I sensed Eustace behind me, and turned to see him advancing rapidly down the corridor, broom tied to the handlebars of his new boneshaker bicycle, as if he were tilting for the King. His lance hit me squarely in the chest, and I overbalanced. The suit of armour, with me inside, toppled off the top stair and I was battered half to death as I thundered and crashed all the way to the bottom.
I came to rest on my front, and decided I was dead. Dead at ten years old, what a waste. Everyone would be very sad, and miss me very much. Then I realised I wasn’t quite dead. I spat blood, and my last milk tooth came out of my mouth and rattled off somewhere down inside my armour. Through the visor I could only see the pale flagstones of the hall, and then the leather of my father’s brogues creasing as he bent down to check I was alive.
He lifted my helmet off, and smiled down at me, his pipe clamped firmly in place, as ever. His eyes sparkled approvingly as he gently felt my jawbone and the vertebrae at the back of my neck. He loved it when I did dangerous, reckless things. “That was a bloody wonderful fall, young knight, well done. Extremely well-timed…”
Pa turned, and I followed his thoughtful gaze to the remnants of a Zhou dynasty pot that had always lived on a plinth in the hall. My heart sank. I was for it.
“I always hated that vase,” Pa said. “Let’s have a look at your war wounds.” Gently, he helped me out of the suit, and together we surveyed my injuries (scraped knees, sliced forearm, black eye) and the damage to the armour (spurs snapped off, breastplate wrenched laterally, helmet dented.)
“This was your fourteen times great-grandfather’s,” he said. I nodded glumly. “Though if you can’t throw yourself down a flight of stairs in this, then what? That’s the sort of caper armour was designed for! This suit hasn’t seen this sort of action since Flodden Field.”
“But I didn’t throw mysel…” I began, and then stopped abruptly remembering that Trevelyans never tell tales. Eustace, from his hiding place, stuck his longbow fingers up at me.
“Let’s get you some hot chocolate, King Arthur,” said my father, and off we went to the scullery together. “There was a story about your fourteen times great grandfather. Apparently he had an Irish wolfhound that was as big as a horse…”
My early life was full of life-affirming days like this. My Ma and Pa were the kindest and most wonderful people one could imagine. Ma adored my brother and I. Pa spent his entire life moulding his sons into capable, solid chaps. One day we’d spend all afternoon practising judo on the lawns, and the next we’d dam the stream and try to make pets of the beavers. The next day we’d explore the Reformation-era tunnels across the three thousand acres of our farm. No two days were the same, but all of them were stuffed full of japes, warmth and family. My life at Nimbu would continue this way forever and ever. Until I was eleven, that is.
We were playing our traditional family game of sardines one Easter Saturday. Ma and Pa were tingling with excitement at this annual event, and Pa had dropped several hints that their hiding place this year was quite something. It was. They levered themselves into a priest hole that dated back to the house’s original construction in 1549. It was under the main fireplace. They were convinced that Eustace and I knew about it, but actually we had no idea.
After just an hour Eustace and I gave up our search, and decided to sample Mother’s port collection. Later that afternoon the north wind blew, turning a gentle spring day wintery again. We lit a fire. The post-mortem suggested that Ma and Pa part-roasted and part asphyxiated over a period of twelve hours. I had assumed it was the wet logs that were screaming.
Eustace discovered their bodies a few days later. He was never the same backslapping soul again. He grew timid and insular, developing what the doctor called ‘a rich inner-life’. In every meaningful sense, I lost my brother that day as well as my parents. And since that time I’ve never been able to light a fire without suppressing a panic attack.
Eustace and I inherited Nimbu Towers and a colossal fortune, which was of no solace whatsoever, at least at first. A perpetual gloom settled on Nimbu. I left the day-to-day management to Masterson, who was an excellent regent. Masterson was assisted by a young servant boy, Cacahuete. He was the son of Senor Caballero, a horse doctor and drinking crony of my father. Through bad investments, poker and billiards, Caballero owed Pa nearly a million pounds, and this was back when a million pounds was a lot of money. One night in the library, Caballero swore the lifelong fealty of his first-born son, as yet unborn, if my father would forgive the debt.
Pa had accepted this grandiose promise, expecting it to come to nothing. But when I was five years old a dumpy little toddler was left in Nimbu’s front porch in the dead of night. Before my father could follow him, Senor Caballero had hanged himself in the woods. I wish I could say that Cacahuete became another brother to me, but that would be an untruth. He was always a servant and so Masterson formally adopted him.
I knew Pa had wanted me to go to Winstowe, so I wrote to the headmaster to arrange myself a place. When I was thirteen years old, I left Eustace, Masterson and Cacahuete at Nimbu to fend for themselves. It had been two years since my parents were laid in their graves, and I was already my own man, strong-willed and independent. Nothing focuses a chap more than catastrophic loss.
I drove Pa’s Wolseley Hornet down to Winstowe College, crashing only twice on route. There, my life began again. I met several wonderful people, and made many lifelong friends, who have supported me through thick and thin, but mostly thick.
I also met Victor Cornwall.
It whips along doesn’t it? I don’t think my readers need to know much more about my early life, but things got a bit more interesting at Winstowe College.
I propose to carry on from here:
Winstowe College, 1934-35
Winstowe College turns out the best chaps in the world if you value independence of thought and self-reliance above all things. But if you’ve always been loved unconditionally by your parents, up to the moment they were roasted to death beneath their own fireplace, then it can be a shock to the system. Luckily I’m a fast learner.
On the first day of the September term I parked the Hornet at a local garage and walked the last mile to my new school. I had two cracked leather suitcases into which were stuffed various schoolboy essentials including a cricket bat, a catapult, a box containing a petrified lizard and four pounds of mint humbugs.
When I got to the school gates, I had a bit of a crisis of confidence. I stood around awkwardly, not wanting to go in and announce myself, in case I did the wrong thing. It wasn’t long before a boy with a strangely angular head, whose uniform was already dishevelled, turned up. A stern man with a noticeably straight back accompanied him. “Wait, Victor,” barked the man. “I’m going to have a drink with Dr Philpott. I’ll be back for you at some point.”
Victor Cornwall obediently sat on his suitcase, and we watched his father march towards the school alone. “Hullo,” he said, and took a Chelsea bun from his pocket. He didn’t offer me any of it, although I could have done with some.
“Hullo,” I countered.
“I’m Victor Cornwall. That was my father. I doubt he’ll be coming back.”
“At least you still have a father. Both of my parents are dead,” I said. I told him how they had suffocated, and he was very impressed.
“Which House are you in?” It turned out we were in the same House, and the same dorm. So we shook hands formally. That was that.
Cornwall was right about his father not returning for him, so together we walked down the long drive to School. Then we loafed around our new dorm watching it fill up with trunks, hatboxes and other small boys. As the tearful mamas and upright fathers drifted away, I noticed that Cornwall would simply go up and introduce himself to anyone he pleased. If I stood near enough he’d introduce me too.
“This here is Trevelyan. His mum’s in Hollyw
ood, which is why he’s stuck here. She’s an actress in the talkies. She’s got very big tits,” he said by way of introduction to the other dormers, Corky Vong, Choudry Sing-Singh, Gavin Tremeloe, R.P. Hatsbettie-Gatsbettie and the Hon. Sebastian Mashie.
How big are they, the chaps wanted to know. Examining my fingernails, I confirmed that they were pretty big. You should see them, Cornwall confirmed, because they are easily the biggest tits in England. Bloody hell, Trevelyan’s mum’s got the biggest tits in England, explained somebody to somebody else. I got a lot of kudos for that, and I saved a place for Cornwall in the tuck shop queue.
In short order, Cornwall and I became cocks of the dorm. There is a very simple formula for avoiding being bullied at boarding school. You simply bully everyone else. That’s about the only good bit of advice Cornwall’s father gave him, he said. We began to throw our weight about. We became chaps you went to see if other chaps needed teaching a lesson. We had a Hornet stashed in a garage down the road, which made our lives much easier when the prefects got to hear about it. We became the chaps you went to see if you needed contraband items, such as nudie magazines, gin or fireworks. I learnt a bit about geography, history and mathematics, but more importantly by that first half term I was in profit by eight guineas, and also had a cricket bat signed by Bradman, and all my French prep done, in a decent imitation of my handwriting, in perpetuity. Winstowe College was a tolerable place as soon as you discovered how it worked.
That said, school life was an endless grind of Latin, poetry, French and prep. The food was terrible. It was always freezing on the rugger field. There were occasionally memorable events to punctuate the term. My favourite teacher, Dr Wimsey, was dismissed from service for bringing down the Second Master’s goshawk with a bow and arrow. A young chap called Arglington burst his appendix and died. On Speech Day, the cricketer Douglas Jardine gave an excellent speech about the Bodyline tactics he used against the Australian batsmen in the 1932-33 Ashes Tour. He then gave a demonstration of how to pitch the ball short on the leg stump so it rises to the batsman in an intimidating manner. Demonstrating the technique, Jardine shattered Terrepin Minor’s kneecap into seven pieces. Terrepin Minor had to remove himself to the San for the rest of the term, and was delighted.
__________
About a month before the end of the Christmas term, a new boy arrived in a black Daimler, It was a bloody nice car, like a shark, according to Sing-Singh, who saw it glide down the gravel drive one afternoon while the rest of us were on a cross-country run. Sing-Singh was not allowed to do cross-country running on account of his fox bite that had gone septic.
The new boy was brought directly up to the dorm, and put straight to bed. All we saw of him that first evening was a torso-shaped lump in the bed, but his kit was of excellent quality. Somebody said he was Austrian. Unpleasant things had happened to his parents very recently, and they were dead. That must have been why he’d been bundled off to Winstowe at short notice, but then it was the 1930s. Lots of parents were dead. There was nothing special about that.
At first he had dreams that were very loud, but dorm chaps were surprisingly sensitive about grief after lights-out, so it didn’t create too much of a stir. After a week he quietened down. Clearly the mountains had made him a self-reliant type.
His name was Gruber Hansclapp. ‘Gruber’ was odd enough to serve as a nickname. Gruber was young for the year, scrawny, and horribly pale. Dr Young-Hawkins, the housemaster, called Cornwall and me in to his office, and told us to keep an eye on him, which meant we were on our honour not to beat him up too often. Cornwall and I were bloody good to him actually. We only took half of his chocolate, which was Swiss. He told Sing-Singh that his cook made it for him in his Schloss.
We helped him settle in, in return for our German gobbets completed. He didn’t talk much, although he had excellent English. He spoke Austrian only to Baltenfriez, a year above us.
There was something unnerving about Gruber. He was inscrutable as he stood on the margins and appraised you. You felt he could see right into you, like a vicar or Matron. He did that with everyone, weighing and sizing, squirrelling information away for a time when it would be useful. He was pretty badly treated by the prefects. He didn’t seem to care, sucking up their detentions and punishments with no reaction at all. Then Hellington Snr, the worst of the prefects in the Lower Sixth, suffered some awful burns when he left his candle aflame in his study one night. Tremeloe said he’d woken and Gruber had been out of his bed when it happened. Tremeloe said this very quietly, only once, and he’d never repeat it.
Prefects soon got bored of Gruber and left him alone, which was rarely what happened if you were a ruminative, bookish type. He was uninterested in sport but tremendous at chess. Gruber could beat Dr Young-Hawkins at chess without even concentrating. He once took him apart in eight moves, and was thrashed for not respecting an opponent. Dr Young-Hawkins was sent off to a London hospital later that term, after eating some bad bacon and developing a sickness that wouldn’t go away.
Sing-Singh boldly asked Gruber for an Austrian stamp for his collection. Gruber completely ignored him. But that evening a torn-off envelope marked Melk was left on his pillow. Melk was a town in Austria.
In time, Gruber assembled a little band of followers, who began to fetch and carry for him. He had a bag carrier in the form of Schoonerman, a maths spod with protruding teeth. The thuggish Urkhartt, loose-head prop for the fourth XV at only twelve years old, became his henchman. Urkhartt gave Hennessey Minor from the year above a black eye for not getting out of Gruber’s way in the crowded changing room corridors.
Before long, Cornwall and I realised that some of the chaps who used to come to us for contraband were talking to Gruber instead, but only through Schoonerman. Requests were often on a grander scale than anything we could manage. Yes, Gruber could arrange for a letter to arrive from Huxtable’s home address excusing him from a survival weekend on Dartmoor. Yes, it would be possible for Liberty’s to deliver a mink coat to a girl from the Lyons Corner House whom Mr Thrum was courting. Yes, it would be possible for the Headmaster’s Wife to be urgently called away the same weekend the Nurses’ Auxiliary was billeted at the school. Gruber Hansclapp was playing this game at a pretty high level.
Cornwall and I became obsessed with the inscrutable Austrian. I started to note interesting facts about him in my little leather notebook, just as Hamilton MacFadden did in The Black Camel. I still have that notebook today. The first thing I wrote was ‘Why does G. get up so early. Where does he go?’
Nobody got enough sleep at school, as the timetable was relentless. But Gruber would creep from the dorm at five in the morning, and always be back for breakfast, where he sat serenely at the table in immaculate uniform. Cornwall and I decided to find out where he was going. When he slid from under his thin eiderdown the following morning, we were already fully dressed, having gone to bed in our clothes, ready to tail our mark.
Gruber was through the door and along the passageway with remarkable speed. We counted to twenty and scooted after him. Outside the dorm, silence reigned. The school tabby stared at us indignantly from a windowsill, her claws bloody from her last kill.
A distant creak told us Gruber had gone down the second staircase, past the corridors for the refectory and across the parquet flooring of Assembly. We followed. By the time we’d crept downstairs we’d heard the further noise of the janitor’s entrance opening. Cheeky blighter must have had a key made! Impressive. We heard the door close softly as Gruber made his way out into the grounds. We counted another twenty, and pulled the door open again. This time we heard faint crunching on the gravel, leading out towards the pitches. We edged the low stone perimeter wall that marked the boundary of school grounds, and passed the black obelisk to a track littered with rusting farm implements. We were headed towards the groundsman’s huts and the stables, all strictly out of bounds for pupils.
Fr
ustratingly Cornwall had to stop to spend a penny. We would have blown the tail, I told him, except that Gruber’s destination was now clear. Winstowe College did not survive on school fees alone. Hundreds of acres gifted to the College in the 1300s were tenanted out to farmers. A herd of Friesians wintered in a milking barn at the end of this track.
We moved quietly into the cowshed, and stood just inside the doorway, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the dark. The occupants were shifting uneasily, lowing and gently butting heads in warning at our arrival. Through the gloom, I could see Gruber making his way across the straw-strewn floor through their lumbering bodies. Cornwall took a step forward but slid in a cowpat and fell on his arse. In a moment of weakness I crouched down to help him. This was lucky, as Gruber abruptly turned, suspicious. He didn’t see us though.
He made his way to the back of the shed, to an isolation stall, and stepped inside. For the split second before he disappeared his entire demeanour changed. I saw his tensed shoulders relax and a broad grin break across his face.
I don’t know if you have ever tried to make your way through a herd of uneasy Friesians in a shed, but it was very like over-fifties night at Heavy Betsy’s. We trod carefully, but even so Cornwall was briefly crushed between two heifers as we made our way to the stall. I took an angry hoof to the shin, and countless ungentle head butts.
The isolation stall’s door was ajar, and inside was a spindly-looking bullock, a year old, on fresh straw. This was not a local cow, but the sort of beast you might see grazing on a lowland slope in Switzerland. It was shaggy and mahogany brown, with the beginnings of horns on its elegant head. His coat was in exquisite condition, and we could see why. Gruber had his back to us and was currycombing it with obvious affection, whispering “Ich lieber dich, Hermanus, meine schone kleine stier, Ich lieber dich.”
Scoundrels Page 7