Moab is my Washpot

4

When I was a prep-school master at Cundall Manor School in North Yorkshire, eleven or twelve years after arriving at Stouts Hill (note the dashing blazer in the photograph and wonder that this man was allowed to live) the boys at my breakfast table liked me to tell them over and over again the story of Bunce and the Village Shop. I think it gave them a kick to know that a teacher could once have been Bad – not just naughty, but Bad, really Bad.

Discipline at Stouts Hill, for all that I have correctly described the place as familial, friendly and warm, was tough, or what would be called tough today. It centred more or less entirely around the cane: the whack as it was called by masters, matrons and boys.

‘You get caught doing that, you’ll get the whack a friend might say with lip-smacking relish.

‘Right, Fry, if- you’re not in bed in ten seconds flat, it’ll be the whack for you,’ the master-on-duty would warn.

‘How many times have you had the whack this week, Fry?’ I would be asked in wonderment.

The headmaster when I arrived at Stouts Hill was still the school’s founder, Robert Angus. He kept a collection of whippy bamboo canes behind the shutters of his study and they were used with great regularity, most especially during the feared Health Week, a time when he made it plain that his arms and shoulders craved exercise and would look for the slenderest excuses to find it. During Health Week an infraction of the rules that would usually have resulted in lines or detention would be upgraded to the whack. A crime ordinarily punishable by three strokes would be dealt with by six, and so on.

If Health Week was to be feared, far more terrifying were those occasions when Angus was unwell or away and the deputy headmaster, Mid Kemp, took over the running of the school and the administration of physical punishment.

Mid, I was disconsolate to find out while researching for this book, was short for Middleton. I had spent the whole of my life up until now convinced that it was an abbreviation for Midfred, which would have suited the man better.

In my memory Mid Kemp’s hands, his patched tweed jackets, his moustache and his hair were all yellowed with nicotine. I don’t know what it is about modern cigarettes, but no longer does one see the great stained smoking fingers and egg-yolk streaked white hair of old. Mid Kemp looked and talked like C. Aubrey Smith in The Four Feathers. His favourite word, one for which I have a great deal of time myself as a matter of fact, was Arse. Everyone was more or less an arse most of the time, but I was arsier than just about everyone else in the school. In fact, in my case he would often go further – I was on many occasions a bumptious arse. Before I learned what bumptious actually meant I assumed that it derived from ‘bum’ and believed therefore with great pride that as a bumptious arse I was doubly arsey – twice the arse of ordinary arses.

When umpiring cricket matches, Mid Kemp treated his own arse to the bracing leather comforts of a shooting stick and would perch at square leg in a yellow haze of nicotine that spread from short midwicket to deep fine leg.

Mid Kemp treated boys’ arses, on those occasions when Angus was away, to the most ferocious cuts of the cane. Instead of the straightforward thwack, his speciality was the bacon-slicer, a vertical downwards slash requiring far less effort and inflicting infinitely more pain than the conventional horizontal swat.

Early in my time at Stouts Hill he was replaced as deputy headmaster by Angus’s son-in-law, A. J. Cromie, an alumnus of Trinity College Dublin who bore a ferocious moustache and terrified me more than he could ever have known. Cromie drove a spectacularly beautiful blue Rolls Royce, wore (in my memory at least) green Irish thornproof tweeds and taught me French in an accent which, young as I may have been, I suspected to be far from authentically Gallic.

Angus in his day beat me many times, always with gentle sorrow. Mid Kemp sliced me from time to time with a rather mad, rather frightening glazed boredom. Cromie beat me more than anyone since his reign as proper headmaster coincided with my rise from infancy to boyhood, from naughtiness to wickedness. When he beat me it was always with a glum resignation.

‘Oh God, it’s you again…’ he would bark when he arrived at his study to find me waiting outside the door, the approved station for those who had been sent for a thrashing. ‘And what is it this time?’

Did it do me any harm being beaten? Did it do me any good? I really don’t know. Autres temps, autres mœurs - it is now considered barbaric, sadistic, harmful, disgraceful, perverted and unpardonable. As far as I was concerned it had at least the virtue of being over quickly, unlike detention, lines or the wearisome cleaning and sweeping errands that stood as lesser penalties. Often, in fact, one was given a choice of punishments and I always chose the cane.

I never got any pleasure out of it, mind you. My sexual fantasies are, I trust, as weird, frightening and grotesque as yours and the next person’s and the person next to them, but flagellation, spanking, birching and the infliction of even the mildest pain have never been anything for me other than absolute turn-offs.

There was pleasure in going straight to the school lays after a beating, pulling down one’s shorts and pants and flushing the loo, to the accompaniment of a great hissing sigh – like Tom sitting himself in a bucket of water after Jerry has set light to his tail – that I did enjoy. There was too the talismanic pride of showing one’s stripes to the dormitory, like a Prussian Junker displaying his duelling scars.

‘Wow, that one bit…’

‘Nice grouping…’

‘Actually Fry, if it breaks the skin and you bleed you can complain to the government and he’ll go to prison, that’s what I heard.’

‘Apparently, if he raises his arm above shoulder height, it’s illegal…’

Maybe some of you reading this will think that men who can beat children like that are swine.

I feel terrible about that because the men who beat me were not swine.

Maybe now you’ll think people like me who can forgive their childhood beatings – or claim even that there is nothing to forgive – are victims of some sort of ‘cycle of abuse’. Maybe you think I should be angry, that I should damn the schoolmasters who beat me and damn my parents and damn the men and women who allowed it.

Maybe you think there is nothing more pathetic, nothing that more perfectly illustrates all the vices and impediments of Old England than the spectacle of the Old Boy trying to defend the system that chastised him with strokes of the cane.

Maybe you are right. Maybe I am a woeful and pathetic specimen. Maybe I do suffer without knowing it the disastrous consequences of a barbaric and outdated education. Maybe it has disturbed the balance of my mind. Maybe it has warped and thwarted me. Fuck knows. I don’t and, without wishing to be rude, you most certainly can’t know either. We are living in a statistically rare and improbable period of British life. The last twenty years are the only twenty years of our history in which children have not been beaten for misbehaviour. Every Briton you can think of, from Chaucer to Churchill, from Shakespeare to Shilton, was beaten as a child. If you are under thirty, then you are the exception. Maybe we are on the threshold of a brave new world of balanced and beautiful Britons. I hope so.

You won’t find me offering the opinion that beating is a good thing or recommending the return of the birch. I frankly regard corporal punishment as of no greater significance in the life of most human beings than bustles, hula-hoops, flared trousers, side-whiskers or any other fad. Until, that is, one says that it isn’t. Which is to say, the moment mankind decides that a practice like beating is of significance then it becomes of significance. I should imagine that were I a child now and found myself being beaten by schoolmasters I would be highly traumatised by the experience, for every cultural signal would tell me that beating is, to use the American description, a ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ and I would feel singled out for injustice and smart and wail accordingly.

Let’s try – and God knows it’s hard – to be logical about this. If we object to corporal punishment, and I assume we do, on what grounds is this objection based? On the grounds that it is wrong to cause a child pain? Well I don’t know about you, but when I recall childhood pain, I don’t recall the pains of toothache, a thrashed backside, broken bones, stubbed toes, gashed knees or twisted ankles – I recall the pains of loneliness, boredom, abandonment, humiliation, rejection and fear. Those are the pains on which I might and, still sometimes do, dwell, and those pains, almost without exception, were inflicted on me by other children and by myself.

I have paused on this subject of corporal punishment because the issue is so culturally loaded today as to be almost impossible to inspect. It comes in so many people’s minds very close to the idea of ‘abuse’, a word which when used within ten spaces of the word ‘child’ causes hysteria, madness and stupidity in almost everybody.

I know that had I dispassionately described to you the use of the cane without any comment, without summoning counsel for a conference in chambers, then many of you would have wondered what I was up to and whether I was entirely balanced. You will have to form your own judgements, but try to understand that when I think about being caned for repeatedly talking after lights out, or for Mobbing About In The Malt Queue, and other such mad prepschooly infractions, I feel far less passion and distress than I do when I think about the times I was put into detention for crimes of which I was innocent. If it should so happen that you could prove to me that one of the masters who beat me may have derived sexual gratification from the practice, I would shrug my shoulders and say, ‘Poor old soul, at least he never harmed me.’ Abuse is exploitation of trust and exploitation of authority and I was lucky enough never to suffer from that or from any violation or cruelty, real or imagined.

It is a cliché that most clichés are true, but then like most clichés, that cliché is untrue.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will always hurt me.

Bones mend and become actually stronger in the very place they were broken and where they have knitted up; mental wounds can grind and ooze for decades and be re-opened by the quietest whisper. Kirk drawing attention to my singing, that was abuse, and he was just a silly child who knew no better. Mid Kemp and his mad bacon-slicers, that was the Game and it amuses me.

Sidebar over.

Of all the school rules I liked most to flout, the breaking of bounds gave me the greatest pleasure.

Perhaps there’s a metaphor there, I do hope not, all this psychology grows wearisome.

The school grounds were extensive. I’ve made glancing mention of the lake, woods and pony paddocks. Uley itself lay out of bounds and beyond legal reach. We crocodiled to the church there on special Sundays – the Christmas Carol service, for example, when Easter Day fell in term time, or when the school play was performed in the village hall (‘Stephen Fry’s Mrs Higgins would grace any drawing-room’, my first review) – but at all other times Uley was verboten, off limits, here be dragons, don’t you bloody dare.

Uley had a village shop-cum-post-office crammed with Sherbet Fountains, Everlasting Strips, and two types of penny chew – Fruit Salads and Blackjacks. I don’t know why they were called penny chews, they should really have been called farthing chews because you could buy four of these little wrapped squares of deliciously sticky tooth-decay for just one penny. The village shop also sold a brown, shredded confection that was packaged to look like rolling tobacco and tasted I think of coconut. It came wrapped in waxed paper and had a picture of a Spanish Galleon on the front. That and the endless varieties of other pretend smoking materials – candied cigarettes with red dyed ends, chocolate cigarettes wrapped in real paper and liquorice pipes – must now seem almost as wicked to the modern puritan sensibility as child-beating and fox-hunting. The most important thing about these sweets however is that they could not be bought at the school tuck-shop. The tuck-shop had its Fry’s Turkish Delight (bane of my life, that and all the other nicknaming possibilities around it), Crunchie and

Picnic bars, but only the village shop had rice-paper flying saucers filled with sherbet, pink foamy shrimps, rubbery little milk bottles and chocolate buttons sprinkled with hundreds and thousands.

The ownership and sly proffering of paper bags filled with those forbidden fruits became almost as great a totem of heroism as the possession of pubic hair, and was shared with friends in just the same shifty but giggling, shy but boastful manner. Since no amount of pinching, teasing, soaping, threatening and cajoling could cause even the blondest silken millimetre of pubic hair to sprout from me, sweets became my testament of manliness.

Aside from all that, the very act of slipping and sliding around the lake’s edge, cutting down past the boathouse, across the gymkhana field with its dressage poles and tatty jumps, over the second games field, across the lane and into Out of Bounds territory had its own thrill. At this time too, nature’s best side, the side that didn’t creep and crawl and ooze, was beginning to open itself up to me. Cider With Rosie, in literary terms, was just about an item of school uniform to us; many of the boys knew Laurie Lee as a friend, he sometimes drank his beer in Uley’s pub and on special occasions came to read to us. A killer Cyborg from Vark would fall in love with the countryside if he heard Laurie Lee reading about it.

The walk from the school to the shop was, I reckon, a little over a country mile, but I liked to linger. I picture myself, eyes streaming and face blotched with hay fever, sitting under elm trees, firing plantain buds, blowing grassblade fanfares through my thumbs and rubbing nettled shins with dock. The overpowering breath of watermint from the skirting of the lake margin would stay with me until one of my sandals had broken the crisp leathery surface of a cowpat and from then on I would carry with me the decent tang of sun-cured dung. There was a curious pleasure to be gained too, perhaps a hangover from playing rudies with Timothy in Chesham, from pulling down my shorts and crapping in the grass unseen by all but cattle. Maybe that’s a primal thing, maybe it’s just that I am weird.

I never liked to be accompanied on these trips. I once tried going with someone else, but it felt wrong. He was too scared to dwell on the journey itself, too keen to eat all the sweets before getting back to school, too frightened, in short, of getting caught. Getting caught, I think now, is what it was all about to me.

People sometimes say to me these days, ‘You know, I was just as bad as you at school, Stephen. Thing is, I never got found out.’

Well, where’s the fun in that? I always want to reply. That’s a boast? ‘I never got found out, clever, clever me.

I am quite aware, by the way, that I am the exception and they are the rule. I’m the freak in this equation, I know that. Not that I actively, consciously knew that I wanted to be caught.

I did love sweets, God how I loved them. The mouthful of fillings today and the gaps where grinders should be show that I loved sweets long past the proper age.

One afternoon, perhaps I was eleven years old and moving towards a kind of seniority within the school, I came across a joke shop catalogue lying about in one of the dormitories. I suppose the rest of the school was playing cricket and I had managed as usual to get myself Off Games by inducing an asthma attack. I loved the feeling of having the school to myself, the distant shouts and echoes without and the absolute stillness within. My heart always sank when the final whistles went, the school noises drew closer and I knew that I was no longer the master of the lost domain.

A voice is whispering in my ear that this joke shop catalogue belonged to a boy called Nick Charles-Jones, but this is of minor importance. For a half-crown postal order, it seemed, a fellow could have dispatched to him:

· chattering false teeth

· a small round membrane of cloth and tin which allowed one to throstle, warble and apparently throw one’s voice like a ventriloquist

· a bar of soap that turned the user soot black

· itching powder

· a sugar cube that melted and left a realistic looking spider floating on the surface of the victim s tea-cup

· a finger-ring buzzer

· a look-alike chewing gum pack that snapped like a mouse-trap.

Trouble was, I had no postal order, nor any access to such a thing. Unlike Billy Bunter, the Winslow Boy and other famous schoolchildren, I didn’t even really know what a postal order was. To be perfectly frank with you I’m still not that sure today.

However. It occurred to me that if I mustered up two shillings and sixpence in loose change and then stuck all the coins together with sticky tape and sent them off for ‘The most hilarious collection of jokes and gags EVER assembled’ with a note of apology accompanying, then only the flintiest-hearted mail-order joke shop would refuse to honour my order.

I had about a shilling on me, which left one and sixpence to go. One and six (seven and a half pence in today’s currency) was not a great deal of money, but any sum that you do not have when you are eleven years old seems a fortune. I expect today schoolchildren get sent four credit card application forms every day through the post like everybody else, but things were different then. The sand gold and navy blue of a Barclaycard had only just been introduced and was at first taken up by rather dodgy characters -the sort of people who smoked Rothmans, drove E-Types and swanked about the place with BEA bags over their shoulders and were best played by Leslie Phillips or Guy Middleton.

Stealing had become second nature to me by this time and the boys’ changing room was the place to start. Up and down the pegs I would go, lightly tapping the trousers and blazers until I heard the chink of coins.

You can steal from the school, you can steal from a shop, you can steal from a bank. Stealing money from the clothing of friends is… what is it? It is not naughty or unstable or unmanageable or difficult: it is as bad as bad can be. It is wicked, it is evil. It makes you a…

THIEF

… and nobody loves a thief.

I still blush and shiver when I hear the word used aggressively. It crops up in films on television.

Gentlemen, I am sorry to say that we appear to have a thief among us.

Stop thief’

You thieving little rat…

Why, you’re nothing but a cheating, lying thief…

It’s still doing it to me, that word.

The changing rooms. The clink of money. Breathing hard. Mouth parted. Heart hammering. They are all outside playing games. Coast is clear.

I am trying hard, even now, to forgive myself for these years of stealing. The shoplifting, the more glamorous insanity with credit cards later on, all that can be laughed or shrugged off. Perhaps.

But this, this was nasty, this was sly.

‘There always was something sly about you, Fry.’

There was a way some masters and prefects had of pronouncing my surname that seemed to me, in my guilt, to mean cunning and unclean and ratty and foxy and devious and unhealthy and deceitful and duplicitous and sly. Sly Fry.

I could argue in my defence that I spread the load that afternoon. I could say that I needed (needed?) one and sixpence, so I took just small quantities of three-penny bits and pennies to make up the sum, rather than cleaning out and impoverishing one particular victim.

But that’s not right.

I took small amounts from several people to lessen the chance of there being a fuss.

‘Bloody hell. I had a bob here at lunchtime…‘ would have been the cry of any boy robbed of a whole shilling.

Whereas, ‘Tsh, I’m sure had tuppence somewhere was less likely to raise a hue and cry.

Those changing rooms at Stouts Hill, then later at Uppingham. From Mary Hench’s boot to the regular, almost daily ransacking of boys’ pockets for cash, changing rooms have been my killing fields.

I’m still trying to find excuses for myself. I’m wondering whether it was some kind of vengeance. I hated games so much, hated so much those who loved them and excelled at them. Was that why the preferred locus of theft for me was always the changing room, with its casually dropped jock-straps, muddy laces and stink of stale sweat?

Did I hate games because I was so shite at them, or was I so shite at them because I hated them and did I hate them because of…

THE BATHS

amp;

THE SHOWERS?

Is that where it all begins? With the cock-shy terror of the showers?

It did consume me, the thought of undressing in front of others. It ate at me like acid throughout my schooldays and beyond.

There’s more on this theme coming later. Let’s just say for the time being that I was wicked. When I wanted money or sweets, I stole them and I didn’t care from whom. From my mother’s handbag at home or from the desks and hanging clothes of my fellow pupils. For the moment, we’ll call me a weasley cunt and have done with it.

So, there we are. I’m back in the dormitory sellotaping together nine or ten coins. With a neatly filled-in order-form they are slipped into an envelope which I stuff with a handkerchief to make an innocent package – after all, perhaps the postman may be an awful thief and if he felt the coins he might just steal them, and wouldn’t that be too dreadful…

It was Julian Mather’s handkerchief that did the stuffing as it happens, the nametape lovingly stitched by a sister, a nanny or an au pair perhaps. Myself, to the great aggravation of my mother, I could never keep a handkerchief for longer than a week.

‘What do you do with them, darling? Eat them?’

And I would repeat the eternal schoolboy lie.

‘Oh, everybody loses their handkerchiefs, Mummy.’

Or perhaps I would blame the school laundry. ‘Nobody’s handkerchief comes back. Everyone knows that…’

So, down the stairs I crept, on the hunt now for postage stamps.

I knew that Cromie was umpiring a cricket match and that his study was likely to be unlocked.

It was an intensely exciting pleasure to be illicitly alone in the headmaster’s study. On one occasion when I had been there before, rifling though his papers, I had come across a report on myself. It concerned my Eleven Plus results.

We had taken the Eleven Plus at Stouts Hill without ever knowing what it was or what it meant. My form master, Major Dobson, had simply come in one day with a pile of papers and said, ‘You’re all getting rather lazy, so I’ve decided you can keep yourselves busy with these.’

He had handed out some strangely printed papers and told us we had half an hour or fifty minutes or whatever it was to answer all the questions.

We were never told that this was the notorious Eleven Plus, the national compulsory test that separated the children of the land into Grammar School children and Secondary Modern children, dummies and smart-arses, failures and achievers, smarmy gits and sad no-hopers, greasy clever-clogses and rejected thickies. A stupider and more divisive nonsense has rarely been imposed upon a democratic nation. Many lives were trashed, many hopes blighted, many prides permanently dented on account of this foolish, fanatical and irrational attempt at social engineering.

Since all of us at prep school were bound for independent public schools who took no notice of such drivel anyway, the whole thing was considered by the Stouts Hill staff to be a massive irrelevance, a tedious and impertinent piece of bureaucracy to be got though with as little fuss as possible and certainly without the boys needing to be told anything about it.

The examination itself took the form of one of those fatuous Eynsecky IQ tests, mostly to do with shape-recognition and seeing what new word could be slipped between two existing words to make two phases, that sort of hum-dudgeon…

BLOW… LOT

… for example, to which the answer would be JOB, as in ‘blow job’ and ‘job lot’ – though I’ve a feeling that may not have been one of the actual questions set for us on the day. I remember questions like:

‘HEAR is to LISTEN as SEE is to…?‘ or

‘Complete this numerical sequence 1,3,5,7,11…?‘

And so on.

So, foraging through the headmaster’s desk one afternoon I had happened upon a list which called itself Eleven Plus results, listing Intelligence Quotient Results or some such guff. I noticed it because my name was at the top with an asterisk typed next to it and the words ‘Approaching genius’ added in brackets. Gromie, the headmaster had underlined it in his blue-black ink and scrawled, ‘Well that bloody explains everything…’

It will seem boasting wherever I go with this, but I was not in the least pleased to learn that I had a high IQ. For a start I didn’t like the ‘approaching’ part of the phase ‘approaching genius’ (if you’re going to be a freak, be a complete freak, no point at all in going at it half-cock) and secondly I wriggled in discomfort at the idea of being singled out for something over which I felt I had no control. They might as well have exclaimed at my height or hair colour for all that I felt it had anything to do with me as a person.

Years later as an adolescent, when I fell into the error of confusing my brain with my self, I actually went so tragically far as to send off for and complete the Mensa application test and proved to myself that I was more than ‘approaching’ genius and felt extremely self-satisfied. It was only when I realised that the kind of intelligence that wants to get into Mensa, succeeds in getting into Mensa and then runs Mensa and the kind of intelligence that I thought worth possessing were so astronomically distant from each other, that the icing fell off the cake with a great squelch. It is on occasions like this that I praise God for my criminal tendencies, my homosexuality, my jewishness and the loathing of the bourgeois, the conventional and the respectable that these seem to have inculcated in me. I could so easily, given the smallest twist to the least gene on the outermost strand of my string of DNA, have turned into one of those awful McWhirterish ticks, one of those asocial right-wing libertarian freaks who think their ability to find anagrams and solve Rubik’s cubes is a serious index of mental value. Having said which, I was determined to solve Rubik’s Cube myself and pride myself on my ability to do the Times crossword quickly. I square this rather vile vanity with myself by claiming that I do these things to show that it is possible to have a knack with such games and not be a graceless Freedom Association beardie.or a Clive Sinclair style loon. Also, if I’m honest, I submit myself to these forms of mental masturbation from time to time to prove to myself that my brain hasn’t yet been rotted away by drugs and alcohol. My great Cambridge friend, Kim Harris, the friend to whom I dedicated my second novel, The Hippopotamus, is a superb chess player, attaining a Master level at a young age: he takes a wicked delight in drinking at the chess board and being wholly unlike the scurfy, bottle-end spectacled schlemiels whom he faces over the board. I think we are both honest enough to admit that we are each in our own way guilty of snobbery of a quite dreadful kind.

‘While on the subject of intelligence, I have to say that I have never found it an appealing quality in anyone and therefore have never expected anyone to find it appealing in me. It grieves me deeply that many people who think me intelligent or believe that I fancy myself intelligent or have read somewhere that some journalist has described me as such, expect me to judge others by intelligence. The number of times strangers have opened conversations with me in this manner…

‘Of course, I’m no brain box like you…’

‘I know I’monly stupid, but…’

Or worse still, ‘Don’t you find it rather dull being surrounded by actors for so much of the time? I mean let’s face it, most of them are thick as two short planks.’

I just don’t know where to begin with this kind of talk.

Even if it were true that most actors are stupid, and it isn’t, the idea that I might project myself as the kind of person who looks for intelligence in others as an index of value sends the creepiest of shivers down my spine. I might use long words from time to time and talk rapidly or name-drop culturally here and there and display any number of other silly donnish affectations, but if this gives the impression that I might admire a similar manner or nature in others, then it makes me just want to go ‘bibbly-bobbly-bubbly-snibbly wib-wib floppit’ for the rest of my life, read nothing but Georgette Heyer, watch nothing but Emmerdale, do nothing but play snooker, take coke and get drunk and use no words longer than ‘wanker’ and ‘cunt’.

I don’t know many people who can do the Times crossword more quickly than me. There again I do know dozens and dozens of people vastly more intelligent than me for whom the simplest cryptic clue is a mystery – and one they are not in the least interested in penetrating.

Also, it must be said, I don’t know many people as capable of my kinds of supreme dumbness.

I’m the last person on earth to bear with equanimity that kind of Bernard Inghamy, Fred Truemany Yorkshireman who blathers on about nous, gumption, common sense and the University of Life -‘you see, they’re all very well these Oxbridge educated so-called intellectuals but have you ever seen them trying to boil a tyre or change an egg…?‘ and all that pompous bum-wash, but, awful as such attitudes are they are no worse than the eugenic snobbery of those who believe that the ability to see the word ‘carthorse’ scrambled in the word ‘orchestra’ or to name every American state in alphabetical order raises them above the level of the average twitcher, trainspotter or Gyles Brandreth style word-game funster.

The discovery of Cromie’s scrawled ‘Well that bloody explains everything …‘ next to my name determined me to investigate his study on every available occasion. I did not like the idea that things were being written about me without my knowing it.

So, back to our main time-line again. I’m in the study alone. This time I’m looking for stamps.

Cromie had one of those elegant polished desks, with lots of knobs and sliders and fluted volutes and secret drawers – the kind of desk a sly fox like me loved to play with.

I succeeded in pressing a wooden stud under the desk: a section flew back on a spring and what did I see?

Sweets.

Bags and bags of sweets.

Confiscated sweets. Foam shrimps, fruit salads, blackjacks, flying-saucers, red-liquorice bootlaces, every desirable item of Uley village shop bounty that could be imagined.

In that lips-parted, heart-pounding, face-flushed state that can signify sexual ecstasy or the thrill of guilt and fear, I grabbed from each bag four, five, six or seven sweets, stuffing them into my pockets, unable to believe that such good fortune could have come my way. You set out to steal a few postage stamps and there before you is a drawer filled with all the treasure you have ever dreamed of.

Granddaddy was watching, that I knew. It was the one great worm in every delicious apple I ever stole. My mother’s father had only recently died and he had become my figura rerum, my familiar. I knew whenever I stalked about my bedroom naked, sitting on mirrors, sticking a finger up my bum or doing any of those other mad, guilty childish things that constitute infantile sexual play to the psychologist, that Granddaddy Was Watching. Whenever I did truly bad things too, like stealing, lying and cheating, Granddaddy Was Watching then. I had learned to ignore him, of course, and the disappointed look in his eyes as he turned away in disgust. He expected so much better of his grandson than this. But then I had learned to ignore the sad, sweet expectations of the soft-eyed Jesus who also watched me whenever I was bad. At that time I never thought of myself as Jewish, which is perhaps as well, or those two Jews, one recently dead, the other fluttering like a dove over the altar every morning at chapel, might have driven me to a wilder state of madness and self-loathing than I was already in.

Just as I crammed a few final penny chews into my last spare pocket I heard, not too far distant, the creak of a footstep upon a wooden plank.

I pushed the secret drawer shut and peered through the study door.

I could see no one there, just the deserted hallway and the birdcages. Perhaps the mynah bird had been practising new sounds.

I edged myself out of the study, closed the door quietly and turned, just in time to see Mr Dealey, the school butler, emerge from the dining room, bearing silver candlesticks and a vast epergne.

‘Ah, now then, Master Fry,’ he said in his Jack-Warner-I’ve-been-about-the-world-a-bit-and-have-got-your-number kind of a way.

I was sure that he had no idea that I had been inside the study. Surely he had seen me at the door and thought I was waiting outside?

‘You won’t find the Headmaster inside on a fine afternoon like this, young Fry,’ he said, confirming the thought. ‘You shouldn’t be inside yourself. Young lad. Sunny day. It’s not healthy.’

I started to pant a little, and pointed to my chest. ‘Off games,’ I said with a brave, shoulder-heaving wheeze.

‘Ho,’ said Dealey. ‘Then perhaps you should come with me and learn how to polish silver.’

‘No fear!’ I said and scuttled away.

Close calls of that nature always charged me up into a state of mania. My passion at the time for the prison-of-war genre in books and films derived, I suppose, from an identification with the POWs and the edge of discovery and detection on which they permanently lived… replacing the stove over the tunnel’s hiding-place just before the entrance of the Commandant, popping their heads down seconds before the searchlight revealed them. Books like The Wooden Horse and Reach for the Sky were full of these moments and I consumed them with a passionate fever.

This time, I was away and free, a whole pocketful of sweets to the good, not a Jerry in sight and the Swiss border only a few miles hence.

I slipped out into the garden and made my way towards the lake. The boathouse there was a good place to sit and eat sweets.

On the way however, I encountered Donaldson, who was also off games and he had a new game to show me.

An electric fence had just been erected around a section of one of the fields. This area was to be turned into a fourth eleven cricket pitch or something similar, and the fence was needed to stop the ponies from going near. An announcement had been made about it and how we were not to touch it.

‘But how about this,’ said Donaldson, taking me towards the fence.

I followed him in some trepidation, he was no particular friend of mine, Donaldson. He was big and beefy, only off games because he was injured, not because he was cowardly or a weed. He had never bullied me, nor ever tried to, but I feared some practical joke which would end with me being pushed against the electric fence and being given an electric shock. Growing up in a house with Victorian wiring, I had got to know enough about electric shocks to dread their sullen thumping kicks.

Donaldson stood by the fence, motioned me to be quiet and then suddenly leaned out and grabbed the wire with one hand before letting go of it again just as suddenly. His body hadn’t jolted or jumped at all.

‘Is it switched off then?’ I asked.

‘There’s a ticker,’ he said. ‘Listen.’

Sure enough, from some control device on one of the corner fence-posts came a regular ticking sound.

‘Every time it ticks,’ said Donaldson, ‘it sends a charge. But if you grab it in between ticks, you’re okay. Go on. Have a go.’

Still fearing some practical joke, I listened to the ticks until I felt sure of their tempo and then touched the wire and let go quickly.

Nothing.

I laughed. This was fun.

We carried on with the game, refining our ability to touch the wire for longer and longer periods as we became more and more familiar with the rhythm of the ticker and together, Donaldson and I bonded in one of those complete moments of childhood friendship that last only as long as the particular period of play, each of us knowing that the next time we met we would be no closer than we had been before.

We were soon joined by other boys, returning from their cricket, rounders and athletics, and Donaldson and I, masters-of-ceremony, initiated them into the Ways of the Ticker.

Then I had an idea.

‘What about this?’ I said. ‘Suppose we all link hands and stretch out in a line. Then one of us grabs the wire and actually gets a shock. The current should go all along the line getting weaker and weaker until it reaches the last person.

‘What’s the point of that?’

‘Well, the winner is the person with the most points. How many of us are there? Fifteen. So the person who actually touches the wire gets fifteen points, the person next to him fourteen and so on, down to the last person who gets one. If you break the link you’re out.'

It took a certain amount of organisation, but eventually some rules were roughed out that allowed everyone to get the chance to be the Fifteen Man, the one who touched the wire and bore the brunt of the current.

Never physically brave I decided for who knows what reason, that I should be the Fifteen Man first. Donaldson was next to me and grasped my free hand. When we were all firmly linked I leaned towards the wire.

‘Remember,’ I said sternly, ‘anyone who lets go is O-U-T out. For ever.’

Fifteen heads nodded solemnly. I reached forwards, held my breath and grasped the wire.

The first tick sent a surge through me that almost knocked me off my feet, but I held on for a second tick, almost unaware of the screams and giggles that were spreading out along the line.

After the third or fourth shock, I let go and looked back.

Fifteen boys were jumping up and down, yelling and giggling. The line had held.

The boy at the end, who had received the least shock was none other than Bunce and he was pink and grinny with the pleasure of having kept his nerve and held on.

We played this game for another half hour and I’m not sure I had ever been so completely happy. There was a combination of delights here that had never come together for me before: the knowledge of sweets and sweets and sweets in my pocket, the pride of a new-found physical courage, the pleasure of being not just part of a game, but master of it, the delicious awareness that I had somehow persuaded fifteen boys to break a school rule. We were in it together. I hadn’t joined in with them, they had joined in with me.

Bunce had never overlooked the casual kindness of our first meeting in the Paddington train. He didn’t ever tag, having too much dignity to be one of nature’s hangers on, but he always liked me, no matter what I did, and he always grinned when he caught my eye and looked sad when I was teased or shouted at or in trouble.

Everyone had enjoyed a turn as the Fifteen Man, we had worked out the right number of pulses to hold on for to ensure the maximum pleasure and now Donaldson and I were conferring on refinements. He suggested that the chain should actually be a semicircle and that the last man in the line should touch the wire at the same time as the first. Someone warned with awe and dread in their voice that this would cause a Short Circuit and that the person in the middle, when the two pulses of current met, would be burnt to a cinder. Perhaps we should collect a pony and use that as a guinea-pig. A pony in the middle of the semi-circle seemed a very funny idea, and a pony being fried to a crisp struck Donaldson as the most fantastically amusing proposition he had ever heard.

‘Oh, we’ve just got to,’ he said. ‘Look! There’s Cloud. We’ll use Cloud.’

Cloud was an elderly grey pony with a great Thelwell-style underhang of a belly. Cloud was the first pony I had ever ridden and I hated the idea of her being electrocuted. I had inherited from my parents a love of animals that I frankly confess to be anthropomorphic, sentimental and extreme. The very sight of bears, seals and the more obviously endearing mammals will cause us all to weep copiously. I shall never forget the red mist that descended over me, years later, when I once saw youths throwing stones at some ducks in a park in King’s Lynn. I picked up some huge pieces of builder’s rubble nearby and started to hurl them at the boys, roaring the kind of meaningless obscenities that only pure fury can put into the mind. ‘You shit spike wank turdy bastardheads… how do you fucking like it, you tossing tossers…’ that kind of thing.

Were Donaldson and I going to fall out over the use of Cloud in the game? I really did not want that, but nor did I want to be the wet-blanket that doused the spreading warm glow of the moment, the kill-joy that dislocated that perfect rhythm of these unfolding new ideas. Improvised childhood games, like children themselves, are imponderably unpredictable in their robustness and their fragility.

I don’t want to paint Donaldson as some cruel monster. I am certain he would no more have countenanced the zapping of an innocent old pony than any of us.

But this was never put to the test.

A voice came clear down the hill to interrupt us. It was the deep and almost broken voice of Evans, a prefect and the school’s best bowler. One of his faster deliveries had once cracked a middle stump in two. He took the Cricket Ball Throwing Cup every year, on one occasion throwing the ball so far that it went clean over a lane and was never found.

‘Fry! Is Fry Minor down there?’

‘Uh oh!’ said Donaldson, nudging me.

I brushed silently past Donaldson and the others, all pleasure drained from me, and started to climb the hill towards the silhouette of Evans outlined on the ridge.

What had I done wrong?

That’s absurd, I knew what I had done wrong, but I could not understand how I could have been found out. It was impossible.

Maybe Mr Dealey had seen me coming out of Cromie’s study. Maybe someone had missed a few pennies from their pocket and had guessed that I had stolen them. Maybe there had even been a witness.

‘Get a move on, will you?’ Evans stood under the great horse chestnut at the top of the hill and glowered down at me as I laboured up towards him. ‘Haven’t got all day.’

He was in his cricket whites, streaked with the long green grass stains of a man who isn’t afraid to dive.

‘Sorry, Evans,’ I said. ‘Only, it’s my asthma. I can’t run too much in this weather…’

‘Oh yes, your asthma. Well, never mind that, I’m to take you to the headmaster’s study.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Asthma and deafness too?’

‘But why? What have I done?’

Evans turned away as I reached the ridge of the hill, not even looking to see whether I would follow. ‘You’d know that better than me. Cromie just puts his head out of his study door, sees me and says, “Evans, track down Fry the Younger and bring him to me at once.”’

For Evans the event was merely a distraction from nets or from whatever else he had on his mind and I could see that he led me without either relish or sympathy, only with careless disinterest. I trailed behind him like a wet spaniel wondering furiously what it was that Cromie could know.

We reached the outside of his study too early for any excuse to have come to my head, nor had I had time to rehearse fully in my mind the stout and stolid style of blank innocence that would come to me when Cromie confronted me with my crime, the hot indignation of my denial, the hooting outrage that would possess me the moment he accused me of… of what?

‘Enter!’

Evans had rapped on the door. I stood there, legs braced.

‘That means “come in”,’ said Evans, swinging the door open for me.

Cromie was not at his desk. He was sitting in one of his two leather armchairs, reading. The first thing I looked for, with the quickest darting glance, was any sign that the secret drawer to the desk was open. It was not.

‘Thank you, Evans. Very prompt.’

‘Sir.’

Evans vanished with another turn on his heel. He went on in later life to Harrow, playing cricket for the school and shining in the cadet force, where his ability to turn smartly on his heel won him, I have no doubt, the Sword of Honour and the admiration of all.

I lingered in the threshold. There was a jaunty gleam in Cromie’s exceptionally blue eyes, and a crisp upturn to his russet moustache that puzzled and frightened me.

For all I know Cromie’s eyes are brown and his moustache was green: I hope he will forgive any inaccuracy. I believe he is a wise enough man to know that false memory can be more accurate than recorded fact.

‘Come in, Fry, come in!’ he cried with the affable assertiveness of an archdeacon inviting a curate in for a friendly talk on Pelagianism.

‘How kind, sir,’ I said, ever pert.

‘Sit,’ said Cromie, indicating the other armchair, the armchair whose seat and cushions, up until this moment, I had only ever seen from upside-down, while bent over one shining leather arm preparing to receive the cane.

I sat in some bewilderment.

I was too far away from leaving the school to be ready to receive the famous Leaver’s Talk about which the school whispered fiercely at the end of each term, the Leaver’s Talk which told everyone what they already knew about Vaginas and Babies and Testicles and Urges and Some Other Boys.

I stared at the carpet hopelessly confused.

After what seemed an age, Cromie put down whatever it was that he was reading and twinkled across at me.

‘Fry,’ he said, slapping a cavalry-twilled knee. ‘I am going to make a prediction.’

‘Sir?’

‘You are going to go far.’

‘Am I, sir?’

‘Believe me, yes. You are going to go very, very far.

Whether to the Palace of Westminster or to

Wormwood Scrubs I can’t quite tell. Probably both, if

I know my Fry.’ He rubbed the knee he had already slapped in the manner of an older man, a man whose arthritis or war wound might be playing merry hell, but was none the less a companionable reminder of better days. ‘Do you know why you will go far, Fry?’

‘No, sir.’

‘You’ll go far because you have the most colossal nerve.’

‘Have I, sir?’

‘For colossal nerve, for sheer, ruddy cheek, I have never met anyone to match you.’

All this said so easily, so chummily so – there was no escaping the word, mad as it seemed – so admiringly.

‘Fry has a problem,’ Cromie went on, seeming now to be addressing the bookcase. ‘He has a parcel he wishes to send, but, drat and curse it, he has no stamp. So what does he do? He goes into Sir’s study, cool as you please, sees a heap of letters and packages waiting to be stamped, puts his own on top of the pile and leaves. “Old Dealey will take the whole lot out to the post office and mine will be stamped along with the rest of them,” he thinks to himself. How was he to know that Sir might come along before Dealey had taken them away and recognise the highly individual handwriting of the most impudent scoundrel this school has ever had the honour to house?’

God, God, God … the joke shop order … the pennies stuck together. I had clean forgotten.

In all the excitement of discovering those sweets I must have laid the package down on the desk when fiddling with the secret drawer.

Great heavens almighty.

‘Such cavalier insolence deserves a reward, Fry,’ said Cromie. ‘Your reward is that Dealey has duly taken your parcel to Uley along with the others and it will be sent to its destination at the school’s expense and with my compliments.’

He rubbed his chin and chuckled.

Maybe Jesus Christ and Granddaddy did not judge and punish. Maybe they loved me.

I knew what was expected of me in return and gave Cromie the full repertoire: the ruefully apologetic stretching of the lips, the bashfully sheepish grin, the awkwardly embarrassed shifting in my seat.

‘Well, you know, sir. I just thought…

‘I know very well, sir, what you just thought,’ said Cromie, smiling back as he stood. He looked about him. ‘This must be the first time you’ve been inside this room without leaving it with a sore backside. Well, count yourself lucky. Use some of that colossal nerve to better account in future.’

It was true that the only times I had been in that study in Cromie’s company had been to receive two or three of the best. The last time had been for a visit to the village shop. Thee strokes, with a promise of double that amount next time.

I stood up now, and squeezed my eyes tight in horror as I heard the rustle of paper bags in my trouser pockets. This would be no time for illegal sweets to tumble from me like coins from a one-armed bandit.

‘It’s all right, there’s no need to look so frightened. Off you go.

‘Thank you very much and I’m sorry, sir.’

‘Go and sin no more, that’s all I ask. Go and sin no bloody more.'

Sitting under a cedar of Lebanon half an hour later, stuffing foam shrimp after foam shrimp into my mouth, I mused on fate. Maybe I was brave, in a certain sort of way. It took courage to be deceitful and dishonest and conniving and wicked. More courage than it took to toe the line.

The late summer light was lovely on the lawns and lake, there were more fruit salads and a bag of flying saucers left in my blazer pocket.

‘F-r-r-r-ry!’

When the name was called with such rolling menace, it could only mean Pollock, Pollock the head boy with raven black hair and a sadistic hatred of all things Fry the Younger.

He came round from behind the tree and had snatched the bag from out of my hand before I knew what was happening.

‘So we’ve been to the village shop again, have we?’

‘No!’ I said, indignantly, ‘we have not.’

‘Don’t bother lying. Shrimps, milk bottles, flying saucers and blackjacks. Do you think I’m an idiot?’

‘Yes I do Pollock. I do think you’re an idiot. I haven’t been to the village shop.’

He struck me across the face. ‘Don’t be cheeky, you little creep. Empty your pockets.’

Because of that fall at Chesham Prep my nose has always been immensely sensitive to the slightest percussion. The least strike will cause tears to spring up. In those days the tears were added to by the humiliating realisation that they looked like real tears.

‘Oh for God’s sake, stop blubbing and empty your pockets.’

There is nothing like a false accusation to cause even more tears.

‘How many times do I have to tell you,’ I howled. ‘I haven’t been to the village shop!’

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure you haven’t. And what have we got here then?’

If the memory weren’t so absurdly anachronistic, I could almost swear that Pollock ripped open one of the flying saucers and put his tongue to the sherbet like a Hollywood cop tasting white powder.

‘But it’s not from the village shop! It’s not, it’s not!’

There was no getting through to this idiot.

‘Christ, you’re for the high jump this time,’ said Pollock, turning away with all my spoils.

As he spoke we both heard the bell ring for tea. He looked up towards the main school buildings.

‘By the ships straight after tea,’ he grunted and stumped up the hill.

How strange that the phrase ‘by the ships’ has only just come back to me.

At one end of a corridor, the other end of which led to the headmaster’s study, there were two model battleships mounted in glass cases. A prefect who sent you to see the headmaster always said ‘By the ships, after lunch…‘ or ‘One more squeak from you, and you’ll be outside the ships’. Odd that I didn’t remember those ships earlier on in the telling of the story. I think one of them may have been HMS Hood, but maybe I’m wrong. I am certain too that they had red paint on the funnel which seems unlikely in a royal naval vessel. Perhaps they were cruise liners. Whatever they were, they spelled disaster.

With rising panic I stumbled up after Pollock screaming at him that I hadn’t, I hadn’t, I hadn’t been to the village shop. I heard only answering echoes of laughter as he disappeared into the school.

I heard a small voice at my elbow.

‘What’s the matter, Fry? Whatever is the matter?’

I looked down to see the anxious brown eyes of Bunce blinking up at me.

I wiped a sleeve across my snot-running nose and tear-stained cheeks. I could not bear it that one who so admired me should see me in such a state.

As I was wiping that sleeve the idea came into my head fully born and fully armed. The speed of its conception, birth and growth almost took my breath away. I had followed Evans earlier in the afternoon all the way from the electric fence to Cromie’s study without being able to think of any defence to any accusation and now – in deeper trouble by far – a rescue plan had emerged in a second. It was complete in my mind before I had even removed the sleeve from my face.

As Biggles never tired of telling his comrades, there is always a way. Always. No matter how tight the squeak, and remember chums, we’ve been in tighter squeaks than this, there is always a way out. Algy, look lively and pass me that rope…

‘Pollock’s just caught me with a load of tuck from the village shop,’ I said in a low voice, laden with doom.

Bunce’s eyes rounded still further. I could tell that the glamour and exoticism of village shop tuck frightened and fascinated him. This was by now at least his second year, I suppose, but somehow, like little Arthur in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, he was always functionally the youngest boy in the school. I remember that earlier on this summer term, a master had casually pointed out to him that he had turned up to a PE lesson in white plimsolls instead of black and he had gone redder than a geranium and wept and wobbled for days afterwards. His sixth term at the school, he hadn’t even been close to punishment or the gentlest chastisement, but it was his first ever deviation from the letter of school law and it had upset him deeply.

‘Golly,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you get the whack last week for…?‘

‘Exactly,’ I said, interrupting. The thing was to keep the little chap off balance. ‘And Gromie said if I was caught again I would be expelled.’

‘Expelled?’ Bunce breathed the word in a terrified whisper as though it were nitro-glycerine that might explode if handled too roughly.

I nodded tragically. ‘I don’t know what my mother and father would do if I were expelled,’ I said, sniffing a little sniff.

‘But why?’

‘Why? Because it would upset them so much, of course!’ I said, nettled by such denseness.

‘No, I mean why did you go to the village shop again if you knew you would get expelled?’

Well, I mean really. Some people.

‘It’s… it’s hard to explain,’ I said. ‘The thing is, never mind why, there’s just no way out, that’s the point. Pollock’s confiscated the evidence and he’s going to…‘ My voice trailed off in sudden wonderment as an idea seemed to catch hold. ‘Unless, that is, unless..

‘Unless what?’

‘No, no… it’s asking too much,’ I said, shaking my head.

‘Unless what?’ squeaked Bunce again.

‘It’s no good, I’d better face it. I’m done for.’

‘Unless what?’ Bunce almost stamped the ground in his desperation to be told.

‘Well… I was thinking that if I could say that I hadn’t been to the village shop but that I had got the tuck from someone else…’

I let the thought hang in the air.

‘You mean,’ said Bunce, ‘that if a boy said that he was the one who had been to the village shop not you then you wouldn’t be the one who had been and you wouldn’t be expelled?’

I didn’t bother to follow the literal meaning of that peculiar sentence but assumed he was along the right lines and nodded vigorously. ‘Trouble is,’ I said grimly, ‘who on earth would do that for me?’

I watched, with the detached and curious interest of the truly evil, as Bunce blinked, bit his lip, swallowed, bit his lip and blinked again.

‘I would,’ he said at long last.

‘Oh, no!’ I protested. ‘I couldn’t possibly ask you. I mean you’re far too…’

‘Far too what?’

‘Well… I mean, everyone knows, you’re a bit of a… you know…

I allowed myself to stumble, too tactful to finish the thought.

Bunce’s face grew dark. ‘A bit of a what?’ he said, in something close to a growl.

‘Well,’ I said gently, ‘a bit of a goody-goody.’ He flushed and looked at the ground. I may just as well have charged him with complicity in the holocaust.

‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘I’m the idiot. I don’t know what it is with me. I just can’t help being bad.’

He looked up at me, suddenly and for the first time annoyed with himself because he just couldn’t help being good. Which is what I had wanted him to feel.

Christ, I’m smart, I said to myself. Perhaps this is what is meant by ‘approaching genius’. Do I know how to play a person like a fish, or do I not…

I could see that Bunce was coming to an independent decision, or rather that he believed he was coming to an independent decision.

‘What’s got to happen,’ Bunce said, in a voice firm with resolution, ‘is that you’ve got to tell Mr Gromie that it was me who went to the village shop. Me not you.'

‘Oh but, Bunce…’

‘No. That’s what you’ve got to do. Now come on, or we’ll be punished for being late for tea as well.’

‘Good Christ, Fry!’ Cromie yelled, pacing up and down the study like a caged Tasmanian devil. ‘Not an hour after I congratulate you on your nerve than you’re back here proving to me that it’s not nerve, it’s cheek, it’s rudeness, it’s bloody insolence!’

I stood on the carpet, biding my time.

‘Did I, or did I not, boy, warn you last time that if you dared so much as to smell that blasted shop again I would have your guts for garters? Well?’

‘But, sir…’

‘Answer me, damn you! Did I, or did I not?’

‘But sir, I haven’t been to the village shop.’

‘What?’ Gromie stopped mid-stride. ‘Are you trying to tell me…’ he gestured towards the bags of confiscated sweets on his desk. It simply amazed me that the thought hadn’t crossed his mind to check his own stash in the secret drawer. Maybe he had forgotten all about it.

‘No, sir. I was eating those, but…’

‘But what? You picked them off a tree? You fished

them out of the lake? I wasn’t born yesterday, you know.’

I wasn’t born yesterday. Pull the other one. Have your guts for garters. Don’t try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Pull your socks up. Buck up your ideas.

I wonder if schoolmasters still talk like that.

‘No, sir, it’s just that I didn’t go to the village shop.’

‘What do you mean?’ Cromie almost clawed the air in his frustration. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

‘Well, sir, what I say, sir.’

‘Are you trying to tell me that someone else gave you those sweets?’

I nodded. At last he understood.

‘And who, may I ask, is this charitable person, this extraordinary philanthropist, who visits the village shop just so that he might bestow sweets on his friends like some benevolent lord of the manor distributing largess to his villeins? Hm? Who might this person be?’

‘I… I don’t like to sneak, sir…’

‘Ho, no. Ho no you don’t,’ Gromie wasn’t buying that one. ‘If you don’t want your promised six strokes, then you had better tell me and tell me this minute.’

My lower lip wobbled as the betrayal was wrung from me. ‘Well, sir. It was Bunce, sir.’

I do not believe I have ever seen a man more surprised. Gromie’s eyebrows shot up to the ceiling and his lips went instantly white.

‘Did you just say Bunce?’ he asked in a hoarse whisper of disbelief.

‘Sir, yes, sir.

‘Bunce as in Bunce?’

I nodded.

Cromie stared at me, eyeball to eyeball for about five seconds as if trying to pierce through to the very back of my soul. He shook his head, strode past me, flung open the door and yelled in a voice that thundered like Krakatoa, ‘Bunce! Bunce! Somebody find me Bunce!’

‘Oh dear,’ one of the parrots remarked, kicking the husk of a nut out of its cage. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’

I waited, standing my ground as I listened to the cries for Bunce echo around the school like calls for courtroom witnesses.

During tea I had looked across at Bunce’s table from time to time. He had been listlessly pushing fried bread into his mouth like a condemned man who has chosen the wrong last breakfast. When he had looked up and happened to catch my eye, his cheeks had blazed scarlet but his head had nodded emphatically up and down and his mouth had formed the word ‘Yes’. I had no doubts about my Bunce. Bunce was brave and Bunce was true.

Within three minutes Bunce was beside me on the carpet in Cromie’s study, his hands behind his back, his mouth set in a firm line, but his legs wobbling hopelessly in their shorts.

‘Bunce,’ said Cromie, sweetly, ‘Fry tells me that…

This was as far as he managed to get.

The dam burst and the torrent filled the room.

‘Sir, it’s true, sir. I went to the village shop, sir. I went. I did. I did go there. Fry went. I didn’t. I mean, I went, Fry didn’t. I went to the village shop, not Fry. I got the sweets for him. He didn’t buy any. It was me. I bought them all. I went to the village shop. I went to the village shop. I did…’ All this came at a pace that made Cromie blink with astonishment. It ended in a howling cyclone of weeping that embarrassed us all.

‘Fry, get out,’ said Cromie. ‘Sir, does that mean…?’

‘Just go. Wait outside. I shall call for you later.’

As I closed the door I heard Bunce’s voice squeaking out the words, ‘It is true, sir. Every word. I went to the village shop and I’m so sorry, sir, I shan’t ever again…’

There were too many people milling about to allow me to stay near and eavesdrop. The great cry for Bunce had fascinated the school.

‘What’s up, Fry?’ everyone wanted to know.

I shrugged my shoulders as if I didn’t care and walked to the end of the corridor down towards the ships.

Higher up the wall, above the Hood and the Dreadnought, or the Invincible and the Repulse or whatever they were, were wooden panels where the gilt names of scholars and other great achievers had been painted. I stood and looked at them. Le Poidevin, Winship, Mallett, de Vere, Hodge, Martineau and Hazell. I wondered for a brief second if my name would ever be up there, but dismissed the idea at once. I knew that it would never be. This was a list of the names of those who had joined in. They had gone on from being captains of rugger and captains of cricket to being captains of school and captains of industry. I wondered if, in a phrase that Major Dobson loved, they had also become Masters of their Fate and Captains of their Soul.

‘Are you a Major of your Soul then, sir, and is that better than being a Captain of your Soul?’ I remember I had asked him this once when he had read that Whitman poem to us and he had smiled cheerily at the question. I had loved Major Dobson because he had been a good teacher and because, in that strange and inappropriate way that children have, I had felt sorry for him. I think my mother had taken me to see a production of Rattigan’s Separate Tables at the Maddermarket Theatre in Norwich when I was quite young, and since then I had always associated Majors with disappointment, regret and, that awful phrase, ‘passed over’.

‘Not bad for a passed-over Major…’ Colonel Ross says to Major Dolby in The Ipcress File.

In fact, I now know, Major Dobson had been captured by the Germans with the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk. He then escaped and fought throughout the war right up through Sicily and Italy. True to the old cliché, he never talked about it. No more than did Mr Bruce who had spent the war years in a Japanese internment camp and taught History and Divinity with the panache and brio of an ancient fabulist. Being fiercely Scottish, the history he taught with such passion was of William Wallace, the Montrose Rebellion and the Jacobite Wars of 1715 and 1745. I have special reason to bless Jim Bruce as you will discover later.

I discovered these and other biographical details only two weeks ago when Ant Cromie kindly sent me a list of answers to a cartload of questions about Stouts Hill. Charles Knight, who taught me Latin and Greek and looked like Crippen the murderer but was the kindest and gentlest man who ever taught me, a man who loved to teach, had no interest in discipline or punishment whatsoever, and took immense pride in my taking the school’s Senior Greek Prize when I was twelve (I have it still, the collected works of John Keats) – he fought in the desert and in Italy too. I remember so clearly history lessons that involved the war, I remember its universal fascination to all of us, for all that it had ended twelve or thirteen years before we were born. Almost every boy in the school could identify the silhouette of a Dornier and a Heinkel and draw Hurricanes, Spitfires and Panzer tanks. Yet not once do I remember a single master refer to war as a personal experience. I would have bombarded, strafed and sniped them with questions, had I known. It puzzles me still, this silence of old soldiers.

Looking up at the names of the old boys always. made me think of the war. Although the school had only been founded in 1935, those names above the ships looked like the names of the war dead, they shared that same melancholy permanence. A contemporary school roll, however outré or grand the names, always sounds perky and chipper; the school roll of a generation ago has the sombre muffled note of a funeral bell.

I had not been staring up at le Poidevin and Winship and Mallett for long before I saw, reflected in the glass case of the ships, the study door open at the end of the corridor. I turned.

Cromie stood in the doorway and beckoned with a single curling finger. I walked down the corridor jauntily.

Somehow, I knew the game was up. I think too that I knew that it was right that it was up. Like a scared mutt darting out from between his master’s legs, Bunce shot from the study and rocketed down the corridor towards me. I caught the rolling whites of his eyes as he passed and thought I heard a panted word, which may have been ‘Sorry’.

As I approached Cromie and the open study door he turned to the six or seven boys who were hanging around, pretending to talk to the parrots and examine the pictures on the walls.

‘What are you lot doing here?’ he yelled. ‘Nothing better to do? Want some extra work?’

They fled in instant silent panic.

Now there was only me in the corridor, walking towards Cromie who was framed against the doorway, his outline dark against the window at the back of his study. The corridor seemed to be getting longer and longer, as in some truth-drug induced hallucination scene in The Avengers or Man in a Suitcase. Still his finger seemed to beckon, still every step that I took seemed to take me further from him.

When the door did close behind us the room was deadly quiet and the sounds of the school could not be heard. Even the parrots and the mynah bird had fallen into silence.

Cromie turned towards the window where the shutters were. The shutters that housed the canes.

‘Of course you know,’ said Cromie with a sigh, ‘that I am going to beat you, don’t you, Fry?’

I nodded and licked my lips.

‘I would just like to believe,’ he went on, ‘that you know why.’

I nodded again.

‘To go to the village shop is one thing. To send a boy like Bunce to go in your place is quite another. Let us not fool ourselves. Bunce would never have gone unless at your bidding. If you can see how cowardly that is, how vile and low and cowardly, then perhaps there is a scintilla of hope for you.’

That was the first time, I remember, that I ever heard the word ‘scintilla’. It is funny how the exact meaning of a new word can be so precisely understood in all its connotations, just from its first hearing.

‘Eight strokes, I think,’ said Cromie. ‘The most I have ever given. I hope never to have to give so many again.’

Bunce never forgave himself, in all the time I knew him, for letting me down. He remained convinced that somehow he could have played it better. He should have swaggered, acted the part of the real, wicked, dyed-in-the-wool village-shopper. I wanted to hug him for his sweetness. Just a great hug to reward such goodness of nature.

I wanted to hug myself too.

I wanted to hug myself for fooling Cromie.

He still didn’t get it. Still didn’t know the real truth. I had stolen his sweets, stolen money from his pupils and verbally tortured a fine child into lying for me. And all I had been beaten for was the schoolmasterly crime of being a ‘bad influence’.

The boys of Cundall Manor School loved me to tell them that story when I was a schoolmaster in the late 1970s. I didn’t paint myself in quite the terrible colours I should have done, I left out the parts involving real theft, but otherwise I told it as it was and they loved it.

‘Tell it again, sir. The story of you and Bunce… go on, sir!’

And I would light my pipe and tell them.

I look back now at Stouts Hill, closed during my first term at Cambridge, and I shake my head at the person I was. The child was more malevolent, I think, than the adolescent, because at least the adolescent had love as an excuse. All the child wanted was to tear at sweets with his teeth.

It never quite managed to move with the times, Stouts Hill. Ant Cromie was ambitious and built a fine theatre. But he never liked the idea of too many day boys. The fees were high, the uniform remained fabulously classy and meanwhile the parents became less interested in ponies and Greek and more interested in Common Entrance results and money. They had voted Mrs Thatcher in and they voted out Cloud the pony and the boathouse and the lake and the old Majors and Commanders. On my bookshelf I still have a copy of Fitzroy Maclean’s Eastern Approaches, lent to me by Paddy Angus’s husband, Ian. I really must send it back to him some time. Fitzroy Maclean is dead now and so is Stouts Hill.

I wonder what those who have used it as a Time Share Facility make of the place. I wonder if I left any guilt and shame in the air? I wonder if Bunce’s grief at his own goodness is soaked into the walls?

I was happy there. Which is to say I was not unhappy there. Unhappiness and happiness I have always been able to carry about with me, irrespective of place and people, because I have never joined in.