The Dreaming Suburb

by R. F Delderfield

  Esme moved within range of Longjohn when he was twelve-and-a-half. Eunice, his mother, overrode her second husband, Harold, on the subject of Esme's education. She would not contemplate the prospect of sending him away to school, although she was, perhaps, the one person in the Avenue who could have afforded public-school fees. Harold argued a little but ultimately gave in, as he gave in to Eunice on every issue once Eunice had really made up her mind. Esme was taken away from the private school in Lower Road, and after passing a viva voce examination, was accepted for Godley Grammar School, a fourpenny 'bus-ride north of the Avenue.

  Until he attended the Grammar School, Esme had made no real friends among the children of the suburb. Judith was not so much a friend as a shield-bearing acolyte, and throughout his childhood Esme gained no pleasure from the companionship of boys his own age. He found them lamentably lacking in imagination and on this account dull partners in his eccentric games of make-believe. Judy was better than the best of them. At least she never questioned his decisions, but did what she was told, with the minimum of error.

  Esme was not interested in organised games, and his brilliant memory, for anything he cared to remember, might have resulted in his becoming a teacher's pet. What saved him from this stigma was his capacity to tell stories, and to make them sound more credible than those read in adventure books, together with an incurable romanticism that led him, more or less cold-bloodedly, into the more extravagant exercises of master-baiting. He soon acquired a reputation among the boys for solemn buffoonery and, without being exactly a butt, or a clown, he was able to provoke laughter on a slightly different level from that usually employed by the lower-form humorists. His half-girlish appearance assisted him in this field, for he looked quite innocuous, and it was some time before the staff penetrated his disguise. The boys discovered the real Esme almost at once, for, if he fancied himself humiliated, he could fight back like a tiger and did, more than once, during his first, turbulent term. The smaller boys in Lower School learned not to provoke him, and the bigger boys, like the elephantine Boxer, feared his biting tongue more than his sudden rages.

  Because he was “different”, and because he quickly came to be regarded as something of a crank, his schooldays might have been very lonely, but he was rescued from isolation by the twins, with whom he formed a curious alliance, a bond (it was hardly a friendship) that was to endure most of the time he was at school. He made no impression at all upon the rock-like unity of the Carver boys, but they had a marked effect upon him, not as individuals but as a team, much as they impressed the adults of the Avenue.

  The alliance was forged at the end of Esme's first term, which happened to coincide with the end of the school year, and its anvil was the impending, and seemingly unavoidable, separation of Boxer and Bernard—the one destined for the “C” forms, the other, Bernard, for the slightly superior grade of “B.”

  This would have meant that they occupied different classrooms all the way up the school, and it was a prospect not to be thought of by the Inseparables.

  Unlike each other in physical appearance, the twins were also unmatched in mental ability. Bernard was average. He would never be brilliant, but was capable, if he exerted himself, of moving steadily up the school to the Certificate Fifth. It was equally clear that Boxer, without vigorous help, would eddy about in the lower forms until school-leaving age, and by the time he lumbered into 4C would be surrounded by boys two, or even three years his junior.

  Boxer excelled at every activity outside the classroom. He was a member of the First Football Eleven by the time he was fourteen, and his successes in athletics ensured his popularity from the moment he ran his first circuit of the playing-field. He could swim, shoot, box, sprint, kick far and straight, throw a ball half as far again as any boy in Middle School, and shin up the gymnasium ropes in two seconds under the bogey set by the games master, Mr. Trevlow. He was a great favourite of Trevlow's, and a considerable asset to the school in all competitive contests. Perhaps it was on account of his usefulness as an athlete that Mr. Silverton tolerated the alliance for so long, but this was something Esme was never able to discover.

  The bargain between Esme and the twins was mooted on their way to the main road that last day of term. They took the same way to the 'bus stop in the Cherry Orchard Road. On the way down the Embankment Road, Esme addressed Bernard.

  “3-B for you and me next term, Carver Two!”

  The twins were always known as “Carver One” and “Carver Two”. Nobody was encouraged to use the term of address they invariably employed for one another—Berni and Boxer.

  Apparently, Esme's innocent remark had unwittingly touched a hidden spring in Bernard's mind. He stopped short, and turned to Esme. There was desperation in his frown.

  “They're going to split us up, young Fraser. Boxer's going to 3-C. I saw the list.”

  Esme, who had lived next door to the twins for years, was no stranger to their mutual devotion, but even he was mildly surprised by the urgency in Bernard's voice, and the matching gloom in Boxer's genial features. He saw a chance to move in, and took it on the instant. He needed friends, powerful friends like these two, and it occurred to him at once that they would regard any help he gave them now as an immeasurable service, never to be forgotten. He was a shrewd, observant boy, at once more mature and more childlike than the Carver twins.

  “If we got together we could stay together,” he said, very deliberately.

  Bernard made a gesture of irritation. “I tell you I've seen the list! I looked in Snowball's register, when he was called out yesterday. Boxer's in ‘C', and you and me are in ‘B’.”

  “I dare say,” said Esme, with elaborate nonchalance, “but we don't have to stay in ‘B’, do we? Look at Brett-Thomas. He went into ‘B’ straight off, and they put him down again, soon as he failed the start-of-term test. We don't have to pass it, do we? We don't even have to try. There's harder work in ‘B’, and you can't muck about with ‘Sarky’. He sends you to ‘Longjohn’ for the slightest thing. If you fail the first test they put you down again, like Brett-Thomas.”

  Bernard's face cleared, but only for a moment.

  “We could do that once,” he objected, “but it'd be the same again next term—we couldn't keep on doing it.”

  “We wouldn't have to,” said Esme, “not if we got into 3-C and sat near Carver One, and that's easy enough, as long as your brother bashes anyone who tries to bag the seats next to the hot-water pipes.”

  Boxer had taken no part in this conversation. Most of it was too involved for him. He plodded along beside them, idly twirling his satchel at the full extent of its strap. Now he spoke.

  “I could do that. You just leave the bashing to me. We could sit one behind the other along the pipes, then you could whisper and pass notes. Old Chesty, him who takes 3-C, is half-blind anyway.” He swung his satchel like a flail. “I'd like to see anyone who stopped us getting those seats! I'd just like to see 'em!”

  Bernard could hardly keep the excitement out of his voice.

  “We could do that, young Fraser, I reckon we could do that; but there's home-work. You get written subjects in 3-C, and how are we going to help Boxer do written homework?”

  Esme was now enjoying himself. He always enjoyed a Machiavellian role.

  “We live next door to one another, don't we? I'll do his home-work, and he can copy it all out.”

  And so it was arranged, and it amazed all three of them how smoothly it worked, right from the beginning.

  Bernard and Esme remained in 3-B for less than a week. Their test-papers, turned in that first Saturday morning were so badly written, and so full of howlers, that Mr. Dodge—whose classroom irony had earned him the name of “Sarky” —was thankful to recommend their abrupt transfer to 3-C, where Boxer, already undisputed king of the Lower School, had no difficulty at all in persuading the two boys occupying the desks immediately behind him to abdicate in favour of Esme and Bernard.

  They perfected the
ir system throughout that first term, and by the end of the year it was very nearly foolproof. It was a simple but effective technique. Whenever Boxer was stumped by a question he simply leaned back, and waited for Esme's cautious prompt from the desk immediately behind. “Chesty”, the form-master, who took them for several subjects, was indeed short-sighted, and Esme soon acquired the prison knack of lipless conversation. In a very little while Boxer's ear became attuned to the pitch of Esme's controlled whisper and a stream of carefully sifted information moved up from his rear, like steady reinforcements trickling into a beleaguered saphead.... Edward the First, Conjunction, The Ten Commandments, le Cahier, fifty-seven, ten per cent, Joan of Arc, adjectival Clause ... day after day, week after week, the steady drip went on, until Boxer himself stood in more danger of moving into the “B” stream than either of his supporters.

  “Chesty”, a benign, elderly man, was delighted. Boxer had been represented to him as a particularly stupid boy. He had obviously been maligned. He could only conclude that the boy had never been taught properly. Parker, of Form 2B, was notoriously impatient with what some teachers called the “garden-roller type”—the boy who needed a very strong push to start him off, but who afterwards went rolling forward under his own momentum. “Chesty” even went out of his way to tell Parker as much, during an acrimonious coffee-break discussion in the masters' common-room.

  The whispering served equally well for oral and class tests, but the written home-work called for more delicate handling. Esme enjoyed writing essays, and it was no hardship to him to write two compositions a week. The first time he wrote Boxer's essay, however, he was alarmed, and not a little annoyed, to discover that Boxer's work had earned him nine out of ten, while the author had collected a mere seven. Moreover, “Chesty” read Boxer's effort out loud, as an example of how promising an exercise it was, and it galled Esme to be in no position to claim the credit. He went into conference with Bernard on the subject.

  “He'll smell a rat if I go on doing that, Carver Two! I'll have to make some spelling mistakes, and keep your brother down to about six or seven.”

  Bernard agreed, and thereafter Boxer's work dropped off a little, not suddenly, but week by week, until it hovered about the average of six or seven. Esme also made a point of writing his own essay first, when he was fresh.

  Outside the classroom Boxer took command. On the sports-field the other two acted as his trainer and second. They could be seen, almost any half-day, patting Boxer's huge calves, lacing his boots, holding his sweater, and giving him little pieces of advice, for all the world as though Boxer was a professional, and they each owned a piece of him.

  In the field of mischief, carefully-prepared mischief, the balance of power shifted back to Esme, although the actual commission of a crime was generally assigned to Boxer. Thus it was Boxer who actually lit, and concealed, the cones of pungent-smelling French incense, that Esme purchased from Woolworth's and brought into class, Boxer who actually dropped the stink-bomb into the crevice between the master's dais and the wall, Boxer who gulped down a half-pint of ginger-beer that had been poured by Esme into a well-scoured sulphuric acid bottle on the laboratory shelves. It was this latter incident that caused Mr. Sisley, a young and pitifully earnest chemistry master, to faint on the spot, and later abandon teaching for a snug roost as a manufacturing chemist, at Uxbridge.

  Word of these incidents reached Mr. Silverton from time to time, and occasionally he administered justice on the taut trousers of the chief offenders. He hit hard, and accurately, but without malice. On no occasion, when they were sent in to him for punishment, did he comment on the cause of their being there. He caned them absent-mindedly, as though he was filling in a form, or putting coal on the fire, and the twins loved him for his silences. They were broadminded boys, and regarded Longjohn's cane as his legitimate means of defence against them, but they resented lectures and pi-jaw, for such talk embarrassed them.

  Esme sometimes wondered at the Head's silences on these occasions. It passed through his mind that there was something sinister about them, and it sometimes seemed to him that Longjohn laid into him with a vigour, and a purposeful-ness, that were lacking in his address to the twins. It was not until the faintly ridiculous “Miss Reid row”, however, that he was fully confirmed in his suspicions, indeed, it was not until that incident had been cleared up that he came to know Longjohn at all.

  Up to that time Longjohn had never been a human being, just “The Head”—to whose study one went for a hiding, a lean, scarred man in a neat grey suit, who read prayers at assembly, and was occasionally seen wandering about the corridors.

  The “Miss Reid affair” was rather more than a classroom frolic. Miss Reid was the headmistress of the Girls' Grammar School, housed in adjacent buildings, and separated from the boys' school by an eight-foot brick wall, surmounted by embedded glass and three strands of barbed wire.

  Miss Reid distrusted men and loathed boys. For years she had carried on a guerilla war against the boys' school, claiming the use of the communal playing-field at short notice, insisting that the boys' time of dismissal should be put back to 4.30, in order to give the girls time to get clear, and discourage association—pinpricks inflicted by a steady stream of memos, recommendations, and suggestions, aimed at segregation, that sometimes caused Mr. Silverton's cheeks to twitch with maddening persistence. The feud between the two staffs was common knowledge among the rank and file of both schools, and the pupils naturally did all they could to exacerbate the situation. One of the boys' counterattacks was their time-honoured method of reclaiming lost balls.

  Miss Reid's precise instructions regarding the reclamation of balls that went over the wall were carried out with ironic punctiliousness. Almost every day a boy wearing an expression about half-way between meekness and idiocy would present himself at Miss Reid's study, touch his cap, and ask for permission to reclaim a ball.

  There came a day, however, when a football, driven hard and high by the size-nine boot of Boxer Carver, soared over the wall, and bounced on to the roof of the girls' toilets, rolling thence into the gutter, and remaining wedged there.

  Impatient for the continuance of the game Boxer waived the customary procedure.

  “Aw—give me a hunk up, Berni, and I'll get it without going round.”

  In the event it was the lighter Bernard who retrieved it, after first climbing on Boxer's shoulders, and then on Esme's. He threw down the ball, and was preparing to scramble back to the wall when Miss Reid herself emerged from the washroom, immediately below. Seeing a boy climbing nimbly over the lavatory roof towards the dividing wall, she squealed with rage.

  “Name, boy! Name!” she shouted, spreading her arms in order to prevent girls behind her from emerging into the open.

  Bernard, who seldom made a joke, decided to make one now.

  “I'm Dan, Dan, the Lavatory Man!” he replied, very pleasantly, and leaping on to the wall, rejoined his brother and Esme in the boys' yard.

  He found Boxer, who had overheard the quip, almost hysterical with laughter. Unable to resist an active part in such a gallant demonstration, he ran along to a buttress, clawed his way to the top of the wall, thrust his head between the strands of wire, and shouted: “And I'm his twin-brother, mother!”

  Miss Reid came round before afternoon assembly, and the trio owned up before the inevitable identity parade could be organised.

  “I demand that the boys be expelled,” said Miss Reid, as the Head escorted her into the vestibule; “this is intolerable—quite intolerable!”

  “Indeed, it is,” was all Mr. Silverton would reply, “and you may rely upon me to deal with it at once, Miss Reid. Thank you for reporting the matter.”

  Deal with it he did, that same afternoon, and at first Esme had no reason to suppose his method would differ from that employed on previous occasions. He caned the twins first, and dismissed them, breathing hard, and clutching fistfuls of buttock, into the hall, where they were told to remain until supplied
with a quire of paper on which to write: “Ribald remarks seldom fall into the category of humour” one thousand times.

  “And if I detect the work of sympathisers on any of the pages handed in, you can assure them in advance that they'll write their own lines standing up!” was Longjohn's parting shot.

  Esme stood by. He had taken no actual part in the incident, and was already beginning to regret the impulse of quixotic loyalty that had prompted him to join the twins in confession. A dabbing like that! AND a thousand lines!

  But Longjohn only tossed his cane into a cupboard, and Esme noticed that his cheek was twitching more violently than ever.

  “Sit down, Fraser,” he said shortly; “it's time you and I had our first intelligent conversation. How old are you now?”

  Esme sat, relieved, but uncertain.

  “Fifteen, sir,” he said, and suddenly realised that he was blushing.

  Longjohn took out a pipe and slowly stuffed its bowl.

  “Fifteen,” he mused, and his face ceased to twitch. “When were you fifteen?”

  “In February, sir.”

  Longjohn finished filling his pipe. There was a long silence, during which Esme could hear his heart-beats very distinctly. Presently Longjohn said:

  “I've known all about your arrangements with the Carvers for some time past, Fraser. I tell you this straight away so that we can start on open ground. What I am anxious to know is how long do you intend to keep it up? Until you leave? Until you've failed School Cert., and thrown away every opportunity you ever had of learning how to learn?”

  Esme shuffled his feet. He discovered, to his secret chagrin, that he was unable to meet Longjohn's eye. The man's friendliness and reasonableness were agonising. He wished now with all his heart that the Head would reach for his cane and give him the same ration as he had dealt out to the twins. Then he realised that this was all part of Longjohn's treatment. He was deliberately setting out to make him feel small, and mean, and cheap.