But it was his next statement that made me sit bolt upright, clutching the armrest of my chair with a deathly grip as he announced ‘an exciting new development, which we hope may be the beginning of a long and successful partnership with our sister school, Mulberry House, and which, as you will already know, begins as of next week in Sixth Form . . .’
I said: ‘Excuse me, Bursar. But what exactly are you talking about?’
The Bursar gave me a look. ‘I’m talking about Mulberry House,’ he said, ‘and our plan to introduce a system of consolidated classes in certain subjects at Sixth-Form level.’
Consolidated classes, forsooth.
‘You mean mixed classes, Bursar?’ I said.
He gave a rather narrow smile.
‘Our boys and Mulberry girls?’
‘That’s usually what we mean by mixed, Roy,’ said the Bursar, playing to the gallery. ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure you’re more than satisfactorily equipped to prevent any inappropriate behaviour.’
I made a sound much like the one favoured by the Old Head.
‘Don’t say you didn’t know about this,’ the Bursar went on impatiently. ‘The details were e-mailed to you months ago.’
‘I don’t do e-mail, Bursar,’ I said.
‘Don’t do female, did you say?’ The Bursar was hitting his stride now, playing for laughs at my expense. ‘Well, you heard the Head, Roy. We’re all facing changes. Besides, with class sizes as they are, I thought you’d be grateful for the extra bodies.’
I suppose he had a point there. Last year, my Lower Sixth Latin set consisted of four boys, one of whom dropped the subject at Christmas in favour of Business Studies.
Still – girls. Mulberry girls. There’s something about our sister school that sets the whole of my being on edge. I don’t know if it’s the girls themselves – the rolled-up skirts, the giggling and the look of superiority – or if it’s the mistresses, most of them dowdier versions of the girls; or the current Headmistress, a bottle blonde of indeterminate age and increasingly predatory temperament, whose hemlines over the past ten years have risen in inverse proportion to her dwindling chances of snaring a man.
But in thirty-four years at St Oswald’s, I’ve usually managed to avoid dealing with our sister school, linked as it is with St Oswald’s by our own Foundation, as well as by decades of collaboration in school plays, concerts and trips abroad.
‘Gods preserve us,’ I muttered.
Sitting beside me, Robbie Roach gave a lecherous snigger. ‘I think you’re being ungrateful,’ he said. ‘What I’d give to have a few of those Mulberry girls in my class.’
Robbie teaches History – so badly that Bob Strange ensures he never has a Sixth Form. Instead he runs field trips and Scout Camp, which he enjoys enormously, whilst maintaining the pretence that this takes up a great deal of his valuable leisure time, and therefore deserves compensation.
Now he gave me a wink and hissed: ‘Berry fresh, old boy. Berry fresh.’
To hear him you might imagine an elderly roué of the kind featured in one of Eric’s French films. In fact, he is harmless; all talk; unable to control his hair, let alone his classes. The idea that he, of all people, might be capable of seducing a Mulberry girl – or even getting one to hand in her homework on time – was beyond ludicrous.
I addressed the real enemy. ‘Bursar. May I venture to ask whether all subjects will benefit from this proposed consolidation? Or is Classics the only area in need of – er – curricular corsetry?’
Robbie Roach sniggered again.
The Bursar gave him a sharp look.
‘Just the usual,’ he said. ‘And the Languages Department.’
By the usual I guessed he meant Music and Drama, both departments which have had more to do with Mulberry House than most over the past few years. As a result, their members of staff have gone native to an alarming extent, staging productions of musicals with exclamation marks in the title, running yoga classes after School and getting in touch with their feminine side.
All very well, I suppose, but it’s an open secret that Mulberry House wants a merger, which St Oswald’s, like a cautious bachelor faced with the threat of matrimony, has so far neatly avoided.
This seemed to me the thin end of the wedge. It’s not that I don’t like girls, of course, but I prefer to like them from afar. I also like kittens and ice cream, but would rather not see them brought into class.
Harrington gave me a sympathetic look. ‘I know this must all seem very new,’ he said. ‘But we must face the facts. The dinosaurs have had their day. It’s time for St Oswald’s to evolve. Survival is our priority now. And we will survive. Well, maybe not all of us—’ His smile grew a little more pronounced. ‘But those who face the future instead of clinging to the past. They’ll survive. We’ll survive. Because we are survivors!’
Once more, the Common Room rose en masse, to give him a standing ovation. I remained seated, though Eric stood, clapping furiously with the rest. Harrington accepted their tribute with an air of amusement – and maybe a hint of veiled contempt, which of course only I saw. Once more, I thought his gaze shifted to mine, as if to assess the potential threat. Is this how the snake-charmer feels, when he locks eyes with the cobra? And if so, I can’t help wondering which is the charmer, and which is the snake?
4
Michaelmas Term, 2005
In every Common Room in the world, certain well-known tribes are represented. The Suit, brought into the School by chance on a plague ship during the Sixties, as exemplified by Bob Strange; the Stickler, by Dr Devine; the Old Boy, who, like Eric Scoones, can’t seem to keep away from the place, and, of course, the Tweed Jacket, of which I am the prototype. Ladies are either Dragons or, most often, Low-Fat Yoghurts, a damp subspecies of female who sits in a corner, discussing by turns the latest diet, or scandal, or episode of Neighbours. And then there is the Snake-Charmer; a type that occurs only once or twice in a Master’s lifetime. How strange now to see Johnny Harrington reborn into such a disguise; how strange, and yet I am not surprised. Haven’t I always known he’d come back? Haven’t I known it for twenty years?
He arrived in my life at the age of fourteen, in the autumn of ’81. He was new to St Oswald’s; a seventh-term boy with an impressive academic report and a flawless behavioural record. Shiny hair of impeccable (though slightly girlish) cut; a face unmarked by adolescent acne; even his uniform looked neater than the other boys’; his shoes polished to an alarming gloss and his School tie knotted in just the right way—
I’ll admit it: I disliked him on sight. There was something cold about Harrington; the same coldness, perhaps, that defines our own Bob Strange. He was polite; he was handsome; he was correct; he always said sir. But he had a way of saying it, and a way of looking at you that made you want to check whether your fly was zipped up, and made you aware of the sweat stains under your armpits and the chalk marks on your jacket and the mistake you made in Latin translation that you thought you could pass off as a joke—
His Latin, I found, was excellent. He’d been home-schooled until he was nine, after which time he had been placed in one of our local Middle Schools, and by the time he reached St Oswald’s he was already more than up to standard. This pleased me at first; one of the problems of seventh-term entrants was that barely half of them had studied Latin at all, and it was my job, as the most junior Classicist, to catch them up over lunchtimes and Breaks, while Dr Shakeshafte, my Head of Department (who also happened to be the Headmaster), sat in his office, listening to the cricket and eating cheese against his doctor’s advice.
Harrington, however, needed no help from me. He did his work quickly and accurately and with a look of polite boredom on his face, never volunteering answers, but never making a mistake either. He was easy to ignore in favour of those boys who genuinely found the subject taxing; my group numbered thirty-five, and although I didn’t exactly neglect Harrington, I’ll admit he was easy to overlook. So easy, in fact, that when the first compl
aint came, it took me altogether by surprise.
Remember, times were different then. Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. The Yorkshire Ripper had just been condemned; Charles had just married Diana. Classics still had an empire then, consisting of three Masters; an office; a section in the School Library and various classrooms, annexes and stock cupboards. At forty-one, I was at my peak; sprightly of step and speedy of brain. I was no novice, however. I’d been at St Oswald’s for a decade, having taught at a couple of inferior schools before then, and I was reaping the rewards of experience. The boys knew and respected me – after all, I’d taught most of them at one time or another.
As for the staff – St Oswald’s Masters tend to stay put once they have been appointed, and several of that long-ago crew are still on board the old ship today – among them, the Chaplain, Eric Scoones and even our own Dr Devine, younger and even less bearable at only thirty-six years old, with all the misplaced arrogance that usually comes with the territory. I had my own seat in the Common Room, its cushions unmarked by the passage of years, and a leonine share of the timetable that now seems impossibly generous.
Most of my colleagues at the School – many of them Tweed Jackets of the kind I was destined to become – seemed startlingly decrepit to my untutored eyes. I baulked at St Oswald’s tradition by not attending Assemblies, by my unorthodox methods, and by infusing my lessons, or so I thought, with something a little more colourful than mensa, mensa, mensam (personally I’ve always found that the noun merda illustrates the First Declension just as well, and for some reason stays with the boys for a whole lot longer).
In those days there were the three of us in the Classics Department: Dr ‘Touchy’ Feeley, an irascible Oxbridge man approaching his Century; myself and the Headmaster, Dr Shakeshafte, who was Head of Department in name only, and on those infrequent occasions when the timetable required a third Classics Master to be available.
Like so many Headmasters, Shakeshafte did as little teaching as possible, leaving myself and Dr Feeley to run operations in his name, and spent the best part of his day in his inner sanctum, engaged in head-masterly activities as vital as they were unfathomable. Of course, when it came to complaints, Shakeshafte was always the first to find out, which was what happened about four weeks into the term when I was summoned (that’s the only word to describe it) to his office one rainy lunchtime.
‘Enter.’
The Headmaster’s office was a large, brown room overlooking the Quad, with Gothic windows and a predominant aroma of leather and cheese. The Head was at his desk, apparently writing a letter, although I was sure that until he heard my knock he had been listening to the wireless as usual. A gold-nibbed pen the size of a torpedo between his large fingers, he did not acknowledge me as I came in, but ponderously finished his letter, signed it with a flourish, and then began another, as I waited in silence on the small Oriental rug in front of his desk.
That was the Old Head’s style, you know. A bludgeoning rudeness permeated everything he did, and his contempt for anyone incapable of matching it was legendary. I waited for precisely five minutes, watching the rain crawl down the mullioned window, then I said: ‘I can see you’re busy, Headmaster. I’ll try to come back at a more convenient time.’
I turned to the door. I would have left, too; and the Head must have known I’d call his bluff because he put down the torpedo, stood up and faced me with the look that had reduced so many boys to pulp and earned him the nickname of SS – or ‘Shitter’ Shakeshafte.
I was not a boy, however, and I was not unmanned. The Head was a bully of the old school, and the only way to deal with bullies is to face them down. It wasn’t easy. There was something vaguely pachydermic about the Old Head; a distribution of his not inconsiderable weight that was more rhino than man. His eyes were small, in great, bloodshot orbs. Even the sound he made as he got to his feet – a kind of inarticulate oof! – put me irresistibly in mind of Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, which Eric Scoones’s French Sixth-Form class happened to be studying that year.
‘Please, Headmaster,’ I said. ‘Don’t bother to get up on my account.’
He oofed again, and damned my impertinence. ‘Suppose you think it’s funny, eh? Bloody comedian. Well, we’ve had a complaint. Here.’ And he flung a piece of paper in my direction, which I caught, and found to be a letter on notepaper headed Dr R. Harrington, MA (Oxon).
It wasn’t the first time I’d had a complaint. Of course I get more of them nowadays, because boys know their rights (or think they do), and behaviour that would have earned them a reprimand, detention or even the cane in those days has now been identified as a sign of learning difficulty, hyperactivity, dyslexia or Attention Deficit Disorder (which we, in the unsympathetic old days, used to call Not Paying Attention), all of which conditions deserve sensitive treatment rather than a kick in the pants.
Personally I found the old treatment quite effective (and so did the boys), but the same faction that has since outlawed the term ‘blackboard’ and spawned such linguistic monsters as ‘chairperson’, ‘differently abled’ and ‘academically challenged’ obviously thinks otherwise. Nowadays I get a complaint almost every time I give a boy a detention, but I mostly tend to ignore them – as, in fact, do the boys themselves. In the old days, though, a complaint was a serious matter, and I racked my brains to understand what I might have done to upset Dr Harrington, MA.
‘Who is this Harrington, anyway?’ demanded the Head.
I filled him in on the boy’s history, at least the little I knew of it. Then I read the letter, and the mist began to clear. I can’t remember the wording, of course, but certain phrases have stayed in my mind. Lack of moral guidance was one; and so was vocabulary unsuitable to the classroom, and repeated use of foul and obscene language.
‘But I don’t use foul and obscene language,’ I protested. It was true; I’d never even sworn at a boy, and God knows I’d had reason to once or twice.
‘Well, that’s not what the boy says,’ oofed the Head. ‘In fact the bloody boy has made a list of all the unsuitable words you’ve been teaching them, and passed it on to his bloody parents, who, if you’d bothered to read his bloody file, are both of them bloody Bible-bashers who think that Mary Whitehouse is a dangerous bloody liberal—’
‘Nicely put, Headmaster,’ I proffered, admiring his alliteration.
At this, HM did everything but lower his head and charge. He handed me the list on a sheet of vocabulary paper, neatly copied out in Harrington’s spiky handwriting.
Merda, merda, merdam—
‘Ah. Yes. I see. But how anyone could take offence at that—’
‘Obviously, someone did,’ snapped the Head.
‘The boy’s just a podex with merda for brains—’
‘What?’
‘Merely a figure of speech, Headmaster.’
‘And precisely the kind of thing – I mean, what kind of an idiot—’
I could see HM was getting dangerously overwrought. ‘Headmaster,’ I said. ‘The subject is Latin. The words are in the dictionary. They appear on the syllabus—’ (Well, maybe not podex, I told myself. Or even merda.) ‘And all of this—’ Once more I broke off to brandish the vocabulary page. ‘All this is simply an aggravated case of what my colleagues in the French Department call honi soit qui mal y pense.’
‘Oof,’ said Shakeshafte, but I could see that the red mist was clearing. ‘Well, I don’t want to hear any more of it. I’ll thank you to stick to mensa in the future. This is Classics, not comedy.’
I acknowledged that it was. Forty-four years a Master, and I don’t think old Shakeshafte had ever smiled, let alone made a joke. He didn’t like me; and yet I knew he would stand by me – Shakeshafte was old-school through and through, and I knew that whatever reprimand he might give to a colleague in private, in public he would back them to the hilt.
All the same, I resented it. I’d thought young Harrington a good pupil, and yet here he was, noting down my throwaway comments and rep
orting on me like a School Inspector, encouraging his parents to take umbrage—
Damn it, there was something sinister about it. Something that spoilt my pleasure in the entire form. I’d never tried to be popular, but until that moment I’d thought myself approachable; seasoned enough to be comfortable, and yet still young enough at heart to understand what it was like to be fourteen and to enjoy a laugh. Until then, I had believed I had a rapport with the boys in my form. I stayed in the form-room at lunchtimes; I joined in their conversations, even made the occasional joke. My nickname was Quasimodo – because I lived in the Bell Tower – and word around School was that I was mostly OK, except with bullies and homework evaders, and that my classes, though tough, were probably more fun than most.
But somehow, with Harrington, something had changed. I didn’t notice it at first – he really was such a colourless boy – but it seemed to me that Michaelmas term that my form had not quite come together the way it normally did. Sometimes it happens that a form is shaped by a few dominant personalities; sometimes a rift between two rival groups can make for a form that is ill at ease. That year’s 3S were a diffident lot, with heads that seemed forever bowed and eyes that refused to make contact. It took me two weeks to learn their names – as a rule I know them in a single day.
There were other anomalies, too. Usually in a class there’s at least one clown; one bully; one fighter; one rebel; one butt. In September ’81 there seemed hardly any definition; no one seemed to step out of line; and the faces that peered out from behind their desk-lids were bland as rows of cheeses. And yet, there was an atmosphere. Something disagreeable. Something sly, that sniggered and watched.
It took me some time to connect this with little Johnny Harrington. The boy wasn’t especially popular. He didn’t play to the gallery. He had no apparent interest in girls, societies or sports – although he was quite a good swimmer, and even once won a House trophy in the 100-metre crawl. He always gave in his homework on time, never even failed to hand in one of his library books. He was friendly with two other seventh-term boys; Nutter, who, despite a promising name, gave no redeeming sign of eccentricity, and Spikely, the tattletale; a neat, bespectacled little boy with a curiously alert and intellectual look, belied by his exam results.
Different Class Page 4