see his young boss’s energies were still flourishing.
~
Near the end of the practice session, Stephen and the boys were over in the nets, a row of three narrow batting cages encased in mesh so that up to three batters could swing away safely beside one another while bowlers practiced their throws. Concrete strips defined what would be the grass strip of a real pitch leading up to the batter’s post, and a twelve-foot-long narrow woven mat temporarily covered the pavement to soften the bounce of the ball before it reached the batters.
Two of the nets were in action that day—with one in the middle empty for extra space. As practice drew to a close, everyone was concentrating at the side of just one enclosure where eleven-year-old Denis Juric, a new foreign transfer student hoping to make the team, was about to face off against Percival, their star fast bowler.
Along with his parents and younger sister, Juric was stuck in Britain at least for the school year, and probably longer. The family had moved into the village during the summer so Juric’s father could commute to his new post at the Bosnian embassy just opening in London to represent one of the handful o
f new nations emerging from the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Luckily, Juric and his family were now in Britain and not in their homeland, where civil war raged. They certainly couldn’t go back, Stephen thought, and the boy was desperate to fit into the strange new English world he had entered.
Stephen could sense how nervous Juric was—after all, the nets were much worse than the game. The confined space the slight boy stood in was similar to a fenced dog run. Even with a bat, batting pads, and batting gloves with rubber spikes on the backs to protect his hands, all he knew was that someone much bigger and stronger was walking back about thirty yards for a run-up to the point from which he would hurl the rock-hard red cricket ball full force directly at him—not off to the side, but at him—and that it would probably first land somewhere just ahead of him on the hard concrete surface, then bounce up into his front. And instead of just trying to get the hell out of the way and save himself, he was supposed to step in toward the throw, and either block it down with his bat or smash it aside as it flew by.
Juric looked unsteady as Percival started his run. The bowler was almost sprinting by the time he unwound his arm in a full-circle arc, releasing the ball with the full force of his running body and follow-through behind it. It was too much for Juric, who lost his nerve just as it bounced, pulling his arms back and up to cover his freckled face, with the ball luckily glancing off the raised bat, purely by chance.
Stephen heard a snicker or two from the onlookers. But not fatal, he thought. So he moved fast to put a pause in the action.
“Right, lads, almost time to stop now. Percival, lead the others in clearing up. Get the other mat over there and start taking the wickets and bails into the kit room. Pick up all the gear and then come right back here for the close. Leave this cage here set up for now. See if you can have it all done in five minutes. Hurry
along now.”
The rest of the boys broke into action, making a race of it while Stephen stepped inside the cage. Juric was in shreds, a tear just starting to form in an eye. “Now, Juric, come along—we’re going to fix this up. Everyone knows this is hell itself in here. The question is, are you going to let it get the better of you? Or are you going to turn it around and have it work for you? Your father told me you were great with a bat or racquet and ball and I know you can do this. Come on. Let’s give it a try. Ready?”
“Okay, sir,” said Juric, catching a breath.
“Back in your stance. Now take a deep breath in and blow out.” Stephen went round behind the boy and picked up four of the balls. Then he walked back to the open end of the cage.
“Just block these for me.” He bounced an easy one onto the mat and Juric stepped into it, catching it firm in the middle of the bat, knocking it back. “Great, now forget about me and just see the ball. Don’t think about where we are, or what’s happening. Just keep your eyes on the ball. Find it before it ever leaves my hand, and just keep watching it, staring at it and guiding it onto the wood of your bat. Ready? I’m going to give you three in a row, so snap back after each one.”
Stephen bounced the balls at the boy, rapidly, with just two seconds between each, and Juric moved forward to meet each one and then back into his stance.
“Well done,” Stephen said, picking up four more balls. “Now these will be a bit faster. This time I want you to breathe in just before I bowl each, and breathe out hard as you hit. Give it a try.”
Stephen stepped about ten feet farther away, and one at a time bowled three balls overhand onto the mat, each one harder than the one before.
“Try the breathing thing now. And don’t take your eye off the ball. Spit your breath out as you step into it—like a karate kick or something. And I want you to be thinking, ‘There is no way in hell I am going to let this ball by me.’”
He bowled the last one toward the boy, hard. Juric blocked it square.
Stephen began, “Now, Juric—”
“Yes, sir.”
“How’s it feeling?”
“Much better, sir. Sorry about before.”
“Forget it. But you must put it behind you forever. You must take back lost ground. Here, let’s try a few more—and this time I want to hear you say aloud as you hit it, ‘There is no way in hell this will get by me.’ And extra marks if you can say ‘hell’ just as you strike it. Remember—never take your eye off the ball.” Stephen bowled three more balls fast and Juric sounded out the words as he smacked them.
“Stay angry, Juric.”
The other boys now were coming back across the fields from the kit room and Stephen stood watching to meet them. “Come along—got to close up now. Right, line up along the side of the net here.” The boys gathered quickly.
“Okay, we’ll be having a ‘friendly’ practice match against Merchant Taylors in about a fortnight. They’re big. They think very well of themselves and very little of us—very little of St. George’s. So we have to be angry, and we have to be determined. We have to play for every boy in the school to put those grammar school toffs in their place.”
Stephen had their total attention; he could tell they were startled to hear their headmaster speak in this manner. “So it’s not going to be about you, but about all of us and our friends who aren’t even on the team. We have to make a stand. So I want some spirit out there—some anger that they take for granted they can just beat us. Just like a battle for god’s sake: we’re David and they’re Goliath. Okay, now for a final over. Percival, get ready to bowl hard—one more time, six of the best, please. Juric, give me your bat!”
Stephen went into the nets and rolled the four balls way out into the field, where Percival walked back to his mark. The boy picked up the first ball and moved farther away for his run-up, while Stephen squared up a stance in front of the wickets. “Let fire, Percival—for God, school, and country.”
Stephen blocked the first one expertly, steering it over into the mesh on the left side. Amazing how fast these young teenagers can hurl, he thought—but not near as fast as the county level he competed on.
The second ball was wide of the wicket, so Stephen stepped across over to it and smacked it baseball style with terrific force into the fencing just where the boys were, startling them and having them cover their faces, forgetting the fence.
“Right. That one was a six for St. George’s. One more, Percival. Can we have a wicket this time?”
“Come on, Percival,” shouted several of the boys. “Take him out, take him out.”
Taking extra care, Percival sharpened his stare and aim, growing more determined. He put more spring into his run-up and was at absolute full tilt when he let it fly.
“Much better,” said Stephen, barely able to block the ball down into the mat. “And again, if you can.”
This time the ball was aimed true and Stephen had it true in his sights—but he let the ball take the tiny space between his bat and his leg pad, whizzing past and crashing into the three wicket stumps and hurling the two small bails skyward.
“Howzat!” shouted the boys, cheering as Stephen straightened up.
“That is an out, clean and full on. Well done, Percival.”
The boys were excited—two of them ran out to Percival in celebration. It was quite an honor to bowl out Stephen, who they knew was a real cricketer and a star batsman on the county
club team.
“Right now, boys, listen up. I asked Percival for one more over. That would be six balls, and he’s only thrown four. So time for a final pair. Juric, come in here—and Percival, do your worst.”
The boys grew still and quiet. What was going to happen?
Juric stepped in and Stephen handed him the bat and whispered. “Angry, Juric—stay angry. No way in hell it’s going to get by you.”
Juric looked very determined. Thank the lord, thought Stephen. As Stephen stepped out the front of the cage, he rolled two balls out toward Percival, who was searching his coach’s face intently. “Your worst, Percival, do absolutely your worst—no holding back now. It’
s too important.”
Juric had every fiber of his being braced behind his bat—he wasn’t about to be shaken now. He didn’t see Percival any longer, only the ball as it wound up around in a circle and hurtled toward him at full speed. He had taken his breath in and now forced it out through his teeth, saying “hell” as he blocked the ball squarely.
“Well done, Juric,” shouted one boy.
“Bravo,” said another.
“Last ball!” called Stephen, and Percival again walked way back. He ran forward and uncorked the last bowl. It had the right speed and the right length but was slightly off to the right. Moving forward with “hell” on his lips, Juric raised up his bat and hit out just as the ball went by, making contact nicely. Not a six or a four, but certainly a good chance at a run, or even two, if they ran it well.
“Hooray for you, Juric,” said one, with all the boys running in to congratulate him. Percival even walked in tired and said, “Well hit!” The excitement enveloped the whole team.
Another reputation was saved, thought Stephen. Any of us can become heroes. Any of us could be atop that war memorial.
“Right,” shouted Stephen above the action. “That’s it for tonight. See you again at three o’clock tomorrow. Juric, come help me carry these things in and lock up.”
Juric picked up the wickets and bails and threw them onto the middle of the mat with the other gear. He was glowing with the excitement. Stephen put everything else on as well and then rolled it up as a rug. “You get the other end, there,” he told
the boy.