by Jonathan Coe
OK, so the prefects don’t carry truncheons. (Yet.) And there isn’t much in the faces of Lambert, C. J. or Pinnick, W. H. C., as they stand there swaying from side to side and looking justifiably embarrassed, to strike fear into the soul of the prospective school revolutionary. But the principle is the same. What is a school prefect, after all, for all the ludicrous “prestige” that is supposed to attach to the job, but a glorified henchman for the Chief Master? A hired thug, in other words: except that the thugs the Chief Master hires usually look as though they would have difficulty roughing up a mischievous cub scout, and all they receive for their pains is a nice new tie and a pretty little badge for their Mummies to sew on to their blazers over the Christmas holidays.
In classical times, the Praetorian Prefect was the commander of the imperial bodyguard, an elite squad formed by the Emperor Augustus to prevent any recap of that nasty business with Julius Caesar. Unfortunately they did not prove the most trustworthy of helpers and the institution was abolished by Septimius Severus who concluded that they were just as likely to kill him as protect him. Would that today’s prefects showed as much spirit!
The Bill Board has not run many campaigns in the last few terms: our editorial policy has usually been to present our readers with the facts, and allow them to make up their own minds. But this is an issue about which we all, collectively, have very strong feelings. Quite simply, we believe that this enfeebled hangover from the days of imperial skulduggery has no place in a distinguished and forward-looking school in the 1970s.
We urge our readers to petition the Chief Master and Mr. Nuttall on this subject. And, since another batch of prefects will have been “elected” (how, or by whom, we mere commoners are never permitted to know) by the time this edition comes out, we also make this plea to the new appointments. Resist! Say no to those establishment perks! It is no kind of privilege to become the oppressor of your former comrade-in-arms!
SIGNED,
Doug Anderton . . .
“. . . Signed, Doug Anderton, et cetera.”
Doug finished reading from his typescript and looked around for support. He found it at once.
“Good stuff,” said Claire, emphatically. “Very good indeed. I don’t mind signing that.”
She scribbled her signature beneath Doug’s and passed the sheet of paper on to Philip. He shook his head worriedly. “This’ll put the cat among the pigeons,” he muttered. But he agreed with everything that Doug had written, and added his signature to Claire’s.
“Benjamin?” said Doug.
Benjamin hesitated for longer than Philip. As always, he was impressed by the power of Doug’s rhetoric and the clarity of his thinking. He envied him his ability to choose his position and defend it fiercely when, for his own part, he was cursed with the compulsion always to see both sides of every argument. He was friendly with several prefects and tended to think that they were decent people trying to do a difficult job. It was all very complicated.
“Well . . . OK,” he said, and signed the editorial too. He was an artist, after all, and artists had to do something politically controversial every so often.
That left only Emily Sandys, the newest recruit to the editorial team, who seemed more reluctant than anyone to commit herself to this act of subversion. Doug stared at her, almost accusingly, as if this was exactly what he had been expecting. He disliked Emily for the very same reason that Benjamin was secretly drawn to her: she was one of the leading lights behind the joint Boys’ and Girls’ School Christian Society. Benjamin had never actually aligned himself with this unfashionable organization, of course. By temperament he was not a joiner of groups, and in any case, he could never have lived with the social stigma. The Christians were held to be at the very bottom of the King William’s evolutionary scale, even lower than the Combined Cadet Force or a miserable-looking trio of bus-spotters who called themselves the Public Service Vehicle Group. The very thought of them conjured up grisly images of woollen sweaters and table-tennis evenings and Bible-study meetings heavy with the scents of furtive adolescent sexual attraction and lingering body odour. These people were simply too awful to contemplate. But Emily, in Benjamin’s eyes, was different. She was clever and she could take a joke and her design ideas had transformed the paper in the last few months and neither he nor Philip nor even Doug had failed to notice that she also had a thoroughly distracting body, in a plump, curvy sort of way.
“What will happen if I don’t sign it?” she wanted to know.
Doug looked around the table, and let out a long breath to signify the gravity of the situation.
“Well, to be honest, Emily, I think you would have to resign. Because the rest of the board is completely united on this one, and we’re planning to throw the whole weight of the paper behind the campaign.”
“Oh.” She looked very disappointed. “But I love coming to these meetings. They’ve been such good fun.”
Doug shrugged his shoulders. The choice was hers.
“All right,” said Emily, and the fifth and final signature was added to the typescript. Doug took the sheet of paper back and looked at it with a smile of satisfaction.
“Excellent,” he said. “A significant moment in the history of The Bill Board.”
Significant but, as it turned out, short-lived. Ten minutes later, Benjamin was forced to resign from the editorial team. A messenger from the Chief Master had put his head round the door of the meeting room to tell him that he had just been made a prefect.
“You couldn’t have turned it down,” said Philip, consolingly, at the bus stop later that day. “You don’t get asked to be a prefect, you get told to be a prefect.”
“Exactly,” said Benjamin.
“I mean, if you turned it down, there are all sorts of ways the school could take it out on you.”
“Quite.”
“They might never give you a reference. Or they might write to Oxford or Cambridge and tell them you were a troublemaker and weren’t to be trusted.”
“Absolutely. That’s what I’ve been telling everyone.”
“You had no choice in the matter, really. It’s just your rotten luck that they decided to pick on you.”
Benjamin smiled his gratitude and wondered, not for the first time, why everybody couldn’t be as reasonable as Philip. It was all the more magnanimous of him given that he and Doug and Harding had not even, inexplicably, been elected to the Carlton Club. Why had Benjamin been singled out for such high distinction, then? It seemed to make no sense. Almost all of his friends had been scathing when they heard of the appointment. Doug had treated him to a ten-minute lecture on “selling out to the establishment.” Claire had simply stopped talking to him. Emily had been quite kind, it was true, but a more reliable foretaste of the delights to come was provided at this very moment by two of Paul’s little contemporaries, running up to him at the bus stop.
“Excuse me, Mr. Prefect,” they said, crowding around his legs. “May we stand in the bus queue please?”
“May I put this chocolate wrapper in the litter bin, please, Mr. Prefect?”
“Do you mind if my friend and I talk to each other, Mr. Prefect? You won’t put us in detention?”
“Just piss off, the pair of you,” said Benjamin, and they ran away laughing delightedly.
He tried to tell himself that the furore would soon die down. It was the same at the end of every term when the new prefects were announced. And at least this time there was another, genuine scandal to keep everybody talking: the snubbing of Culpepper. Most people had assumed that he would become School Captain, or Vice-Captain at the very least. But it turned out that he had not even been made a prefect. Accounts varied, but the most colourful said that he had been weeping openly by the notice board when the names were posted up. He had used expressions to describe the Chief Master and the Deputy Chief, Mr. Nuttall, which had shocked the few members of the sixth form who were worldly enough to understand them. And—but again, versions of this story differed, and few
people could believe that it was really true—some witnesses said that he had spat at Steve Richards, another of the newly appointed prefects, when they passed in the corridor.
The bus was a long time coming, today, and before it arrived Benjamin glimpsed Cicely approaching him from the other side of the Bristol Road. It was 4:30 on a wintry December evening. Dusk was already falling, and she was protected against the cold by a full-length cashmere overcoat and enormous cloche hat; as usual, she drew the attention of everyone waiting at the bus stop; the crowd even pulled back a little to let her pass, and it was a source of unspeakable pride to Benjamin when she walked straight up to him and planted a kiss on his cheek. The coldness of her face was delicious, and they held each other in a lingering hug: the sort of hug you might expect between an affectionate brother and sister.
“Oh Benjamin, I’m so proud of you,” she said. “You’ll make a wonderful prefect, I know you will.”
“Do you think so?” (It was the first time anybody had said anything like this to him all day.) “Everybody else has been so . . . funny about it, so censorious. Do you think I’m doing the right thing?”
“Everything you do is right, as far as I’m concerned. I have absolute faith in your judgement.”
He felt on the point of exploding with happiness when he heard these words. He had barely spoken to Cicely this term and had almost forgotten (no, that could never be true; had forbidden himself to remember) what wonders she was capable of doing for his self-esteem. Suddenly he knew that he had to see her again.
“This is your bus,” she said, kissing him goodbye. “Don’t let me keep you.”
“Cicely—do you think we could go for a drink again soon? Some time over the Christmas holidays? It seems ages since we talked.”
“Gosh, that would be lovely, wouldn’t it? Absolute heaven. I’ll call you.”
Something in the way she said it made Benjamin know that it would never happen. And Philip, who had overheard most of their conversation, broke it to him on the bus home that these days, so the rumour went, Cicely was having an affair with Mr. Ridley, the husband of her Latin teacher, and he would never let her go out for a drink by herself with someone from the Boys’ School. Benjamin sighed and watched the first flakes of snow start to settle against the window of the bus. He always seemed to be the last person to find out.
Bewildered by the events of the closing days of term, he sought to anchor himself, over the Christmas holidays, in the relative certainties of family life.
Lois had come back from hospital again, and was living in her old room. The intervals between her severest, most paralyzing bouts of depression were getting longer and longer, to everyone’s relief. Loud noises still scared her, and she could not tolerate violent films on the television. They had to be careful not to present her with anything that might remind her of the events of November, 1974. But she was able to hold down a job, for the time being, even if it was nothing more arduous than a few hours each day behind the counter of the local off-licence, and there were other encouraging omens. When her Aunt Evelyn gave her a postal order for Christmas, she spent the money on a five-year desk diary, and began writing in it on New Year’s Day. Everyone interpreted this as a sign that she had begun to think more hopefully about the future.
Paul kept himself to himself. He sat in his room most of the day, either working on his school holiday assignments, or poring over the pages of Time, Newsweek, The Spectator, The Listener and the other political weeklies that had lately become his favourite reading matter. On Christmas night, when the rest of the family gathered round the television to watch The Morecambe and Wise Show, he stayed upstairs, reading a collection of essays by the economist Milton Friedman.
Colin and Sheila were delighted at Benjamin’s success. When she sewed the new prefect’s badge on to his school blazer, Sheila’s eyes were so cloudy that she could barely see to thread the needle.
Even though they only lived a few miles up the road, it was a family tradition (in a family which regarded tradition as inviolable) that Benjamin’s grandparents should come to stay for three days at Christmas. The subsequent seventy-two-hour orgy of over-eating and television-watching had always seemed to Benjamin to be one of the highlights of the year, but this time, perhaps because he was weighed down by thoughts of his new responsibilities, perhaps because he was simply so unhappy with the recent progress of his relationship with Cicely, he could not raise any real enthusiasm for it. He went through the motions, but that was all.
There was only one moment which, whenever he thought about it, days or months or even years later, seemed to have a different texture to it, almost an aura of the numinous or sublime. It happened on Christmas night, while Paul was upstairs absorbing the rudiments of monetarism and the rest of them were watching Morecambe and Wise, and it concerned Benjamin’s grandfather.
Benjamin had been feeling a new kinship with his grandfather over the last few months. It dated from a time in mid-August, when the family had been holidaying in North Wales and his grandparents (because this—of course—was the tradition) had come to stay in a nearby guest house for a week. One uncharacteristically sunny afternoon, Benjamin and his grandfather had gone for a walk along Cilan Head, and had stopped, as was often their custom, to rest for a while on the twin mounds of Castell Pared Mawr. From here they had an incomparable view of the immense, azure ocean as it slapped restlessly against vertiginous cliffs; despite the dense afternoon haze they could see right across Porth Ceiriad bay and towards the islands of St. Tudwal’s. They contemplated this awesome scene in silence for many minutes, until Benjamin’s grandfather, without any kind of preface, said an extraordinary thing:
“Who could possibly look at this view,” he asked, “without believing in the existence of God?”
It was a question that required no answer, which was a good thing because Benjamin, as usual, would not have been able to think of one. He had never suspected that his grandfather held religious convictions, and had never mentioned to him (or to any of his family, besides Lois) his own strange moment of revelation in the locker room at King William’s more than three years ago. Benjamin had come to feel that religious belief, at its most sincere, was an essentially private thing, a wordless conspiracy between oneself and God. It was overwhelming to discover, almost tangentially, through an offhand remark, that his grandfather might be a fellow-conspirator. Benjamin glanced at him curiously, but he was staring out to sea, his eyes almost closed, his silver hair rippling in the breeze. Nothing more was said on the subject. A few minutes later they moved on and continued their walk.
Benjamin’s experience on Christmas night was very different. Harder to think about, harder to pin down. It happened in the middle of The Morecambe and Wise Show. Benjamin was sitting on the sofa, with Acorn—now an old, fat cat—stretched out on his lap. His grandfather was sitting in an armchair, to his left. Morecambe and Wise were doing a sketch with Elton John. Ernie was trying to put together a musical number, in which Eric sang the main tune and then Ernie added a counter-melody, while Elton John accompanied them on the piano. Every time they tried to rehearse it, it went wrong. Eric would sing the first few bars, but then as soon as Ernie entered with the counter-melody, Eric would stop singing the main tune and join in with his partner. It was a corny routine, but the consummate timing of the performers, the electrical rapport and empathy between these two middle-aged men who by now were the most loved entertainers in Britain, turned it into a miracle of spiralling hilarity. Suddenly, sitting entranced before the television, Acorn’s purrs sending slow vibrations of contentment through his body, Benjamin had a fleeting vision: it came to him that he was only one person, and his family was only one family, out of millions of people and millions of families throughout the country, all sitting in front of their television sets, all watching these two comedians, in Birmingham and Manchester and Liver-pool and Bristol and Durham and Portsmouth and Newcastle and Glasgow and Brighton and Sheffield and Cardiff and Stir-ling and
Oxford and Carlisle and everywhere else, all of them laughing, all of them laughing at the same joke, and he felt an incredible sense of . . . oneness, that was the only word he could think of, a sense that the entire nation was being briefly, fugitively drawn together in the divine act of laughter, and looking across at his grandfather’s face, convulsed with joy, a picture of gurgling ecstasy, he was reminded of the face of Francis Piper, when he had come to King William’s to read his poetry, and how it had seemed to resemble the face of God, and at that very instant Benjamin found himself thinking that perhaps his ambitions were all wrong—his desire to be a writer, his wish to become a composer—and that to be a bringer of laughter was in fact the holiest, most sacred of callings, and he wondered if he should set his sights on being a great comedian or a great scriptwriter, but then the feeling passed, the sketch ended, some boring singer came on instead, and Benjamin knew that he was really just an ordinary teenager, an ordinary teenager in an ordinary family; even his grandfather’s face looked ordinary, after all, and Benjamin noticed for the first time that Lois hadn’t been laughing with them, and the sense of blinding clarity was gone, and once again everything in his life seemed fraught, complex and uncertain.
20
Benjamin awoke, opened his eyes, and noticed some peculiar things.
Firstly, opening his eyes had made no difference. He still couldn’t see anything. Secondly, he was in excruciating pain. His back ached and he had cramp in both legs but this was small fry compared to the pulsing, shuddering pain in his temples, which periodically spread out in waves of unmitigated agony, making him feel that his entire skull was enclosed in a slowly contracting vice. Thirdly, he could not move. His freedom of movement was restricted on all sides, apparently by four walls made of some sort of wood.