‘Splendid. Having pulled-through, apply an oily rag.’ The boys followed his instructions and oiled barrels.
‘I’ll leave the Major to show you round,’ said the Headmaster, and disappeared. Presently, when rifles had been inspected and the little column moved off to the Armoury, Mr Clyde-Browne found himself being taken on a conducted tour of the Assault Course. A high brick wall with ropes hanging down it was succeeded by a muddy ditch, more ropes suspended from trees across a gulley, a barbed-wire entanglement, a narrow tunnel half-filled with water and finally, built on the edge of a quarry, a wooden tower from which a tight wire hawser slanted down to a stake some thirty yards away.
‘Death Slide,’ explained the Major. ‘Put a toggle rope in water so it won’t burn, loop it over the wire, grasp firmly with both hands and away you go.’
Mr Clyde-Browne peered nervously over the edge at the rocks some fifty feet below. He could see exactly why it was called a Death Slide. ‘Don’t you have a great many accidents?’ he asked. ‘I mean, what happens when they hit that iron stake at the bottom?’
‘Don’t,’ said the Major. ‘Feet touch down first and they let go. Put them through parachute landing technique first. Keep knees supple and roll over on the left shoulder.’
‘I see,’ said Mr Clyde-Browne dubiously, and refused the Major’s offer to try it himself.
‘Then there’s rock-climbing. We’re very good there. Lead boy goes up first and fixes the guide rope and after they’ve had some training we can get a squad up in two minutes.’
‘Amazing,’ said Mr Clyde-Browne, ‘and you’ve never had an accident?’
‘Couple of broken legs once in a while but they’d get that anyway on the rugger field. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that the boys taking this course are less likely to do themselves an injury than inflict some pretty nasty ones on other people.’
They went into the gym and watched a demonstration of unarmed combat. By the time it was over, Mr Clyde-Browne had made up his mind. Whatever else Groxbourne might fail to provide, it would guarantee Peregrine’s entry into the Army. He returned to the Headmaster’s study well content.
‘Right, well I think we’ll put him in Mr Glodstone’s house,’ said the Headmaster, as Mr Clyde-Browne took out his cheque book ‘Marvellous with boys, Glodstone. And as for fees …’
‘I’ll pay in advance for three years.’
The Headmaster looked at him quizzically. ‘You wouldn’t rather wait and see if he finds our atmosphere suits him?’
But Mr Clyde-Browne was adamant. Having got Peregrine into what approximated to a public school, he had no intention of having him expelled. ‘I’ve added a thousand pounds for the Chapel Restoration Fund,’ he said, ‘I noticed you’re making an appeal.’
*
And having written out a cheque for ten thousand pounds, he left in an ebullient mood. He had been particularly heartened to learn that the Overactive Underachiever’s course extended into the summer holidays when Major Fetherington took the group to North Wales for ‘a spot of mountaineering and cross-country compass marching’.
‘It will give us a chance to get away on our own,’ Mr Clyde-Browne thought happily as he drove south. But this was not the argument he used to persuade his wife, who had learnt from a friend that Groxbourne was the last school she’d send her son to.
‘Elspeth says it’s a brutal place and the boys are nearly all farmers’ sons and the teaching is appalling.’
‘It’s either Groxbourne or the local comprehensive.’
‘But there must be other schools …’
‘There are. A great many, but they won’t take Peregrine. Now if you want your son to mix with a lot of teenage tarts at the comprehensive, you’ve merely to say the word.’
Mrs Clyde-Browne didn’t. It was one of her most ingrained beliefs that only the working class sent their children to comprehensives and Peregrine must never be allowed to pick up their deplorable habits.
‘It seems such a shame we can’t afford a private tutor,’ she whined, but Mr Clyde-Browne was not to be deflected.
‘The boy has got to learn to stand on his own feet and face up to the realities of life. He won’t do that by staying at home and being mollycoddled by you and some down-at-heel unemployable posing as a private tutor.’ A remark which said as much for his own view of the world’s awful reality as it did for his apparent conviction that Peregrine had spent the first fifteen years of his life standing on other people’s two feet or perched on one of his own.
‘Well, I like that,’ said Mrs Clyde-Browne with some spirit.
‘And I don’t,’ continued her husband, working himself up into a defensive fury. ‘If it hadn’t been for your insistence on bringing him up like a china doll, he wouldn’t be the idiot he is now. But no, it had to be “Peregrine do this and Peregrine do that” and “Don’t get your clothes dirty, Peregrine.” Come to think of it, it’s a wonder the boy has half a mind to call his own.’
In this he was being unfair. Peregrine’s peculiarities owed as much of their bias to his father as to his mother. Mr Clyde-Browne’s career as a solicitor with court experience disposed him to divide the world up into the entirely innocent and the wholly guilty, with no states of uncertainty in between. Peregrine had imbibed his rigid ideas of good and bad from his father and had had them reinforced by his mother. Mrs Clyde-Browne’s social pretensions and her refusal to think the worst of anyone in their circle of acquaintances, all of whom must be nice because the Clyde-Brownes knew them, had limited the range of the entirely good to Virginia Water and the entirely bad to everywhere else. Television had done nothing to broaden his outlook. His parents had so severely censored his viewing to programmes that showed cowboys and policemen in the best light, while Redskins and suspects were shown in the worst, that Peregrine had been spared any uncertainties or moral doubts. To be brave, truthful, honest and ready to kill anyone who wasn’t was to be good; to be anything less was to be bad.
It was with these impeccable prejudices that he was driven up to Groxbourne and handed over to Mr Glodstone by his parents who showed truly British stoicism in parting with their son. In Mr Clyde-Browne’s case there was no need for self-control, but his wife’s feelings expressed themselves as soon as they had left the school grounds. She had been particularly perturbed by the Housemaster.
‘Mr Glodstone looked such a peculiar man,’ she whimpered through her tears.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Clyde-Browne brusquely, and refrained from pointing out that any man prepared to spend his life trying to combine the duties of a zoo keeper, a prison warder and a teacher to half-wits could hardly be expected to look normal.
‘I mean, why was he wearing a monocle in front of a glass eye?’
‘Probably to save himself from seeing too clearly with the other one,’ said Mr Clyde-Browne enigmatically, and left her to puzzle over the remark until they got home.
‘I just hope Peregrine is going to be happy,’ she said as they turned into Pinetree Lane. ‘If he isn’t, I want you to promise me …’
‘He’ll go to the comprehensive school,’ said Mr Clyde-Browne, and put an end to the discussion.
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. The
re 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 Leighton 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’s 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 favourite. 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 at least had 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 bayoneting 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.