Finding Again the World Read online

  When I grow up, I want to—

  These papers were to be read by Dr. James, described by Uncle Arthur with a wink and a finger pressed to the side of his nose as “the old trick cyclist.”

  I watched the boys writing, watched the way the pencils were gripped or clasped. I curbed the use of the wall-mounted pencil-sharpener after a couple of boys had managed to reduce new pencils to one-inch stubs. I denied nine requests to go to the lavatory. At the end of the allotted time, I collected and counted the pencils and glanced through what Uncle Arthur had called the “completions.”

  They were brief, written in large, wayward script, and violent in spelling. Some of the papers were scored almost through. Deciphered, they expressed the wish “to be pleeceman,” “to have big mussels,” “to go Home,” etc.

  One paper was blank except for the name sprawled huge.

  “Who’s Dennis Thompson?”

  A boy put up his hand. He looked about eleven or twelve.

  “Why didn’t you complete the sentence, Dennis?”

  “Well, I don’t do writing, do I?”

  The accent was south London.

  “Why’s that?” I said.

  “Well, I’m excused, aren’t I?”

  “Excused?”

  Uncle Arthur bustled in. I was to meet the Old Man. Immediately. The boys were left with dire threats. I was hurried through the North Building and out of the rear door. The brown-suited figure was standing some two hundred yards distant with his back to us looking at the vast area given over to garden.

  “Word to the wise,” puffed Uncle Arthur, laying his hand on my arm, “sets great store, the Old Man does, by being called ‘Headmaster.’”

  As we drew nearer, Uncle Arthur cleared his throat.

  The Headmaster’s hand was large and moist.

  Uncle Arthur was dismissed.

  The Headmaster returned to his contemplation of the large floral bank which spelled out:

  EASTMILL RECEPTION CENTRE.

  I stood beside him looking at the greyish plants of the lettering, the green and red surrounding stuff.

  “The letters,” he said, after a long silence, “of the display are Santalima Sage. A hardy perennial.”

  I nodded.

  “The red,” he said, pointing, “the green, the contrasting foliage, known as the filler, is called Alternamthera.”

  I nodded again and said,

  “It’s extremely impressive, Headmaster.”

  “A tender annual,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Alternamthera.”

  “Ah!” I said.

  “I am proud of our record here at Eastmill, Mr. Cresswell. In eleven years, three—”

  The mirrored glasses were turned upon me.

  “—only three absconders.”

  I nodded slowly.

  “Two,” he said, “were caught before they’d gone five miles.”

  He paused.

  “The third was apprehended in Pontypool.”

  There was a long silence.

  We studied the floral display.

  Eventually, he cleared his throat in a manner which I took to be a sign that the interview was concluded.

  “Thank you, Headmaster,” I said.

  The long day bore on with three more “completions,” lunch supervision, midday roll-call and showers. The cricket match between Windsor and Stuart with twenty boys on each side was interminable. The shepherd’s pie and jam-roll with custard weighed upon me. Uncle Arthur seemingly tireless, drove the boys on through the afternoon’s hot sun. An occupied boy, he held, was a happy boy. As we stood joint umpires at the crease his public exhortations were punctuated by sotto voce asides:

  “Don’t ponce about, lad! Hit it square!”

  Stole a Morris Minor.

  “Come on, lad! That’s not the spirit that won the war!”

  Had half a ton of lead off of a church roof

  The game lasted for more than three hours.

  After evening meal supervision, roll-call, and evening showers, I settled down in the empty Common Room with the files of those names I’d managed to remember. I’d scarcely got myself arranged, coffee, ashtray, cigarettes, when the door opened and I looked up at a man of about forty who was wearing a blue suit with a Fair Isle pattern pullover.

  “Good evening,” I said. “My name’s Cresswell.”

  “James,” he said, nodding his head almost as if ducking, and then plugged in the electric kettle.

  “Not Dr. James?”

  “Well, not really. It’s a Ph.D. You’re from a university. I did try to explain . . .”

  He came over and sat facing me. The blue shoulders were dusted with dandruff. He began to fiddle with a tiny bottle of saccharine tablets, trying to shake out just one.

  “I’m about to make a start on your files,” I said.

  “Were you interviewed by the Home Office?”

  “For this job? I’m not sure really. Some sort of civil service character.”

  “They all call me ‘Doc,’” he said. “Even the boys.”

  I watched him trying to funnel saccharine tablets back into the bottle.

  “Have you spoken to the Headmaster? Since you’ve been here?”

  “Yes,” I said. “This morning.”

  “Did he by any chance say anything to you about me? In any way?”

  “No,” I said. “He . . .”

  “Or imply anything?”

  He started nibbling at his thumbnail.

  “No. He didn’t say anything, really. Just warned me about boys absconding. He seemed to want me to look at his flower-bed-thing. Actually,” I said, “he seemed rather odd.”

  “Odd!” said Dr. James. “Odd! The Headmaster—”

  He got up and went to close the door.

  “Files,” he said, guiding the boiling water into his mug, “files and expert opinion are obviously the centre of any such organization as this. The heart. The very core.”

  He looked up, spectacles befogged by steam.

  I nodded.

  The teaspoon was stuck to the newspaper.

  “The Headmaster,” he said, “the Headmaster ignores my reports. He rejects all my recommendations. He deliberately undermines the efforts of all my work. Deliberately. And he openly influences the staff against me.”

  “Why?” I said.

  Seating himself again, he took off his spectacles and stared at me with naked eyes.

  “There have been countless ugly incidents. He’s incapably alcoholic, but of course you must have realized that. And for all this, accountable to no one, of course, we have the Home Office to thank.”

  “But why would he undermine your. . . ?”

  “Because he perceives me as a threat.”

  The naked eyes stared at me. He rubbed the spotty spectacles on the Fair Isle pullover.

  “Threat in what way?”

  “The man has no education whatever beyond elementary school. Yes! Oh, yes! But there’s more you should know, Mr. . . . er . . .”

  “Cresswell,” I said.

  “For your own protection.”

  He peered again towards the door.

  “Before he became Headmaster, he was employed—I have access to the files—the man was employed by the City of Eastmill—”

  He bent his head and hooked the springy wire side-pieces of the spectacles around the curves of his ears and looked up again.

  “—employed as a municipal gardener.”

  “No!” I said.

  He nodded.

  “But how on earth . . .”

  “Ask our masters at the Home Office.”

  “Good God!” I said.

  He carried the mug of coffee to the door.

  “Mention to
no one,” he said, “that we have spoken.”

  I settled down to read.

  The files contained condensed case histories, I.Q. scores, vocabulary scores, reports from previous schools, reports from social workers and probation officers, family profiles, anecdotal records, recommendations. The files were depressingly similar.

  Thompson, Dennis.

  I remembered him, the London boy from the morning who’d claimed to be excused from writing, the waif’s face, the dark lively eyes. Fifteen years of age. According to the scores he’d received in the Wechsler-Bellevue, Stanford and Binet, Terman and Merrill, etc., his achievements and intelligence were close to non-existent. His crime was arson. Three derelict row-houses in Penge had been gutted before the flames had been brought under control.

  He claimed not to know why he had done it.

  He said he liked fires.

  * * *

  I soon lost my nervousness of these boys under my charge. As the days passed, I stopped seeing them as exponents of theft, rape, breaking and entering, arson, vandalism, grievous bodily harm, and extortion, and saw them for what they were-working-class boys who were all, without exception, of low average intelligence or mildly retarded.

  We laboured on with phonics, handwriting, spelling, reading.

  Of all the boys, I was most drawn to Dennis. He was much like all the rest but unfailingly cheerful and co-operative. Dennis could chant the alphabet from A to Z without faltering, but he had to start at A. His mind was active, but the connections it made were singular.

  If I wrote CAT, he would stare at the word with a troubled frown. When I sounded out C-A-T, he would say indignantly: Well, it’s cat, innit? We had a cat, old tom-cat. Furry knackers, he had, and if you stroked ’em . . .

  F-I-S-H brought to mind the chip shop up his street and his mum who wouldn’t never touch rock salmon because it wasn’t nothing but a fancy name for conger-eel.

  C-O-W evoked his Auntie Fran-right old scrubber she was, having it away for the price of a pint . . .

  Such remarks would spill over into general debate on the ethics of white women having it off with spades and Pakis, they was heathen, wasn’t they? Said their prayers to gods and that, didn’t they? Didn’t they? Well, there you are then. And their houses stank of curry and that. You couldn’t deny it. Not if you knew what you was talking about.

  These lunatic discussions were often resolved by Paul, Dennis’s friend, who commanded the respect of all the boys because he was serving a second term and had a tattoo of a dagger on his left wrist and a red and green hummingbird on his right shoulder. He would make pronouncement:

  I’m not saying that they are and I’m not saying that they’re not but what I am saying is . . .

  Then would follow some statement so bizarre or so richly irrelevant that it imposed stunned silence.

  He would then re-comb his hair.

  Into the silence, I would say,

  “Right. Let’s get back to work, then. Who can tell me what a vowel is?”

  Dennis’s hand.

  “It’s what me dad ’ad.”

  “What!”

  “It’s your insides.”

  “What is?”

  “Cancer of the vowel.”

  The long summer days settled into endless routine. The violent strangeness of everything soon became familiar chore. Uncle Arthur left me more and more on my own. Showers and the inspection of teeth. Meal supervision. Sports and Activities. Dormitory patrol.

  The morning appearances of the Headmaster were predictably unpredictable. The Lord’s Prayer was interspersed with outbursts about what would happen if boys did not pull their weight, the excessive use of toilet-paper, an incoherent homily concerning the flotilla of small craft which had effected the strategic withdrawal of the British Army from Dunkirk, and, concerning departures from routine, detailed aphasic instructions.

  Every afternoon was given over to Sports and Activities.

  Cricket alternated, by Houses, with gardening. Gardening was worse than cricket. The garden extended for roughly two acres. On one day, forty boys attacked the earth with hoes. The next day forty boys smoothed the work of the hoes with rakes. On the day following, the hoes attacked again. Nothing was actually planted.

  The evening meals in the Staff Dining Room, served from huge aluminum utensils, were exactly like the school dinner of my childhood: unsavoury stews with glutinous dumplings, salads with wafers of cold roast beef with bits of string in them, jam tarts and Spotted Dick accompanied by an aluminum jug of lukewarm custard topped by a thickening skin.

  Uncle Arthur always ate in his apartment with the wife referred to as “Mrs. Arthur” but always appeared in time for coffee to inquire if we’d enjoyed what he always called our “comestibles.” Mr. Austyn, referred to by the boys as “Browner Austyn,” always said:

  May I trouble you for the condiments?

  Between the main course and dessert, Mr. Brotherton, often boisterously drunk, beat time with his spoon, singing, much to the distress of Mr. Austyn:

  Auntie Mary

  Had a canary

  Up the leg of her drawers.

  Mr. Grendle drizzled on about recidivists and the inevitability of his being dispatched in the metal-work shop. Mr. Hemmings, who drove a sports car, explained the internal-combustion engine. Mr. Austyn praised the give and take of sporting activity, the lessons of co-operation and joint endeavour, The Duke of Edinburgh’s Awards, Outward Bound, the beneficial moral results of pushing oneself to the limits of physical endurance.

  But conversation always reverted to pay scales, overtime rates, the necessity of making an example of this boy or that, of sorting out, gingering up, knocking the stuffing out of etc. this or that young lout who was trying it on, pushing his luck, just begging for it etc.

  The days seemed to be growing longer and hotter; clouds loomed sometimes in the electric evenings promising the relief of rain but no rain fell. The garden had turned to grey dust; cricket-balls rose viciously from patches of bald earth. Someone stole tobacco; there was a fight in the South Building dormitory. Comprehension declined; pencils broke. Showerings and the cleaning of teeth measured out each day.

  One afternoon at the end of my fifth week, I was in charge of thirteen boys, seven having been commandeered by Mr. Grendle to do something or other to his forge. At the shrill of my whistle, the boys halted outside Mr. Ausryn’s shed while I drew and signed for the necessary cricket gear.

  I unlocked the gate in the wire-mesh fence, locked it behind us. The cricket bag was unpacked; two boys were detailed to hammer in the stumps. The rest stood in a listless group grumbling about bleeding sunstroke and bleeding running about all bleeding afternoon for bleeding nothing.

  There were only three bails; I had signed for four, had watched them go into the bag.

  “Bail?” repeated a boy in vacant tone.

  “What’s he mean, ‘bail?’” said another voice.

  “It’s money what you have to pay to get out the nick.”

  “You stupid berk!” said another voice.

  The laughter grew louder, jeering.

  I shrilled on the whistle, confronted them.

  “I will give you,” I said, “precisely five seconds to produce the missing bail.”

  “What’s he going on about?”

  “If the bail,” I said, “is not produced . . .”

  A flat voice said,

  “Oh fuck the fucking bail.”

  Lunging, I grabbed a handful of the nearest denim, swung the boy off his feet. He fell on one knee. I jolted him backwards and forwards ranting at him, at them.

  “Sir!”

  Dennis’s voice penetrated.

  “’Ere! Sir!”

  The boy fell slack; he was making noises.

  My hand was like a claw.

  I wandered aw
ay from them, crossing the limed line of the boundary, and sat waiting for my heart to stop the thick hammering. The close-mown grass was parched and yellow. Beyond the mesh fence yards in from of me were thick woods a quarter of a mile deep before the beginning of the houses of the East Point subdivision. In the afternoon heat the trees were still. I watched the unmistakable dance of Speckled Wood butterflies over the brambles, dead leaves, and leaf-mould at the wood’s dappled edge. As a child, I’d chased them with my green muslin net. I stared beyond them into the darkening, layered shade.

  Time had passed without my noticing. The missing bail had appeared; the game had got under way without the usual squabbling; was now winding down to a merely formal show of activity.

  Dennis wandered over and in a pretence of fielding, crouched down a few yards away from me.

  “It’s all right, Dennis,” I said.

  He nodded. He sat down.

  “It’s all right,” I said again.

  Soon all the boys were sprawled in the grass.

  “Wish we could play in there,” said Dennis, staring into the woods.

  I lay back and closed my eye listening to their voices.

  You could make a house in a tree like on the telly. That family. They had this house . . .

  You haven’t got no hammer and you haven’t got no nails. And you haven’t got no bits of old wood neither.

  What about Tarzan, then? He didn’t have no hammer neither.

  Red suns behind my closed eyelids glowed and faded.

  ‘Ere! Know what I’d be doing right now if I was Tarzan? Do you? I’d be having a bunk-up, having a crafty one with Jane.

  Get lost! With a face like yours, wanker, you’d be lucky to cop a feel off his bleeding monkey.

  I sat up and forced the key around the double ring until it was free. I tossed it to Dennis.

  “Be back here,” I said, “in one hour. Understand?”

  As I lay back in the grass, I heard their yells and laughter, the sounds of their passage through the undergrowth, sounds which grew fainter. Later, a thrush started singing.

  At three o’clock, I walked back towards the four main buildings.

  * * *

  Well, even that, I suppose, could do as an ending.

  Of sorts.