I felt as if my prayers had failed, or I had. I did my best to believe in the ones I mumbled on the night before starting at the new school. Though the prospect made me feel apprehensively excited, I slept before the sun went down. Hours later I wakened in the dark. The barking of a dog had roused me, and now another one started to yap. I tried to ignore them, but curiosity sent me out of bed. I stumbled to the window and eased up the sash. As I craned across the corner of the table and out of the window, a breeze set the leaves of the trees in the graveyard swarming and then fumbled at my face.
The dogs were in the back yards of two houses down the road, near the allotments. The only activity I could see was the scurrying of a few fallen leaves across the grass between the graves. The dogs were as noisy as ever, but I was about to close the window when a movement drew my attention towards the allotments. For a moment I imagined one of the stone figures in the dimness beneath the trees had come to life. No, someone had stooped to pick up some item. No doubt a gardener was collecting vegetables, even if it seemed an odd hour for the task. The figure straightened up with its prize, and I didn’t want to be caught watching. I inched the sash down, shutting out some of the canine clamour, and went back to bed. I was almost asleep when a thought overtook me, after which I found it hard to sleep. There was a hedge between the cemetery and the allotments, which meant the figure couldn’t have been where I’d thought I saw it. It had been in the graveyard.
2 - The First Day
It was saying goodbye at the end of my road that made me feel how much my life had changed. “See you sometime,” Bobby said, and marched across the tram tracks as soon as the policeman on point duty beckoned all the children who were waiting at the kerb.
Just then I didn’t understand how much of her performance was bravado. I thought her attitude went with her broad straight shoulders, not to mention her prominent chin and long nose, which she was fond of pointing at anyone who disagreed with her—she only had to raise her face an inch to make it haughty, a trick she’d learned from her mother. “Well,” I said to Jim with some bravado of my own, “now we’re the Tremendous Two.”
We’d walked to school with Bobby for years, but that wasn’t what I had in mind. Originally our crew, which we’d called a gang because that was the word you used, had been the Faithful Five. The name was my idea, derived from books by Gnid Blyton—at least, that was how I used to read Enid’s signature that was printed on every cover. We were a benign bunch, whose most daring exploits included braving the police station to hand in a wallet we’d found in the park and tracking down a lost dog that took all of us to capture it, leaving Bobby with a bite for which she’d had to have a jab. Then Paddy’s and Sean’s family had moved to Dublin, reducing us to the Tremendous Three, and now I felt as if we’d lost another member—felt that the dual carriageway, on the far side of which Bobby was talking to girls in the same grey uniform at the bus stop, might as well have been as wide as the Irish Sea. “That’s us,” Jim agreed, though he didn’t sound anxious to linger over the subject, perhaps in case any of the boys around us overheard. “Hey, here’s a tram.”
The route was one of the last in Liverpool. I’d liked trams more than buses ever since I could remember—the metallic squeal of wheels on the tracks, the peremptory clang of the bell, the crackle and spark of the pulley on the wire. In those days we wouldn’t have dared to cross to the tracks until the policeman signalled that we could, and we reached the stop in the middle of the dual carriageway with just seconds to spare. We rode on the top deck as far as Queens Drive, and couldn’t resist tipping back the wooden seat to face the wrong way before we clattered downstairs. Now there was nothing to distract us from the prospect of the day, and the bus stop at the crossroads was crowded with boys in the green Holy Ghost Grammar uniform.
All of them were older than us, and quite a few let us know with disparaging glances. “Here’s a pair of tiddlers,” someone remarked, and another said “More like a fat frog and a shrimp.” Since Jim ignored this, I did my best, though the colour of my face must have given me away. We were so inexperienced that when a bus drew up we assumed everyone would board in some sort of order, but even when we managed to gain a foothold on the platform, several boys tried to shove us aside. “Watch out, fatso,” the first of them told Jim.
“I wouldn’t say that to him,” I said with relish.
I ought to have restrained myself, I think now. I could have been setting him up for a fight, even if the bus driver would have intervened—in those days adults often did. Jim might have been plump, but underneath was solid muscle, and most of his ample width wasn’t fat. He grasped the metal pole at the corner of the platform and used his entire back to propel the boy against his friends, who staggered backwards like a slapstick routine, barely managing to stay on their feet. “That’s shown them,” I muttered to Jim.
His foe’s face had turned mottled wherever acne left some room. “We’ll get you,” he said.
It was a standard threat meant to leave us feeling vulnerable. “Go to bed,” Jim retorted, since wishing him to hell was stronger language than we were supposed to use, and his adversary elbowed his way along the downstairs aisle to glare at a smaller boy until he gave his seat up.
We’d forgotten about him by the time the bus reached the school. I didn’t understand why, having piled off the platform, everyone immediately quietened down, and then I saw a priest waiting just inside the school gates. Both tall gateposts bore a stone dove, a holy symbol somewhat undermined by the dungy whitish crown a rival bird had planted on the left-hand sculpture, I thought it best not to look at Jim in case we made each other laugh, a reaction I could see the priest was unlikely to appreciate. He was the youngest priest I’d ever seen, which might have been why he was keeping his face as severe as his black robe and the celluloid collar that hemmed in his neck. I didn’t grasp my mistake until I heard a boy so old he didn’t have to wear a cap say “Good morning, Brother O’Toole.” All the boys with caps raised them while saying “Good morning, sir,” and I was nervous of stumbling over the ritual. I was glad that Jim performed it first, but the man I’d taken for a priest was unimpressed. “First day,” he said as if this wasn’t much of an excuse. “Name?”
“Jim Bailey, sir.”
“Bailey. Make sure your tie is knotted properly in future.” Brother O’Toole was already scrutinising me as though he wouldn’t be satisfied until he found a fault, “Your name, boy,” he said, plainly expecting not to have to ask.
“Dominic Sheldrake, sir.”
“Sheldrake.” His tone made it clear that I shouldn’t have included my first name. “You’ll need to learn to speak up at Holy Ghost,” he said. “You won’t be staying quiet in class.”
“No, sir,” I blurted, fearing silence wasn’t allowed.
“Cut along, both of you. You’ve much to learn about how to conduct yourselves here, and the sooner you start the better.”
I was afraid that some of the parade of boys doffing caps might have observed my humiliation. I felt half my age and acutely out of place, feelings aggravated by the sight of the school towards which everyone was trooping. The elongated two-storey red-brick building was enormously larger than Bobby’s and our old school—as wide, I thought, as a street was long. The daunting prospect made the gravel underfoot feel like a penance, and I wasn’t halfway along the drive when my feet began to ache so much that I ventured onto the extensive lawn. At once Brother O’Toole’s thin sharp voice cut through the gnashing of gravel. “Sheldrake, keep to the path.”
My face was still blazing by the time Jim and I reached the school. The broad central doors were for masters, one of whom was striding in while his black gown flapped back from his shoulders, and the pupils had a side entrance half the size. Beyond it coat hooks bristled on the walls of an extensive alcove at the near end of a corridor. A determinedly dour-faced boy who I gathered was a prefect showed us the back of his hand to indicate the nearest hooks. “New boys hang there,” he s
aid as if daring us to misunderstand.
The day was so cloudlessly hot that it could almost have been mocking our incarceration, and we’d left our coats at home. Since there were only a few empty hooks, Jim hung his cap over mine, “Best pals, are you?” the prefect said.
“We’re good ones,” Jim admitted, and I mumbled “That’s us.”
“So long as that’s the most you are. We don’t want any pansies here.”
Anger overcame my shyness, and I returned his stare. “We’ve never met one up till now.”
Beyond a pair of fire doors the corridor led past a flight of bare stone stairs and met us with smells of the school—floor polish, chalk dust, boyish sweat and the cloth of a multitude of uniforms. The passage overlooked an empty schoolyard and then a playing field bracketed by football posts, while internal windows hid classrooms behind frosted glass. A large vague murmur let us know that the double doors at the end of the corridor belonged to an assembly hall.
It was two storeys high and full of several hundred boys, who sat on backless benches fixed to the uncarpeted wooden floor. Sunlight slanted through windows more than halfway up the wall, and I couldn’t help finding their inaccessibility reminiscent of a prison. Prefects stood at the corners of the hall, and the nearest crooked a jerky finger at us. “New boys sit in front,” he called. “Get a move on. Don’t run.”
We’d only just sat down at the far end of the bench closest to the stage when the general murmur was wiped out by the rustle and shuffle of a mass of boys rising to their feet. Teachers were emerging onstage through a doorway at the back. The monks came first, followed by the masters in their gowns, which barely fluttered with the pace of the procession. Several dozen men lined up in front of chairs at the rear of the stage before a final monk strode to the front. “Good morning, boys,” he said in a high voice that I could have thought was being strangled by his collar.
“Good morning, headmaster.”
Jim and I had been seconds late in standing up, and now our response lagged behind the chorus. Mine was so belated that the silence isolated the last syllable, which sounded unintentionally derisive. “For you new boys,” he said and fixed me with a glance, “I am Brother Trainer.”
That’s what I heard, which suggested the threat of being trained like an animal. I didn’t realise until I saw his name in The Good Spirit, the school magazine, that it was Treanor. “Once I was like every one of you,” he said.
Apparently he’d been a pupil at the school. Had he really felt as nervous as I did, and made to feel smaller by everything he encountered? Just then I was preoccupied with how he’d grown to look. His head was a little too large for his body, and tapered from a high broad shiny forehead towards a small triangular chin, aggravating the resemblance to a balloon pumped out of his round collar. “See that you make full use of your years at this school,” he said. “Every one of you is worthy of the Holy Ghost, or you would not be here.”
Perhaps he didn’t just mean the Eleven-plus, the examination we’d all had to sit to qualify for admission, but he brought it to mind. These days even the assumptions it implied about the children it was testing seem impossibly remote: the decimals and fractions and the other calculations the Arithmetic paper expected us to master before we reached our teens, the parsing of sentences and correction of grammar in General English, the close reading of extracts that Comprehension required, the numerical puzzles and mixed-up sentences that made up General Intelligence and Knowledge, the infrequent opportunities for creativity afforded by Essays and Compositions… Back then I was haunted by a sentence for correction in which I’d failed to see any mistake: The bishop and another fellow then entered the hall. Years later I learned you were supposed to refer to the bishop and another gentleman, a distinction I found finicky even then, but I was still trying to solve the problem as Brother Treanor said “Your years at Holy Ghost will give you gifts for life. One gift is hope. One gift is faith. One gift is truth.”
In that case I’ve kept just one of them. He had a good deal more to say, though nothing I recall now, before he led the school in prayer. “I believe in God”—I joined in without faltering, since the words of the Apostles’ Creed were so familiar that I hardly heard them. “Viriliter contendere,” he said after the amen, a phrase that persisted in bemusing me when the staff and all the boys apart from our year repeated it at the top of their united voice. “That is our motto,” he informed us, “the first words you will translate in your Latin class. And now you are excused from singing the school song on your first day, but be sure you are all ears. You must know it when we assemble tomorrow.”
“Come, Holy Spirit, fill our souls
And keep us straight and true.
Come fill our minds with faith and truth
Which both shine forth from You…”
It had been composed by a former choirmaster at the school, and felt as if the past had found a voice. It referred to striving like a man—the meaning of the Latin motto—and to eagerness for knowledge, and victory on the field, whether at sports or in battle. I did my best to store up every word, though I was diverted by how Brother Treanor marked each beat with an almost imperceptible nod, bobbing his head more than ever like a balloon. Two lines in particular stay with me, and I wonder whether even then I should have noticed some reaction from one member of the staff:
“We learn from men who went before,
And are the men to come.”
A stentorian reprise of the first verse brought the song to an end, and Brother Treanor delivered a last nod. “New boys remain seated while you are assigned,” he said.
Each year was divided into three classes—Alpha, Beta, Gamma—and we’d had to sit a second test to determine which we would be in. We perched on the bench, whose absence of a back was making my spine ache, while the veteran boys and all the staff except two monks and a lay master filed out of the hall. The master was the tallest of the three, and actually appeared to gain stature as he came down the steps from the stage. “Here are the Alphas,” he said, producing a page from inside his tweed jacket. “Listen for your name.”
I was afraid Jim and I might be separated, especially when the teacher said “Mr Bailey.” The sentence about the bishop was troubling me, suggesting that I could have done less well than Jim at the Holy Ghost examination. The alphabet snagged on several names that began with Mac or Mc or M before it came anywhere near me, but at last the master said “Mr Sheldrake.” Though I’d started to dislike the sound of my name shorn of the one I identified with, I felt flattered by his way with it. “Here, sir,” I said and stuck my hand up. He stooped in my direction to acknowledge me, just as he had with the others, and at last I recognised him.
Shouldn’t I have done so earlier? Even now I’m not sure whether it was simply that you often don’t recognise someone when you meet them in a context different from how you first saw them. Having finished off his list with Mr Yates, he gestured us all to stand. “Please follow me, gentlemen,” he said.
He led the way to the nearest classroom and held the door open while we all filed in to select our desks. I sat next to Jim, though I would have retreated to the back if he hadn’t taken a seat in the middle of the room. The teacher closed the door, shutting out the sound of someone scraping painfully at a violin, and picked up a stick of chalk from the trough at the foot of the blackboard on the wall. “I’m Mr Noble,” he said, writing the name with a series of flourishes over an incomprehensibly blurred trace of an earlier message, and ending with a shrill full stop. “I shall be your form master. Come to me with any problems, gentlemen. Let’s work together to make this a rewarding year for all,” he said, and I felt I was going to like him. I didn’t even think he realised I had watched him push the pram through the graveyard.
3 - A Glimpse in a Field
Is the resilience of youth a blessing or a curse? I suppose it’s both. Most children accept their life, since it’s the only one they experience for themselves. It took me just a few days
to grow used to attending the Holy Ghost, and then with the intolerance of all my years I wondered how my younger self could have had a problem. Once you learned the layout of the school it was entirely manageable and by no means as immense as it had seemed. Within a week the schoolyard was as familiar as my own back garden, and before long the playing field was too. Soon many of the teachers were part of my life as well, and their quirks in particular.
Some were harmless, and some we pretended were. Mr Askew lived up to his name, since he’d been shot in the leg at Dunkirk, and introduced himself by telling us “I’m taking you for English” as if he hoped we’d hear a pun. Mr Clement always said “Bonjour, mes amis” and stayed in the language for the first five minutes of each French lesson, timing himself with a gold watch he fished out of his waistcoat. Brother Monrahan clapped his pudgy hands whenever a mathematics problem was solved, urging “Add that up. Five more marks for another easy answer.” Brother Titmuss often said “Pardon the flatulence” when we trooped to the laboratory to be met by a sulphurous stench, but he didn’t welcome any laughter, and his voice would rise to a whinny if anyone botched an experiment. Mr Mcintosh would complain “Eheu” several times in the course of every Latin lesson, and would inform us yet again how vital the language was before setting us exercises out of a textbook as a prelude to subsiding into boozy torpor at his desk. For Religious Knowledge we had Brother Mayle, who would drape a languid arm around the shoulders of whichever boy he’d singled out and murmur “If you know your apostles you won’t go wrong.” Sometimes we saw him strolling past the gymnasium, where at the end of the period Mr Jensen delighted in subjecting the class to all the excesses the communal showers could produce. Brother Stimson regularly counselled “Reach for beauty” to his art classes, which Jim and I chose as the alternative to music, but he closed his eyes tight and emitted a stuttering sigh when confronted with most of the results his advice produced. Mr Bushell would cover the blackboard with maps at the start of each geography lesson and stub a blunt finger on some location that whoever he called out would have to identify at once, or else the board and then the boy would be hit with a strap. This was an implement most of the Holy Ghost staff had a use for, though some favoured more eccentric methods: Brother Mayle liked tugging sinners up on tiptoe by a tuft of hair, while if an error roused Mr Mcintosh he was liable to thump the offender’s head with the blackboard duster, scattering a dandruff of chalk. Brother Treanor proved to be obsessed with the exact words of the school song, so that if he thought he heard anybody singing “And we’re the men to come” he would make the entire school repeat every verse while he prowled the aisles, strap at the ready. The only man who never used the strap was Mr Noble, which was one reason why Form One Alpha liked him.
The Searching Dead Page 2