The Whistling Schoolboy and Other Stories of School Life

by Ruskin Bond

  There were just one or two boys who actually read books for pleasure. We tend to think of that era as one when there were no distractions such as television, computer games and the like. But reading has always been a minority pastime. People say children don’t read any more. This may be true of the vast majority, but I know many boys and girls who enjoy reading—far more than I encountered when I was a schoolboy. In those days there were comics and the radio and the cinema. I went to the cinema whenever I could, but that did not keep me from reading almost everything that came my way. And so it is today. Book readers are special people, and they will always turn to books as the ultimate pleasure. Those who do not read are the unfortunate ones. There’s nothing wrong with them, but they are missing out on one of life’s compensations and rewards. A great book is a friend that never lets you down. You can return to it again and again, and the joy first derived from it will still be there.

  I think it is fair to say that, when I was a boy, reading was my true religion. It helped me discover my soul.

  Here Comes Mr Oliver

  part from being our Scoutmaster, Mr Oliver taught us maths, a subject in which I had some difficulty obtaining pass marks. Sometimes I scraped through; usually I got something like twenty or thirty out of a hundred. ‘Failed again, Bond,’ Mr Oliver would say. ‘What will you do when you grow up?’ ‘Become a scoutmaster, sir.’

  ‘Scoutmasters don’t get paid. It’s an honorary job. You could become a cook. That would suit you.’ He hadn’t forgotten our Scout camp, when I had been the camp’s cook.

  If Mr Oliver was in a good mood, he’d give me grace marks, passing me by a mark or two. He wasn’t a hard man, but he seldom smiled. He was very dark, thin, stooped (from a distance he looked like a question mark), and balding. He was about forty, still a bachelor, and it was said that he had been unlucky in love—that the girl he was going to marry jilted him at the last moment, running away with a sailor while Mr Oliver waited at the church, ready for the wedding ceremony. No wonder he always had such a sorrowful look.

  Mr Oliver did have one inseparable companion: a dachshund, a snappy little ‘sausage’ of a dog, who looked upon the human race, and especially small boys, with a certain disdain and frequent hostility. We called him Hitler. (This was 1945, and the dictator was at the end of his tether.) He was impervious to overtures of friendship, and if you tried to pat or stroke him he would do his best to bite your fingers or your shin or ankle. However, he was devoted to Mr Oliver and followed him everywhere except into the classroom; this our Headmaster would not allow. You remember that old nursery rhyme:

  Mary had a little lamb,

  Its fleece was white as snow,

  And everywhere that Mary went

  The lamb was sure to go.

  Well, we made up our own version of the rhyme, and I must confess to having had a hand in its composition. It went like this:

  Olly had a little dog,

  It was never out of sight,

  And everyone that Olly met

  The dog was sure to bite!

  It followed him about the school grounds. It followed him when he took a walk through the pines to the Brockhuist tennis courts. It followed him into town and home again. Mr Oliver had no other friend, no other companion. The dog slept at the foot of Mr Oliver’s bed. It did not sit at the breakfast table, but it had buttered toast for breakfast and soup and crackers for dinner. Mr Oliver had to take his lunch in the dining hall with the staff and boys, but he had an arrangement with one of the bearers whereby a plate of dal, rice and chapattis made its way to Mr Oliver’s quarters and his well-fed pet.

  And then tragedy struck.

  Mr Oliver and Hitler were returning to school after an evening walk through the pines. It was dusk, and the light was fading fast. Out of the shadows of the trees emerged a lean and hungry panther. It pounced on the hapless dog, flung it across the road, seized it between its powerful jaws, and made off with its victim into the darkness of the forest.

  Mr Oliver was untouched but frozen into immobility for at least a minute. Then he began calling for help. Some bystanders, who had witnessed the incident, began shouting too. Mr Oliver ran into the forest, but there was no sign of dog or panther.

  Mr Oliver appeared to be a broken man. He went about his duties with a poker face, but we could all tell that he was grieving for his lost companion, for in the classroom he was listless and indifferent to whether or not we followed his calculations on the blackboard. In times of personal loss, the Highest Common Factor made no sense.

  Mr Oliver was no longer seen going on his evening walk. He stayed in his room, playing cards with himself. He played with his food, pushing most of it aside. There were no chapattis to send home.

  ‘Olly needs another pet,’ said Bimal, wise in the ways of adults.

  ‘Or a wife,’ said Tata, who thought on those lines.

  ‘He’s too old. He must be over forty.’

  ‘A pet is best,’ I said. ‘What about a parrot?’

  ‘You can’t take a parrot for a walk,’ said Bimal. ‘Oily wants someone to walk beside him.’

  ‘A cat maybe.’

  ‘Hitler hated cats. A cat would be an insult to Hitler’s memory.’

  ‘Then he needs another dachshund. But there aren’t any around here.’

  ‘Any dog will do. We’ll ask Chimpu to get us a pup.’

  Chimpu ran the tuck shop. He lived in the Chotta Shimla bazaar, and occasionally we would ask him to bring us tops or marbles, a corflic or other little things that we couldn’t get in school. Five of us Boy Scouts contributed a rupee each, which we gave to Chimpu and asked him to get us a pup. ‘A good breed,’ we told him, ‘not a mongrel.’

  The next evening Chimpu turned up with a pup that seemed to be a combination of at least five different breeds, all good ones no doubt. One ear lay flat, the other stood upright. It was spotted like a Dalmatian, but it had the legs of a spaniel and the tail of a Pomeranian. It was floppy and playful, and the tail wagged a lot, which was more than Hitler’s ever did.

  ‘It’s quite pretty,’ said Tata. ‘Must be a female.’

  ‘He may not want a female,’ said Bimal.

  ‘Let’s give it a try,’ I said.

  ‘During our play hour, before the bell rang for supper, we left the pup on the steps outside Mr Oliver’s front door. Then we knocked, and sped into the hibiscus bush that lined the pathway.

  Mr Oliver opened the door. He locked down at the pup with an expressionless face. The pup began to paw at Mr Oliver’s shoes, loosening one of his laces in the process.

  ‘Away with you!’ muttered Mr Oliver. ‘Buzz off!’ And he pushed the pup away, gently but firmly, and closed the door.

  We went through the same procedure again, but the result was much the same. We now had a playful pup on our hands, and Chimpu had gone home for the night. We would have to conceal it in the dormitory.

  At first we hid it in Bimal’s locker, but it began to yelp and struggled to get out. Tata took it into the shower room, but it wouldn’t stay there either. It began running around the dormitory, playing with socks, shoes, slippers, and anything else it could get hold of.

  ‘Watch out!’ hissed one of the boys. ‘Here comes Fisher!’

  Mrs Fisher, the Headmaster’s wife, was on her nightly rounds, checking to make sure we were all in bed and not up to some natural mischief. I grabbed the pup and hid it under my blanket. It was quiet there, happy to nibble at my toes. When Mrs Fisher had gone, I let the pup loose again, and for the rest of the night it had the freedom of the dormitory.

  At the crack of dawn, before first light, Bimal and I sped out of the dormitory in our pyjamas, taking the pup with us. We banged hard on Mr Oliver’s door, and kept knocking until we heard footsteps approaching. As soon as the door was slowly opened, we pushed the pup inside and ran for our lives.

  Mr Oliver came to class as usual, but there was no pup with him. Three or four days passed, and still no sign of the pup! Had he passed
it on to someone else, or simply let it wander off on its own?

  ‘Here comes Oily!’ called Bimal, from our vantage point near the school bell.

  Mr Oliver was setting out for his evening walk. He was carrying a strong walnut-wood walking stick—to keep panthers at bay, no doubt. He looked neither left nor right, and if he noticed us watching him, Mr Oliver gave no sign. But then, scurrying behind him was the pup! The creature of many good breeds was accompanying Mr Oliver on his walk. It had been well brushed and was wearing a bright red collar. Like Mr Oliver, it took no notice of us. It walked along beside its new master.

  Mr Oliver and the little pup were soon inseparable companions, and my friends and I were quite pleased with ourselves. Mr Oliver gave absolutely no indication that he knew where the pup had come from, but when the end-of-term exams were over, and Bimal and I were sure that we had failed our maths papers, we were surprised to find that we had passed after all—with grace marks!

  ‘Good old Oily!’ said Bimal. ‘So he knew all the time.’ Tata, of course, did not need grace marks—he was a wizard at maths—but Bimal and I decided we would thank Mr Oliver for his kindness.

  ‘Nothing to thank me for,’ said Mr Oliver gruffly, but with a twist at the corners of his mouth, which was the nearest he came to a smile. ‘I’ve seen enough of you two in junior school. It’s high time you went up to the senior school—and God help you there!’

  The Lady in White

  (An extract from Mr Oliver’s diary)

  ghost on the main highway past our school. She’s known as Bhoot-Aunty—a spectral apparition who appears to motorists on their way to Sanjauli. She waves down passing cars and asks for a lift; and if you give her one, you are liable to have an accident.

  This lady in white is said to be the revenant of a young woman who was killed in a car accident not far from here, a few months ago. Several motorists claim to have seen her. Oddly enough, pedestrians don’t come across her.

  Miss Ramola, Miss D’Costa and I are the exceptions.

  I had accompanied some of the staff and boys to the girls’ school to see a hockey match, and afterwards the ladies asked me to accompany them back as it was getting dark and they had heard there was a panther about.

  ‘The only panther is Mr Oliver,’ remarked Miss D’Costa, who was spending the weekend with Anjali Ramola.

  ‘Such a harmless panther,’ said Anjali.

  I wanted to say that panthers always attack women who wore outsize earrings (such as Miss D’Costa’s) but my gentlemanly upbringing prevented a rude response.

  As we turned the corner near our school gate, Miss D’Costa cried out, ‘Oh, do you see that strange woman sitting on the parapet wall?’

  Sure enough, a figure clothed in white was resting against the wall, its face turned away from us.

  ‘Could it—could it be—Bhoot-Aunty?’ stammered Miss D’Costa.

  The two ladies stood petrified in the middle of the road. I stepped forward and asked, ‘Who are you, and what can we do for you?’

  The ghostly apparition raised its arms, got up suddenly and rushed past me. Miss D’Costa let out a shriek. Anjali turned and fled. The figure in white flapped about, then tripped over its own winding-cloth, and fell in front of me.

  As it got to its feet, the white sheet fell away and revealed—Mirchi!

  ‘You wicked boy!’ I shouted. ‘Just what do you think you are up to?’

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ he gasped. ‘It’s just a joke. Bhoot-Aunty, sir!’ And he fled the scene.

  When the ladies had recovered, I saw them home and promised to deal severely with Mirchi. But on second thoughts I decided to overlook his prank. Miss D’Costa deserved getting a bit of a fright for calling me a panther.

  I had picked up Mirchi’s bedsheet from the road, and after supper I carried it into the dormitory and placed it on his bed without any comment. He was about to get into bed, and looked up at me in some apprehension.

  ‘Er—thank you, sir,’ he said.

  ‘An enjoyable performance,’ I told him. ‘Next time, make it more convincing.’

  After making sure that all the dormitory and corridor lights were out, I went for a quiet walk on my own. I am not averse to a little solitude. I have no objection to my own company. This is different from loneliness, which can assail you even when you are amongst people. Being a misfit in a group of boisterous party-goers can be a lonely experience. But being alone as a matter of choice is one of life’s pleasures.

  As I passed the same spot where Mirchi had got up to mischief, I was surprised to see a woman sitting by herself on the low parapet wall. Another lover of solitude, I thought. I gave her no more than a glance. She was looking the other way. A pale woman, dressed very simply. I had gone some distance when a thought suddenly came to me. Had I just passed Bhoot-Aunty? The real bhoot? The pale woman in white had seemed rather ethereal.

  I stopped, turned, and looked again.

  The lady had vanished.

  Missing Person: H.M.

  (An extract from Mr Oliver’s diary)

  ensational disappearance of Headmaster.

  He hasn’t been seen for two days, three nights. Stepped out of his house just after daybreak, saying he was going for a walk, and did not return.

  Was he taken by the leopard? Had he been kidnapped?

  Had he lost his footing and fallen off a cliff?

  H.M.’s wife in distress. Police called in. Inspector Keemat Lal, C.I.D. asks questions of everyone but is none the wiser, it appears. He is more at home with dead bodies than missing persons.

  Finally he asks: ‘Did he take anything with him? A bag, a suitcase? Did he have money on him?’

  ‘I don’t know about money,’ said Mrs H. ‘But he took his gun.’

  ‘He must have gone after that leopard,’ I surmised. ‘I hope the leopard hasn’t got him.’

  And so once again we all trooped off into the forest—the Inspector, two constables, MrTuli, four senior boys (including Tata and Mirchi) and myself. After two hours of slogging through mist and drizzle we made enquiries in two neighbouring villages without receiving much by way of information or encouragement. One small boy told us he had seen a man with a gun wandering about further down the valley, so we trudged on for another two hours, the portly Inspector Keemat Lal perspiring profusely and cursing all the while. Some of our police officers acquire a colourful vocabulary in the course of their careers.

  Trudging back to school, I got into conversation with Inspector Keemat Lal, who had a tendency to reminisce. ‘What was the closest shave you ever had?’ I asked. ‘The closest shave. Oddly enough, it was when I went into a barber’s shop for a shave. This was in Agra, when I was a sub-inspector.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well, the barber was a friendly enough fellow, a bit of a joker. After lathering my cheeks and stropping his razor, he casually remarked, ‘How easy it would be for me to cut your throat, sir!’

  ‘I didn’t take him seriously, but I resented his familiarity and the bad taste of his remark. So I got up from the chair, wiped the soap from my face, and walked out of the shop. The next customer gratefully took my place.’

  ‘Of course he was joking,’ I said.

  ‘So I thought. But next day, when I went on duty, I learnt that he had cut the throat of one of his customers. Quite possibly the one who took my place. The barber was a homicidal maniac. He had been acting strangely for some time, and something had snapped in his head.’

  ‘Getting up and leaving—that was good reasoning on your part.’

  ‘No, reasoning didn’t come into it. It was pure instinct. When it comes to self-preservation, instinct is more reliable than reason.’

  No sign of H.M., no further news of his whereabouts, not even a sighting. The return journey was even more arduous as it was uphill all the way. Everyone complained of thirst, and at the first small shop we came to, I had to buy soft drinks for everyone, although the policemen were hoping for something stronger. Arrivin
g at school, we straggled into H.M.’s garden just as it was getting dark. Mrs H opened the front door for us. She was beaming. And no wonder. For there was H.M. sitting in his favourite armchair, enjoying a cup of tea!

  No thanks for our efforts and no tea either, not even for the policemen.

  It transpired that H.M. had been feeling very depressed for some time, on account of his being unable to master the intricacies of Kreisler’s Violin Sonata, and in a fit of frustration and anger he had smashed his violin, then taken off with his gun, meaning to shoot himself. He had spent a day in the forest, a night in a seedy hotel, and a day and a night in the Barog tunnel and railway waiting room, before deciding that the Violin Sonata could wait for another violin.

  ‘Cracked,’ said Mirchi, not for the first time. ‘Sir, are all Headmasters like this?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ I hastened to assure him. ‘Some of them are quite sane.’

  Miss Babcock’s Big Toe

  f two people are thrown together for a long time, they can became either close friends or sworn enemies. Thus, it was with Tata and me when we both went down with mumps and had to spend a fortnight together in the school hospital. It wasn’t really a hospital—just a five-bed ward in a small cottage on the approach road to our prep-school in Chhota Shimla. It was supervised by a retired nurse, an elderly matron called Miss Babcock, who was all but stone deaf.

  Miss Babcock was an able nurse, but she was a fidgety, fussy person, always dashing about from ward to dispensary and to her own room, as a result the boys called her Miss Shuttlecock. As she couldn’t hear us, she didn’t mind. But her hearing difficulty did create something of a problem, both for her and for her patients. If someone in the ward felt ill late at night, he had to shout or ring a bell, and she heard neither. So, someone had to get up and fetch her.