Vintage Stuff

Chapter 4

It continued. By the time he was allowed out of the Sanatorium, Peregrine had finished all the Adventures of Richard Hannay and was well into Bulldog Drummond's. He went home for the holidays with several volumes from Glodstone's library, a letter from the Headmaster explaining that he intended to abolish corporal punishment and apologizing for Peregrine having to be beaten at all, an excellent report on his term's work and a positively glowing testimony from Mr Glodstone. Mr Clyde-Browne read the Headmaster's letter with mixed feelings and didn't show it to his wife. In his opinion there was a great deal to be said for beating Peregrine, and in any case, it seemed to suggest that the brute had at last taken it into his head not to do what he was told. Mr Clyde Browne took that as a good sign. His views of the excellent report and Glodstone's testimony were different.

'He seems to be doing extremely well at his work,' said Mrs Clyde-Browne, 'He's got an Alpha for every subject.'

'One hesitates to think what the Betas must be like,' said Mr Clyde-Browne, who was surprised to learn that any of the masters at Groxbourne knew enough Greek to use Alpha.

'And Mr Glodstone writes that he has shown remarkable character and is a credit to the House.'

'Yes,' said Mr Clyde-Browne, 'He also says Peregrine is a born leader and that's a downright lie if ever I heard one.'

'You just don't have any faith in your own son.'

Mr Clyde-Browne shook his head. 'I have every faith in him except when it comes to leading. Now if that damn fool housemaster thinks...oh, never mind.'

'But I do mind. I mind very much, and I'm thankful that Peregrine has at last found someone who appreciates his true gifts.'

'If that's all he does appreciate,' said Mr Clyde-Browne with rather nasty emphasis.

'And what exactly does that mean?'

'Nothing. Nothing at all.'

'It does, or you wouldn't have said it.'

'I just find the letter peculiar. And I seem to remember that you found Mr Glodstone peculiar yourself.'

Mrs Clyde-Browne bridled. 'If you're thinking what I think you're thinking, you've got a filthier mind than even I would have supposed.'

'Well, it's been known to happen,' said Mr Clyde-Browne, among whose guiltier clients there had been several seedy schoolmasters.

'Not to Peregrine,' said Mrs Clyde-Browne adamantly, and for once her husband had to agree. When next day, on the pretence of having to mow the lawn in December, he questioned Peregrine on the subject, it was clear that he took a robust attitude towards sex.

'Onanism? What's that?' he shouted above the roar of the lawn-mower.

Mr Clyde-Browne adjusted the throttle. 'Masturbation,' he whispered hoarsely, having decided that auto-eroticism would meet with the same blank look.

'Master who?' said Peregrine.

Mr Clyde-Browne dredged his mind for a word his son would understand and decided not to try 'self-abuse'. 'Wanking,' he said finally with a convulsive spasm. 'How much wanking goes on at school?'

'Oh, wanking,' Peregrine shouted as the lawn mower destroyed Mr Clyde-Browne's cover by stopping, 'well, Harrison's are a lot of wankers and Slymne's go in for brown-hatting, but in Gloddie's we '

'Shut up,' yelled Mr Clyde-Browne, conscious that half the neighbours in Pinetree Lane were about to be privy to what went on in Gloddie's, 'I don't want to know.'

'I can't see why you asked then,' bawled Peregrine, still evidently under the impression that the lawnmower was purely incidental to the discussion. 'You asked if there was a lot of wanking and I was telling you.'

Mr Clyde-Browne dragged lividly at the mower's starting cord.

'Anyway, Gloddie's don't if that's what you're worried about,' continued Peregrine, oblivious of his father's suffering. 'And when Matron thought I'd been shafted, I told her '

Mr Clyde-Browne wrenched the lawnmower into life again and drowned the rest of the explanation. It was only later in the garage, and after he'd warned his son that if he raised his voice above a whisper, he'd live to regret it, that Peregrine finally established his innocence. He did so in language that appalled his father.

'Where the hell did you learn the term "brown-hatter"?' he demanded.

'I don't know. Everyone uses it about Slymne's.'

'I don't use it,' said Mr Clyde-Browne. 'And what's slime got to do with it. No, don't tell me, I can guess.'

'Slymne's a shit,' said Peregrine. Mr Clyde-Browne turned the statement over in his mind and found it grammatically puzzling and distinctly crude.

'I should have thought it was bound to be,' he said finally, 'though why you have to reverse the order of things and use the indefinite article into the bargain, beats me.'

Peregrine looked bewildered. 'Well, all the other chaps think Slimey's wet and he's sucking up to the Head. He wears a bow tie.'

'Who does?'

'Mr Slymne.'

'Mr Slymne? Who the hell is Mr Slymne?'

'He's the geography master and there's always been a feud between his house and Gloddie's ever since anyone can remember.'

'I see,' said Mr Clyde-Browne vaguely. 'Anyway, I don't want you to use foul language in front of your mother. I'm not paying good money to send you to a school like Groxbourne for the privilege of having you come home swearing like a trooper.'

But at least Mr Clyde-Browne was satisfied that Mr Glodstone's extraordinary enthusiasm for his son was not obviously based on sex, though what cause it had he couldn't imagine. Peregrine appeared to be as obtuse as ever and as unlikely to fulfil the Clyde-Brownes' hopes. But he seemed to be happy and rudely healthy. Even his mother was impressed by his eagerness to go back to school at the end of the holidays, and began to revise her earlier opinion of Groxbourne.

'Things must have changed with the new headmaster,' she said, and by the same process which saw no bad in her acquaintances because she knew them, she now conferred some distinction on Groxbourne because Peregrine went there. Even Mr Clyde-Browne was relatively satisfied. As he had predicted, Peregrine stayed on in the summer holidays and allowed his parents to have an unencumbered holiday by going on Major Fetherington's Fieldcraft and Survival Course in Wales. And at the end of each term, Peregrine's report suggested that he was doing very well. Only in Geography was he found to be wanting, and Peregrine blamed that on Mr Slymne. 'He's got it in for everyone in Gloddie's,' he told his father, 'you can ask anyone.'

'I don't need to. If you will insist on calling the wretched man Slimey, you deserve what you get. Anyway, I can't see how you can be doing so well in class and fail O-levels at the same time.'

'Gloddie says O-levels don't matter. It's what you do afterwards.'

'Then Mr Glodstone's notion of reality must be sadly wanting,' said Mr Clyde-Browne. 'Without qualifications you won't do anything afterwards.'

'Oh, I don't know,' said Peregrine, 'I'm in the First Eleven and the First Fifteen and Gloddie says if you're good at sports '

'To hell with what Mr Glodstone says,' said Mr Clyde-Browne, and dropped the subject.

His feelings for Glodstone were but a faint echo of those held by Mr Slymne. He loathed Glodstone. Ever since he had first come to Groxbourne some fifteen years before, Slymne had loathed him. It was a natural loathing. Mr Slymne had, in his youth, been a sensitive man and to be christened 'Slimey' in his first week at the school by a one-eyed buffoon with a monocle who professed openly that a beaten boy was a better boy had, to put it mildly, rankled. Mr Slymne's view on punishment had been humane and sensible. Glodstone and Groxbourne had changed all that. In a desperate attempt to gain some respect and to deter his classes from calling him Slimey to his face, he had devised punishments that didn't include beating. They ranged from running ten times to the school gates and back, a total distance of some five miles, to learning Wordsworth's Prelude off by heart and, in extreme cases, missing games. It was this last method that brought things to a head. Groxbourne might not be noted for its academic standards but rugby and cricket were another matter, and when boys who were fast bowlers or full-backs complained that they couldn't play in school matches because Mr Slymne had put them on punishment, the other masters turned on him.

'But I can't have my authority undermined by being called nicknames to my face,' Slymne complained at a staff meeting convened after he had put six boys in the First Eleven on punishment two days before the Bloxham match.

'And I'm damned if I'm going to field a side consisting of more than half the Second Eleven,' protested the infuriated cricket coach, Mr Doran. 'As it is, Bloxham is going to wipe the floor with us. I've lost more practice time in the nets this term than any summer since we had the mumps epidemic in 1952, and then we were in quarantine and couldn't play other schools, so it didn't matter. Why can't you beat boys like any decent master?'

'I resent that,' said Mr Slymne. 'What has decency to do with beating '

The Headmaster intervened. 'What you don't seem to understand, Mr Slymne, is that it is one of the occupational facts of teaching life to be given a nickname. I happen to know that mine is Bruin, because my name is Bear.'

'I daresay,' said Mr Slymne, 'But Bruin's a pleasant name and doesn't undermine your authority. Slimey does.'

'And do you think I like being called the Orangoutang?' demanded Mr Doran, 'Any more than Glodstone here enjoys Cyclops or Matron's flattered by being known as Miss World 1914?'

'No,' said Mr Slymne, 'I don't suppose you do, but you don't get called Orangoutang to your face.'

'Precisely,' said Mr Glodstone. 'Any boy foolish enough to call me Cyclops knows he's going to get thrashed so he doesn't.'

'I think beating is barbaric,' maintained Mr Slymne, 'It not only brutalizes the boys '

'Boys are brutal. It's in the nature of the beast,' said Glodstone.

'But it also brutalizes masters who do it. Glodstone's a case in point.'

'I really think there's no need to indulge in personal attacks,' said the Headmaster, but Mr Glodstone waved his defence aside with a nasty smile.

'Wrong again, Slymne. I don't beat. I know my limitations and I leave it to the prefects in my house to do it for me. An eighteen-year-old has an extremely strong right arm.'

'And I suppose Matron gets boys to do her dirty work for her when she's called Miss World 1914,' said Slymne, fighting back.

Major Fetherington spoke up. 'She doesn't need to. I remember an incident two or three years ago involving Hoskiss Minor. I think she used a soap enema or was it washing-up liquid? Something like that. He was off games for a week anyway, poor devil.'

'Which brings us back to the main point of contention,' said the Headmaster. 'The Bloxham match is the high point in our sporting calendar. It is of social importance for the school too. A great many parents attend and we'd be doing ourselves no good in their eyes if we allow ourselves to lose it. I am therefore overriding your ban, Mr Slymne. You will find some less time-consuming means of imposing your will on the boys. I don't care how you do it, but please bear in mind that Groxbourne is a games-playing school first and foremost.'

'But surely, Headmaster, the purpose of education is to '

'Build character and moral fibre. You'll find our purpose set out in the Founder's Address.'

From that moment of defeat, Mr Slymne had suffered further humiliations. He had tried to get a job at other, more progressive, schools, only to learn that he was regarded as totally unsuitable precisely because he had taught at Groxbourne. Forced to stay on, he had been despised by the boys and was made an object of ridicule in the common-room by Mr Glodstone who always referred to him as 'our precious little conscientious objector.' Mr Slymne fought back more subtly by raising the level of geography teaching above that of any other subject and, at the same time, exercising his sarcasm so exclusively on boys from Glodstone's house that they failed their O-levels while other boys passed.

But the main thrust of his revenge was confined to Glodstone himself and over the years had developed into almost as demented an obsession as Glodstone's lust for adventure. Mr Slymne's was more methodical. He observed his enemy's habits closely, made notes about his movements, watched him through binoculars from his room in the Tower, and kept a dossier of boys to whom Glodstone spoke most frequently. Originally, he had hoped to catch him out fondling a boy Slymne had bought a camera with a telescopic lens to record the event incontrovertibly but Glodstone's secret sex life remained obstinately concealed. He even failed to rise to the bait of several gay magazines which Mr Slymne had ordered in his name. Glodstone had taken them straight to the Headmaster and had even threatened to call the police in if he received any more. As a result, Mr Slymne and the entire school had had to sit through an unusually long sermon on the evils of pornography, the detrimental effects on sportsmen of masturbation, referred to in the sermon as 'beastliness', and finally the cowardly practice of writing anonymous letters. The sermon ended on the most sinister note of all. 'If any of this continues, I shall be forced, however unwillingly, to refer these matters to the police and the long arm of the law!'

For the first time in his agnostic life, Mr Slymne prayed to God that the sex-shop owner in Soho to whom he had sent his order wouldn't solicit Mr Glodstone's custom again, and that the Headmaster's threat wasn't as all-inclusive as it had sounded. It was a view evidently shared by the boys, whose sex life over the next few days became so restricted that the school laundry was forced to work overtime.

But it was thanks to this episode that Mr Slymne first glimpsed Mr Glodstone's true weakness. 'The damned scoundrel who sent that stuff ought to have known I only read decent manly books. Rider Haggard and Henty. Good old-fashioned adventure yarns with none of your filthy modern muck like Forever Amber,' Glodstone had boasted in the common-room that evening, 'What I say is that damned poofters ought to have their balls cut off, what!'

'Some of them appear to share your opinion, Glodstone,' said the Chaplain, 'I was reading only the other day of an extraordinary case where a man actually went through some such operation and turned himself into a woman. One wonders...'

But Slymne was no longer listening. He put his coffee-cup down and went out with a strange feeling that he had found the secret of Glodstone's success and his popularity with the boys. The wretched man was a boy himself, a boy and a bully. For a few extraordinary seconds things reversed themselves in Mr Slymne's mind; the boys were all adults and the staff were boys, boys grown larger and louder in their opinions and the authority they wielded but still small, horrid boys themselves in their innermost being. It was as though they had been stunted in perpetual adolescence, which explained why they were still at school and hadn't dared the risks and dangers of the outside world. As he crossed the quad with this remarkable insight, as curious in its transposition of his previous beliefs as one of the negatives held up to the light in his darkroom, Mr Slymne felt a sudden relief. He was freed from the responsibilities of his career. He was no longer a schoolmaster, no longer an elderly thirty-eight, he was eighteen, no, fifteen, and entitled to a fifteen-year-old's ebullient spirits and unfeeling harshness, but with the marvellous difference that he had years of adult experience and knowledge on which to rely in his war with Glodstone. He would destroy the bully before he had finished.

With something approaching gaiety, Mr Slymne climbed the steps in the Tower to his room two at a time and added the findings that Glodstone only read adventure yarns to his dossier on the man. Downstairs, there came the sound of fighting in the dormitory. Mr Slymne rose from his desk, descended the stairs and ten minutes later had changed the whole pattern of his life by beating three boys without a qualm.