Wicked Little Joe

by Joseph Hone

  Allt pulled back O’Grady’s head. ‘It was indeed, O’Grady. Sit down.’ O’Grady descended, mopped his brow and sat down. Allt glared at the rest of us. ‘The subjunctive. I suggest you don’t forget it.’

  These days, of course, Allt would have been arrested. But then these days most pupils don’t know any grammar. What Allt, with his academic brilliance, was doing at a less than third-rate school, where he stayed for a year, I’ve no idea. Perhaps he needed the money. Many people did in Ireland in those days, and teaching jobs in the few Protestant schools were scarce. In any case he went on to Cambridge, where earlier my grandfather had introduced him to the Yeats scholar T. R. Henn, who appointed him Senior Research Student at St Catherine’s College. Here Allt worked for several years on the great Variorum Edition of Yeats’s poetry, and, in 1954, absentmindedly, he stepped off the wrong side of a London suburban electric train, onto the live rail where, more than the hapless O’Grady, he frizzled.

  It was a tragic end for Allt. Yet I have to see him as part of the jollier times at Sandford Park, these lighter incidents (though O’Grady would not have seen it that way), so as not to harp on the background terrors. I see a disconnected medley of such bizarre moments, like clips from a farcehorror movie that was never released.

  Froggy Bertin, moving gently up and down, warming his tummy and privates on the central radiator in one of the garden classrooms, while reciting verbs: ‘j’ai, tu es, il a …’ ‘Ha! Ha!’ from a tease in the back of the class. ‘Zat boy will take fifty lines: “I must not make zee monkey out of zee French teacher.”’

  Mr Furness, the tall, somehow mysterious, crinkly-haired Maths teacher from Belfast (there was a rumour that he’d had some unfortunate experience with a woman – or women!), getting in a terrible bate and clipping me over the ear one evening when I was playing ‘Oh Rose I love you!’ on the assembly hall piano. ‘Why, Sir? There’s nothing wrong with the song.’ ‘It’s a dirty song, Hone. That’s why.’ (I didn’t learn why until later when Wilshire, an older, knowing day boy, told a group of us round the stove the dirty version of it: ‘Oh, Rose, I love you, won’t you let me come and have a screw?’) Lots of prurient sniggering, before Wilshire turns to me. ‘Go away, Hone, you’re too young for this sort of talk. Move off.’

  Mr Cookman, the genial young housemaster from Enniscorthy, testing the new pulley-and-sling fire escape from the top dorm window; the other part-time housemaster, Mr Elliot from Sussex, forever studying medicine in Trinity, and all us boarders, looking up expectantly. Cookman puts the canvas sling under his arms, gingerly pushes himself out the window, lets go, and falls like a stone. He hits the ground hard, lying prostrate. It looks like he’s broken his leg, or at least twisted his ankle. We hope. In some pain certainly. We are all agog, doing nothing. Mr Elliot moves forward, giving medical succour to Cookman, gently feeling his ankle. ‘Get Matron’, he says. ‘Matron’s out, Sir. She’s gone to the pictures.’ ‘Can we go to the pictures, Sir? Tonight at the Sandford cinema? They’re showing a very educational film, The Blue Lagoon, about fishes and things in the south seas.’ Mr Elliot looks up. ‘I’m not quite the fool you think me, Mather. Fishes and things … here, help me with Mr Cookman.’ Half a dozen of us rush forward now, helping Mr Cookman up, carrying him indoors. And Mr Elliot breaks into song, while we struggle along, Cookman squeezed uncomfortably amongst us like a side of beef. ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow! For he’s a jolly good fellow … and so say all of us! And so say all of us!’ We all join in, a loud chorus, all of us happy now, with the exception of Mr Cookman, no doubt.

  Lugging Cookman up the stairs to where he had his room next to our dorm on the top floor, another dream-like clip comes to mind. The dorm was a long room with six iron beds running along either side, and another curtained-off bed for the dorm captain at the end, and a big cupboard against the far wall where we kept our clothes. And in it, since we now went to Cubs at Sandford Church Hall along the road, were our Cubs outfits: the cap, scarf, toggle, green pullover with its badges of merit, short trousers, long woolly socks with the penanted garters and so on. There was a boy called Thompson in the bed opposite me, at the other end of the room by the window, a small boy, new to the school, who spoke hardly at all. That his parents were out east, his father a rubber planter in Malaya, was among the few facts we’d managed to get out of him. I woke one night and, with the moonlight from the badly-curtained window, I saw the small figure of Thompson making a slow and stately progress down the centre of the dorm between the beds. I supposed he was going to the lavatories, or that he was sleepwalking. But then I saw that he was completely dressed in his Cubs outfit. I got up and whispered to him, ‘It’s not Cubs night, Thompson. Where are you going?’ ‘Back to Malaya,’ he said in a sensible voice. ‘I got my pathfinder’s badge last week, you see.’ ‘Don’t be stupid, Thompson, Malaya is thousands of miles away. Get back into bed before someone hears us.’

  Someone did hear us, the dorm captain, out of bed and on his feet now. ‘What are you two doing? Get back into bed at once.’ And then Thompson shrieked out, ‘No, I can’t! You see I’m going home to Malaya. I am! I am!’ he yelled. And then the whole dorm was awake, with Mr Elliot in the room and the lights on. Sensation! Subdued chatter. ‘Thompson’s going back home to Malaya!’ ‘He’s mad!’ ‘How’s he going to get there?’ ‘He’ll fly BOAC, from Heathrow, in one of their new Stratocruisers.’ ‘No, he’s going to walk, it’ll take him months, and he’ll have to learn to walk on water.’

  ‘Shut up all of you.’ Mr Elliot led Thompson out of the dorm. He brought him downstairs to Matron, we heard later, where the boy spent the rest of the night in her room. Next day Thompson wasn’t there. He’d left the school. Walking on water all the way back to Malaya! What a laugh, we thought. Thompson was a great joke for all of us over the next week. I didn’t see then, as I see now, that Thompson’s shrieks for home were mine as well. But I kept my mouth shut, hated the Cubs evenings, and never got a pathfinder badge to find my way home with.

  And another vivid clip – Len Horan, the kind-hearted, hugely muscular Irish teacher with the glary eyes, bristling dark eyebrows and fierce moustache, at the high desk during second prep in the heavy sighing silence one evening. He’s seen something and is stalking a boy at a back desk, light and soundless on his feet. The fat boy Louis Watson, with his head down, is fiddling with something in his lap. Horan pounces on him. We all turn. It’s nothing more than a handkerchief in Watson’s lap, which he’s been screwing round in his hands. I wasn’t far away from him. I see his face, all stained with tears when he looks up.

  There were always tears before bedtime at Sandford Park.

  Few things saved me from the awfulness of the school. One was sports, which I became good at – cricket, rugby, tennis, table tennis, and particularly athletics, under the enthusiastic tutelage of Len Horan: the sprints, high and long jump and especially the seven-pound shot. Horan had been an Irish champion at the senior, sixteen-pound level in the shot and he showed me how to do it in a far corner of the park – how, crouching right down, with one’s back almost to the field in front, one had to skip across the circle at great speed, then let fly by straightening up, torso, arm and wrist moving one after the other at an ever greater speed, in one flowing movement, which ended in my hopping about on one foot, at the front edge of the circle, watching the little cannonball disappear over the horizon. Well, not quite. But I became pretty good at the shot and athletics generally, winning more or less everything at the annual school sports, and the same with cricket.

  This success gave me some immunity from the bullying and dismissive attitude of the other boys. The all-knowing, derisive, wiseacre Wilshire, for example, who did no sports at all, always carried a letter from his mother saying he had asthma or flat feet or something. But my athletic gifts put me out of his reach and on a level with older boys in the senior sports teams.

  To be good at sports was, and still is, a way out of the pain and boredom of school, and any failur
e at school learning. And a way of being admired, by the other boys and some of the teachers. I was grudgingly admired – grudgingly because I always felt at Sandford Park, and later when I went to St Columba’s College, the public school up in the Dublin mountains, that this admiration for my sporting prowess was mixed as much with cynical surprise – for it became well known in both schools, by boys and masters, that I was a wicked and lazy lot in most other ways. Smoking behind the bicycle shed or the cricket pavilion, being caught out of bounds intent on a bit of shoplifting down Ranelagh Road, skiving off this and that and doing little or no work, and being beaten regularly for all these things.

  So there was ironic comment that in the field of sports I was tops. This didn’t add up for the authorities. I think it seemed unfair to them that, being clearly a bad lot, I should win those most admired things in schools of the time: all the glittering sports prizes. If you were bad, then you should be bad at everything. And if you were well behaved, then you should be good at everything. That was the natural order of school expectations in those days. I was an insult to that order. This annoyed the authorities. And pleased me.

  I was bad at schoolwork, except in writing English and History essays and doing elaborately coloured geography maps. Indeed in English I once won the form prize in a short story competition set by a new English master, the delicate, wispy-voiced, literary-minded Mr Sheehan. But this was largely achieved through prior advice from some of the other more knowing boys, who must have recognized my gifts as a fantasist long before I did, and encouraged me to write reams of fiction, much more than was asked for, about a mad schoolboy who does all sorts of mad things, including eating a mound of marshmallows and then nearly drowning in a lake of liquid chocolate. I wrote at such length simply because Mr Sheehan had told us that whoever won the prize would read his story out in the next class. And of course, as we saw, the longer the story lasted the less difficult grammar work would have to be done that day. And we all remembered the near immolation of O’Grady in his failure to identify the subjunctive, so that my story, when I came to read it out, lasted the whole fifty minutes of class. The boys cheered me at the end – for being let off parsing and analysis, not for the story, I’m sure.

  Dudgeon, in due and painful course, disappeared from Sandford Park, before my five years of incarceration there ended. Did he resign, or was he removed by the Governors? Years later someone told me that he’d become headmaster at a public school in England. Perhaps in those days there were still some public schools where Dudgeon’s subtle tortures and open brutality would have been welcomed.

  In any case Sandford Park, by 1949, was in a poor way. And it was at that moment, aged twelve, that I should have been removed from it, and sent somewhere else. I wasn’t. Meanwhile the Governors, deciding to cut their losses, put the lease on Sandford Park up for sale. It was bought by a Major Wormell, middle aged and recently retired from the British-Indian army. The Major was in retreat from the Labour government to Ireland perhaps, as many British were at that time; he probably bought the lease for a song, given its few pupils and very doubtful reputation. And now another complete transformation occurred, the school changing character from Dudgeon’s sadist bunker to British military circus.

  Major Wormell – the Mad Major as we soon dubbed him – was tall and of great girth, with crinkly brown hair parted severely in the middle. Yet his face was relatively small and he had curious, slanty eyes – a monkey face that jerked alarmingly every few minutes, a nervous tic (the result of an old war wound) accompanied by a grimace, giving him the air of a huge puppet on strings being badly handled. An impression emphasized by the quick tiny steps he took, arms swinging, as if heading a parade of sepoys in Chandrigar. He walked like this with particular speed, we soon noticed, after the day boys had gone home at three o’clock, down the laurel drive, to McCaulay’s public house near the school gates.

  He had a younger, leggy, wasp-waisted, blonde and bosomy wife, a woman the like of whom we had not seen before – a Betty Grable gorgeously swum into our ken. We eyed her with the confusions of half-awakened sexual greed whenever she was on parade, which was rarely since she kept to herself in the new head’s quarters, a bedroom made over from Matron’s old room, and in the ornately gilded drawing-room next door. The previous matron had been dispensed with, since there were now only about six boarders, and Mrs Wormell was to take over her matronly duties. We all hoped to be ill, so as to test what we thought would surely be her stimulating ministrations. Unfortunately I was never ill.

  The Major, with the end of Empire in India, was clearly keen to continue things in the imperial manner at Sandford Park. Indeed he must have thought the Republic still part of the Empire. He found a Union Jack in the attic and brandished it about of a summer evening, well oiled from sessions at McCaulay’s, when he would take we few boarders for military drill in the old ballroom together with a new teacher, a nice but rather ineffectual ex-army friend of his, a Captain Villiers. The two of them, among other military drills, put us through the slow march of one of the Guards regiments the last few inches of each step being slid forward, airborne, just before touching the ground. By now there were only four boarders, myself and the two small Brownlee brothers and another bigger boy called Bowden. Up and down we went, the length of the ballroom, between the desks, a ragged, out-of-step troop. I see the Mad Major now, annoyed with our progress, showing us how to do the Slow March – a huge figure, light but unsteady on his feet, swaying slightly on one leg before the touch down with the other, Captain Villiers with the Union Jack rampant behind him.

  The following year, with the boarders now reduced to three and the day boys to about thirty, the Major must clearly have seen that he would have to take dramatic steps to increase the school rolls or go bust. And what better way to this end than by improving the recreational facilities? So with the help of potent sundowners in McCaulay’s and the large supply of bottled lager that he kept in the little pantry next to his study, he hit upon a splendid scheme: since there was no swimming pool, he would drain the pleasantly exotic garden pond and turn it into a pool. But discovering that this would be both expensive and impractical, he reduced his ambitions: he would convert one end of the pond, by the little covered boat house. Or rather the boys would, boarders first thing before breakfast (with the promise of an extra fried egg) and day boys in their lunch hour.

  The pond was drained and then in a ham-fisted and literally sloppy way, over months of the spring term, with shovels and wheelbarrows, the mud was lifted from the boathouse end; with little effect, for overnight the squelchy liquid from the rest of the pond would seep across into the cleared area and we had to begin all over again, emerging each morning for our extra fried egg covered in green slime. The day boys made themselves scarce over lunchtime, pleading dentists’ or doctors’ appointments. Progress was slow. Eventually, however, with a sort of wooden coffer dam to keep the squelch away, one end was cleared, cement and a concrete mixer were obtained, and, with the Major himself now in daily charge, we started to concrete the bottom and replace the coffer dam with a brick wall halfway along the pond.

  The Major got a plumb line and large wooden set squares from the carpentry shop and gave us an inspiring talk about how he’d been in charge of Army Engineers out in India, constructing rope and pontoon bridges over roaring torrents and great rivers; and how, by comparison, this building work would be easy. It wasn’t. With water seepage from beneath, the concrete on the bottom failed to set, the unsteady, half-built brick wall tended to collapse overnight, and the Major got into mighty tizzies, his neck twitch going into overdrive as he shouted commands like an overblown pyramid slave master. ‘Brownlee! Have you no idea how to set a brick on a brick wall straight?’ – Brownlee up to his ankles in damp, unset concrete at that moment.

  I will give the Major one thing – he was persistent. The pool was completed and very slowly filled with water from a number of leaking, thrashing garden hoses, with which we had good fun, deluging eac
h other when the Major was taking ‘refreshments’ in his pantry. We swam in the pool only half a dozen times, for there was a distinct problem in attempting any full immersion. Owing to various miscalculations the pool was only about two feet deep or three at the most, so that any proper swimming was impossible. And it soon emerged that the pool had several other basic faults: there was no water inlet, no outlet back into the main pond and no chlorine cleaning, so that soon the water became stagnant and slimy, peesmelly and very uninviting.

  The pool and swimming lessons were tactfully forgotten and the Major set his mind to another means of increasing the school rolls – by improving our academic work, in face of the Irish Ministry of Education’s Intermediate exams which were to take place the following summer. The Major knew that in one particular subject we (apart from Wilshire) were real dunderheads: Latin, in which we were required to get at least a pass mark of over forty per cent or fail the exam, and find our future careers severely blighted. Most of us were likely, and me especially, to get about ten per cent in Latin, if that.