An Open Prison

by J. I. M. Stewart

  ‘Do sit down,’ Mr Hayes said.

  I had expected to converse with Robin Hayes’s father through one of those overlapping armoured glass contraptions which confront one nowadays when one buys a railway ticket or cashes a cheque in a bank. I’d have found anything of the sort difficult. As it was, I judged it wasn’t beyond me at least to make do.

  ‘I’ve gathered from Mrs Hayes,’ I said, ‘that you’d like to discuss Robin’s affairs, and I’m glad to have the opportunity. I can assure you, for a start, that he’s doing well. His form work is very solid. And, outside that, he’s being thoroughly useful to me as my Head of House.’ I felt I couldn’t say less than this, although in doing so I wasn’t being entirely candid. There had been something elusive about the boy during the first week of term.

  Mr Hayes was silent, so that I had to wonder what to say next. The man’s expression, I felt, might afford me a cue, and for the first time I took a straight look at him. There was something meagre in his appearance, and in this he differed from his son, who was robust, if in a fine-boned way. This rendered the more striking the fact that facially there was a strong resemblance between man and boy. Yet what they shared couldn’t be termed expressive in the sense of suggesting any sort of temperamental affinity. I didn’t feel either that Mr Hayes would make a reliable prefect or that his son might not be trustworthy in small financial matters. It was just a physical correspondence, and little was to be gathered from it. But here was Mr Hayes still saying nothing, and all I could do was to add to the commendation of which I had just delivered myself.

  ‘The boy works hard,’ I said.

  ‘He pushes hard.’

  I didn’t make much of this laconic statement, the tone of which was not laudatory.

  ‘An unnecessary term, or two unnecessary terms, still at school. At over a thousand pounds a time. Oxford or nothing. And then nagging about that car. Hard as hard.’

  It may be imagined that I listened to this, Mr Hayes’s first speech, with astonishment. I recalled his son’s making some light remark about school bills. And I recalled the Rolls-Royce.

  ‘That car?’ I repeated stupidly. ‘A Rolls-Royce?’

  ‘A Morgan – the equivalent thing, it seems, among the affluent young. Of course I said Rolls-Royce. I wasn’t going to point at him in open court, you know. Poor callow little brute.’

  I didn’t know how to take this speech – or that I wanted to take it at all. So I tried to edge away from it.

  ‘I can understand, Mr Hayes, that there may be difficulties about money. I believe the school . . .’

  ‘He can get money out of his uncle – my wealthy brother-in-law. I never could, but Robin can. If his mother will let him, that is.’

  ‘About Oxford, then.’ I saw there was nothing for it but to take hold of the conversation as well as I could. ‘About which Honour School Robin should read. Am I right in thinking you see him as likely to go to the bar?’

  ‘His mother’s notion. Nonsense!’ Mr Hayes said this robustly. ‘He isn’t clever enough.’

  ‘Robin is a very adequately able boy.’

  ‘That may be. But even if you are a good deal more than that, you have to wait for years for your briefs. Of course he can be called, and then look round for some job having nothing to do with the courts, for which being a barrister is considered as some sort of subsidiary qualification. But money pouring away all the time.’

  It seemed clear, and far from unaccountable, that financial considerations had become of paramount importance with Robin Hayes’s father. I tried again.

  ‘Then, Mr Hayes, have you any suggestion for the boy yourself?’

  ‘I think he might try for the police. Or perhaps the prison service.’ Mr Hayes gave me a swift glance, so that I wondered whether it amused him to see me for the moment dumbfounded. ‘I must speak to the Governor about it,’ he went on. ‘A Harrovian, but a very decent fellow. I’m a Carthusian myself.’

  I didn’t like this at all – and chiefly because Mr Hayes didn’t really like it either. It had been an uneasy kind of humour, and I was surprised at my not having recognised in him the instant he came into the room an uneasy man. It was, after all, what he ought to be. From the moment of his being convicted his position had become impossible, or had vanished. He had no place in society, nor ever would have again.

  Such for a time was to be my feeling after my visit to Hutton Green. I can now see that it was wrong and also snobbish. Had Mr Hayes been a genuine gardener of the humble ‘jobbing’ sort; had such been his unassuming position in life; had he simply reached through a window and grabbed a wallet: in these circumstances my mind would have encountered no difficulty in thinking in terms of adequate expiation, of rehabilitation, of recovered self-respect, and the like. Mr Hayes’s crime, one might say, had consisted in his having as a boy got himself sent to Charterhouse. Noblesse oblige – even the not very considerable noblesse that inheres in receiving an education among gentlemen. These were conventional reflections. At the same time I was puzzled by Mr Hayes, as if there were a side to him of which I was only obscurely aware – something unpredictable and not quite to be written off under the ‘shabby scoundrel’ formula.

  But had my visit in the slightest way been any good? I decided that it had achieved nothing at all. As I had taken my leave of Mr Hayes I said a few words of the ‘if anything happens I’ll let you know’ order. It was a familiar utterance with me on concluding an interview with a parent, but it didn’t sound convincing when offered to a felon. (Whether Mr Hayes was technically a felon, I wasn’t sure. I had a notion one has to assault somebody to gain that status.) If I had come by anything it was a new, or augmented, view of Robin Hayes. His father had spoken disagreeably about him as a kind of family extortioner. In court he had protected his son – apparently by saying ‘Rolls-Royce’ when he should have said ‘Morgan’. But to me he had virtually insinuated that it was the boy’s demands which had prompted him to crime. This was horrible any way on; it could be felt as even more unsavoury than the suspicion I had shared with Miss Sparrow that Mr Hayes’s dire need of money might have had its background in blackmail not in the least of a domestic order.

  Yet I doubted whether Robin’s conduct, even if it had been much as his father represented it to me, was justly to be viewed in a very unfavourable light. I reminded myself that at seventeen one can gain a licence and drive a car, and I knew that several of the boy’s contemporaries owned cars at home, although they were of course not allowed to bring them to school. They were mostly the sons of business people with plenty of money around. Robin might have been insufficiently aware that his father’s circumstances were very different. And of course there hadn’t actually been either a Morgan or a Rolls-Royce – Mr Hayes having presumably been ‘nicked’ before any such purchase was made. Again, school agreeably continuing through one’s nineteenth year, with Oxford or Cambridge to follow, was a taken-for-granted assumption by plenty of boys at Helmingham. All in all, it seemed to me that in an important point of character and family loyalty Robin Hayes deserved the benefit of any doubt. I was worried about him – or worried about him in a new way – all the same. It would be necessary to have a further private talk with him soon, since it was my duty to let him know that, at his mother’s prompting, I had been to see his father. This would be an awkward occasion, but good might come of it. I hadn’t seen much of the boy since his turning upon me the day before term began, and I felt that this was a matter of deliberate avoidance on his part. But ours was a situation in which misunderstandings could easily arise, so it was incumbent upon me to make it clear to him that I didn’t regard him and his problems as a nuisance.

  When I got back to the House I found that (as so often happened) a major crisis had erupted during my absence. Something had gone wrong with the gas supply in the kitchen; the boys had been obliged to put up with a cold dinner; and several of them had protested in a sadly underbred way.

  III

  When John Stafford came to H
elmingham – or rather after he had spent a couple of terms playing himself in – he instituted a number of sweeping changes. The most startling was the placing of all extra-curricular activities upon a voluntary basis. Military training was a partial exception: it could be declined by boys who were prepared to ‘do’ something called ‘Civic Duties’ instead. Nobody much cared for these, which consisted of such occupations as pushing old women around in Bath-chairs, so in fact what was known as the C.C.F. went on much as before. But among games boys were free, term by term, to pick and choose – or they could decline anything of the sort altogether. The majority of the staff (and I was among their number) were aghast before this ukase. Housemasters in particular (rather comically, I suppose) simply felt that the end had come; they were aware how a succession of hopelessly wet days produces a sharp increase in disorderly behaviour, and even costly damage to property, within a house. Eventually we were most of us obliged to agree that the new scheme of things worked well. This was particularly true of the oldest boys – the effective management of whom had become more and more a matter of insisting less and less upon their doing this or that. At first there was a sharp turning away from team games (chiefly rugger and cricket) to tennis, squash, fives, fencing, and similar activities emphasising individual encounter. But quite soon the traditional rivalry between house and house (as between school and school) asserted itself anew, and nearly everybody was playing football or cricket or hockey as before.

  It chanced that on the afternoon of my return from Hutton Green I came upon a boy called Iain Macleod standing before the House notice-board, regarding with evident dissatisfaction a list he had just pinned to it. Macleod, my second prefect, was the House’s captain of rugger – worthily so, since he was the sort of full back who frequently scores tries himself and then converts them.

  ‘Won’t it do, Iain?’ I asked humorously, having glanced not very attentively at what he was about.

  ‘It will have to, I suppose. But just where am I to find my right-wing three-quarter, sir? Robin is as fast as anybody in the House, and he has such a safe pair of hands that by half-term he might be playing for the school. I was looking forward to nursing him for that. And for the House he just can’t be replaced.’

  ‘Good heavens, Iain! Has Robin gone on the sick list?’

  ‘Nothing like that. He simply told me this morning that he has decided not to play rugger this term.’

  I was upset. Being a prefect is a condition that imposes many responsibilities on a boy, and one of them is certainly playing rugger for his House if he is regarded as a key man in its side. John Stafford himself would have been the first to concur in this. It looked sadly as if Robin Hayes was going back on his implicit undertaking not, as he had expressed it, to retire into private life.

  ‘But, Iain,’ I said, ‘surely you’re not going to take that lying down? Haven’t you reasoned with him – or threatened to have the whole team scrag him, if need be?’

  ‘It wouldn’t work, sir. And I didn’t like to say too much. Not after what Robin told me. I expect you know what I mean.’

  ‘Well, yes.’ My heart sank before this. There had probably been no need for Hayes to ‘tell’, since by this time everybody must know about his father.

  ‘Robin says he’s determined to get over it.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that, Iain. Only . . .’

  ‘He says that if he tries hard enough he’s sure he can succeed by the end of term. Even get his hundred metres cert.’

  ‘His . . .?’ I found myself staring at Macleod stupidly. And he was looking strangely at me himself – having tumbled to the misunderstanding I had fallen into.

  ‘It’s a queer thing.’ MacLeod went on hastily, ‘in a chap so full of pluck as Robin. And he has a queer explanation. He says that when he was quite small his father used to chuck him into the sea and shout at him to save himself. His father believed that to be the best way to teach a boy to swim. It seems his father has a thing about swimming, and claims he got his half-blue at Oxford for water-polo. Can one get a half-blue for that?’

  ‘My dear Iain, I’ve no idea.’

  ‘It all sounds a bit phoney to me, anyway. One of those psychological things. You persuade yourself you have a memory of something that seems to be a rational explanation of something else. Really, it’s a phobia – something quite irrational. There’s a word for it, I gather. Hydrophobia. But isn’t that a disease you get only if you’re bitten by a mad dog?’

  ‘In one sense – yes.’ I found this confused thinking difficult to sort out. ‘But I’ve certainly heard of people so unaccountably afraid of water that they panic if you take them on a pond in a dinghy. Rudyard Kipling was like that – and his father wasn’t the kind of man who would chuck a child into the sea. I’d no idea Robin is inclined the same way, and has such a notion about it in his head. I just hope, Iain, that he isn’t trying to go about this tackling the thing secretly. Haunting the swimming-pool when nobody else is around.’

  ‘He couldn’t do that.’ Macleod said this so soothingly that I wondered whether the boys in general supposed that I was readily subject to fits of nervous agitation. ‘The outdoor pool is drained this term, you know, and the indoor one is always locked up except when the bath-wallah is on the job. He gives a swarm of brats lessons four afternoons a week for the first half of term. And Robin says he’s going to pocket his pride and muck in with the kids.’

  ‘That’s very sensible in him, no doubt.’ I wasn’t pleased, and I didn’t conceal the fact. ‘But everything in its place. It’s a poor reason for cutting out of rugger. I’ll have a word with him. Perhaps I can make him change his mind.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’ Macleod, although junior to Hayes on the school roll, was the more mature young man of the two, and now he spoke with an assumption of growing equality between us, which I found entirely pleasing. I even asked myself whether it was for the worthiest qualities that I had made Hayes my top boy. Macleod was certain of a final term as Head of House, but if Hayes hadn’t returned to us he might have had a fair expectation of three. These seem insignificant or puerile matters to admit to a chronicle. But in a school they count for a good deal.

  ‘I’ll abide by your advice, Iain. I value it.’ I spoke briskly, as if our conference had better now be closed. But Macleod had something further to say.

  ‘Robin has told me about his father. I expect most people know about it, but I believe I’m the only boy Robin has chosen to mention it to. I don’t suppose the situation is going to lead to any crisis. But if anything perplexing does come to your knowledge, sir, I hope you’ll consider telling me. Robin Hayes and I are fairly close friends now.’ Iain Macleod was an ugly boy with an engaging smile. And he smiled as he spoke. ‘Or cancel “fairly”,’ he said. ‘“Chums”, perhaps. Like the Boys of Greyfriars.’

  I coped with this by giving an understanding nod as I turned away. Macleod hadn’t, perhaps, reflected that I might receive confidences which I couldn’t share with other people without having Hayes’s permission.

  As relevantly here as somewhere else, I may record that now and then an individual boy – that rather than a clump of them – used to occasion in me a pang I had come to recognise as arising from the fact of fatherhood having been denied me. Nor had I compensated for this, as some similarly circumstanced men do, by cultivating the power of making intimate friends – ‘chums’, if you like. What this casual encounter before the House notice-board left me with was an indefinable feeling, almost akin to envy or jealousy, as I thought of those two youths (for neither ‘boys’ nor ‘men’ is quite right) happily in harness together.

  I am conscious of never having been too good with the junior boys. Although without any memory of having been particularly unhappy at my own prep school, I have always regarded the English upper-class tradition of consigning children to a boarding-school at the age of eight or nine to be little short of barbarous. I don’t feel the same about their arrival, probably at the age of thirtee
n, to face the rough and tumble of a large public school. Sometimes I am not quite happy with it, all the same. And it was one result of this that at Helmingham I commonly found it difficult to get on close and easy terms with the ‘brats’. But here Miss Sparrow had been a great find. It is of course the recognised function of a matron in a boarding-house to mother the younger boys, and the responsibility is much increased if the housemaster is unmarried. The senior boys don’t often make this type of identification; they would like a young and pretty matron to whom they could make experimental passes of – if there be such a thing – an entirely chaste sexual order.

  Miss Sparrow held Sunday tea-parties which turned into cheerful romps four or five times a term. More importantly, she was the established confidante of every boy who sought one; to pass her room was commonly to be aware that she had a visitor and that the talk was of sisters and dogs and ponies – even of gerbils and guinea-pigs. But in this field of endeavour the older boys fell to me, and I cultivated for it such talent as I had. One of my habits was to take advantage of the free half-hour between the end of supervised prep and the House supper-hour. Sometimes two or three at a time, and sometimes individually, the fifth and sixth formers would be invited to drop in on me for a glass of wine and casual conversation. I recall with pleasure and some modest surprise how seldom these occasions turned sticky. I believe that here I owe a debt to my father who, throughout my later boyhood whenever I was at home, let few days pass without half an hour of useful and enjoyable conversation tête-à-tête.