The Lost Boys

by Gina Perry

  As far as Kelman was concerned, he was just doing his job. ‘My role was to point out, “Come on, you’re not supposed to do that, it’s like getting into the maze with the rat and pushing it. And you’re not supposed to push the rat.”’

  But it seemed this was the last thing Sherif wanted to hear.

  On the sixth day of the tournament, the activities were comparatively low-key — making model planes and performing songs and skits. Harvey, replacing Carper as participant observer, and White actively took on the role of coaches, cheerleaders, and combatants in charge of their teams, with Sussman’s enthusiastic support.

  It was the last day of the tournament. Sherif and Sussman had agreed the night before that the Panthers were at risk of giving up on the competition because they believed the men were favouring the other team, and as they had been susceptible to the ‘contagion’ of homesickness, they should be allowed to win. So they stacked the odds against the Pythons — the models the Pythons were given to assemble in the arts and craft contest were more intricate and difficult to finish by the deadline. In the mess hall, each team sat at a table on either side of the room, Harvey egging on the Pythons, ‘congratulating and encouraging’ them as they showed him their work, while White and Harvey traded ‘loud’ comments on the progress of each group.

  At 2.00 pm, both groups gathered outside the rec hall for the announcement of the winners. When Ness read out the final score and announced the Panthers as winners, ‘there were wild shouts and some of them jumped up and down,’ Harvey wrote. As well as the ‘beautiful jackknives’, they were given a $10 cheque, which they ran and gave to Jack White for ‘coaching us and helping us win’. They asked Ness for Doug’s address so they could send him his knife and suggested to him that the Pythons should also receive a prize even though they hadn’t won.

  The losing Pythons were subdued. They sat around on the ground, pulling on blades of grass and not looking at one another. But the Panthers didn’t gloat. Peter and Brian led their team over to shake the Pythons’ hands and ‘commended them for their good performance’, praising their skills.

  Sherif, observing from the back door of the mess hall, would have watched this with a rising sense of panic and anger. It was all wrong. Here they were at the end of the third stage, when the competitions were supposed to have got the boys riled up about their opponents. To the Pythons, the victory of the Panthers should have felt like salt rubbed into their wounds. Anger was supposed to spill into violence, fighting, and retaliation. Sherif had promised this much, and more — a dramatic denouement where he was able to bring together fractious and warring groups into a harmonious whole. In the final stage, when the hostility and hatred between the boys had reached fever pitch, Sherif planned to set fire to the forest so the boys would be forced to cooperate to save their campsite and join forces to put out the flames.

  In his efforts to get one group fighting the other, Sherif and his staff had cut the rope on a precious flag, ‘stolen’ items of laundry, and smeared and demolished the food set up for one group’s dinner, all to trigger a fight between them. Each time, the boys’ irritation and anger was transitory. The only enduring resentment among the losing Pythons was against the staff. Now the Pythons were complaining they had been treated unfairly. Instead of blaming the Panthers, they attributed their loss to the actions of the adults — in particular, the unfair rules imposed by Ness during the tug of war; the favouritism of Sussman, who gave them noticeably more difficult models to assemble in arts and crafts; and the treachery of Mr Mussee, who, being a caretaker, would naturally be short of money and open to bribes from Sussman to vote against them in songs and skits.

  The irony was that the boys’ identification of when the adults were rigging the results was — apart from the bribery of the caretaker theory — spot on. They’d been treated unjustly and they knew it.

  So what happened next should have come as no surprise.

  OJ Harvey sat around the campfire on the hill after supper with the dejected Pythons. It was a warm night, but he built up the fire and sparks flew skywards, the light casting an orange glow over the boys’ glum faces. Harvey was trying to encourage someone to tell a ghost story, but the boys weren’t enthusiastic. A sudden burst of noise made them all jump. Irving, one of the Panthers, burst from the trees, yelling and sobbing. ‘You’d better get down there!’ His glasses flashed orange in the firelight. ‘Or we’ll wreck your tent!’

  The boys around the fire jumped to their feet and began running down the hill, racing towards their campsite. Harvey hurried behind them. Down in the staff office, Kelman heard the shouting too and hurried outside to see what was going on. Kelman and Carper, now both outsiders, had no knowledge of the night’s plans.

  Laurence, Walt, Tony, and the other Pythons raced to their tent. The Panthers were there waiting for them, shouting and jeering. The Python tent gaped open, the pale shapes of their bedding and clothes strewn about in the dirt. It was impossible at first to tell what was going on. Boys on both sides were shouting and crying out their dismay.

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Laurence cried.

  ‘Now you’ve done it!’ someone yelled.

  ‘What happened?’ Mickey stood with his mouth open.

  I imagined the boys ranged on either side of the tent, their eyes glittering, the din of their raised voices, their pounding hearts. And Sherif in the shadows, holding his breath.

  Amid the shouting, Laurence and the rest of the Pythons demanded to know why the Panthers had wrecked their tent. Anger distorted the features of the other boys, who faced them so defiantly. Over the noise, some of the boys pieced together the story. The Panthers had arrived back at camp after their celebratory marshmallow roast and found their own tent demolished and their belongings strewn about. They assumed the Pythons had done it, so they ran straight to the Pythons’ tent and retaliated. Laurence, whose lower lip was trembling, yelled over the top of their cursing and crying, ‘But we were up there! All of us.’ He pointed up the hill, to where the fire glowed among the trees.

  The boys went quiet. Fear flickered from one boy’s face to another.

  ‘We were scared,’ Brian Wood told me. ‘If it wasn’t one of us, then who was it?’ They were no longer Pythons or Panthers; they were a group of children in the dark at the edge of the woods, where shadows seemed to be gathering. A shiver ran through the group and the boys instinctively stood closer together.

  ‘Come see,’ Peter said into the quiet, gesturing back towards the tent on the other side of the stream. ‘Come see!’

  Then the boys were running again, but this time in a single throng, their shouts echoing through the woods as they poured across to the other side of the camp.

  At the Panthers’ tent, it was pandemonium. The boys cried out in dismay, ‘See? See?’ The tent was flattened, suitcases had been thrown among the bushes, bedding was strewn around in the dirt. Irving picked up his broken ukulele and began to cry. The boys stood in a huddle, their faces pale. Peter turned to Laurence and the rest of the Pythons and said shrilly, ‘Do you see now why we’re mad at you?’ Laurence said that he could see it.

  The boys spread out in twos and threes and began picking up clothing and shifting beds. Some moved around the base of the tent, preparing to lift the centre pole and get it standing again. One boy went to fetch a lantern. All of them moved around the tent gingerly. Who could have done this? they asked one another.

  Harvey arrived and called out that the Pythons should return to their own area, but the boys didn’t reply. White was doing his best to keep the groups separate too: he announced that the Panthers could look after it themselves. Harvey persuaded the Pythons that they should get back and sort out their own tent, but they left reluctantly, promising the Panthers they’d be back as soon as they were done.

  Kelman stayed behind at the Panther tent, helping to set it straight and eavesdropping as the boys discussed who could have don
e it. Peter and Irving shook the dirt out of the sleeping bags. They had decided the other group had nothing to do with it. Peter said, ‘Laurence said the Pythons didn’t do it and he doesn’t lie. Laurence is no liar.’ Irving agreed. White, who was smoothing out trampled pillows, said no one else could have done it, but the boys yelled back at him: ‘They couldn’t have done it, because if they had they wouldn’t have offered their help!’

  Then Kelman went to the other side of the stream, to the Python tent, to help the boys tidy the mess. They were agitated. Eric, whose accordion was untouched, was upset for Irving and his broken ukulele, and said angrily that he would go around and demand an alibi from all the adults in the camp. As they retrieved things from the ground, they kept up a staccato discussion, considering and just as quickly discarding different theories. Perhaps it was Sandy the cook, someone said, who had told the boys he was angry that he hadn’t been able to go to the races at Saratoga Springs. Someone else suggested the caretakers. Eric said aggressively to Herb Kelman, ‘Where were you?’ Laurence turned to Harvey and asked whether this was an experimental camp. ‘Maybe you just wanted to see what our reactions would be.’ I imagine Carper would have busied himself moving the lantern, or straightening a suitcase, not trusting himself to answer. When the boys told Carper soon afterwards that they were going to help the other group put up their tent, he made no move to stop them. Meanwhile, Harvey went in search of Sherif to tell him he hadn’t been able to stop the two groups from helping each other, bumping into Kelman on the way. Kelman told Harvey that the Pythons should not be stopped if they wanted to help the Panthers straighten up their tent. Harvey included his curt reply in his notes of the evening: ‘I replied that if I stopped them, I would specify such in my report’, before he hurried on.

  Harvey heard Sherif’s voice, high and rising, before he rounded the corner of the mess hall and saw the men silhouetted against the light from the windows. Sherif had clearly heard the news. Sussman was saying something in an urgent voice, but Harvey couldn’t catch it.

  ‘Dr Sherif,’ Harvey hissed, hoping Sherif would lower his voice. But Sherif was oblivious. Harvey’s mouth went dry when he saw Sherif’s face, red with fury. ‘A vulture,’ Sherif spat the words out.

  Sussman’s face was pale and shiny with sweat, and he kept pushing his glasses up his nose.

  ‘A greedy vulture!’ In Sherif’s mind, Sussman had ruined the experiment out of his selfish lust for credit. Everything about Sussman, from his youth to his ambition, now infuriated Sherif. He took another step towards Sussman, shaking both his fists in the air around Sussman’s ears.

  Sussman nervously licked his lips and took a step back. ‘But we agreed!’ Sussman protested. ‘Dr Sherif, we agreed before supper —’

  ‘I never said!’

  ‘Dr Sherif,’ Harvey said more loudly, skirting the fire ring and wood pile.

  Sussman looked imploring at Harvey. ‘OJ, tell him.’

  But Harvey pursed his lips and gave his head a little shake as if to say, it’s no use. Sherif had been drinking, and Harvey knew that trying to reason with him in this state was hopeless. He’d seen Sherif furious and on the attack before, but never like this. This night, Harvey told me, Sherif had gone ‘bonkers’.

  Sherif drew back his fist, ready to take a swing, and Harvey picked up a piece of wood from the pile and grabbed Sherif’s arm. ‘Dr Sherif!’ he said, pulling on his arm to get his attention. ‘If you do it, I’m gonna hit you.’

  Sherif tried to shake him off, but Harvey held firm.

  ‘We discussed it …’ Sussman was babbling. ‘We did …’

  And they had, just an hour earlier. Harvey wrote in his notes:

  Around 7.00 pm, before Sussman talked to Sherif, I met with Sussman by the mess hall and we discussed the frustration planned for the night. The consensus had been reached between Sherif, Sussman, myself, and Jack White that the frustration should be against the Panthers since they had won the tournament and seemed quicker to get angry and seek revenge against the other group.

  While the boys were engaged at their marshmallow roast, Harvey wrote, ‘Sussman was to go to the Panthers’ tent and wreck it.’

  The competition and now the wrecked tent had not only provoked no hostility, but the boys were reconciled, and had turned on the staff. I thought of Kelman’s remark about how Sherif was unable to accept that he might have been wrong. Even if the tent-pulling incident wasn’t his idea, he’d agreed to it, but now he looked desperately for a scapegoat. And Sussman was it.

  Sherif abruptly stopped struggling against Harvey and then turned and rushed away. At 11.00 pm that night, he called all the men into the mess hall and announced the experiment was over. OJ Harvey, Jack White, and even Marvin Sussman argued that they should continue, since they’d come this far, but Sherif, despondent and looking exhausted, refused to listen.

  I thought of the letters Sherif had written in the months leading up to the experiment, his mood of foreboding at the prospect of what he called a ‘Herculean’ task. I had thought, reading these letters, that this vision of himself as the lonely hero labouring against the odds and his at times extravagant and sentimental language had seemed overly melodramatic. From his letters and writings, Muzafer Sherif saw himself in dramatic terms, as a social scientist labouring to reveal a profound truth, someone whose work was his life. This study was the end product of three years of funding and countless years of work. The failure of this study was more than a setback; it would have felt catastrophic. Still, he first blamed Carper and Kelman, and then his right-hand man Marvin Sussman, for the study’s lack of success, unable to admit even in the face of all the evidence that the theory he put forward was the element at fault.

  ‘He was devastated,’ OJ Harvey told me. ‘He hardly spoke for the next two days. He took it very badly and was deeply depressed.’ Sherif stayed in the tent by the edge of the birch grove and made it clear he wanted to be alone.

  Meanwhile, each of the men used the remaining days of the camp to deal with what had happened in their own way. Harvey and White grappled with what they would do now for their dissertation. Sussman did his best to keep himself busy and useful, trying to ignore the fact that Sherif was blaming him for the study’s failure. Kelman and Carper wrote detailed notes summarising how and why the study failed so that Sherif had an account to guide him in case there was a next time.

  In the last days of the camp, the boys felt abandoned. Jim Carper and Jack White no longer showed any interest in them, and looked tense and unhappy. Even the caretaker, who had been everywhere they went during the first couple of weeks, was nowhere to be seen. Walt remembers roaming aimlessly around the camp with a bunch of other boys, and at one point stopping to throw bricks at the old upright piano near the mess hall. ‘Why we did this I don’t know, but we destroyed that piano.’ Walt, the son of a piano teacher, who had been learning the instrument for five years before this camp, sounded mournful. I imagined the sound of the bricks hitting the keys, the crash of discordant notes, the piano booming and shrieking, the lid caving in, the front board gaping, the hammers splintered into pieces. Walt is still unsettled by the memory of it: ‘It was so out of character for me.’ I imagined how loud the silence would have seemed when it was over, with the boys looking at the piano split and tumbled in the dirt as if they were waiting for something to happen, but it would have been quiet, just the tick of insects and the rustle of the leaves nudged by the hot wind. ‘There was a sense we had of being on our own. There was no one stepping in and saying, “Hey, you can’t do that.”’

  And it was that moment that was most unsettling — that feeling that nothing they did mattered, no one would stop them, no adult was going to intervene and tell them what was or wasn’t against any rules. ‘When it was over I was not happy with myself. It was so out of character,’ Walt repeated.

  But there was a sense of freedom too. Brian remembered the relief of all b
eing back together as a single group, and wondered if it brought them closer together. ‘It reminds me of that sense of kinship you read about, when strangers have been through an experience together and they develop a bond. When it came down to it, we stuck together, didn’t we?’

  Brian’s words stayed with me. Yes, the boys had stuck together, but the same couldn’t be said for the men.

  For Sherif, remaining at the campsite was an unbearable prospect. The next day he wrote in his diary: ‘Talked with OJ and Jack in Panther campfire area from 2.00–5.30.’ They had sat on a log facing the cold fireplace. The day was overcast and the wind shivered the trees. Sherif sat with his elbows on his knees, smoking and staring into the fireplace. Harvey did most of the talking. Sherif didn’t take much persuading. ‘He was absolutely heartbroken,’ Harvey recalls. ‘But we all agreed we wanted to do it again. Sherif agreed that he had been pushing too hard and pushing all of us too hard and that he wasn’t the best one to be in charge.’ They went back and forth, ‘salving their wounds’, going over and over what had gone wrong. And what had gone right. ‘Jack and I told him we’d only do it again if I could be in charge.’