Nanny had always been in a unique position with Gordon. Now she was in the same position with Robert. Ruth must let Nanny have her way because Nanny could not be dismissed. She knew too much. Nanny wished with all her heart that she did not, for knowing was a burden that had grown with the years, just as the dread of Gordon’s ever finding out that he had been cheated had never gone.
The longer she kept the secret, the deeper her miserable involvement. But she could never tell. Twice Nanny had postponed her long-planned trip to Canada because she would not leave Robert to the mercy of Ruth nor could she take him with her if the secret were to be kept. She must wait until Gordon retired. Gordon was Robert’s best safeguard against Ruth’s cruelty.
Today Ruth had sent for her to discuss Robert’s latest wrongdoing. Nanny descended to the drawing-room floor from her apartments in the attic to find Ruth, wearing the severely tailored suit she used for magisterial work, in a fury, pacing the drawing room, fuming. ‘You will have to go for him, Nanny. It is impossible for me. The wretched child!’
‘What is it?’ Nanny said. ‘Please stop pacing, Ruth.’ She spoke to Ruth as if she, Nanny, were the senior authority figure. It evened things up a little.
‘It’s Robert. I had a phone call from the school. He ran away.’
She spoke harshly and, Nanny noticed, high spots of colour had come into her cheeks. There were times when Ruth seemed certifiably deranged, to Nanny’s mind. ‘Why?’
‘He’s wicked. He just ran away again.’
Nanny’s heart skipped a beat. Robert had not ‘bolted’ as Ruth termed his escapes, for a couple of years. It used to frighten her to death – his going missing for days and her not being allowed to report it. She used to have to keep it quiet because he only did it when Gordon was away at sea, and Ruth would not go to the police and have the family name dragged through the mire. Ruth used to say, ‘He’ll turn up when he’s hungry enough. I’ll make sure he won’t do it again.’
Now, in the drawing room, Nanny looked at Ruth and asked, ‘Why? Where? Do you know?’
‘No!’
Robert’s school was as far from home as it was possible to be, on the outskirts of London. Ruth said it was one of the most distinguished prep schools in Britain. Robert detested it and referred to it as Colditz. Nanny had never seen it though Gordon described it to her as ‘a toughening-up establishment’.
In Nanny’s opinion ‘a toughening-up establishment’ was the last thing Robert needed. Robert was a weakling, there was no doubt about it. But how could a child flourish in a home where he was in fear of his mother’s temper and the whippings she gave him? And how could a boy grow straight and strong if he were not given good nourishment?
To insist that he was not to be given second helpings was cruel; the latest order, given to the kitchen staff and not to Nanny on his last end-of-term holiday, that Robert was to eat meat only twice a week, was quite wrong. Tuberculosis and infantile paralysis were the scourge of children, and Nanny was going to countermand all such orders. If it happened again she would tell Gordon about it. Anyone would imagine that Ruth was trying to enfeeble Robert.
She looked Ruth in the eye. ‘Don’t you think it’s your duty to go to the school since Gordon can’t do it?’
‘No!’ Ruth snapped open her crocodile handbag and fished out a vanity case and a wallet. ‘There’s a train at ten.’ She took four five-pound notes out and put them on the overmantel. ‘That’s for your fare and the hotel bill,’ she said. ‘You have full authority to take any action in this matter, no matter how severe. And you are much more likely to get to the truth than I. Frankly I won’t waste my time listening to Robert’s excuses.’
She sat down, opened the vanity case and pursed her lips as she inspected her eyebrows and hair. ‘I have so little time these days.’ She applied a small powder puff to her nose and then took out a large, gold-plated lipstick and made swooping vermilion curves on her full, small mouth.
Nanny watched, disgusted. She did not approve of cosmetics and saw no reason for Ruth to use them, especially as the intimate side of her marriage was evidently over. She and Gordon had separate bedrooms. And though Nanny suspected that Gordon would have preferred it otherwise, she knew that some women could not continue a physical relationship at Ruth’s age. Ruth showed no interest whatever in the opposite sex and Nanny sometimes wondered if she had imagined that conversation with Mike Hamilton in the nursery after Robert’s birth. She said now in reply to Ruth, ‘It would mean a great deal to Robert if you went. I’m sure Gordon would want you to.’
Ruth looked up from the mirror and raised one expressive eyebrow. ‘I said I have so little time, Nanny. So little time for Gordon. I have no time for Robert.’
So it was that by eleven o’clock Nanny found herself travelling in a third-class carriage speeding towards London, unable to concentrate on anything but her darling Robert. What on earth had happened? What was so awful that her darling Robert, at only twelve years old, would run away to London? And what action could she take but soothe the righteous anger of the school’s headmaster and ask him not to be too hard on her angel?
Robert limped out of the headmaster’s study after receiving six of the best. He would not blub, especially in front of Whitmore and Cutler and their six stinking, rotten cowards who were spread out down the corridor about ten feet apart, ready to trip him or jeer if he stumbled or showed any sign of weakness.
His knees felt like jelly, and the red-hot, searing pain in his buttocks and his back was agonising. His skin must be broken, for he could feel the pull of his underwear against sticky, drying blood. He would probably be marked for life, he thought bitterly. The last whiplash scarring had not faded.
The headmaster, Thomas Barber, to whom Robert had given the deserved secret nickname the Barbarian, was a crashing snob who made his preferences for his several young lordling pupils very plain. He made plainer his predilection for delivering ferocious beatings to young boys who had no protection.
If Robert had had Cutler’s money or Whitmore’s foothold in the English aristocracy he’d no doubt be one of the Barbarian’s blue-eyed boys. Now he drew level with Whitmore who, at thirteen, was six months older than himself, but a head taller and twice as broad.
‘Och, the noo. He’s crying,’ Whitmore jeered. ‘Smacked botties for the wee laddie, was it?’
Robert put a hand to his forehead to push back the dark, wavy hair from his eyes. It was stuck, damp with the sweat of fear. He was halfway down the panelled corridor. If he could keep going, if his legs would carry him steady, he’d make it to the sick bay. It wasn’t cowardice. He was short of breath again, the tight feeling was in his chest and all the signs were there for another attack of coughing and wheezing.
‘Puny little thing! Eh, what?’ said Cutler, sticking out one foot, hoping to trip him. Robert avoided the foot but only by taking two steps in quick succession and nearly stumbling. This made the bullies laugh and, following Cutler’s lead, cry, ‘Do it again!’
‘Do the Highland fling!’
‘I’ll bet he looks sweet in his kilt, dancing to the bagpipes.’ They would close in at any moment and make threats.
Robert was at the end of his tether with it. Now he summoned up the courage to mutter ‘Shuddup!’, before, to his relief, one of the masters came through the door at the end of the corridor. He was safe for the moment, although masters never intervened in bullying, which for Robert confirmed that it was deliberately encouraged by the Barbarian.
The master was Robert’s music teacher, a crusty old fellow whose only sanction over these bullies would be to give detentions for loitering in the corridor. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded of Whitmore who had no musical ability. Piano playing was seen as sissy by the mob.
‘Nothing, sir,’ said Whitmore.
‘Then do something,’ said the master curtly. Four order marks and the boy would have to do an hour’s drill before breakfast as well as having a half-hour added to prep for each order mark.
The toughs moved on and the mob followed, with the master watching.
Robert ran up the stairs to the sick room. He was gasping for breath when he reached the school nurse’s domain. She was not motherly, but being the only female in the place, apart from the masters’ wives, was more like an elderly aunt. She was, at least, dutiful.
‘Ah! They brought you back. What a state you are in. Come here!’
Robert leaned his shoulder against the closed door. His whole body was trembling uncontrollably now but he dared not let his backside touch anything. His underpants and grey flannels felt as if they were made of hair cord on the hot, tender area. He closed his eyes and put his hands on to the door to steady himself before he drew in several rapid, shallow breaths. Now he was afraid. The air in his lungs could not be released fast enough. He could not speak. His face was suffused with blood. His head was spinning as, clutching his knees, he bent forwards, struggling to breathe, unable to speak. A few seconds later he slid to the shiny linoleum and lay, semi-conscious, at the nurse’s feet.
He dreamed and yet he knew that he was dreaming, because only half of his dream had really happened. He had run away after a night of terror in the dormitory where, because he was the smallest and weediest, they had soaked his mattress with water. He had to sleep on it, knowing that if he complained to the dormitory duty master he wouldn’t be believed, but that not to complain was an implicit admission of bed-wetting. He’d lain there, cold, hungry and afraid until dawn.
Dawn came early in May, and this morning, in the cool grey light, he had dressed in flannels and a shirt. He did not put on the stiff collar that would give the game away. He took with him a jersey and a few things from his locker, and unseen he climbed out of the window and dropped to the balcony of the woodwork room. There he hung by his hands before dropping to the grass and running like the devil for the wall. Once over it, he picked himself up and ran. A mile from school he reached the main road and cadged a lift from a lorry driver.
Jack, for that was the driver’s name, was an ex-naval type who was about to stop for breakfast at a transport cafe. Robert asked if he might eat too. Jack said, ‘I hope you’re telling the truth. You’re on your way to Scotland. You have a train ticket but you lost your money for the bus?’
‘Yes,’ Robert lied, then added, ‘I’ll give you the money back when the post offices open. I have my book with me,’ and was soon tucking into the best breakfast he’d had in his entire life.
Jack bought him a huge plate of bacon, sausages, two eggs, mushroom, tomato and fried bread. This he ate with three bread rolls and a steaming mug of strong tea with all the sugar he wanted, though sugar was rationed, seven years after the war had ended. And all this in a smoky place with laughter and jokes and the juke box playing Guy Mitchell’s ‘She Had a Dark and Roving Eye’. Robert would never forget it.
Jack wanted to talk about the war. ‘Your father’s in the navy?’
‘Yes. Soon be out though. He’s finishing at fifty-five.’ Robert was full and happy. He didn’t want to show off to Jack, who had been an able seaman throughout the war. ‘He was on the Rutland.’
‘A mate of mine was on the Rutland,’ said Jack. ‘Had some hairy near misses in the Med. Said if they’d not had the captain they did, he’d be on the bottom by now.’ He began to regale Robert and the two others at the table with stories of his wartime experiences in Coastal Command. He said, ‘Can you manage more?’ to Robert, seeing him wiping with his bread every last streak of egg from the plate.
‘Would you mind awfully if I did?’ Robert said. He never had enough to eat. School meals were foul. Earwigs crawling out of the salad were commonplace. Once he’d found white maggots – live ones under his one slice of cold meat. Even at home Mother said he was greedy and must not be over-fed. She kept strict watch over his voracious appetite, saying he must have worms or some other noxious sickness. The only times he’d ever not been hungry were when he went out on the boat with Father – those wonderful days, few and far between, when Father was home and they’d take a picnic hamper stuffed with good food, and even sometimes pull in at Dunbar harbour and dine out. There, fish and chip suppers could be had at any hour of the day.
Jack shouted, ‘Another breakfast for me cock-sparrer,’ to the man at the counter, who came at once to place a second plate before Robert, saying, ‘Got hollow legs, boys this age.’
‘How old are you?’ asked Jack.
‘Fourteen.’ Robert’s twelfth birthday had come a month ago. He’d had no presents. Two cards only had arrived for him: one from Nanny, containing three pounds; and one from Mother and Edward combined, containing a ten-shilling note. It was more than enough to buy his ticket home. And he’d have time to wander around London and look at the Egyptian mummies in the British Museum, go to Lyon’s Corner House.
The best part of the dream, though, was getting on to the train and having enough money to buy a four-course lunch, and later getting out at York to buy food on the platform to see him through until Edinburgh.
The dream became particularly fanciful after that, because instead of the cold-shouldering and fierce fury of Mother and the reasoned bafflement of Father, he’d been welcomed home like the prodigal son and told he need never return to the place he’d remember for the rest of his life for its terrors, the humbug of its headmaster and the unchecked bullying that made every minute there a nightmare.
In fact, the real-life adventure had ended there, in Trafalgar Square, where, emerging from Lyon’s Corner House, he’d walked straight into two policemen and been driven back to school to be punished by the Barbarian.
He was floating up, up out of the dream. A cool breeze was stirring the starched curtain at the sick-room window. There was a smell of iodine and he saw beside his bed the inhalator bowl that the nurse always spiced with friar’s balsam. He must have had a severe attack of asthma – so severe he couldn’t remember a thing about it. His eyes began to focus. There was a new doctor, stethoscope dangling, standing over him and there, behind the doctor, the nurse. Beside the nurse was the headmaster – and, wonderfully, there beside the Barbarian, was Nanny.
He blinked and checked. He was awake and Nanny was talking in her most severe voice to the Barbarian. ‘What do you mean – you do not allow a pupil to be examined by his own doctor?’
The Barbarian answered testily: ‘He has been seen by the school doctor.’
‘And?’ said Nanny.
The Barbarian replied, ‘There is nothing wrong with him. It was an attack of asthma. He has had treatment and a sedative.’
Nanny said, ‘I am here as Sir Gordon Campbell’s representative. I demand a second opinion.’ She nodded to the doctor. ‘Go ahead, please.’
The Barbarian could do nothing to stop him. Robert was being stripped of his clothes; he flinched and winced as the doctor, with Nanny’s help, peeled the bloodied vest and underpants away from his skin. The doctor drew in breath sharply when he saw the bruising, the weals and open wounds. Then Robert felt the cold metal of the stethoscope on his chest and back, while Nanny turned and held him with gentle hands.
Finally, the doctor looked towards the headmaster and said, ‘You realise that if I were dealing with a poor boy at a state school I should be duty-bound to report this to the Schools Inspectorate?’
‘We are the seedbed for Eton and the best public schools in England. We inculcate qualities of leadership, bravery and endeavour,’ the Barbarian blustered.
‘I am going to remove him to hospital,’ the doctor said. ‘He is underweight and unclean. Not even basic health care has been given to this boy.’ With one index finger he lifted Robert’s chin to reveal the grime on his neck. Helpfully, Robert tipped his head back. The doctor evidently could see what nobody else appeared to have noticed. The school regime was squalid; the facilities minimal. They were allowed only two tepid, shallow baths in a communal bathroom every week, with no adult supervision and the mob in attendance.
‘He has been severely beaten,’ t
he doctor said. ‘Beaten to the point of collapse. I must have an explanation.’
Robert began to enjoy himself. The Barbarian would not admit to having inflicted the injuries and Robert himself would not dare to tell who had administered the beating or it would be the worse for him, but it was gratifying to lie there listening to the Barbarian’s excuses. Maybe he’d spend a couple of days in the sick room or hospital. It would be a welcome respite.
Nanny spoke up. ‘Robert will not be taken to hospital. Nor will he remain here. I am taking him home.’
Robert opened his eyes and smiled at her. She was standing beside the bed, pulling the sheet over his exposed behind. He adored Nanny. She was old; in fact, she was ancient. She had been Nanny to Father and Father was over fifty. But she was a powerful presence and theirs was a mutual affection. She said, ‘Can you stand, Robert?’
He swung his legs off the bed. He was in pain but he would not give the Barbarian the satisfaction of seeing his agony. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Pack your case. Bring only personal things. The school will send the rest.’
Gingerly he pulled on his flannels and left the room while Nanny made clear her own feelings to the assembled officialdom.
His small case was found for him by the groundsman who kept the box-room keys, and when this was done Robert made for the dorm. Whitmore was there, alone. He was seldom alone and never brave without his mob around him. But he looked down his nose at Robert and said, ‘In a funk now, are we? Sent for Nanny?’
Robert knew he’d not be coming back. He had seen it in Nanny’s face. He would never again have the opportunity to stand up to Whitmore, man to man. It was going to be his first serious fight. He’d scrapped before to save himself but had never started a fight. He could not know that from now on he would never wait until his enemies struck first. He simply knew it was now or never.
He was small for twelve, but wiry and angry and hungry: all the things Whitmore was not. He dropped his case and squared up to the bigger boy. ‘Say that again, Whitmore,’ he snarled.
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