Toby, leaving a judicious interval, strolled back towards the classrooms. If Mr Makepeace was a study in how much inhumanity a man could bear, Mr McWhirter was a study in how non-human a man could become.
‘Macbeth, Act One, Scene Seven,’ he announced as the boys clattered in. His voice was harsh and nasal, as if it had had to fight a stiff battle around the bridge of his nose before it had been able to emerge at all.
‘ “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.” The word “done” in its first appearance may be taken to mean “finished”. “If the assassination / Could trammel up the consequence . . .” The word “trammel” here means . . .’
Iain Ogilvie McWhirter’s teaching methods, Toby felt, were more than a little old-fashioned. In fact, it seemed that Burleigh School as a whole was untouched by modern educational theories. In this respect the boys were lucky. But Toby wondered whether the old-fashioned theories it conducted itself by were of the best, or consistently applied. He wondered, indeed, if some of the teachers were interested in anything other than getting through to three-thirty, filling up the time with something or other. Mr McWhirter’s methods meant that some—any—excuse had to be found to interrupt his recital every ten minutes or so.
‘Sir, sir,’ said a boy. ‘Sir, do you think Macbeth is a good play?’
It was a question calculated to arouse Mr McWhirter’s scorn. He piped through his nasal tubes a snuffling laugh.
“If you think it a good play, all the better for you. And if you don’t—you still have to do it.’
‘Well, because, I mean, sir—we did it in 2A, and now we’re doing it again, sir—’
‘And we’re doing it again next year for GCE,’ drawled a voice that Toby recognized as Hilary Frome’s.
‘Oh no!’ sighed the chorus.
‘Well, you won’t be able to say you don’t know the play,’ returned Iain McWhirter, with another nasal chortle.
‘Actually,’ said Hilary Frome, ‘the school has only got Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, and Henry IV, Part I, and that’s why we have to do them so often. Look—’ he held aloft his battered, ink-bespattered copy—‘this one looks as if it’s been in use since the Boer War.’
The trouble with Hilary Frome, thought Toby, was that he was so often right. Watching that fair, contemptuous face he thought how well he knew the type from his own school. But Hilary did not impress Mr McWhirter.
‘ “And catch with his surcease success,” ’ he intoned, and the class settled down to another ten minutes of drudgery.
It was at this point that Dorothea Gilberd, wandering round the school in search of him, came upon Toby. With a schoolboy’s shamefacedness, as if he had been caught out in something furtive (as, really, he had), he agreed at once to take her class.
When he came to look at the poem Miss Gilberd had intended to teach, Toby rather wondered at her judgment. When he took classes for McWhirter he stuck to the Romantics, or things that one could get a good adolescent wallow out of: Housman, say, or The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He really couldn’t see 2B going for Thomas Gray. He should have realized that it was a poem that Miss Gilberd herself had had drummed into her at a Girls’ High School in the West Riding, sometime in the nineteen-forties. Anyway, she had thrust into his hands a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, in its revised and enlarged 1911 edition, prepared and annotated for use in the Public Schools, and he didn’t argue. Perhaps, after all, she might have some master plan behind her teaching.
‘ “Alas! regardless of their doom,
The little victims play!
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond today . . .” ’
‘I say, sir,’ said Pickerage, looking up at him with his Puck face, ‘don’t you think that’s a bit exaggerated? I mean, schoolboys as little victims, and all that?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said another boy darkly.
‘Actually, you’ve got it a bit wrong,’ said Toby. ‘What he’s saying is that they play away quite happily, not realizing what’s in store for them in the rest of their lives. Though from what I’ve read about eighteenth-century Eton, anything that came after that could only be a pleasant relief.’
‘Was it that bad, sir? Was it worse than here?’
‘Of course it was, Pickerage. Infinitely worse.’
‘Hilary Frome says that Burleigh is one of the twenty-five worst schools in the country.’
‘Then Hilary Frome is talking nonsense. If he thought that he would hardly want to be the next head boy.’
‘He said that if the Ministry of Education had any guts, they would refuse to recognize it,’ pursued Pickerage.
‘He was having you on,’ said Toby firmly. And then, slipping out from under this delicate and embarrassing subject, he went on: ‘Anyway, you’re missing the point, Pickerage. The point is, what is going to happen to these boys later. Look, in the very next lines Gray says:
“Yet see, how all around them wait
The ministers of human fate
And black misfortune’s baleful train!”
These are the things that are in store for them in later life.’
‘Well,’ said Pickerage, obstinately, ‘I don’t see the ministers of human fate pointing their fingers at me.’
It was a remark that Toby was to remember, with a catch of his breath, a week or so later.
• • •
As it happened, Toby was to get a good conspectus that day of the foothills of Burleigh teaching. For after he had supervised lunch, Corbett Farraday came and put his hand on his shoulders and said:
‘I say, I’m doing an absolutely top-hole experiment with 4A second period this afternoon. Why don’t you come along? It’s going to knock them in the aisles.’
He did everything, Toby felt, but say he had a spiffing wheeze. The fact was that Corbett was more than a bit of an embarrassment. He seemed to have got so immovably entrenched in the short trouser stage of life that nothing could ever arouse him to a sense of adult realities. Now he was looking at Toby with the pleading grin of the schoolboy planning a jape, and Toby, who was near enough to that stage to want to put it firmly behind him, would have loved to refuse. But you couldn’t refuse Corbett, or speak brutally to him. Somebody should have, perhaps, much earlier in life, but now it was too late.
‘I’d love to,’ said Toby.
When he came into the labs, Corbett was already poised over a crucible of smoking liquid, looking less like a mad professor than an incompetent short-order cook.
‘Now, boys,’ he said, ‘this should be awfully jolly.’
He waved his hands over the mist-producing crucible, as if he were a Christmas-party conjuror.
‘Now, little boys—watch this!’
The little boys—pubescent, sexually precocious fifteen-year-olds—gazed back, some with reluctant expectation, some in tolerance, one with an expression of cultivated languor.
‘And now, what do I do? I take this little bottle of the pink stuff . . . and very carefully, very gently, I add it—like this . . .’
He drew, slowly, the little bottle over towards the crucible, seeming to hug himself with anticipation. Nothing delighted him more than to feel twenty-five eyes fixed upon him. Slowly, still like a conjuror, he gently poured a drop or two in. From the crucible there arose a great, green, fluorescent haze, which enveloped the lab bench and the teacher in an inappropriately lurid glow.
‘I say,’ said Hilary Frome, calculatedly offensive, at the height of Corbett’s triumph, ‘do we have to waste time on these party tricks? Some of us want to get through GCE next year, you know.’
Corbett Farraday flinched like a spurned puppy. Toby would have liked to kick Hilary Frome. The trouble was that, as usual, he had a point.
• • •
At the end of teaching, the long street towards the centre of Cullbridge was for a time a babble of noise, with scuffles, cap-snatching and schoolboy indecencies hurled from green-blazered groups
on one side to green-blazered groups on the other. A sensible quarter of an hour later, the teachers began to trek home, most of them to bachelor quarters of various degrees of chastity. Toby spent some time smoothing the ruffled sensibilities of Corbett Farraday (‘I mean, after all, when you try to give them a bit of fun . . .’), then he went to check the changing huts, which Bill Muggeridge usually forgot to lock after his afternoon tearing round blowing whistles at the boys. Then Toby trudged towards the boarders’ annexe which was for the moment his home.
Toby Freely was just nineteen, only a couple of years or so older than the oldest boy at Burleigh. He was the son of a clergyman, and his mother had scrimped and saved and made the lives of her family and parish miserable in order to send her son to Portlington. Portlington was a public school so minor that you got none of the cachet for having been there that is the real point of an English public school education. In fact, you had to go through the humiliating procedure of explaining to everyone that it was indeed a public school. It wasn’t much of a place, and Toby hadn’t been particularly happy there.
He was in the third-year sixth when he got his place at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. In fact, it was while he was up for the interview that he read in The Times the advertisement that had brought him to Burleigh:
GRUBWORTHY AND STING
EDUCATIONAL SERVICES LTD
are seeking for January 1983 SCHOOL LEAVERS to teach games and other subjects in Boys’ Private and Preparatory Schools.
No fee whatever is payable for these posts.
The honesty of the advertisement struck him. When he called in at the offices of Grubworthy and Sting, on his way through London, they were no less honest with him.
‘Of course, we have to put these advertisements in,’ said the tired, courteous, slightly frayed man who interviewed him, ‘because we are a service for all schools in the private sector. All schools, however unsat . . . if you see. But we would hardly recommend . . .’
‘I don’t know,’ said Toby. ‘It might suit me. As a fill-in.’
‘I mean, look at this one,’ said the interviewer, becoming quite indignant and picking one of the schools’ letters contemptuously from the pile. ‘ “Help with games and with the small boarding section. Some elementary teaching in various subjects.” My God! They don’t want much for nil salary, do they? Lucky they didn’t specify they required a Ph.D. “Homely atmosphere.” That means the cooking is even more dreadful than it usually is in these places.’
But Toby was made obstinate by his first off-the-cuff effort to get himself a job.
‘I think I’d like it,’ he said. ‘Would I get it?’
‘Oh, you’d get it. You don’t think there’s a queue, do you? But you know, dear boy, the only possible reason for taking a job like this is to get away from school or family.’
‘Those are my reasons,’ said Toby.
So, having done his best to dissuade him, the man did his best to get him reasonable terms. He threw the name Portlington into the telephone conversation, assured Mr Crumwallis that it was indeed a Public School, and the results were gratifying. A purr came down the line. Mr Crumwallis even agreed that, in view of his boarding-school duties, Toby should be paid for any teaching he did. In accordance with experience and qualifications. Toby had no experience or qualifications.
He had taken up his duties shortly after the beginning of the spring term, when he was sure of his place at Trinity Hall. The school had fulfilled all the worst forebodings of the gentleman at Grubworthy and Sting, but Toby had not been unhappy. He had more or less sole charge of the twenty-seven boys in the boarding section. One evening off a week he had insisted on, and on those evenings Mr or Mrs Crumwallis occasionally poked their noses through into the boarding annexe and yelled ‘Shut up’ through the riot proceeding there. Otherwise Toby was father, mother and elder brother to the boys, and on the whole he enjoyed himself, creating for them the home he felt he had never had himself. Many of the boys were children of army families, or business families settled abroad. They were mostly a little lonely and disorientated, enjoying none of the (few) advantages of the ordinary boarding-school, and too few in number to feel any sense of corporate identity. Toby felt he was doing good.
Today he trudged up to his cubbyhole of a room, showered in the communal bathroom, and went along to tea at four-thirty. Tea was a plate of doorsteps cut by Mrs Garfitt the housekeeper at one-thirty, as soon as school lunch was over. If the doorsteps could have curled at the edges, they would have done so. She had regarded his suggestion that they be put in plastic as a piece of impertinence to a woman of her years.
‘Oh God, raspberry jam again,’ said Mortimer, as he entered the room. ‘Toby, why is it always raspberry jam?’
They called him Toby in the boarding annexe, ‘sir’ in the school, except when they got it mixed up.
‘It isn’t always raspberry,’ said Toby. ‘I distinctly remember fish paste last Thursday.’
‘Ugh, filthy old fish paste.’
‘Look at this fruit cake,’ said Pickerage, the live wire of the boarding annexe. ‘It must be months old. All dry and crumbly.’
‘Nonsense, it’s perfectly all right. Meant to be like that.’
‘My mother never makes cakes that are meant to be dry and crumbly,’ said Mortimer.
‘Hilary Frome says he sees old Garfitt round the back door of the baker’s on her way to school in the mornings,’ chimed in Pickerage. ‘Buying up all the really old stuff for practically nothing. I expect it’s true, don’t you, Toby?’
‘No, I don’t. And why are you quoting Hilary Frome every other sentence these days, Pickerage? Doesn’t anyone else ever say anything worth remembering?’
‘Not really. Anyway, he’s my friend. He often talks to me. We’re good friends, Hilary and I.’
Pickerage said it self-importantly. Hilary Frome was, after all, head boy designate. But in Toby’s experience friendship between a boy in his fourth year and one in his second was a rare occurrence, and one which would usually be a particular sort of friendship.
Toby decided to keep his eye on Hilary Frome.
CHAPTER 3
PARENTS’ EVENING
There was one thing, Toby thought, about Mr Crumwallis: the teachers might dislike or despise him, but in the end they toed his line. Like tonight, Parents’ Evening, when they had assembled at his behest in the Staff Common Room overlooking the school driveway to watch out for arriving parents and usher them through to the headmaster’s sitting-room, where the first part of the festivities were to take place. Or was it less his personality that accounted for their compliance than his power—a power so much greater than that of a headmaster within the State system? Glenda Grower, who rarely commented on her past career within that system, seemed to think so.
‘And so, my children,’ she said, dominating the staff room as inevitably she dominated whenever she chose, ‘so we all troop along an hour early, as commanded by the Great God Crumwallis, to usher the parents from their Daimlers and along to the glittering scene awaiting them in the Crumwallis quarters. Aren’t we good little children? Or are we, perhaps, merely craven? We have, after all, a meagre enough amount of free time. It wouldn’t have happened, I can tell you, at Bedfordshire Comprehensive.’
Glenda Grower’s hair, auburn and shiny, was normally tied in a neat bun at the back of her head, but tonight it had been allowed to stream glamorously down her back. She had been at one of the best State schools in England, where she would still be, no doubt, but for what Toby had heard referred to as an Incident. Toby would have liked to inquire further, but had feared a snub at his age and inexperience. It accounted, he supposed, for her aloofness, and the occasional appearance of resentment and unhappiness.
‘Not all of us are toeing the line,’ said Tom Tedder. ‘McWhirter’s not here, for one.’
‘But then, our Mr McWhirter’s a law unto himself, is he not?’ said Glenda, tossing a splendid lock back from over her eye. ‘No doubt he will shuff
le in five minutes after the first parent comes, and shuffle out half an hour before the last one goes. Money talks.’
‘Don’t underestimate him,’ said Septimus Coffin, tugging at his tufty moustache. ‘He may be the world’s most tedious teacher and its driest personality, but he has one admirable quality: he is totally honest. When Mrs Whatsit asks him tonight why her little Johnny isn’t making more progress with his English, Iain McWhirter will reply that progress is not to be expected from a boy who is abysmally lazy and congenitally stupid.’
‘Whereas the rest of us,’ said Glenda Grower, ‘will mutter something like “perhaps his real strengths do lie elsewhere”.’
‘It seems a good idea,’ said Penny Warlock, looking up to Glenda and wondering if she herself would be as impressive a figure after ten or fifteen years in the teaching profession. ‘Perhaps I’ll try the total honesty line.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ said Glenda Grower. ‘I really wouldn’t. But bully for McWhirter. As I say, money is power.’
‘I don’t think it’s anything to do with money,’ said Septimus Coffin. ‘It’s his position as licensed eccentric. Though, mind you, it scares the pants off poor old Crumwallis. Watch him tonight. He’ll be on tenterhooks the whole time, and muttering to the parents things like: “A true eccentric, our Mr McWhirter, but a very fine scholar in his field.” ’
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