Vintage Stuff

Chapter 3

But Mrs Clyde-Browne's fears were groundless. Peregrine was perfectly happy. Unlike more sensitive boys, who found the school an intimation of hell, he was in his element. This was in large measure due to his size. At fifteen, Peregrine was almost six feet tall, weighed eleven stone and, thanks to the misguided advice of a physics teacher at his prep school who had observed that even if he did a hundred press-ups every morning, he still wouldn't understand the theory of gravity, he was also immensely strong. At Groxbourne, size and strength mattered.

Founded in the latter half of the nineteenth century by a hopelessly optimistic clergyman to bring Anglo-Catholic fervour to the local farmers' sons, the school had remained so obscure and behind the times that its traditions were those of an earlier age. There was fagging and beating and a good deal of bullying. There were also prefects, the ritual of morning and evening chapel, cold showers, draughty dormitories and wholesome, if inedible, food. In short, Groxbourne maintained the routine of its founder without achieving his ambitions. For Peregrine, these abstract considerations had no meaning. It was enough that he was too hefty to bully at all safely, that the school bell chimed at regular intervals throughout the day to tell him that a lesson had ended or lunch was about to begin, and that he never had to think what he was supposed to be doing.

Best of all, his tendency to take things literally was appreciated. In any case, no master ever encouraged him to take his time. It was always, 'Now shut up and get on with it.' And Peregrine got on with it to such an extent that for the first time in his life he found himself nearer the top of the class than the bottom.

But it was on the games field that his ability to take things literally paid off. In rugby, he hurled himself into scrums with a lack of fear that won him a place in the Junior XV and the admiration of the coach, himself a Welshman and well qualified to judge murderous tactics.

'I've never seen a youngster like him,' Mr Evans told Glodstone after a match in which Peregrine had followed instructions to the letter by putting the boot in, heeling the ball out with a fury that suggested he intended taking the opposing pack's with it, and tackling a fly-half so ferociously that the fellow was carried off the field with concussion while Peregrine claimed his shorts as a trophy.

It was the same with boxing. Peregrine brought a violence to the sport that terrified his opponents and alarmed the instructor. 'When I said, "Now let's see who can shove the other bloke's teeth through his tonsils," I didn't mean belt the blighter when he's unconscious,' he protested, after Peregrine, having knocked another boy stone-cold, proceeded to hold him against the ropes with one hand while punching him repeatedly in the mouth with the other.

Even Major Fetherington was impressed. Mr Clyde-Browne's boast that his son was a keen shot proved true. Peregrine had an unerring eye. On the small-bore range his bullets so seldom missed the bull that the Major, suspecting he was missing the target with all but one, put up a large paper screen behind it and was amazed to find he was wrong. All Peregrine's bullets hit the bull. And the Assault Course held no terrors for him. He scaled the brick wall with remarkable agility, dropped cheerfully into the muddy ditch, swung across the gully, and squirmed through the waterlogged tunnel without a qualm. Only the Death Slide caused him some problems. It wasn't that he found difficulty sliding down it, clinging to a toggle rope, but that he misunderstood the Major's instruction to return to the starting point and proceeded to climb back up the wire hawser hand over hand. By the time he was halfway up and hanging forty feet above the rocks at the bottom of the quarry, the Major was no longer looking and had closed his eyes in prayer.

'Are you all right, sir?' Peregrine asked when he reached the top. The Major opened his eyes and looked at him with a mixture of relief and fury. 'Boy,' he said, 'This is supposed to be an Assault Course, not a training ground for trapeze artists and circus acrobats. Do you understand that?'

'Yes, sir,' said Peregrine.

'Then in future you will do exactly what you are told.'

'Yes, sir. But you said to return to...'

'I know what I said and I don't need reminding,' shouted the Major and cancelled the rest of the afternoon's training to get his pulse back to normal. Two days later, he was to regret his outburst. He returned from a five mile cross-country run in the rain to discover that Peregrine was missing.

'Did any of you boys see where he got to?' he asked the little group of exhausted Overactive Underachievers when they assembled in the changing room.

'No, sir. He was with us when we reached the bottom of Leignton Gorge. You remember he asked you something.'

The Major looked out on the darkening sky it had begun to snow and seemed to recall Peregrine asking him if he could swim the river instead of using the bridge. Since the question had been put when the Major had just stumbled over a stone into a patch of stinging nettles, he couldn't remember his answer. He had an idea it had been abrupt.

'Oh, well, if he isn't back in half an hour, we'll have to send out a search party and notify the police,' he muttered and went up to his room to console himself over a brandy with the thought that Clyde-Browne had probably drowned in the river. Twelve hours later his hopes and fears were proved to be unfounded. The police, using Alsatians, had discovered Peregrine sheltering quite cheerfully in a barn ten miles away.

'But you definitely told me to get lost, sir,' he explained when he was brought back to the school at five in the morning.

Major Fetherington fought for words. 'But I didn't mean you...' he began.

'And the other day you said I was to do exactly what you told me to,' continued Peregrine.

'God help us,' said the Major.

'Yes sir,' said Peregrine, and went off with the School Sister to the Sanatorium.

But if his consistency was a pain in the neck to the Major, his popularity with the boys remained high. Not only was Peregrine never bullied, but he guaranteed the safety of other new boys who could always look to him to fight for them. And thanks to his size and his looks his battered appearance as a baby had been aggravated by boxing not even the most frustrated sixth former found him sexually inviting. In short, Peregrine was as prodigiously a model public schoolboy as he had previously been a model child. It was this extraordinary quality that first drew the attention of Mr Glodstone to him and shaped his destiny.

Mrs Clyde-Browne had been right in her assessment of the housemaster. Mr Glodstone was peculiar. The son of a retired Rear-Admiral of such extreme right-wing views that he had celebrated the blitz on London by holding a firework display on Guy Fawkes Night, 1940, Gerald Glodstone had lost not only the presence of his father, but that of his own left eye, thanks to the patriotic if inept efforts of a gamekeeper who had aimed a rocket at his employer and missed. With the eye went Glodstone's hopes of pursuing a naval career. Rear-Admiral Glodstone went with the police to be interned on the Isle of Man where he died two year later. The subsequent punitive death duties had left his son practically penniless. Mr Glodstone had been forced to take up teaching.

'A case of arrested development,' had been the Headmaster's verdict at the time and it had proved true. Mr Glodstone's only qualifications as a teacher, apart from the fact that his late father had been Chairman of the Board of Governors at Groxbourne, had been his ability to read, write and speak English with an upper-class accent. With the wartime shortage of schoolmasters, these had been enough. Besides, Glodstone was an enthusiastic cricketer and gave the school some social cachet by teaching fencing. He was also an excellent disciplinarian and had only to switch his monocle from his glass eye to his proper one to put the fear of God up the most unruly class. By the end of the war, he had become part of the school and too remarkable a personage to lose. Above all, he got on well with the boys in a wholesome way and shared their interests. A model railway addict, he had brought his own elaborate track and installed it in the basement of the gym where surrounded by his 'chaps' he lived out in miniature his earliest ambition without the ghastly fatalities that would evidently have resulted from its fulfilment on a larger scale.

It was the same with his intellectual interests. Mr Glodstone's mental age was, as far as literature was concerned, about fourteen. He never tired of reading and re-reading the classic adventure stories of his youth and in his mind's eye, forever searching for a more orthodox hero than his father on whom to model himself, found one in each old favorite. He was by turns D'Artagnan, Richard Hannay, Sherlock Holmes, The Scarlet Pimpernel (who accounted for his monocle), and Bulldog Drummond, anyone in fiction who was a courageous and romantic defender of the old, the good and the true, against the new, the wicked and the false, as he and their authors judged these things.

In psychological terms, it could be said that Mr Glodstone suffered from a chronic identity problem, which he solved by literary proxy. Here again, he shared his enthusiasms with the boys, and if his teaching of English literature was hardly calculated to get them through O-level, let alone A, it had at least the merit of being exciting and easily understood by even the dullest fifteen-year-old. Year after year, Groxbourne turned out school leavers imbued with the unshakeable belief that the world's problems, and particularly the demise of the British Empire, stemmed from a conspiracy of unwashed Bolsheviks, Jews in high finance and degenerate Black men and Germans with hooded eyelids who tapped their fingers on their knees when at all agitated. In their view, and that of Mr Glodstone, what was needed was a dedicated band of wealthy young men who were prepared to reinforce the law by 'going outside it' to the extent of bayonetting left-wing politicians in their own cellars or, in more extreme cases, tossing them into baths filled with nitric acid. That they didn't put Bulldog Drummond's remedies into practice was largely due to lack of opportunity and the need to get up at dawn to do the milking and go to bed before the criminal world was fully awake. But above all, they were saved by their own lack of imagination and later by the good sense of their wives.

Mr Glodstone was less encumbered. His imagination, growing wilder with age, could imbue the most commonplace events with arcane significance, and successive school matrons with charms they most certainly did not possess. He was only prevented from proposing to them by an exaggerated sense of his own social standing. Instead, he was sexually self-sufficient, felt guilty about his partially enacted fantasies and did his damnedest to exorcise them by taking a cold bath every morning, summer and winter. During the holidays, he visited one or other of his numerous and, in some cases, still wealthy relatives or followed, as far as changed circumstances allowed, in the footsteps of his fictional heroes.

Thus, like Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps, though without the incentive of a murdered man in his rooms, he took the morning train from London to Scotland and spent several exceedingly uncomfortable nights trying to sleep in the heather, before deciding he was more likely to catch pneumonia than find adventure in such a bleak and rain-sodden part of the world. The following summer he had followed Richard Chandos' route to Austria, this time on a motorcycle, in the hope of locating The Great Well at Wagensburg, only to discover Carinthia was packed with coach-loads of tourists and German holiday makers. Mr Glodstone retreated to side roads and walked forest paths in a vain attempt to invest the area with its old magic. And so, each summer, he made another pilgrimage to the setting of an adventure story and came home disappointed but with a more fanatical gleam in his eye. One day he would impose the reality of his literary world on that of the existing one. In fact, by the time Peregrine came under his care, it was extremely doubtful if the housemaster had any idea what decade he was living in. The rolling stock and carriages of his model railway suggested the nineteen-twenties with their Wagons Lits and Pullman cars which were all pulled by steam engines.

But his proudest and most dangerous possession, acquired from a dead uncle, was a 1927 Bentley, in which, until he was asked by the Headmaster to spare the school a multiple tragedy, he terrified a few favoured boys and every other road-user by hurtling at tremendous speed along narrow country lanes and through neighbouring villages.

'But it was built for speed and eats the miles,' Glodstone protested, 'You won't find a car to equal it on the road today.'

'Mercifully,' said the Headmaster, 'and it can eat as many miles as it wants out of term time, but I'm not having the School Sanatorium turned into a mass morgue as a result of your insane driving.'

'Just as you say, Headmaster,' said Glodstone and he had kept the Bentley in immaculate condition, locked away in his garage, awaiting the day when it would, as he put it, come into its own.

With the arrival of Peregrine Clyde-Browne at Groxbourne, that day seemed to have come closer. Mr Glodstone had found the perfect disciple, a boy endowed with the physique, courage and mental attributes of a genuine hero. From the moment he had caught Peregrine in the school bogs beating Soskins Major to a pulp for forcing a fag to wipe his arse for him, Mr Glodstone had known that his involuntary calling had not been wasted.

But, with a discretion that came from having seen what had happened to several masters in the past who had shown too early an interest in particular boys, he demonstrated his own impartiality by speaking to the House prefects. 'I want you chaps to keep an eye on Clyde-Browne,' he told them, 'we can't have him getting too big for his boots. I've known too many fellows spoilt because they're good at games and so on. Popularity goes to their heads and they begin to think they're the cat's whiskers, what!'

For the rest of the term, Peregrine's presumed ambition to be any part of the cat's anatomy was eradicated. When he wasn't doing a thousand lines for not polishing a prefect's shoes properly he was presenting his backside to the Head of House wielding a chalked cane for talking in dormitory after Lights Out, when he hadn't been, or for taking too long in the showers. In short, Peregrine was subjected to a baptism of punishment that would have caused a normally sensitive boy to run away or have a nervous breakdown. Peregrine did neither. He endured. It simply never crossed his mind that he was being singled out for special treatment. It was only when he was accused of a singularly beastly sin against Nature by the Matron, who had found blood on his pyjama trousers, that he was forced to explain.

'It's just that I got twelve strokes yesterday and eight the day before,' he said. 'A chap can't help bleeding.'

'You mean you've had twenty strokes since Tuesday?' said the Matron, utterly appalled.

'You can count them if you like,' said Peregrine matter-of-factly. 'Though actually I had sixteen last week and they're still showing so it'll be difficult to sort them out.'

Half an hour later, after his backside had been inspected by the Matron and the doctor, Peregrine was lying face down in bed in the San. and the Headmaster had sent for Mr Glodstone. Since he was rather more progressive than his predecessor and held strong views on corporal punishment, and had been waiting to have a row with Glodstone, the meeting was acrimonious.

'Do you realize we could be sued for damages for what's been done to that poor boy?' he demanded.

'I don't see how,' said, Glodstone, lighting his pipe nonchalantly. 'Clyde-Browne hasn't complained, has he?'

'Complained? No, he hasn't. Which only goes to show how brutally you run your house. The poor boy's clearly too terrified to say anything for fear he'll get another thrashing if he does.'

Mr Glodstone blew a smoke ring. 'Is that what he says?'

'No, it isn't. It's what I say and what I mean '

'If he doesn't say it, I don't see how you can argue that he means it,' said Mr Glodstone. 'Why don't you ask him?'

'By God, I will,' said the Headmaster, rising to the bait, 'though I'm not having him intimidated by your presence. I'll speak to him alone and you'll kindly wait here while I do.'

And leaving Mr Glodstone to browse through his personal correspondence with a curiosity the Housemaster would have found disgusting in one of his 'chaps', he marched off to the San. By the time he returned, Glodstone had put some more wood on the fire, together with two unopened envelopes for the hell of it, and the Headmaster was forced to temporize. Peregrine had refused to complain about his treatment and, in spite of the Headmaster's pleading, had said he was jolly happy in Gloddie's house and anyway, chaps ought to be beaten.

'What did I tell you?' said Glodstone, and sucked noisily on his pipe. 'Boys appreciate a firm hand. And Clyde-Browne's made of the right stuff.'

'Perhaps,' said the Headmaster morosely. 'But whatever stuff he's made of, I don't want any more of it beaten this term. It may interest you to know that his father is a leading solicitor and has paid his son's fees in advance. A man in his position could bring a court action that would bankrupt the school.'

'Just as you say, Headmaster,' said Glodstone and took his leave, while the Headmaster went back distraughtly to his depleted correspondence and considered desperate measures for getting rid of the ghastly Glodstone.

Outside the study, the Housemaster knocked his pipe out into a bowl of hyacinths and returned to his rooms. There he selected one of his favourite books, Mr Standfast by John Buchan, and took it up to the San.

'Thought you might like something to read, old chap,' he said to the back of Peregrine's head.

'Thank you very much, sir,' said Peregrine.

'And jolly good show on your part not letting the side down,' continued Mr Glodstone. 'So when you've finished that, tell Matron and I'll bring you another.'

The literary infection of Peregrine had begun.