by George

by Wesley Stace

  Curiouser and curiouser.

  I was Alice through the looking glass.

  Fisher and the Secret Compartment

  When he woke, surprised he had ever fallen asleep, George saw the extent to which he had been wedged into the other boys’ lives. His blue cotton bedspread was like all the others, but only now did he notice how the bed itself was shoehorned into its space, jutting out under an eave at an angle, an embarrassment among all the parallel lines.

  Matron was on the prowl, sniffing out any residual holiday behaviour, the legacy of lenient parents. She did not spare the new boy her litany of petty complaint, taking one look at the dark blue overcoat that lay at the top of his trunk and shaking her head. “Oh no, no, no. Oh dear, no. No. You’re not getting away with that, my lad. It’ll be a mighty cold winter without a coat.”

  He joined the herd on its way to the trough. The previous evening had been a disorientating blur, but now he was able to map the route downstairs; past the other dormitories (Shakespeare, Chaucer, Spenser, Dryden), through a hallway converted into a public changing room, past a library and a colourless corridor that could only lead to classrooms, down a flight of stairs, past an array of hanging roller skates (he had none), the room where everyone (except for him) kept his tuck box, and the board where the day’s teams were displayed, the names of the chosen handwritten on disks dangling on hooks in formation. Many of those ahead of him were unable to resist the urge to finger these disks as they passed. George did not. Then down the corridor, newly painted boy-proof neutral, that led to the arch of the dining hall, past dressing rooms that returned a promising echo; on the left, the kitchens, from which wafted the unappetizing smell of burned fat (to the soundtrack of staccato bickering in an indistinguishable language); and as they drew nearer, official notice boards, drawing pins, gold letters, a display of crests, a list of scholarships, a billiard table. George was about to submit to breakfast with some relief when the line turned sharply right and snaked outside through a door flanked by two iron griffins.

  “Griffins,” said a pudgy oracle, who had been shadowing him. “Lion with the head of an eagle. Are you new?” Gravel crunched underneath George’s shoes. The leaves had not quite started to fall. “I’m Nick. We’re in the same class. . . . Morning walk,” he added by way of explanation, looking as though he needed to exhale. He was simmering with this kind of helpful information and had to let off steam regularly. “Every morning. Down the driveway, past the building site for the new assembly hall, down to the conker trees, and back. Unless it’s raining.” Today there was only light drizzle. “Then you do a lap of the Green Court and say good morning to the headmaster.”

  This moment assumed ever-increasing importance after the turn at the trees. George practised in his head, hoping to chance upon the perfect tone. Nick, sensing this nervous rehearsal, was happy to play the old hand. “Just don’t say ‘Good morning, Swish!’ That’s his nickname, Swish. It’s the sound of . . .” Nick took great pleasure from a deft flick of his wrist. Canes had loomed large in George’s vision of Upside. Aside from Frankie’s quaint visions, he had gleaned his entire knowledge of such schools from books (Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby) and television (Billy Bunter and Whack-O!). “But it’s his initials too,” continued the talking almanac. “Stewart W. S. Hartley. You see? Swish.” He repeated his sadistic mime. “You don’t say much, do you?” The group ahead of them extended satirically enthusiastic greetings to Hartley, who, framed by an oak portico beneath a Tudor arch, rocked back and forth on his heels and banged a pipe against his palm.

  “Morning, sir,” chirped Nick.

  The head nodded, regarding the clouds suspiciously. He was a large bear of a man with well-padded hands and a scarcely controlled black and grey beard that he stroked as he inspected the heavens. Though thinner than Giant Haystacks, the wrestler, and more urbane than Grizzly Adams, he had something of the wild man about him. George felt himself about to speak, but he found himself lost in his options, and nothing emerged.

  “Mr. Fisher, I presume,” boomed Hartley.

  “Yes,” George said, taken aback, and stopped, conscious of the obstacle he presented to the group behind.

  “Just walk around,” said the head impatiently. He seemed about to pass judgement either on George, the weather, the school, or life in general. “Fisher, it’s time to sample the delights of your first Upside breakfast. It could be kedgeree, a kipper, porridge. Will you rise to the challenge?” He was unexpectedly jolly, almost a bearded pantomime dame.

  “What’s kedgeree?”

  “That, Fisher, is the six-million-dollar question. In you go.” The interview at an end, Hartley transferred his attentions to those behind. “Good morning . . . Good morning . . . Tuck your shirt in . . . Morning . . . Haircut . . .”

  The dining room, overseen by the stern, knowing eyes of ancestral headmasters, echoed to shuffling feet and screeching chairs. A moment’s silence was replaced by an unenthusiastic mumbling, culminating in a reverberant Amen, which in turn became the clanking of plates and the chatter of the breakfast table.

  At the top of George’s table sat a large naval type, whom someone made the grave error of addressing as Mr. Poole. This impertinence was corrected: Commander Poole. The main event was a charred sausage accompanied by either a golden piece of fried bread, happy entire or in small crumbs, or pre-buttered toast. George imagined the cursory swipes of a knife that eked out one portion of butter over ten slices of toast, leaving the last few dry. At home, butter was spread as extravagantly as conversation: only thick enough when accurate dental records could be taken from the impression of your incisors. Every last inch of surface area was covered, to save having to butter the crusts separately.

  According to Captain Bird’s Eye, who littered his speech with cryptic nautical jargon, whatever anyone did at the table was wrong. Tentative attempts at conversation were constantly interrupted; the offender had taken too much or too little, taken it with the wrong implement, or with the right implement but in the wrong way; he was swinging in his chair, leaning in his chair, not sitting with his back straight, or sitting with his back too straight in a way that mocked the previous command; he poured the tea either too quickly (“It’s splashing”), too slowly (“Don’t make a meal of it”), or too carelessly (“It’s going everywhere!”); most grievously, if he managed to start eating, he was talking with his mouth full, and no one wanted to know what he was having for breakfast. It was impossible to predict what would be right and what wrong. The tea was hot: was it best to leave it till it cooled (“Don’t let it get cold, boy”) or drink it while it was hot (“Be careful, you’ll scald yourself ”)? The drinking was equally fraught with hazard; they were lectured if they slurped, sipped, or swilled, for which offences they were variously threatened with the plank, swabbing the decks, or, most vituperatively, the cat.

  This onslaught was unlike any communication George had experienced between human beings in the real world. Frankie never told George off; she never told anyone off for anything. This task sometimes fell to Queenie, who offered rebuke in such a kindly way that it seemed only a heedless repetition of the offence would constitute a true sin. George had been ordered out of the way by brusque stage managers, but backstage was their world, all their tuttings in the greater service of the show. His mother had represented school as a paradise for boys, a playground for equals, for so it was in her dreams; by the end of the meal, George had realized that school was a Neverland for teachers only. Grace came as a relief.

  “For what we have just received,” muttered the boy next to him, “may the Lord be truly grateful. Amen.” That didn’t seem right.

  There was a second shock that morning: his name had been changed. The Fishers had been mystified by the suffix “mi” on the name labels that his mother, whiling hours away in various shades of green room, had shown surprising willingness in sewing onto every item of clothing bound for the large black trunk. This job, which would
once have fallen to Sylvia, should have been Queenie’s, but Frankie, who had bought a thimble especially, insisted. “Mi? A name I call myself?” was as far as Frankie got. At roll call before morning assembly, George understood. He had a namesake at Upside, older, more experienced, bigger. He was no longer George Fisher, he was Fisher Minor. “Yes, sir,” said George, reluctantly acknowledging the diminutive.

  In his beginning-of-term address, the headmaster expatiated on the school motto, Vincit Veritas. “ ‘Honesty is the best policy’? ‘The truth will out’? No. These are attractive but loose translations which Mr. Cope,” he nodded towards a chalky gown, “would rightly deplore. ‘Truth Conquers.’ Truth is the beginning of every good to the gods and of every good to man.” He then regaled the shuffling assembly with an anecdote about Plato, before the introduction of the school song: “There’ll Always Be an Upside.”

  George said nothing during the first two classes. His arrival threw things out for the school photo at break: there wasn’t room in the back row with his contemporaries, and he had to sit cross-legged at the front with the other newcomers, most of whom were four years younger, teachers breathing down his neck from the row behind.

  That night George dashed off a quick postcard to his mother c/o The Stage Door, Palace Theatre, Brighton. “It’s quite strange here, but I’ll get used to it.” He didn’t want her to worry. “They changed my name to Fisher Minor. Love, Georgie.” A week later, his name was called after lunch: he had a letter. It was a faded, crinkle-edged postcard of the West Pier in all its dated, shabby splendour. “Dear Fisher Minor, I am so happy for you. I wish someone would call me that, but then we’d get muddled. With love from your always loving Frankie (Fisher Mater).”

  School was a new world with unimagined customs and codes, where maps had no keys, rituals no explanations. A few of the natives reluctantly offered help, but most paraded the exclusivism of their fellowship, its in-jokes and its private language, and laughed at George’s pidgin attempts to be accepted. They had all learned together, three years previously, and they weren’t going to make it easy for any Johnny-come-lately. Anyone overeager to offer himself as Man Friday obviously had his own reasons for doing so: Nick was unpopular — the physical attributes of a griffin weren’t all he didn’t know you knew. Even when you thought you’d got rid of him, he lingered, like something you’d stepped in.

  For the first few days, lessons proved a relief from the harder work of fitting in. What had the others learned until the age of eleven? Only an ability to read and write was taken for granted. Basic general knowledge allowed George to participate in most subjects: from History, which dawned with Henry VII; and Geography, mainly concerning clouds; to the irrelevancies of Scripture; and Latin’s dark, incomprehensible code (apparently pointless beyond its illumination of well-known words and phrases: Et tu, Brute?, Quo Vadis?, Per diem, Status Quo, and Exeunt). Of equations and chemical formulae he knew nothing, but these they seemed to be learning together for the first time.

  George had imagined that his many skills would be useful. He spoke a little French, knew a theatre outside and in, had a comprehensive knowledge of lighting gels, loved to read (anything), could catnap at the drop of a hat in almost any position, was an accomplished maker of all kinds of beverages (hot brews for the throat, cold cocktails for the after-show), and could busk unselfconsciously on the piano and recite any number of the monologues that were common Fisher currency; but none of these were on the Upside timetable or uppermost in the minds of its pupils. George knew nothing of anything that was, neither Top of the Pops nor the in-swinging corner, and liked neither the look nor smell of compulsory games. To everyone else, the midafternoon was a joyful respite from the rest of the day, but to George it was a miserable trudge in a damp shirt. His classmates treated him with suspicion: they did not like a boy happy in his own company, and they let George know this in many predictable ways, all apparently quite acceptable in the eyes of the staff.

  One thing was clear: there was no room at Upside for pleasure. Of those things he considered luxurious (sweets, comics, television), none was allowed. The one pleasure that remained was reading, but even this was discouraged. The school did not advocate use of the library, at least not to read a book; it was the venue for detention — this summed up the general attitude to literature. An imported novel had to be vetted by the headmaster, who (after an agonizing day or two — he was in no particular rush) returned it outside his office with his initials scrawled inside the front cover. George, whose family had encouraged an early graduation to grown-up fiction, was in the grip of The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene. The English teacher, Mr. Burgh, a petite yet pugnacious northerner who, despite his drowsy mole-like features, was always spoiling for a fight, proclaimed it too grown-up and recommended the works of Arthur Ransome, Frank Richards, and Captain W. E. Johns.

  Sundays were particularly unusual. Despite the absence of God and His relations from the Fisher pantheon, the sabbath remained sacred: a late rising, a long lunch, the full works cooked by Queenie, always followed by the washing up (from which Des excused himself, absconding to the bathroom with the newspaper); then a lazy afternoon, the centrepiece a matinée, as dictated by the BBC schedule. The League of Gentlemen, The Court Jester, The Last of the Mohicans, Roman Scandals, any number of Sherlock Holmes — he loved them all, sat next to Evie, whose job it was, Radio Times and magnifying glass at hand, to alert him to the identity of every actor, outline his previous experience, and then rack her fading memory to recall where she had seen him most recently, while George struggled to pay attention to the movie and humour her in equal measure.

  He had known he wouldn’t be going home on Sundays, but not that everybody else would. Only the most foreign, the strangest, did not spend Sundays with their own families. Homegoers could take pity on the forlorn and offer an invitation — but term was too young for such generosity, besides which George did not yet register on the meter of popularity.

  He watched from Pope as matching parents in a vast range of Rovers reunited with their spawn. He surveyed the Barbour-jacketed fathers, all identical, and the mothers, in whom there was allowed slightly more (but very little) variation. George couldn’t produce anyone like this to pick him up, nor could his family have produced anything to pick him up in — only Des had owned a car: no Fisher could drive. The tardiest of the parents arrived, and the last of their sons disappeared; peace reigned in the driveway, and the long Sunday ground remorselessly on.

  George’s day was spent with a motley assortment of his fellow deserted, which included a Lebanese boy who could barely speak English, an Indian whose parents must have been uncommonly generous benefactors to Upside, for their son was all but retarded, and younger English twins whose widowed father lived in America. Mr. Potter let it be known that their resentment at having to stay at Upside was nothing compared to his own. The weather was considerately mediocre, prohibiting sports, so they spent most of the day inside, playing games and, miraculously, watching television, which showed nothing but religious and farming programmes until the matinée finally began. In sympathy, food and sweets were handed out to these orphans with a freer hand. The day trudged on.

  “Can I go to the library, sir?” asked George wearily.

  “Why?”

  “To look at the books.”

  “Take the twins with you.”

  George could locate none of his recent favourites — no Greene, no Ambler, no MacLean — not that anything was in order, the shelves bowed by books with grimly coloured spines, each with a little picture below the title. Tatty how-to books harkened to a bygone time when schoolboys habitually boasted a healthy interest in genealogy, knots, and the avid collection of postage stamps or birds’ eggs. The extant novels were similarly dated and unpromising, tales of child detectives, adventurous airmen, courageous pets, and fat, unwilling schoolboy skivers. There was a vast preponderance of heavily abridged versions of the classics (ruined for children), volume upon volume of bowdle
rized Greek myth, and nothing at all to interest Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

  “Hadn’t we better be getting back?” said one.

  “Yes, hadn’t we?” agreed the other.

  It was still only early afternoon.

  At 6:30 those who had enjoyed shore leave returned in time for evening chapel, full of boasts, happy and spoilt. Many had done no more than watch television, like the abandoned, but they had done it in their homes, with their pets, with their parents, surrounded by their toys, eating their homemade fudge.

  George stood in line and waited for roll call.

  “Fisher Minor?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Another Sunday with the lepers was best avoided. But his family certainly wasn’t coming to pick him up. Queenie getting Evie out of bed and into a train, and pushing her wheelchair down the drive, furs flapping round their necks — it didn’t seem likely. George knew to avoid becoming too friendly with the Sunday colony, in case he too came to wear their mark. But what was the alternative?

  He spent the next few days in a conscious effort to make himself available for somebody else’s family, a would-be evacuee standing on tiptoe, looking his smartest; but he was ignored. It was time to be noticed — what did he know that they didn’t?

  On Thursday evening, lights-out was, as usual, the signal for dutiful noise. The participants called themselves the Blackout Society, the name of which, supposedly handed down through generations of insomniac Papists, styled its members outlaws, though its rules were as unprogressive as a St. James club. George, whose preferred illicit pleasure had been to read under the covers by the light of a key-ring torch, had by no means yet put himself forward, let alone found a sponsor.

  This evening, the members of the Blackout Society were reduced to telling the most frightening stories they knew. George had heard these tired tales from countless stagehands. It was time to up the ante.