by Mann, W. E.
eight
The story of the previous night’s events, or something resembling it, had spread throughout the school like a contagion. People were turning to stare at Algie, Freddie and me as we waited nervously outside of Wilbraham’s study. There was a small cluster of boys loitering in the Front Hall, obviously intending to listen in.
Algie’s right eye, magnified by his thick glasses, was purple and seeping and had swollen shut. It looked like a rotten plum. He sat next to me with his cap pulled down over his forehead and his red armband strangling his sleeve. He was trembling in fear, his left eye darting around frantically. I had tried to reassure him that we wouldn’t be in any trouble, but it was impossible.
My face was just as colourful a picture as his. The left half of my bottom lip was fat and wobbling, my right elbow was still throbbing faintly and a great bruise had spread down my forearm like spilt ink expanding across blotting-paper.
“In you come, boys,” growled Mr. Wilbraham, holding the door open for us and looking all the more fearsome in his gown and mortar-board. “Sit!”
We sat. Algie was staring at his sandals. He was almost convulsing with the tension. Wilbraham perched on the edge of his desk, which creaked painfully under his monstrous weight.
His study was like the inside of a huge trophy cabinet. The wood panelled walls were adorned with glittering cups, shields and medallions awarded for who-knows-what. There was a pair of crossed swords on the wall over Wilbraham’s right shoulder, and a pair of crossed shot-guns on the wall over his left. Directly behind him, almost seeming to hover over him like a grizzly halo, was the severed head of an enormous white stag with antlers that spread out in a vast, uncomfortable embrace.
“Now, look here you three,” he began. He was speaking very softly. It was unsettling. “Vanderpump has officially informed on you. He has said that Portico is a hotbed of rebellion and that you, Turnpike, and you, Strange, are the ringleaders. I trust you understand what this means.”
He looked at each of us, allowing time for the message to sink in. Algie released a shuddering moan of terror, tears streaming down his cheeks. The mention of the word “inform” was enough to fill even the bravest soul with dread. My stomach weakened. My poor mother.
“But... but...,” stammered Freddie.
“Quiet, boy!” Wilbraham boomed, making the windows rattle and Freddie recoil. Wilbraham looked towards the door as if to ensure that anyone outside it would have heard him. He then leant towards us, his angry scowl softened and he started to speak in a conspiratorial whisper.
“Look here, boys. I don’t give a damn about Vanderpump’s lies. Fact is he’s a disgraceful bully. But unfortunately, as I’m sure you are aware, he has friends in high places. Very high places.”
I was bemused. But then I realised: Wilbraham was trying to protect us. The rules were clear. If a boy heard a Master or another boy plotting or conspiring against the Party, or even accidentally muttering something that sounded vaguely anti-Nazi, he had a duty to inform to Mr. Wilbraham and nobody else. Mr. Wilbraham then had a duty to pass the information directly to Schulekommandant Ludendorff. The information would pass straight up the chain of command and end up with the Gestapo, who would put you on file or perhaps pay your family a visit to ensure that no harm was meant.
“I will take this nonsense no further,” whispered Wilbraham, “on the understanding that you will not, under any circumstances, mention this conversation to anyone. Yes? I know the boy’s father. He still owes me a favour or two, so there will be no trouble.”
Algie looked up from the floor. He had stopped shaking and whimpering and was staring in open-mouthed disbelief at Wilbraham.
He was usually such a terrifying man. Well, he was more ogre than man really, with a great, thatched head, a grizzled beard which would make a spacious home for a flock of geese, and enormous, swollen hands which could swing a length of silver birch with cruel speed.
He paced over to the window and stood there, gazing out, with his hands clasped behind his back, like Inspector Poirot on the brink of solving an intricate murder. I turned to watch Wilbraham. It was a glorious morning and the view from the window of his office was spectacular, like a scene from a painting. It looked out between two of the pillars, over the circular lawn in front of the school, straight up the mile-long drive, along which Mr. English boasted that he could get his Morris Minor to do fifty, and up the wooded hill to the Monument, which was perched there like a space-rocket poised for launch.
Wilbraham shook his head as if to extract himself from the landscape. “I will have to issue you with some punishment, of course,” he mused, “for the sake of appearances. So, my proposal would be to give you two, Strange and Turnpike, an afternoon’s Hard Labour, and you, Foxtrap, Detention. I think we can leave it at that, don’t you?”
He swivelled his enormous frame on his heels and looked at us with a barely noticeable nod as if to punctuate his decision. “Righto. I think we’d all better get along to Assembly.”
I was elated with relief. Hard Labour was hardly a punishment at all. It was usually just sweeping the floors and rearranging desks or helping out in the vegetable gardens. Wilbraham knew that.
nine
Freddie, Algie, Reggie and I climbed the steps to the Orangery that morning with boys gaggling around us, trying to find out what happened with Wilbraham. Freddie and Reggie were, of course, keeping them happy with elaborate tales and impersonations, so Algie and I managed to avoid having to say anything to anyone before we had taken our seats. Looking around, I could not see Vanderpump or the Bearbaiter twins anywhere.
The Orangery was the recently repaired west wing of the school building and it was where we had Assembly every morning. Though it gleamed with new windows and carpets, there was always a frostiness about it, even on such a warm summer’s morning.
It was said that during the War an errant bomb dropped by a Messerschmitt had landed in the Deer Park, close to where the Orangery stood and where, at that time, the school was assembled for Prayers, just as we were this morning. The bomb-blast was so powerful that it had caused an earthquake throughout the Forest, shaking the birds from the treetops and the rabbits from their warrens. Since the Orangery was so close to the epicentre, all of its windows were blown in, causing a lethal blizzard of shattered glass. Many of the boys and teachers suffered hideous injuries as the shards sliced across the room, burying themselves deep into flesh, taking slices of arm and ear with them. The Headmaster at that time was announcing the Talltrees 1st XI’s success in the previous day’s football matches against Roseacre, when a large dagger of glass hurtled through the air inches past his head and cruelly slashed his wife’s throat wide open. He stood helpless at the lectern as her head lolled backwards and she gurgled away her flailing final moments.
After this, the Headmaster lost his mind to a trembling insanity from which he never recovered and, before the War was over, he was found in the Round Room, next-door to the Orangery, swinging from the rafters by a noose about his neck.
It was agreed among the teachers when Wilbraham took over as Headmaster that, for reasons of decency, the Round Room should be walled up to serve as a tomb for the Headmaster and his wife.
This morning’s assembly involved the usual dreary assortment of prayers and hymns, followed by Wilbraham announcing that this year the Grand Pillow Fight would be cancelled on account of the “irresponsible behaviour last night”. This news raised a unanimous groan and some scowling glances in our direction. But this didn’t concern me. I was far more disturbed by Wilbraham’s other announcement: Two more boys taken ill, both First Formers.
I looked over to where Colonel Barrington sat between Ludendorff and Saracen. His face was a cruelly expressionless mask. I felt anger and hatred surging inside me. How could anyone be so evil?
Perhaps I should tell someone about what we had heard in the Hidden Library, someone like Wilbraham or maybe Mr. English or Mr. Caratacus? But no, I realised, that would be rea
lly stupid. If I was right in thinking that Barrington was carrying out experiments on boys for the Party, that would mean that his orders would have come from high up. Freddie and I would have to keep it to ourselves for now. Anyway, we would need hard evidence, and we had none. And could we really trust anyone at all, even Caratacus? If Barrington really was doing something under orders, how could we know that there weren’t others involved too?
After Wilbraham’s usual assurance that the epidemic would soon end, he introduced Doctor Boateng. “This morning, boys, we have an unusual treat for you. Doctor Boateng is an Honorary Aryan who is visiting us from the Ethnology Laboratories in Frankfurt. He will be talking to us this morning about some of the more outlandish cultures of the, er... Inferior Races.”
Doctor Boateng stepped up to the lectern. This was the first time I had really seen him clearly. He was a tall and well-built man, but he looked tired, very tired. His eyes were bloodshot and his brow was deeply furrowed.
Most boys shifted in their seats, as if the anticipation of prolonged boredom had already made them uncomfortable. But, as soon as Doctor Boateng began to speak, I knew that it would be a whole lot more interesting than it sounded.
“Can anyone tell me,” he asked with his deep, hoarse tone, “what is the Vodun?”
There was no reply. Boateng left us for a few moments with an evasive silence interrupted only by distracted shuffling and shrugging. Freddie, sitting next to me, had already decided that he was bored and so was fiddling with a ball of Silly Putty which he had detached from the inside of the pocket of his shorts. But it occurred to me that this was not the first time that I had heard the word “Vodun”: It was one of the strange words Doctor Boateng had used during his argument with Colonel Barrington in the Hidden Library. There must be some kind of connection between this “Vodun” thing and whatever it was that Barrington was planning.
“Okay, okay, perhaps I am being unfair,” continued Boateng. “Let me pose my question differently: Can anyone tell me what is Voodoo?”
Well this certainly grasped everyone’s attention. Freddie hurriedly stuffed his Silly Putty back into his pocket and looked up, open-mouthed.
“Anyone? Ah, yes.” He pointed to Reggie.
“It’s black magic, isn’t it, Sir?” Reggie asked. A handful of First Formers tittered.
“Black magic indeed! Anyone else?”
“Isn’t it a cult where they stick pins into dolls?” asked a Fifth Former to more general laughter.
“Ah yes, of course. Pins in dolls,” repeated Doctor Boateng. “Any other suggestions? Yes?”
It was Pontevecchio. “It’s a West Indian religion, Sir,” he stated confidently.
“Aha! We have an excellent theologian in the room! Well done, young man! But does anyone know how Voodoo got to the West Indies?”
After a few moments, Doctor Boateng slotted a slide into the projector and an image appeared on the wall behind him. A drawing of a ship with two very large sails. There was some writing underneath the image, but it was impossible to make out. The silence continued and another image replaced this one. It looked like a black and white photo of the inside of a butcher’s shop. There were a couple of gasps from First Formers. But I could not tell why until Boateng said one word: “Slavery”. Only then did I realise that these were not joints of pork and beef, but were living people piled onto wooden shelves, their ribs and hips jutting frighteningly from their abdomens and their eye-balls and teeth from their haggard faces.
“Slavery has been illegal for a long time now, of course,” Boateng explained to his now captivated audience, “but this is a very old photograph of the inside of a slave-ship. I’m sure you have all been taught by Doctor Saracen in your Ethnic Hygiene lessons that scientists discovered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that many of the non-Aryan races are very well suited to basic labour and do not have well developed senses of family attachment or of personal dignity.” It was strange to hear him speaking about other Africans like this. It sounded wrong, like he was reciting something he had been told to say. “So Western Africa was seen as an enormous resource for labourers who could be transferred to areas of the New World where the need for labourers was high. Most of the slaves would be captured during swift raids on their settlements, often carried out by Africans of other tribes who were paid by Westerners and had been taught the virtues of trade.”
Freddie nudged me, but I knew what he was thinking. It reminded me of Pontevecchio’s story about Barrington’s wife. She had gone missing during a sudden attack on their home. But surely, I thought, slavery had not existed for a very long time and anyway she was a well-educated, married Aryan woman. Surely she couldn’t be sold into slavery, could she? It also made me think briefly about my father who, like the fathers of many of my friends, had been visited years ago by the SS and had never been seen again.
Voodoo, Boateng explained, was brought to the West Indies by the slaves. In Voodoo, there was one god and a number of lesser beings called Loas, who, like saints, look after certain specific things, ranging from hurricanes and plagues to little things, like particular trees and rocks.
“Voodoo followers use Voodoo in every part of their lives,” Boateng continued, “So the most important people are the Voodoo priests. They are known as Houngans, but are more commonly called Witchdoctors.”
Witchdoctors. Of course! Colonel Barrington had mentioned a Witchdoctor during his argument with Boateng. It was a Witchdoctor that had given him the mysterious book.
“When slaves like these,” Boateng indicated the picture on the wall, “arrived in the New World, their new masters forbade Voodoo ceremonies so that they could be educated as good Christians. But it has recently been discovered by scientists that many of the Inferior Races were simply incapable of receiving the Word of God. The shapes of their skulls indicate that their brains do not have the parts necessary to understand such things.” Again, I could not believe that he could speak like that about people of his own race. It made me feel somehow uncomfortable. “Furthermore, they discovered that certain non-Aryan races were capable of surprising levels of deceit, and the slaves continued to carry out Voodoo rituals by disguising them as church services so that their masters would not find them out. In fact, the deception was so thorough that each Loa became associated with a particular Christian saint.
It was because of this deception that Christians decided that Voodoo must be a Satanic cult, performing such outrages as human sacrifice and cannibalism. And these ideas seem to continue to this day. So this,” he said, nodding towards the First Formers, “is why some of you youngsters associate Voodoo with black magic. Well, I’m sorry to tell you that that just goes back to an old misunderstanding. It isn’t black magic. In fact, scientists have shown that while the Inferior Races are capable of dishonesty and fraud, they are not capable of anything as complicated as black magic, even if it did exist.”
I began to get the creeping feeling that Doctor Boateng was not telling the whole truth. During their argument about Voodoo, Barrington had said that Head Matron and Miss Prenderghast were under some sort of spell – that must mean black magic! If Boateng was telling us now that Voodoo has nothing to do with black magic, then one of the two of them must be wrong.
The picture on the wall changed to one showing what looked like dolls made of wood or clay. “This is perhaps where you older boys get the pins-in-dolls myth. They are called Fetishes. All they are is ritual objects rather like Christian relics or crucifixes. But I can tell you that there is nothing sinister about them and, since they are usually made of wood or clay, I should think that they are far too hard to stick needles into!” He threw a quick, sidelong glance at Barrington and finished by stating, “So I’m sorry to disappoint the superstitious amongst you, but Voodoo is not black magic.”
I left the Orangery with the unsettled feeling that there was more to Doctor Boateng than met the eye. But I couldn’t make sense of any of it. I was starting to want to find out more. But firs
t, Double Biology with Miss Prenderghast. If there really was Voodoo black magic, then perhaps we would find out what sorts of effects it had had on her.
ten
Biology was usually a raucous lesson because Miss Prenderghast had absolutely no control. She didn’t seem to mind either. I had never heard her raise her voice and I had certainly never seen her hand out a Detention. She simply continued giving her lessons in her steady monotone, generally facing the blackboard so that she could draw chalk diagrams of who-knows-what, apparently totally unaware of the pandemonium behind her. All I had ever learnt in Biology was how to fire an elastic band with one hand and how to craft a paper aeroplane that could travel the length of the classroom.
The Biology Lab had a faint, but obnoxious smell; something between rotting vegetation and the fumes of a fly burning under a magnifying glass. At the back of the room there were newts in glass boxes, sluggish and glum, and tall, white, anorexic plants which had been grown in the dark and stood now beside their healthy, green cousins. It was a grim place, a concentration camp for flora and fauna.
I watched Miss Prenderghast carefully, trying to detect anything unusual about her behaviour. Although, I thought to myself, her behaviour was very rarely normal. She was an absent-minded, melancholy lady whose husband had been killed at the Battle of Surrey Downs. She smelt sort of damp and her hair was the same shade of grey as her face and eyes. She always seemed to look straight past anyone she spoke to and would often forget what she was saying halfway through her sentences. The other teachers had very little to do with her.
This morning, though, there would be no nonsense.
An expectant hush descended upon the classroom shortly after we had sat down because Miss Prenderghast had mentioned a magic word:
Dissection.
“I thought we weren’t meant to do dissection until we got to the Fifth Form,” Freddie whispered excitedly.