by Mark Evans
‘Sir—’
‘Where—’
‘What—’
‘Is it Lima?’
That was as long as any talk between us lasted. Eventually, I faced up to the fact that the fellow was not conversable and contented myself with the morsels he threw to me. Or, rather, discontented myself, for they were such anti-delights as gravel pie, poison bread and razor crumble and, even though starving, at the thought of them my stomach refused, like a cowardly horse at a scary fence.
Finally the carriage halted once more, the door was flung open again, only this time instead of hurling food in at me, the coachman hurled me out at the ground. Alas, he did not miss his target.
‘Ow,’ I said.
‘Ha,’ he replied, his sadistic grin revealing a toothless mouth-maw inhabited by a grey, wormy tongue.
‘Are we at the school yet, sir?’
He replied not with words but with a gesture. A meaty arm rose, at the end of it a gammony fist from which unfurled a chickeny finger. I looked to where he pointed and saw a sign: ‘St Bastard’s School for Boys’. His message conveyed, the coachman ruffled my hair friendlily with one hand and punched me really quite hard in the head with the other. He then turned, mounted his carriage, cracked his whip and was away.
The sounds of horse and carriage receded and all I could hear was someone crying.
It was me.
With a crack of thunder and a flash of lightning, the sky also started to cry in sympathy. Oh, empathetic English weather! Rain splashed upon me, running down my cheeks and taking a brisk walk down the back of my neck. The chill of the water stirred me, and I rose to my feet. Lightning flashed again and for the first time I saw my new school clearly.
Huge iron gates twisted and curled in front of it, and on top of them was inscribed a metal motto: ‘Orando, Flogorando’. By praying, by beating. Oh, if only it had been so gentle a place!
The school building loomed behind, foreboding, forbidding and forterrifying. Battlements ran along the top of the walls; on their edges sat gargoyles with features plucked straight from hell itself, malicious and mocking.
It looked lovely. By which I mean hideous.
Nevertheless, my school it was, and enter it I must. I took a step towards the gates, but a nearby voice startled me into stillness.
‘Young Pip . . .’
Why, it was a voice I recognized; a voice I had fond memories of; a voice that belonged to Mr Parsimonious. And, glory be, it was not just his voice but it was him as well, walking towards me in the rain.
‘Mr Parsimonious? What are you doing here?’
‘The months ahead will be full of darkness for you, Pip. Darkness and anguish. Darkness and anguish and misery and wretchedness and despair. And probably quite a lot of actual physical pain. So I have come to say . . .’
He paused; I waited. What message of hope had he brought?
‘. . . good luck with all of that. I go now.’ He turned to depart, but his generous nature got the better of him. ‘But before I do, you simply must have these jelly babies. And this ham. And this jewelled box will probably come in handy. And you simply must have these piglets.’
I accepted his gifts gratefully and once more he turned to go.
‘And now I must leave.’ Yet he turned again. ‘But not before giving you this encyclopedia and this haunch of venison. ’Bye!’
He turned yet once more again and this time did go, striding jauntily off. As I have said, he was the most generous of men.
Laden with his gifts, I walked towards the school, my heart thumping within my chest, my breath catching in my throat and my liver somersaulting nervously and thereby joggling my kidneys.
As I passed through the gates, all was ominous silence, bar the patter of rain, the sob of my tears and shrieks of woe from within the school. So it was actually quite noisy.
Now a dark-cowled figure emerged from a doorway and, with a crooked forefinger, summoned me inside. Was this Death himself come to claim me? Mr Parsimonious’s piglets squealed and wriggled with fear in my arms and his encyclopedia felt heavy with dread as well as knowledge as I followed the figure through the door.
Inside was a long corridor, all dark wood and shadows. As I progressed in the footsteps of what I was beginning to fear was actually Death, I saw paintings on the wall depicting scenes from the life of the school. The first was entitled ‘Hanging Day, 1807’. Small boys hung from nooses while mortar-boarded teachers danced jollily around. My fear, already great, grew a little more.
Next, a sporting scene: ‘Staff v Pupils: Cavalry Battle’. The teachers were mounted on great chargers, huge sabres in their hands; the pupils seemed to ride other, smaller, pupils, who were crouched equinely on all fours, and they appeared to be armed only with blunted carrots, though it was hard to tell because of all the blood and bits of chopped-up schoolboy. Now my fear swelled to a positively enormous size.
A third picture: ‘School Play 1813 – live action Gladiators v Lions’. The boys had taken the roles of the gladiators, and playing the lions were some lions. There were heads and legs everywhere. My enormously swollen fear immediately fled and was replaced by a shrieking terror and a violently wobbling panic.
And now Death paused, turned and opened a door leading off the corridor, and indicated that I was to enter.
The door had a brass plaque with ‘Headmaster’ on it, and led to a book-lined study in which there was a leather-topped desk. I stepped in and Death followed, closing the door behind him. Then he pulled back the hood of his cloak and I saw that it was not Death, but a man. And a man whose eyes seemed to sparkle with joy and delight, whose face was lined with soft wrinkles of laughter and amusement and whose nose looked happy.
My shrieking terror quietened and my wobbling panic found its balance and was still.
‘Now, you must be young Pip Bin. Welcome, welcome.’ And now my terror and panic flagged down a passing hackney carriage and left for other locations, for his voice was as rich and soothing as a caramel quilt or a custard coat. While the outside of the school and its very name conveyed horror and misery, this man – the headmaster, I presumed – suggested calm all-rightness was at hand.
‘And you have brought me gifts! Some jelly babies, ham, a jewelled box, some piglets, an encyclopedia and some venison. How kind.’
He removed Mr Parsimonious’s gifts from my arms and I realized he had misunderstood.
‘But, sir . . .’ I began to protest.
Instantly, his face changed. All gentleness, kindness and twinkly avuncularity fled, chased away by the rage and spitting fury that now filled his visage.
‘Did I say speak, boy? Did I? Did I tell you directly to speak?’
He had not, and I tremulously informed him of that fact. ‘No, sir.’
‘You do it again! The impudence! Did I say speak? Did I, eh? Did I?’
As he seemed physically to swell with anger, the developing sense of calm his previously gentle manner had erroneously persuaded upon me disappeared. I examined the logic of the situation: my speaking out of turn had made him furious; yet when he had made an enquiry of me and I had, to my mind, spoken in turn, that, too, had made him furious. Given that my original crime had been giving voice, I decided to keep silent. Yet this, too, was seemingly a criminal offence, for after several seconds he assailed me again.
‘I ask you a direct question and you dare not answer me, boy? Answer me clearly and simply: did I tell you to speak?’
There could be no doubt this time: I had to answer him.
‘No, sir.’
Alas, this, too, was wrong.
‘Again you do it! Again you speak!’
The injustice of my inescapable position stung me like an unfair wasp, and I could not help but respond. ‘But, sir, you told me to!’
It was as if I had poked a headmasterly Vesuvius into eruption, and I was the pupil Pompeii on its lower slopes. Verbal lava swept down upon me. ‘Cheek and impudence the like of which I have ne’er heard! You are
to be beaten, boy! D’you hear? Now, where is my cane?’
My sentence was momentarily suspended as the headmaster approached a large cupboard in the corner of the room. Inside were row upon row of boy-hurty canes. He withdrew one and slashed it about experimentally. Its thin whippiness scorched through the air with a whistle, and I could all too easily imagine the gargantuan amounts of pain it would inflict on me.
But it seemed as if those gargantuan amounts of pain were not enough for the headmaster, for he instantly discarded it.
‘No, not Old Softy.’3 He rummaged in the cupboard and removed another cane. ‘Yes . . . this is more like it.’
He turned to me and I saw in his hands a small branch, gnarled and knobbly, and almost throbbing with agony waiting to be inflicted. He lifted it high and offered one final warning: ‘And if I hear one bleat out of you, you shall be hanged!’
He swept the instrument down, and as it struck, an earthquake of pain exploded from the epicentre of my buttocks. Strongly desirous of not being hanged, I somehow kept the scream of agony deep within me. With a pant of exertion, the headmaster raised his weapon high again; with a grunt of satisfaction he lowered it at vast velocity. As he beat me, I closed my eyes and thought of many things: of my mother and father; of my sisters; of the life I had left behind; but mostly of how there was an angry man hitting me on the bottom with a large stick.
Finally, it was done. The rhythmic explosions of agony subsided into one massive throb of enormo-pain, and suddenly I heard laughter.
It was the headmaster.
I slowly raised my aching body upright and saw that the glinting twinkle of joy had returned to his face. The fury and rage had gone, and for an instant I wondered whether there were not two identical men of vastly differing temperaments who had somehow been changing places over the past minutes without me noticing.
‘Ha ha ha . . . oh dear. You fell for that, didn’t you, young man? Sorry, sorry, it’s a bit of a joke I like to play on every new boy. It lets them know I’m not the type of ogre most headmasters are expected to be.’
This was unlike any joke I had ever come across in my life hithertohencely. The jokes I knew all started ‘Knock, knock’ or ‘There were these two nuns’ or ‘What’s the best way to kill a Frenchman?’4 But I was perfectly prepared to believe that this beating scenario was a traditional form of physical comedy I had not yet come across.5
‘What did you think? No, really, did I fool you?’
I feared reprisal for answering; yet if it had been nothing more than a traditional prank on a new arrival, then not to respond with an honest compliment as to how genuinely he had convinced me that he was actually a psychopathic boy-hating maniac would be the height of rudeness. I took a deep breath, and ventured an answer.
‘I . . .’
‘You dare speak to me? Did I say you might open your mouth? Did I? Did I?’
His frothing fury covered me with grumpy spittle and I braced myself for another cane-based onslaught.
‘No, actually, I did say you could speak. I remember now.’ I sighed with relief, as did my buttocks. ‘So . . . welcome to St Bastard’s. I am the headmaster, Jeremiah Hardthrasher.6 We have only one rule in this school, and that is “Obey every rule” and there are over eight thousand of those. If you find yourself missing home, don’t hesitate to have a little cry, although if caught doing so you will be hanged. Right, that’s it, you can go to your dormitory. As soon as I’ve administered your welcoming beating. Bend over!’
He raised his cane, I lowered my head, and the rain of pain came again.7
1 St Bastard is patron saint of cruelty, hating small boys and, in recent times, TV talent shows. There is no record of any actual school with that name at the time. The most likely candidates for his actual place of education are Thugby School, Beaten College or St Ouch’s.
2 There are three possible explanations for this: the route went via the Arctic Circle during the summer months; the author was confused; or, as proposed by Britain’s only professor of Quantum English, Roger Catchpole, the carriage passed through a space-time wormhole caused by rogue tachyon particles and naughty quarks. Though, as he admits, he was a bit drunk when he thought of the idea and had also just watched seventeen back-to-back episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
3 An actual brand name for a cane in the nineteenth century. Part of the ‘Cruel Irony’ range of punishment instruments for children, which also included the ‘Warm Your Cockles’ branding iron and the ‘Gentle Ben’ potty-training rack.
4 In 1843, these three joke-forms were melded by the Queen’s chief humour adviser Professor Baron Lord Robert De Monkhouse into the now famous Grand Unified Joke: ‘Knock, knock’, ‘Who’s there?’ ‘It’s two nuns, we’ve come to ask what’s the best way to kill a Frenchman.’
5 A reference to the nineteenth-century German ‘Comedy of Agony’ (Das Agonistische Komedie).
6 A pseudonym for real-life schoolteacher Jeremiah Cruelthwack, inventor of the first fully automatic boy-caning machine or Beating Jenny.
7 Some say this line is designed to convey the rhythm of a beating; others suggest the author might just have been in a hurry to get to dinner and therefore sought speed over quality.
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
Yet more misery . . . and the teensiest, tiniest bit of hope
Thus began a period of my life so wretched I cannot put it into words. Mathematically it was like this:
x = 2y4
Where x represents the amount of misery experienced in one day at St Bastard’s and y represents the amount of misery experienced over my entire life before arriving at the school.
In onomatopoeia it was like this:
Aaaarrrggghhhh!!!
But beyond that I have not the vocabularic wherewithal to communicate my circumstances.
Although I have just realized that this is a book, so I really should have a go.
Hmmm . . .
The dormitory I inhabited was a bleak, unforgiving place. There was a cold, hard stone floor and the only furniture was cold, hard stone stones. We used the larger ones as beds and chairs and the smaller ones as pillows.
My first night there, a pillow fight broke out: there were nine broken jaws and three fatalities.
The school routine was remorseless and cruel. Every morning at five o’clock we were awoken by being poked with sharp sticks. We were then herded at the end of some sharp sticks to prayers in the school chapel, where instead of pews we had to sit on sharp sticks. More sharp sticks prodded us towards lessons, where if we gave an incorrect answer we were poked with a sharp stick and if we gave a correct answer we were rewarded by being poked with a blunt stick, though a stick which in the greater scheme of things would still seem sharp to most people; that is to say, people who weren’t used to being constantly poked with sharp sticks.
In fact, the only time we were spared the poking with sticks was when we were beaten by the headmaster, which was regularly and often. To say it made a lovely change from the sharp sticks would be a massive lie.
Lessons were rigorously streamed. By which I do not mean that selection was according to ability, but that they took place in a stream. Whenever it rained the stream was in spate, and during one Latin class alone eight boys were swept away by the torrent. If they were lucky enough to survive the watery plummet, they were sure to meet their doom at the end of the stream where it emptied out into the headmaster’s shark pond.
Punishments for infraction of the eight thousand school rules were many and varied, ranging from being sent luging bare-bottomed down the school grater to being made to don hedgehog pants then do vigorous lunges or, most feared of all, being sentenced to the school salt-mines. Once in there the salt could drive boys mad with thirst: they were often found horribly injured having tried to drink their own heads.
I myself was fortunate: I was only ever sentenced to the neighbouring school pepper-mines. This was a far less deadly place – although Chewsby-Forsdyke was once found having sn
eezed himself inside out.
I think the hunger was maybe the worst. After catching one of the boys smiling without permission or, indeed, reason, Headmaster Hardthrasher had banned meals for the next five months. Worse, though he had banned meals, he had not banned meal times. Thus, three times a day we were forced to sit in the dining hall and pretend to eat by means of whatever mime or physical theatre skills we possessed.
These were incredibly dangerous occasions. Not only would the headmaster often hang boys after being unconvinced by their efforts to eat a facsimile of a chop or a simulacrum of soup but, driven mad by pretend food, the larger boys would sometimes try to eat the smaller boys. Usually the headmaster would intervene before they had consumed more than an arm or a leg, but nevertheless one kept one’s wits about one or, if one had a friend to watch one’s back, two kept two’s wits about two.1
We were clad in rags, unwashed and hungry, so hungry. At night the dormitory echoed with the sounds of boys trying not to weep, and often failing. One night I heard Arrowby crying. He wept for most of the night, stopping just before dawn. On investigation, we found he was completely desiccated, having cried every bit of moisture out of his young body. When I touched him, he crumbled to dust and blew away on the breeze, and I don’t think there was a single boy there who didn’t in some small way envy him.
And then there were games.
The headmaster took a great delight in team sports. He also had a terrible deep-seated envy of Rugby School and its now world-famous eponymous game of violence. Hence he had invented his own: Bastardball.
The object of the game was to get a ball to the end of the pitch and plunge it head first into a bucket of cold dung, for doing which you scored a Bastard.
