by David Nobbs
The next day was Sunday, and Henry wondered if Gerald Lush had forgotten all about the fortune-telling, not realising its symbolic importance to Henry as the first act of unsolicited kindness he had received at Brasenose.
They went to church in a crocodile. How Henry loathed that. He kept imagining that Martin Hammond and Stefan Prziborski, or even Tommy Marsden and Chalky White and Ian Lowson, would emerge from behind the rhododendrons, doubled up with mirth.
After church, many of the boys were fetched by their doting parents. Not Henry. Nor, on this occasion, Gerald Lush. Just as they were going in to dinner he said, ‘Read your fortune afterwards.’
They had unidentifiable meat, with watery carrots and roast potatoes that managed to be extremely greasy and as hard as bullets at the same time. There was spotted dick and custard to follow. A purist would not have had difficulty in finding fault with the consistency of the custard.
The thing was developing a ridiculous importance. It was only a silly craze. It was impossible that the predictions could have any real validity.
After dinner, on the gravel area outside the boys’ entrance to the house, Gerald Lush told Henry’s fortune.
Also present were Bullock and Tubman-Edwards.
‘Choose any number between one and eight hundred and sixty-two,’ said Gerald Lush.
‘Six hundred and thirty-six,’ said Henry, for no particular reason.
Gerald Lush hunted down his huge list. Henry fought against his irrational conviction that this moment was of vital importance.
‘Engine driver,’ said Gerald Lush.
‘Just about right for an oik,’ said Bullock.
Gerald Lush walked away. He was prepared to tell Henry’s fortune and call him Henry in the middle of the night, but he wasn’t prepared to stand up for him in public.
During the next few days, before the expiry of the craze, people rushed to tell Henry’s future. It was impossible for him to refuse. His fortune always came out as something like ‘sewage worker’, ‘burglar’, ‘lavatory attendant’ or ‘schoolmaster’. He suspected that the results were being falsified, especially as nobody would ever let him see the lists. He grabbed at Harcourt’s list once, and it tore, and Harcourt beat him up. Perhaps the best result of all, to judge from the mirth which it provoked, was from Webber’s list.
‘Cricketer,’ said Webber, and everybody fell about.
Under Mr Mallet’s coaching, Henry discovered that he had certain valuable cricketing assets. He had a perfect forward defensive shot, a sound back defensive shot, a classical cover drive, an elegant force off the back foot on both sides of the wicket, a delicate late cut, a savage hook. There was only one snag. He never made contact with the ball. Never ever. In the golden summer of 1947, when Compton and Edrich set the land ablaze with the magnificence of their batting, and Henry alone at Brasenose College worshipped Len Hutton, who let him down by being out of form, every boy at Brasenose College who wasn’t a total weed kept detailed records of his achievements upon the pitch. Henry kept his scores as diligently as anybody. They were 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 not out, 0, did not bat, retired hurt 0, 0, 4, 0, 0, 0 not out, 0 and 0. The 4 occurred when both he and the wicket-keeper missed the ball completely, but Penfold failed to signal four byes, and the runs were credited to him. Despite this appalling record, at the end of the term he completed his final averages, like everyone else. Innings 16, not outs 4, runs 4, highest score 4, average 0.3333333333333333333 recurring. It is hard to imagine a worse predicament for a youngster at an English preparatory school shortly after the war than to be appalling at sport. Add the fact that the youngster in question loved cricket and football passionately, and you will begin to imagine the depth of his unhappiness. Add to this stew of misery the fact that the school was in Surrey and Henry spoke with the flat-capped tones of south Yorkshire. Flavour this casserole of despair with the fact that his surname was Pratt and his legs were short and plump. Season this unappetising ragout of mental anguish with the reflection that he enjoyed reading books and was good at lessons, and you have a picture that would surely melt the stoniest heart.
In his first term at Brasenose College, Henry was several times near to breaking point, but he held on. He endured earth in his bed, a dead song thrush ditto, three apple-pie beds and being on the losing end of innumerable fights. With these physical humiliations, he could cope. He was developing a passive courage, a stoicism which allowed his tormentors to see no hint of his agony, and thus deprived them of the ultimate pleasure of the bully. What he found much more difficult to endure was his nickname. Oiky. Oiky Pratt. Because he believed it to be true.
He’d been told it at Rowth Bridge, by no less an authority than Belinda Boyce-Uppingham. He’d half believed it then. Now he knew it was true. He just didn’t know how to cope when Tubman-Edward said, ‘I say, Oiky, does your old man prefer claret or burgundy?’ His oikishness was vividly brought home to him in connection with the name of Uncle Teddy and Auntie Doris’s house. Cap Ferrat. The boys in his dorm accused him of not knowing what it meant. He reacted angrily, for he really did believe he knew what it meant.
‘O.K., know-all, what does it mean?’ said Bullock.
‘It’s a kind of hat they use in Yorkshire when they go rabbiting with ferrets,’ he said.
How they all hooted.
He felt oiky. His body was inelegant. His movements were clumsy. He felt that he was never quite clean, however much he washed.
Once again, Henry was happiest when buried in his lessons. Throughout his school career so far, many of his fellow pupils had thought he was a swot. Some of his teachers had sensed the presence of that rare quality, a real enthusiasm for learning, and above all for learning to think. It grieves me to have to say that they were deluded. Henry still hadn’t really grasped what education was all about. He liked lessons because they were safe. There was no pecking order of bullying in the classroom. He liked lessons because he was good at them. He did them diligently so that he would continue to be good at them. It was as simple as that.
He was taught Latin by Mr Belling, dry as dust, a human Pompeii, who went round and round the class anti-clockwise firing staccato questions. Wrong answers were marked down, and ten wrong answers meant extra work at weekends. Henry rarely got extra work at weekends.
The French teacher, Mr Massey, had wanted to be a doctor, but he had failed his finals. A simple question about medicine would guarantee at least a ten-minute diversion, in English, often with diagrams on the blackboard. Hooper and Price-Ansty would faint, in that order, at the more grisly of Mr Massey’s revelations. There was an awkward moment when Mr Noon came into the classroom to find a large diagram of the human kidneys on the blackboard. Mr Massey had hurriedly asked the French for kidneys. Nobody had known.
Mr Lee-Archer, the Maths master, hurled books at boys who got things wrong. Mr Lee-Archer had once represented Great Britain, at the discus, in a three-way international athletics match against Belgium and Finland. A Maths text-book hurled at one’s head from ten yards with fearsome accuracy is almost as good an incentive to a lazy boy as fostering an interest in the subject, and a lot easier.
Mr Trench, the History master, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Mr Trench liked facts – names, dates, venues for the signing of treaties. He disliked ideas, theories, causes, effects, parallels, motives, anything that might necessitate delving into the reasons behind the facts. But he was now beginning to lose his grasp on facts as well, and was calling on the boys to reiterate constantly the diminishing fund of facts that he could still remember – the dates of the Battle of Hastings, the signing of Magna Carta, the Battle of Agincourt, Wat Tyler’s rebellion, the length of the Thirty Years War, and a few others, round and round, with the boys embarrassed and helpless, not knowing what to do.
The Geography master, Mr Hill, had no disabilities except his age. He had been pressed back into service during the war, and had stayed on. He was a good teacher, but snoozed a lot. The boys read their Geography books wh
ile he snoozed, and when he was awake he tested them. It was a system that worked well for all concerned, and nobody rocked the boat.
The English teacher, Mr Mallender, believed that hand-writing was next to godliness. His pupils might not have much to say, but at least they would say it legibly. Twice a week, for the first fifteen minutes of the lesson, they would copy out a section of Keats’ ‘Endymion’, to be handed in for Mr Mallender’s inspection. If the hand-writing fell below a certain standard, you did the same section again the next time. When you got to the end of the poem, you were excused hand-writing and were allowed to read during the first fifteen minutes of the relevant lessons. But Keats’ ‘Endymion’ is a long poem, and some untidy boys hadn’t finished it when they left Brasenose. Henry, a late starter, had no chance of ever finishing it.
One day, around the middle of June, Mr A. B. Noon B.A. entered Mr Mallender’s classroom unexpectedly. All the boys stood, except Henry.
It had been a tiring day. Mr Hill hadn’t fallen asleep once. Mr Lee-Archer had struck Henry a glancing blow with Geometry for Beginners. Mr Belling had fired irregular verbs at fearsome speed. Mr Massey had described a delicate eye operation in terms so specific that Henry had almost joined Hooper and Price-Ansty in unconsciousness, and Mr Trench’s store of facts had diminished so much that Webber had calculated that the date of the Battle of Hastings was now coming round every three minutes and sixteen seconds. Henry was eleven pages into Keats’ ‘Endymion’, with a hundred and twenty-three to go. After a good start, his writing had deteriorated under the strain, and there had been moments when he wondered if he would remain on page ten for ever. He kept making mistakes in the couplet:
Oh thou, for whose soul-soothing quiet, turtles
Passion their voices cooingly ’mong myrtles.
A jolly good couplet if you like that kind of thing, of course, even if not one of Keats’ absolute humdingers. Nobody can be on top form all the time. Anyway, it did begin to pall on Henry after he’d copied it out six times. The first mistake he made was due to a lapse of concentration. The preceding lines are – well, you don’t need me to tell you, especially if you’re an Old Brasenosian:
By all the trembling mazes that she ran,
Hear us, great Pan!
Boys will be boys, and Henry’s mind strayed to another pan, made by Cobbold and Sons of Etruria. A chance association can have the power to unlock memories of the past. Proust touched on this, and now it was happening to Henry. He was not concentrating, therefore, and ‘’mong myrtles’ is a killer if you aren’t alert. On this day, Henry had at last got onto page eleven. He was writing the lines:
Their ripen’d fruitage; yellow-girted bees
Their golden honeycombs; our village leas
Their fairest blossom’d beans and poppied corn;
The chuckling linnet its five young unborn,
To sing for thee;…
Relieved to have got over the myrtle hurdle, Henry made the fatal mistake, as any copier will tell you, of concentrating on the meaning of the lines. The village came to life in his mind, and he was gripped by a severe melancholic nostalgia. Memories of Rowth Bridge flooded over him. He was miles away when Mr Noon entered the room and all the other boys leapt to their feet. He was up on the high fells with Simon Eckington when the clip on his ear-hole came.
‘Stand up, boy,’ said Mr Noon.
Henry stood up.
‘Why didn’t you stand up when I came in the room?’
‘I was working so hard I didn’t see you come in, sir,’ said Henry, who no longer used ‘thee’ and ‘tha’, although there was nothing he could do about his accent.
‘Nonsense, boy,’ said the headmaster. ‘You were dreaming. You were in a brown study, weren’t you, Pratt?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You will come along to another brown study after school. My study.’
When the lessons were over, Henry went along the stone corridor, past the door to the dining room, which smelt of the morning’s cabbage, past the door to the kitchen, which smelt of the evening’s rissoles, past the stairs down to the changing rooms, which smelt of dungeons, past Mr Belling’s classroom, which smelt of dust, through the green baize fire-door into a wider corridor, past the common room, which smelt of pipe smoke, and so to the door of the headmaster’s study.
He knocked.
‘Come.’
He entered.
The headmaster sat behind an even larger desk than that of Mr E. F. Crowther. His study was oak-panelled, with a bay window, and one wall was lined with bookcases, filled with learned books which came with the house, and many of which were still uncut. This study announced, ‘We are men of culture here. We will teach your boy civilised values. You are not throwing good money down the drain.’
‘You’re new to our customs, Pratt,’ said Mr Noon, ‘New perhaps to concepts of discipline and team spirit, of pulling together. Are you new to the concept of pulling together, Pratt?’
‘No, sir.’
‘When I enter a room, and you all stand up, it is not because I suffer from megalomania. It is because I am the symbol of authority. You boys are being groomed so that one day you will take up positions of authority yourselves. You must therefore learn to respect authority as a force beyond individuality. That is why I must thrash you, Pratt. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Henry caught a brief glimpse of Mr Trench running stark-naked among the pines. His nervous breakdown had begun. Should he tell Mr Noon? Would he be believed, or would it be taken as a frenzied attempt to evade his punishment? He decided to remain silent.
‘When a boy is beaten at Brasenose,’ said Mr Noon, ‘it is not a punishment. It is a part of his education, and therefore he should be grateful. That is why I insist on boys thanking me after I have thrashed them. Do you understand that?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Bend over.’
Henry bent over.
‘Put your hands behind your back and raise the flaps of your jacket well clear of your buttocks.’
Henry put his hands behind his back and raised the flaps of his jacket well clear of his buttocks.
Mr Noon made a practice swish with the cane.
Henry closed his eyes and gritted his teeth.
Thwack.
Not too bad.
Thwack.
Worse. Think of something nice.
Thwack.
Ouch! Think of the summer holidays.
Thwack.
Not quite such a bad one. I don’t want to think of the summer holidays.
Thwack.
That did hurt. I’m dreading the summer holidays. I don’t want to spend them with Uncle…
Thwack.
…Teddy and, oh God that was a bad one, Auntie Doris.
‘Stand up. That’s it.’
Henry stood up and turned to face Mr Noon. His backside was stinging and raw. The pain was spreading like a sunset.
‘Thank you, sir,’ he said.
One hot day in August, Henry woke early, in his spacious bedroom in the substantial detached house with the attractive irregular gables, in Haggersley Edge, a salubrious residential area situated between the mucky picture of Sheffield and the golden frame of the Peak District. He woke early, because he had plans. He was going back, to Paradise Lane, to see his old friend Martin Hammond. He had delayed too long. There was nothing to fear.
He pulled back the curtains, and gazed on another steamy summer morning. Already, the houses were shimmering in the haze. On the right, the high hills merged with the sky, green and blue mingling in the haze.
He washed himself thoroughly, twice. During the last few weeks of term he had ceased to be quite so spectacularly unpopular. You were never quite so unpopular once you’d had your first beating from Mr Noon. But he had still felt oiky, still had difficulty in persuading himself that he was clean.
He descended the wide, carpeted staircase of the vermin-free house.
They breakfasted
on the patio. The Welgar shredded wheat, boiled egg, and toast and Oxford marmalade were a treat, even if he would have preferred Golden Shred.
Auntie Doris was wearing white shorts and a red shirt. Her legs were amazingly brown and smooth. Both she and Uncle Teddy had been very brown when he arrived back from school. (Not home from school. He couldn’t quite think of it as home.) It wasn’t surprising. They spent so much time on the patio during that wonderful summer. Auntie Doris’s knees were varnished like stair-knobs. He caught himself wondering if she put furniture polish on them.
‘You’re the early bird,’ she said.
‘I’m going to Thurmarsh to see my old friends,’ he said.
‘Good idea,’ she said.
She always said ‘good idea’. She was glad to get him out from under her feet. He had the idea that if he said, ‘I’m going to collect a pile of sheep shit and throw it at the Master Cutler,’ she’d still have said ‘Good idea’.
‘I might be back late. I might go to the pictures,’ he said.
‘Good idea,’ said Auntie Doris.
On Sunday, Uncle Teddy and Auntie Doris had taken him to a restaurant. They had met their friends, Geoffrey and Daphne Porringer. Geoffrey Porringer had blackheads on his nose. Daphne Porringer didn’t. Geoffrey Porringer chose the wine. Daphne Porringer didn’t. Geoffrey Porringer made Henry try it. ‘The sooner you civilise the brats, the better,’ he said. He described the wine as ‘a thoughtful if slightly morose Burgundy’. Uncle Teddy laughed. Daphne Porringer didn’t. Henry thought the wine was horrible, but then he was an oik.