Far, Far the Mountain Peak

by Arthur Clifford

  Briggs seized his chance. ‘He may have a point there.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Meakin, puffing on his pipe. ‘What’s your favourite pupil gone and done now?’ (A long-standing antagonism was reviving.)

  Ignoring Meakin, Briggs addressed Dorothy. ‘Well to be perfectly frank, Mrs Watson, the way that you openly favour that young man is causing problems among the seniors. They resent it.’

  ‘Oh do they now?’ A spear was stuck into Dorothy’s soft underbelly and it hurt. What was more her precious credibility was under attack. She set her face into a grim ‘how dare you?’ expression and switched on the X-ray eyes. Frosty silence.

  Undeterred, Briggs pressed home the attack. ‘I’m afraid they do. After all you do keep him in your house. Why not poor old Sam Hawthorne? He’s just as deserving. And Denby gets all the prizes, doesn’t he? I mean it’s Denby, Denby, Denby, all the time. He’s not the only kid in the school and the other kids are beginning to resent him.’

  ‘He gets the prizes because he is better than most of them,’ declared Meakin hotly.

  ‘Yes!’ added Dorothy, greatly relieved by Meakin’s coming to her rescue. ‘He’s a very positive influence in the school. A real role model for the boys.’

  ‘You really think that?’

  Briggs complacent smile needled Dorothy. ‘Yes I do!’ she retorted hotly. ‘And what’s more, it’s my duty to manage this school as I see fit! If you don’t like the way I run things, Mr Briggs, you can always go elsewhere!’

  ‘I’m not disputing your authority, Mrs Watson,’ replied Briggs with just the smallest touch of glee. ‘But there’s something I think you ought to know.’

  Out, yet again, came the business of his ogling at junior boys when they were naked in the shower after games, embellished this time with further incidents.

  ‘Are you saying he’s a homosexual?’

  ‘It does look rather like it, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Mr Briggs, I shan’t believe it until I’ve got solid evidence, and not a lot of schoolboy smut. That subject is closed.’

  ‘I take your point. But this is a Christian school and we can’t possibly be seen to condone homosexuality. The Bible is quite clear on that matter.’

  With that the meeting ended. The Billy Nolan problem was left unresolved.

  Seeds of Uncertainty

  On the way home Dorothy began to have second thoughts. ‘Pompous bluster worthy of Lawrence at his worst! The rational Professional began to challenge the Emotional Woman. But maybe Briggs did have a point? Maybe Billy Nolan did have a point? After all, it was true. She did favour John Denby… too much perhaps?

  No! She’d been through all this two years ago. John was a good and very positive boy who had repaid her kindness with interest. Forget about these smutty rumours put about by inadequate seniors who were jealous of him. Stand by your protégé in his hour of need! Be strong! Yet, a tiny seed of uncertainty had been planted.

  The following week a timorous and red-faced First Year knocked on her study door. ‘Please, Miss, I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he mumbled, ‘But it’s very embarrassing.’

  ‘Yos, don’t be afraid, what is it?’

  ‘It’s that Third Year boy, Denby. He keeps looking at me in the shower. I mean, he’s always there. It’s embarrassing.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s nothing.’

  Dorothy fervently hoped it was nothing. But the little seed of uncertainty began to germinate.

  A Time Bomb Ticking Away?

  In the event, Billy Nolan was reprieved after a Final Warning. He even managed to apologise for his boorish outburst. The awful reality of losing his little kingdom and being cast out into the hostile world beyond Beaconsfield managed to penetrate even his limited consciousness.

  Meanwhile, blissfully unaware of the dangers closing in on him, John drifted lazily on in his metaphorical dinghy. He began to be obsessed with Danny. It slowly dawned on him that he was quite ridiculously beautiful: that slender, muscular and superbly shaped body, that soft velvety skin, the elegant curve of his exquisitely shaped backside. It was all too good to be true. Showering after rugby became the longed-for high point of the week, a chance to glimpse – oh, so fleetingly! – those naked splendours. When the Demon entered him he was filled with a wild and ecstatic craving; but when it left him he felt as squalid as a little kid who’d messed his pants.

  Then the dreams began. The doctor had said that they would dream about girls. But, while other boys dreamt about girls, he didn’t. Instead it was Danny, always Danny. Danny naked in the shower, Danny naked on the rugby field, Danny cavorting naked round his bedroom at Gloucester Road and asking him to do… that!

  He was at Mrs Watson’s house when it first happened. He woke up to find the sheets sticky and disgusting. That was bad enough, but, oh God, if she’d known what he was dreaming about!

  One night he had a particularly vivid dream. He was at Greenhill on that dreadful Friday, naked in the hands of the baying mob. It should have been a nightmare, but it wasn’t. Instead it was wildly and deliciously exciting in a way that he had never known before. The Demon possessed his everything. And it wasn’t Freddy Hazlett’s bicycle pump that was going into him. It was Danny. Danny naked and wonderful. And, what was more, he John Denby, Denby the big bold lad of Form Three, was enjoying it, enjoying it with a frenzied, searing joy that he’d never known before! He woke up suddenly to find himself engulfed in a sticky white glue. He’d messed Mrs Watson’s sheets again! It was all so degrading! God, if she knew what he’d been dreaming about! If Danny knew!

  Nobody, he decided, must know of this. Absolutely nobody. Like Greenhill, like the walloping Mrs. Watson had given him on top of Askival during that mountain hike on the Isle of Rhum, it must be consigned to oblivion. Dropped into the fire and burned to a nothingness.

  But it wouldn’t burn. It remained there, whole and unscathed, ticking away like a time bomb.

  All Topsy-Turvy

  One dreadful day the bomb exploded. It was a wet Wednesday afternoon and they were showering after rugby with Briggs. It was late March and the playing field was a grassless swamp of sticky mud, which meant that they were exceptionally dirty. The showering took a long time.

  The Demon had entered him that day. All through the game he had become increasingly entranced by Danny’s glorious body, especially by the treasures of the hidden zone which loomed tantalisingly under the small and very tight shorts that he was wearing. The longing became a craving.

  Then, as Danny had strolled unconcernedly into the shower with all those hidden treasures at last revealed, that craving had flared up into an all-consuming flame. In an ecstatic trance, he followed him in. The warm water, which flowed sensuously over his cold, muddy body, seemed almost like petrol, which fed and enhanced the already roaring flame.

  Suddenly, his wildest hopes came true. Danny dropped the soap and bent down to pick it up. Everything he’d been longing for was there before him. In a crazily ecstatic moment the Demon took hold of him. His “thing” was massive and erect and squirting stuff as never before. And it happened.

  Normality returned with a devastating crash. Danny reacted violently: ‘Gerroff yer fucking bender! Sir, Mr Briggs, sir, the bender’s shafting me!’

  He swung round and punched John violently in the face. Blood flowed.

  An excited crowd gathered. ‘Fight! Fight! Hey, lads, Denby’s a bender!’

  A stunned John fought back and together, amid shouts and yells, they rolled onto the floor as the warm water poured over their tangled limbs. Mayhem broke loose.

  A frantic Briggs exploded onto the scene. The one thing he most dreaded was happening: wild disorder in his tightly run domain. If he couldn’t instantly control it, his self-confidence as a struggling PE teacher would be irreparably damaged.

  ‘Stop it at once! I say stop it! What’s going on here?’


  To his immense relief the tumult died down and the two boys disentangled themselves. A sort of silence descended.

  ‘What’s all this about?’

  ‘He bummed me!’ hissed a white-faced and seething Danny, ‘He’s a hom! He bummed me!’

  Briggs felt a surge of exaltation. Religious exaltation. Yes, even the hand of God! Vindication. As a Saved Christian, he’d always known that young Denby was bad. Here at last was that firm evidence that old Dolly was always wittering on about.

  ‘Is this true, Denby?’

  A dazed John just stood and gaped. It was all so unreal.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Yes it is!’ cut in Martin, who was hovering like a vulture over the wounded carcass of his hated rival. ‘Yes it is. I saw him do it, the dirty bender!’

  A chorus of jeers broke out from the assembled crowd.

  ‘All right, lads,’ said Briggs in an unusually gentle voice. ‘You lot get dressed now. I’ll deal with this character. Denby, you wait here.’

  While a bewildered, shell-shocked John shivered alone in the shower, the crowd dispersed in silence. As they left the changing room a babble of excited talk exploded.

  ‘Cor, I never thought he was a bender!’ ‘My Dad’s going to go apeshit when he hears of this!’ ‘Wait till Billy Nolan hears of this, he hates Denby and he hates benders.’

  ‘Now then Denby,’ said a gloating Briggs. ‘You can get dressed and come with me. We’re going to see Mrs Watson.’

  ‘Am I in serious trouble, then?’ asked John, finding his voice at last.

  ‘I should say you are!’ answered Briggs in a firm and confident voice.

  ‘But it was an accident. I didn’t mean it. It just sort of happened.’

  ‘Don’t try to wriggle out of it. I’ve been watching you all term. You’ve been planning this a long time, and just because you were John Denby from Rickerby Hall you thought you would be allowed to get away with it. You have committed a deliberate homosexual assault on another boy and that’s one of the worst things anybody can do.’

  ‘But —’

  ‘Read your Bible, young man. Genesis, Chapter Nineteen. It’s all there. Homosexuals are among the damned. Hitler was bad enough, but even he wasn’t as bad as a homosexual.’

  Dumbly John followed Briggs along the corridor to the door of Mrs Watson’s study.

  ‘Fucking bender!’ Danny screamed at him as he left the school.

  It was crazy. Topsy-turvy. Only an hour before, Danny had been his best friend. Now they were mortal enemies. It was like a road accident. Normal before. Crazy afterwards.

  Briggs knocked on the door and opened it to reveal a normal-looking Mrs Watson sitting at her desk marking a pile of exercise books.

  ‘Yes, what is it?’

  Triumphantly, Briggs delivered his long-cherished and long-rehearsed announcement. ‘This boy has just committed a serious homosexual assault on young Danny Fleetwood.’

  Taken aback, Mrs Watson just gaped. It was such an unexpected bombshell.

  ‘Well?’ she managed to say, looking at John.

  John remained speechless. What could he say? He hadn’t consciously done it. It was the Demon inside him. It had just happened to him.

  ‘Frankly, Mrs Watson,’ said Briggs, ‘I think this merits expulsion. I think you should, also, contact the police. This young man is a danger to all the young people in the area.’

  An embarrassed silence.

  ‘I think you’d better go home, now, John,’ said Mrs Watson eventually.

  ‘This is Meant to be a Christian School’

  ‘Can you fetch Mr Meakin for me, Mr Briggs?’ Dorothy said as John slunk out of the room. ‘This matter needs serious consideration.’ Sensing a major assault on her credibility, she went into Formal Headmistress mode. Guns were loaded. Grenades were primed.

  Meakin duly breezed in amidst the usual clouds of pipe smoke. ‘What’s today’s disaster, then? Arson, rape, terrorist attack? Murder, perhaps?’

  ‘It’s more serious than that,’ said Briggs as they sat down on the settee.

  With the triumphant air of a scientist announcing a major discovery that proved his much-derided theory right, he launched forth. The whole business was lovingly described in all its sordid detail, chapter and verse, with nothing left to the imagination. The long build-up from the beginning of term, the stream of incidents reported to him by other boys, the actual deed, the witnesses who could prove its reality beyond the faintest shadow of doubt… a bravura performance worthy of Rumpole of the Bailey, of which he was an ardent fan.

  ‘Yes, I know this must be very distressing for you, Mrs Watson, especially after all that you have tried to do for that young man,’ he concluded with a victor’s magnanimity. ‘But I have always felt that your benevolence – doubtless well meant, don’t get me wrong! – was, shall we say, somewhat misplaced. I always knew that that young man was bad and, well, now I’ve been proved right.’

  ‘So where do we go from here?’ asked Meakin aggressively. He couldn’t stand Briggs at the best of times, but this complacent triumphalism was unbearable.

  ‘I think it’s obvious. We can’t keep him, can we?’

  ‘You mean expulsion?’ said Dorothy quietly.

  ‘Frankly, yes.’

  ‘Oh come on, Jamie!’ expostulated Meakin. ‘That’s a bit over the top!’

  ‘That’s what you think!’ declared Briggs vehemently. ‘But this is meant to be a Christian school, in case you didn’t know it. And homosexuality is explicitly condemned in the Bible. Leviticus, Chapter Eighteen, Verse Twenty-two: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman: it is an abomination.” There you have it. The word of God. If you’re a Christian you must accept it.’

  Having delivered his knock-out blow, he folded his arms and sat back, confident of victory.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ snorted Meakin, ‘We’re not living in the seventeenth century! Times change, you know.’

  Both looked at Dorothy for support. She remained silent. Deep waters here.

  Then, plunging on, Briggs spoke up. ‘All right, let’s get modern, shall we? Can you imagine what will happen if we don’t act decisively? This school’s already got a bad enough reputation as a dustbin for deadbeats. I see it all the time when I try to arrange sporting fixtures. It will go all round the town that Beaconsfield is a school that allows older boys to sexually molest younger ones. It will be the end of us. The council will close us down – and rightly so, too! Anyway, as I’ve said before, Denby shouldn’t be here. We’re not here to mollycoddle upper-class dropouts. Our remit is among the deprived inner-city kids.’

  ‘But,’ interrupted Meakin, ‘he’s the only one with any real potential!’

  ‘That’s exactly why he should go! He’s a tempter who’ll lead the others astray. The Devil isn’t a silly old thing with horns and tail, you know! He’s beautiful and very clever.’

  ‘You’re not saying that the kid’s the Devil in disguise, are you?’

  ‘Not in so many words, but I am saying that, as the bright and able purveyor of homosexuality, he’s doing the Devil’s work!’

  Borne aloft on the wings of his rhetoric, Briggs ploughed on, filled with the Holy Ghost, as he fervently believed. ‘I mean, have you thought about the future? Sooner or later Denby will be hanging round public toilets and molesting little boys. He’ll be hauled in by the police, up in court, and the press will get old of it and cause us no end of trouble! And when he grows up he could even start murdering his victims – they all do that, you know! It’ll get into the papers and onto television and people will start saying, “Look what Beaconsfield produces!” And they’ll be right. I know you meant well, Mrs Watson, but by getting involved with that young man you’ve landed yourself right in it. I’ll be absolutely frank. If I were you I’d cut my losses and get rid of him
now! Now, before it’s too late. You’ll only regret it if you don’t. It’s no use being sentimental.’

  The torrent ceased while Briggs paused to catch his breath.

  ‘And I’ll tell you another thing,’ he continued, breaking the embarrassed silence, ‘You’ll be having Mr Fleetwood up first thing tomorrow morning.’

  ‘That randy old tomcat!’ sighed Meakin. ‘He’s a fine one to get on his high horse about sexual morality!’

  ‘He’s promiscuous, I’ll grant you that,’ replied Briggs, ‘but he’s absolutely right about homosexuality, especially when it involves child abuse.’

  ‘I’m going to have to think all this over very carefully,’ said Dorothy eventually.

  ‘Well, all I can say is that tough decisions have to be made,’ declared Briggs. ‘This is no time to be weak or emotional.’

  That hurt. A humiliated Dorothy ended the meeting.

  That evening Briggs went down to the Tabernacle and described the day’s events. Filled once more with the Holy Ghost, he ‘spoke in tongues’. A spontaneous service of thanksgiving followed.

  Worse than Hitler?

  John crept back to Mrs Watson’s house where he stayed on weekdays. He was in a daze. Apparently he had done something awful. The trouble was that he couldn’t see why it was so awful. A smutty, embarrassing accident had happened. But, then, such things were always happening with kids – like being sick in cars and needing the bog in the middle of the city. He hadn’t hurt anybody. He hadn’t stolen anything. Yet, according to Briggs, he was even worse than Hitler who had killed six million Jews. It didn’t make sense.

  But that strange exaltation that had gripped him and had pushed him into doing such an embarrassingly dirty thing? It was so mysterious; and so frightening in the way that it took hold of him.

  And now, because of it, he was in the shit. Everybody was screaming at him. Danny was calling him a bender. Even little Michael was calling him a shit-stabber. It was all so crazy, so crazy, indeed, that it probably hadn’t really happened. In any case, the whole thing would probably blow over. If kids went mad, the adults always calmed them down and made them see sense. After all, adults were sane. When he’d gone and peed in his sleeping bag in Scotland two years ago, Mrs Watson had brushed it off as an unfortunate accident. That was all this was, an embarrassing accident, as if he’d gone and peed himself in Morning Assembly.