by Simon Raven
Pittifer Joe came on the scene.
‘Where’s Loder?’ he said. ‘His fort’s jolly feeble.’
‘He’s gone to the bog in the dunes, sir.’
This, as I had supposed, for the time being satisfied Pittifer Joe, who now hung around giving me unwanted advice about the design of my own fort. But at last, ‘Loder’s taking a long time,’ he said. ‘Wallace,’ he called to Wally, who was ambling along under the dunes, ‘just have a look for Loder, please. He’s somewhere in there and he’s neglecting his fort.’
Wally turned without enthusiasm to climb the steep dunes. Pittifer, noticing Wally’s reluctance and not entirely satisfied with delegation of duty, started walking up the beach after him. Something must be done very fast. Always a slow thinker, I was paralysed, my mind a blank. Fortunately there were quicker wits than mine in the group.
‘Sir,’ said Broxton I (a tall, morose, precocious boy, with legs like toothpicks), ‘Sir,’ he called to the departing Pittifer, ‘can you please explain something?’
Pittifer turned.
‘If the Leg Sweep is better than the Leg Glance, why did Prince Ranjitsinjhii always do Leg Glances?’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Mr Wallace, sir. In science yesterday.’
‘Did Mr Wallace say that, Raven?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I lied, by now having some notion of Broxton I’s tactic.
‘Wallace – please come here.’
Wallace, halfway up the dune and not at all sorry to be recalled, plodded down through the fine sand and back on to the beach: Pittifer Joe went to meet him.
‘Did you tell the Sixth Form in the Science Period yesterday,’ said Pittifer levelly as they met, ‘that Ranjitsinjhii always played the Leg Glance and not the Leg Sweep?’
‘I might have done,’ said Wally amiably. (Having no science, he usually allowed the period to turn into a conversational miscellany and in his own casual way imparted a lot of valuable general knowledge.) ‘Yes, I might have done,’ he said. ‘It’s true, you know.’
‘It is not true,’ said Joe sternly.
Although I could not see his face, I could tell from his tone that he had thinned and primmed his mouth into what we called his ‘confiscating’ expression. (‘Nasty little boy, eating sweets in form. Watch me now. I’m going to put them all on the fire. One by one. One…two…three…’)
‘Oh, come along,’ said Wally. ‘You know that photo in the Jubilee Book of Cricket. “Ranjitsinjhii glancing the ball off the Leg Stump”.’
‘There is also a photograph, in the Lonsdale Library book on Cricket, of Ranjitsinjhii sweeping to leg. He did not always glance.’
‘That photo,’ said Wally earnestly, ‘has no definite caption. It only says “Ranji playing to Leg”.’
‘He was playing off the front foot. He must have been sweeping.’
‘It is quite possible to glance off the front foot.’
‘His bat is at an angle for sweeping.’
Lotty came out of the dune with Hayward. Hayward looked jubilant. Lotty looked even more bewildered than he had the last time, and rather haggard with it. What was that story, I thought with some alarm, about the brain turning to water?
‘He could perfectly well be glancing,’ said Wally, mild but persistent, ‘even with his bat at that angle.’
‘He was not glancing,’ rasped Joe, ‘he was sweeping.’
‘All right, have your own way,’ said good-humoured Wally. ‘All I really meant was that Ranji glanced much more often than he swept.’
‘Not true. Lies. Beastly lies.’
For some reason, Wally’s concession had infuriated Joe more than anything yet. His face, I reckoned, must now be at its ‘Filthy little pig’ stage, which it normally reached only in cases of cheating or theft.
‘Lies,’ said Joe, low but intensely malignant. ‘Where have you been, boy?’ he yelled at Lotty as he slunk past towards his fort.
‘Going to the bog, sir.’
‘Lies,’ shouted Joe, transferring his rage, apparently without even noticing, from Wally to Lotty. ‘Horrible lies. Look at your face, the rings round your eyes, you’ve been polluting yourself, you’ll go blind, you’ll go to hell –’
‘– Steady on,’ said Wally. ‘You can’t go accusing people of that sort of thing.’
Luckily Hayward had got out of Joe’s arc of vision before Joe spotted Lotty. Otherwise, I thought, his accusations would have been far worse.
‘I hate LIARS,’ howled Joe. (Yes; howled.)
He seized Lotty by the hair and jerked his head backward and forward, faster and faster.
‘Stop that,’ said Wally.
He hit the inside of Joe’s elbow very hard with the wedge of his hand. Joe released Lotty’s hair, nursed his arm, and bowed his head. Wally nudged Joe off along the beach. No reference was made to the incident, nor did Pittifer Joe lose his temper, ever again.
During later discussion of the day, while all mention of the quarrel was carefully avoided, questions were nevertheless asked about why Lotty Loder had loitered so long in the sand dunes. A normal ‘Lotty session’ took three minutes flat: this time he and Hayward had been gone fifteen.
‘What on earth was going on?’ we insisted.
Lotty sweated and blushed, refused to gratify the curiosity of the general, but later confided in myself. What had taken so long, it transpired, was that Lotty had had his first adult orgasm (‘White stuff coming out’) and had nearly fainted from pleasure.
‘I had to hang about and pull myself together,’ Lotty said.
Hayward had been delighted, relishing the unusual nature of the performance and attributing Lotty’s ecstasy to his own skill. But Lotty was bothered. What was this remarkable phenomenon? Always before he had had ‘the feeling’, along with a lot of ‘throbbing and juddering’, and then it had ‘sort of exploded’ and gone away, leaving a slight discomfort ‘in my pee’, as he explained, which, however, vanished in ten minutes or so, whereupon he was immediately able to start up again. But this time he had felt – well – as if he had been ‘drained’, and hadn’t ‘got keen again’ for nearly an hour, by which time he was sitting in his fort with his team surrounded by the sea. He had been about to suggest that they all did it together, only the Headmaster’s wife had been paddling in that area and it had seemed unwise. But the real point was, Lotty said, that he must know exactly what had happened to him in the dunes. Hayward had been vaguely reassuring and had quoted a rhyme which his elder brother, now at King’s School, Bruton, had taught him:
First it tickles and it prickles,
Then it trickles:
Then it squirts and it spirts
For hours and hours
When you see Harcourt Minor in the showers.
But there was an element of hyperbole here which Lotty mistrusted, and in any case the thing was too frivolous to carry the authority for which he craved. Now, I seemed to know a lot about all this, with all the talk of the row there had been at my last place: could I please enlighten Lotty? Was this afternoon’s occurrence in the natural order, or had he been overdoing it?
So then I told him. It would seem, I said, that he had been doing it rather a lot by other people’s standards, but otherwise everything was as it should be. It hadn’t yet happened to me, I went on, because I hadn’t yet got ‘hairs down there’ (‘Ah,’ said Lotty); but sooner or later I would and it would, and it was the same for everybody. ‘For girls?’ said Lotty. Mulatis mutandis, I replied. I then went on to explain the mechanics of sexual intercourse and the conception of children, which was, I said, what the whole apparatus was meant for.
‘It seems to me you can have a lot of fun without any nuisance of that sort,’ said Lotty, who was not an Exhibitioner Elect of Blundell’s for nothing.
In fact, it now appeared, Lotty found the whole arrangement so ridiculous (‘I mean, imagine trying to stick it in your mother.’ ‘You’re not supposed to stick it in your mother.’ ‘Well, in Matron or Mrs Mack t
he cook. You’d look absolutely daft.’) that he suspected me of having him on. What was the provenance of the information, he wanted to know? In what circumstances had I come by it? How could I authenticate it? Since he would not be satisfied save by the most accurate, detailed and logical account of how I came by my knowledge, I was compelled to give him the full story…
…Which can conveniently begin at the Oval in August, 1938. A boy called Crawford, a friend of mine at my first prep school, had a father who had tickets for the timeless test against the Australians. I was invited to accompany Crawford père et fils to several days of the match, and there we now were, watching Hutton as he plodded towards his world record. Whatever you may hear to the contrary, take it from me that it was a pretty dreary performance; I was far more interested in the man on my left, who kept peeling great strips off his fingernails with other fingernails. How long, I wondered, before he had none left? This question was not to be answered, as the man left shortly afterwards, as soon as Hutton broke Hammond’s record. But by that time there was a much more absorbing drama in the offing, something which we had been working towards ever since we arrived in the Stand at eleven o’clock that morning.
Imagine us there. Crawford and myself, in grey shorts and turned down knee socks topped by our school colours (red and green), Aertex shirts and horizontally striped school ties, grey jackets and big grey floppy sunhats which sported the school riband…imagine us there, Crawford and me, one on either side of Mr Crawford, who was in a dark blue chalk-striped suit, and had iron-grey hair cut very short and an iron-grey Hitler moustache. There we had been sitting, as I say, since eleven o’clock, and now at last Mr Crawford was about to put the boot into his son’s belly in the manner which he must have been planning ever since we sat down.
Mr Crawford had set the thing up by asking for an account of the 1st XI Cricket season at our school. Both Crawford and I, though only ten, were in the XI, and we started on an artless history of the matches played, interrupting and supporting each other, strophe and antistrophe, sticking mostly to fact but occasionally issuing half-baked tactical or general judgments.
The first match had been against Fan Court, where all the boys were Christian Scientists and constantly dying, we assured Mr Crawford, of ruptured appendices because they were never allowed a doctor. Fan Court had made 57, which was a pretty feeble score. One of their batsmen had wet himself with fear of our fast bowler and had then fainted. We afterwards heard (said Crawford) that he died of sunstroke because he wasn’t given any medicine, only prayed for. No, I said; it couldn’t have been sunstroke because it was a very chilly day in early May; it was infantile paralysis. What happened in the match? prompted Crawford Senior.
‘We won with 4 wickets down,’ said Crawford. ‘I made 62.’
‘How can you have made 62 if the other side only made 57?’
‘We played on after we’d won.’
‘How many had you made when you passed their score?’
‘Nineteen, Daddy.’
‘Then that’s all,’ said Mr Crawford with evident satisfaction, ‘that counts. Nineteen not out. That is what goes into the averages. How many did you make, Raven?’
‘Didn’t bat, sir. I’m a bowler.’ (As, in those days, I was.)
‘Did you get any wickets?’
‘Three, sir.’
‘Jolly useful. They say one wicket equals 20 runs. Say 15 in prep school cricket. So you got the equivalent of 45 runs – much better than 19 not out.’
And so the morning had gone on.
By the time we reached the Bigshott match, two patterns had become abundantly plain: the pattern, dismally familiar to all cricketers, of poor Crawford’s form as a batsman, which had started brilliant but turned steadily sour; and the pattern of Mr Crawford’s inquisition, which consisted of probing into every one of his son’s performances, eliciting the maximum disgrace from the bad and somehow contriving to discount or even discredit the good.
‘At Bigshott,’ said Crawford, setting his teeth, ‘they don’t have proper lavs. They go in pails. They make the boys empty them themselves.’
‘Only as a punishment,’ I put in.
‘What about the match?’ insisted the remorseless Crawford père.
Well, we had made 136. Crawford had made 2 and I, batting at No. 10, had fluked 17. Then they went in to bat. I had taken 2 wickets; Crawford, who was given a trial bowl, had taken none – but, I pointed out loyally, had had two sitters missed off his second over.
‘I hate bowlers,’ announced Mr Crawford, ‘who whine about missed catches.’
‘I didn’t whine,’ said Crawford. ‘I didn’t even mention it. Raven did.’
Mr Crawford appeared not even to have heard. I then went on to describe how their best bat had been in with their last, how their best bat had got the bowling and had a whole over left in which to make the 7 runs needed to the green years beat us, how he had hit a brisk four off the second ball, and had then driven the fourth ball so hard that you could hear it hissing and everyone thought it must be another four – only Crawford at extra-cover had thrown himself down to his left, to take a miraculous catch six inches from the ground and win the game for our school.
‘Sheer fluke,’ said Mr Crawford.
‘Mr Edwardes said that it was very lucky –’
‘– Sheer fluke –’
‘– But,’ continued Crawford patiently, ‘that I deserved the luck for being quick enough to get my hands there.’
‘Mr Edwardes should know better than to encourage small boys to get conceited.’
By this time I was beginning to dislike Mr Crawford very much indeed. The odd thing was that he hadn’t behaved at all like this during the earlier days of the match; he had been a bit sombre but perfectly agreeable, remembering to hand out ice cream money and quite prepared to smile (if not without patronage) at our brash little jokes. Why had he suddenly turned so nasty?
That is a question I couldn’t answer then and still cannot. Perhaps he had received one bill too many in the post that morning; perhaps he had failed to satisfy his wife the night before. However that may be, the fact remains that he became more and more unpleasant to his son as the day went on and by the time that the applause for Hutton’s record had subsided he was ready to stick in the knife and twist it.
We had now arrived at the Lambrook match, the penultimate of the season. Lambrook had made 97. At the start of our innings wickets fell swiftly but Crawford, who was beginning (too late) to run into form again, had batted steadily and after 45 minutes was apparently in a position to win the match for us, his own score being 23 and that of the team 59 for 5. But at this stage he had stepped back to pull a short ball, slipped and skidded into his wicket… after which disaster we were all out for 72.
‘Jolly bad luck,’ I said.
‘Sheer carelessness,’ said Crawford Major. ‘Anyway, people who play cow shots deserve everything they get.’
‘I was trying to hook,’ said Crawford miserably.
‘Hooking is for people who can play the game. You didn’t even get your Colours. Did Raven get his?’
Raven had got his. So would Crawford have, had he not made a blob in the last match (a shooter), given away 24 runs off his first over, and missed two skiers (out of the sun).
‘I wonder you weren’t sick on the pitch,’ said his father, ‘to top it all off. It would have made an apt comment on your entire season’s play.’
Now, I hope I have made it clear that Crawford was a jolly nice boy. Although all in all he’d had a wretched season which had ended in cruel humiliation, he had made no complaint and had clapped as cheerfully as anyone, in the circumstances, could possibly expect of him when the rest of us went up the Assembly Room to receive our Colours. But now he had had more than he could bear. Even his one great achievement, the match-winning catch against Bigshott, had been treated by his father with contempt. He needed to get his own back; he needed someone to blame for his misery; he needed a plausible excuse, oth
er than mere ‘bad luck’, for his failure. And so, like many before and after him in similar predicament, he drew a great big stinking red herring right across the trail, diverting the hounds that tormented him to the pursuit of others.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he said, ‘I was worried about Colonel Killock.’
There was a long silence.
‘Colonel Killock? What about Colonel Killock?’
‘Oh, nothing. Nothing, Daddy, nothing.’ But it was already too late.
Lieutenant-Colonel Killock, a married man with two sons, had retired from the Indian Army three or four years previously and had come to our school to teach football, rugger, PT, mathematics and English. He was extremely good at teaching all of them; he was one of the finest natural schoolmasters I ever met, a man whom one would wish above all things to please and would obey as if one’s life depended on it; a firm man yet flexible and tolerant, of apparently inexhaustible good humour and good will.
He liked playing with little boys’ penises, and he did it so deftly that we positively queued up for him. He also liked letting us play with his own, an object of gratifying size, agreeable texture and startling capacity. One of his particular favourites had a tent which he put up in a remote part of the pine woods which surrounded the cricket ground; and as soon as cricket for the day was over, Crawford and I would hurry through the warm pines to ‘The Tent’ (as it was known), inside which several boys, ranging in age from nine to thirteen, would already be lolling about with their shorts round their ankles, exploring one another’s anatomy and waiting for the arrival of ‘Colonel K’. It was a scene of great erotic fascination, vividly memorable to this day, of Petronian power and indecency.
It may be imagined, therefore, that the information which Crawford’s father now had from him really set the fuse sizzling. To be fair to Crawford, I think the uneasiness of mind of which he had spoken was genuine: there was the green years obviously something not quite right, to say the least of it, about five boys and a grown man practising circular fellatio: however much one enjoyed it at the time, one felt a bit dubious when it was over. Whether or not this uneasiness had affected Crawford’s cricket is another matter again, and in any case irrelevant. For what was happening, as I have already tried to convey, is that Crawford was instinctively using ‘Colonel K’ to create a diversion as a result of which he would be exonerated, at someone else’s expense, from any blame for his failure. In fact, of course, he found that he was not only exonerated but was actually deferred to – as long as he kept the revelations coming. Crawford, then, did not stint: any guilt he might feel at his treachery to his companions of ‘The Tent’ was swiftly allayed by assurance that it was his moral duty to tell all; and so, gleaming with self-righteousness and self-importance, tell all he did.
