The Likes of Us

by Stan Barstow

  We were a wartime intake, most of us scholarship boys from working-class homes, with just a few fee-paying pupils among us, of whom Huby was one. Secondary education in those days was limited to the bright and to those who had the cash to compensate for their dullness. Classes were small and everyone knew everyone else. But Huby was never

  in my set, whose activities often bordered on, and occasionally slipped over into, the criminal. Eddie Duncalf, who, the last I heard of him, was driving a lorry, once went to a party at Huby’s house and reported that the guests were mostly boys from the snobbier and more expensive schools in the locality and their standoffish sisters; so I gathered that Huby’s family had solid connections. Scholastically, Huby was a plodder. In his relationships he displayed a tactlessness which irritated some to the point of cursing him, and there were instances of reckless behaviour which endangered not only himself but others. Nor was it unknown for him to pick on someone smaller than himself in a manner not so much brutal as foolishly gleeful. ‘You don’t know

  your own strength, Huby, you daft bugger!’ Well, he found out. And some of us had already found his soft centre.

  Our headmaster was Dr Heathcote Jefferies, a fiery little jumping-cracker of a man whose voice when he was enraged – and he often was – could be heard halfway through the long corridors of the school. A stern disciplinarian, and remorseless pursuer of malefactors, he gave weekly addresses in assembly, remonstrating with us about our patriotic duty, which was to refrain from sabotaging the war effort by slacking, smoking, declining to disturb the brilliantined perfection of our hair by wearing the school cap, and chatting up the girls from the nearby high school at the bus stop. Jefferies had four sons: one had studied law, another medicine; there was one in the church, and one still at Cambridge. We never knew his real opinion of us – it was usually expressed in tones of blistering contempt – but we were not the stuff such achievement is made of; though we did eventually manage a parson and a handful of schoolteachers on top of the foundation of clerks and mechanics. Oh, and a couple of town councillors, one of whom once fought a general election for the Tories in a solid Labour constituency.

  And, of course, Huby.

  It was easy enough later to realise the foreboding that must often have gripped our elders during those first years of the war; but whatever fears did possess them either they hid them well or we discounted them. It seemed inconceivable to us that we could possibly lose. Some of us had fathers or brothers away in the forces, which brought it a little nearer home. There were evacuees among us who spoke of destruction rained from the skies, in queer southern accents which we cruelly mocked. And uniforms everywhere, austerity, rationing, the blackout. But either morale remained remarkably high or we were deplorably insensitive.

  The blacked-out nights cloaked our after-school activities. What did we do during those long dark evenings when no glimmer of light broke the facades of houses, when you could not tell if a shop was open or shut till you’d tried the door and stepped round the heavy entrance curtain, when elderly women walked carefully along by the sparse glow of blinkered torches, armed with hat-pin and pepper for defence against the known enemy or that masquerading as daytime friend? We went to the cinema as often as our funds allowed, acquiring an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Hollywood film of the period; but there were hardly any school societies and no youth clubs, except the religion-tainted groups run by the local churches, which we were at pains to avoid. So we must often have been bored and in this boredom we sought and found the excitement of petty crime. But we were never apprehended by anyone vengeful enough to make an example of us and the taint did not spread into adult life. At least, so far as I know. One or two of those adolescent rogues standing where Huby is now would tempt me to hindsight and the smug satisfaction of having seen it coming all those years ago. But Huby was not in our gang.

  A core of staff too old for military service held the fort among the comings and goings of men conscripted and released. We moved steadily up the school, some of us making the most of what was offered, others inexorably losing ground as they frittered away the advantage our scholarships had given us in a society preponderantly made up of those fated to leave school at fourteen for a life dominated by hourly wage-rates and the time-clock.

  A changing awareness of the girls down the road brought vanity, which was expressed by a facsimile of adult smartness, in pressed trousers, polished shoes and slickly parted hair. The greater part of our time was spent in the ordinary pursuits of boyhood; but we sampled experiences such as smoking, gambling and fondling girls in the shelter of long grass or the darkness of ginnels with the curiosity and awakening appetite of anyone growing through one stage of life into another which seems more pleasureful and exciting.

  There had been a firewatching duty since early 1940: a master and three senior boys sleeping in school every night – the master in the staff room, the lads on campbeds in an attic in the old building. They were supposed to patrol the grounds during an alert and tackle any fires with stirrup pumps until help arrived. The duty was voluntary, but most of us did it for the novelty of sleeping away from home and being in school but outside the discipline of the timetable. We read and yarned, played cards, had a dartboard until too many wild shots pitted the door with holes and it was taken away from us. Some of us smoked, too; always with an ear cocked for footsteps on the bare steps and a paper ready to waft the incriminating fug out of the window. It was an adventure and our activities, though some in violation of the school rules, were innocent enough. Until I did a duty with Eddie Duncalf.

  I became aware in the early hours of the morning that Eddie was not in the room. He was absent for some time. The next day I asked him where he’d been. He grinned.

  It turned out – and I was not the only one who knew about it – that Eddie had somehow obtained keys which gave him access to the pantry in the kitchen and the store cupboards there. From them he was helping himself to small amounts of the foodstuffs used for school meals: butter, sugar, cheese, tinned meat – anything, in fact, which was scarce or rationed. I went with him once, but creeping along those dark corridors in the night, expecting at every corner to bump into the master in charge, was too much for my nerves. I could never fathom anyway what Eddie did with the stuff. There was not enough for him to trade on the blackmarket, even if he had the contacts; and I couldn’t imagine his mother accepting it without explanation. I could only assume he hid it and concocted treats for himself when he was alone in the house.

  He made his last raid on a night when Huby was sharing the duty with us. As Eddie crept from the room and down the stairs, Huby spoke across the distance between our beds.

  ‘He’s a fool.’

  ‘What?’ I responded drowsily.

  ‘Duncalf. He’ll get nabbed one of these times.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Don’t make out you don’t know.’

  I snored gently into the darkness.

  But Huby was to be proved right; or partly so. For, although Eddie was not caught in the act, the outcome was the same. The cook had apparently known for some time that pilfering was taking place. This particular week she had taken an extra-careful inventory and when Eddie over-reached himself and stole more than usual she was able to pinpoint the losses with accuracy. There was an enquiry among the kitchen staff. No culprit could be found there. Then a cleaner remembered seeing currants and raisins on the floor of the firewatching room. Heathcote Jefferies questioned the masters first, then summoned to his study all the lads on that week’s roster.

  We lined up, jostling shoulder to shoulder, in an arc across the front of his desk. Jefferies, at the window, waited till we’d settled before spinning round and reaching for a list of names. He checked us off against this without speaking, then took his stance at one end of the mantelshelf.

  ‘There’s been some stealing from the pantry.’ His gaze raked across
the line of faces.

  ‘The culprit is someone who has been on firewatching duty in the last week.’

  No one spoke. Jefferies must already have selected the likelier suspects, for there were among us some members of swots’ corner who would no more have robbed the pantry than smoke a cigarette or fail to do their homework diligently. Three of them, Tolson, Lindsay and Carter, did duty together and were standing at one end of the line. Jefferies began with them.

  ‘Did you steal from the pantry?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Did you steal from the pantry?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Carter, did you steal from the pantry?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Did you steal from the pantry?’

  ‘Oh, no, sir.’ This was Billy Morrison, a good lad, who knew about Eddie but would never have dreamed of giving him away.

  Jefferies paused here and changed his tactics.

  ‘Do any of you boys know who did steal from the pantry?’

  This was one of Jefferies’s least likeable traits, his inviting you to shop someone else. Morrison spoke for all of us. ‘No, sir.’ I thought afterwards that it was a trick of the light, but I wanted to believe that his lip did visibly curl and that Jefferies noticed it.

  Jefferies returned to the direct question.

  ‘Did you steal from the pantry?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  Eddie: ‘No, sir.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Me.

  A stonewall defence. He couldn’t break it. He had come to Huby, who was last in line.

  ‘Did you steal from the pantry, Huby?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  We were through.

  But Jefferies, stuck with all those monosyllabic denials, let his gaze linger on Huby for another couple of seconds. And Huby, unable to make do with that simple and unbreakable ‘no’, rushed in and sank the boat.

  ‘I was in the room, sir.’

  Jefferies pounced. ‘Which room?’

  ‘The firewatching room, sir.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, sir.’

  ‘How do you know you were in the firewatching room?’

  ‘I was, sir.’

  ‘You mean it couldn’t have been you who stole from the pantry because you were in the firewatching room at the time.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir.’

  ‘So, if you didn’t do it, it must have been somebody who was on duty with you. Eh?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘But you’ve just told me that it happened while you were on duty, but it wasn’t you because you were in the firewatching room.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘So you weren’t in the firewatching room?’

  ‘I was, sir.’

  ‘At the time the pantry was being burgled.’

  It was no longer a question but a statement. Huby floundered. He went red. His mouth trembled. He was lost.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Duncalf came back to the form-room alone twenty minutes later, beaten and angry, and with a threat of expulsion hanging over him which, as it happened, was never carried out. ‘You absolute blithering idiot, Huby. If you aren’t the most useless sod I’ve ever met.’

  But he wasn’t, as he was not many years in showing.

  It was working for the press that kept me in touch with Huby’s early fortunes and made me aware of him again when he really started to rise into the big time. I ran into him now and then before I moved to a provincial evening paper from the local weekly. He was clerking for an uncle, marking time before he went off to do his National Service. When he came back he began to do small deals in scrap metal and before long he’d branched out into war-surplus materials. He made quite a bit of money, married a girl from the town and moved into a new four-bedroomed house.

  Then I lost sight of him until, subbing on a national daily in Fleet Street, I began to see news pars about him and, when his first wife divorced him and he married a girl fifteen years younger than himself, the occasional photograph. By this time he was going up fast; everything he touched seemed to prosper. His interests were widespread: mail order, unit furniture, domestic appliances. I don’t know what quality he discovered in himself and nourished so successfully that he became a millionaire by forty, because, frankly, I don’t understand that kind of talent.

  It was the business editor who ran through the list of Huby’s interests for me and who later, aware now that I’d known him once, warned me of the whispers which preceded the investigation into his affairs and the eventual bringing of charges. Facing the music with him are a couple of fellow directors and the secretary of one of his companies. I don’t know, of course, whether Huby is guilty or not, whether his substance is solid or just a bubble blown by him or his colleagues. But a number of offences do seem to have been committed and it looks as though the real issue is who is going to carry the can.

  What I’m wondering now is whether Mr Heathcote Jefferies Jr, QC, who is to open for the Crown, is as good an interrogator as his father was, seizing on any tiny slip to force, with the ruthless sharpness of his mind and the overwhelming power of his personality, a breach in a solid wall of falsehood. Does he know that Huby was one of his father’s pupils years ago? Probably not, and it doesn’t matter. The old man had no doubt forgotten the incident long before he died.

  But I know what I’d be feeling if I were in the dock with Huby tomorrow, aware that the penalty this time will not be six of the best but more like a year or two inside and a paralysing fine. And waiting – oh, the sweaty-palmed, stomach-fluttering waiting – for Huby to be offered and succumb to that fatal temptation to enlarge.

  Good

  Caroline rang again that morning, at a quarter to nine, after Fred had left the house but before peak rate started. Jean accepted the transfer-charge call.

  ‘Mum. Sorry about that, but I’m short of change.’

  ‘That’s all right, love. You must never let that stop you.’ Jean put a smile into her voice. ‘Mind you, your father did have a word or two to say about our conversation ten days ago. It was on the bill that came yesterday. Nearly four pounds’ worth.’

  ‘Oh, dear! Did you tell him what we were talking about?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. Time enough for that, if –’ She stopped herself. ‘What news have you got?’

  ‘None, really.’

  ‘You mean there’s no change?’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘How’s Alan?’

  ‘Well... fretting a bit.’

  ‘I expect he is. But from what you told me...’

  ‘Oh yes. All the same, it’s worrying.’

  ‘This thing is going to be a worry in years to come as well, unless someone can do something about it. Have you seen a doctor or do you want to wait till you come home?’

  ‘It could be too late then.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I didn’t mean that. I’m sure it’s nothing now.’

  ‘I’ve made an appointment here. I’m going tomorrow.’

  Jean’s younger daughter had irregular periods, a minor nuisance until she met a boy at university and began to sleep with him. Sleep with him! Ye Gods! What Jean’s mother would have said to her! What Caroline’s father would say if her education was put at risk. Not that it would come to that, but Jean did wish that Caroline was where they could talk face to face, taking as long as they needed, and not nearly two hundred miles away on the end of a telephone. Thank goodness, though, the child felt able to share her worry. She had always told all three of them – they both had, come to that – that if anything was wrong they
should come to them first. Anything, she had said. Because even the nicest, best adjusted of children had to live in the same world as everyone else.

  Stephen was still in bed. When she had finished her chat with Caroline, Jean took him up a cup of

  tea. He had shown no desire to go to university and so had not screwed himself to that extra pitch of effort to qualify for entrance. Now Jean rather suspected he wished he had: the three extra years of study would have kept him off the labour market. He did not know what he wanted to do. In better times he could have taken any old job until he found his path. But the better times had slipped into economic recession and there were no jobs; all he had now was this morale-sapping life on the dole. Fred said he had a school full of younger Stephens. ‘What can I tell them?’ he would say. ‘How can I spur them on when I know full well that most of them are destined for the scrapheap at eighteen? Some of these kids may never work. I can’t see whoever’s in power getting three and a half million back into jobs. We shall reap the whirlwind of all this in ten or fifteen years’ time,’ he would brood at his most pessimistic, ‘with an alienated generation that won’t be integrated into a society that’s shown such little regard for them.’

  Stephen stirred under his duvet as she went into the room and spoke to him. She put the teacup on his bedside table and told him not to let it go cold. He had always been sluggish in the mornings. Jean had sympathised with all three of them in the amount of sleep they needed while they were growing. But this lying late in bed every day was not right for a young man of Stephen’s age. Yet how could she blame him? What challenge did the days hold to get him up each morning? The world was wasting him.

  ‘If you want me to cook breakfast for you, you’d better not be long because I’ve got to go out.’