The House Martin

by William Parker

  I used to imagine that one day we really might go there. But then I’d think of my dad and what he would say about it, and I know it’s just never going to happen. Once, we were having dinner in the summer holidays when Mummy was still sad about having to come back. My dad had come in and sat at the table straight from work and wasn’t talking very much because of a bad day at the office. Mummy said she’d love to have some real soft goat’s cheese with juicy tomatoes and olive oil like they have in Matala, and my dad shouted at her, ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, Pamela, please let’s not bloody start on the wonders of Crete!’

  She was a bit drunk, but not so much more than usual that he would be cross about it, so it made me know not to talk about Mummy’s long holiday when he was listening. It would have to be one of our secret conversations. That was the first time I’d ever heard my dad saying that swear word. It’s usually only said by people who are very, very angry—apart from Trotsky John who uses it whether he’s angry or not.

  I liked it so much when Mummy talked to me about packing our bags and going to live in that beautiful place, but of course I knew that we couldn’t really go there. Even if my dad didn’t mind us going, I know that Mummy’s not well enough. I’d be alone with her having to do all the arranging of things, and I’d start to get more and more worried because the Americans have gone home to California by now. There wouldn’t be anyone to show me how to light the fire on the beach or teach me how to make beautiful jewellery to sell in America, so we’d have no money. We’d get more and more hungry and then the winter would come, and we’d get cold as well. Anyway, there are soldiers in charge of Greece now. Trotsky John told me it’s a fascist country. They’ve booted out their king, they don’t like people sleeping on the beaches anymore, and they cut your hair if it’s too long. I’ve read about it in the newspapers, actually. It would be a hopeless situation even if we could go.

  The sun’s gone in again. Just a minute ago, it was shining straight onto my face, but now it seems as though the whole world’s turned grey and ghostly.

  There’s a car coming down the hill outside, very slowly. They all have to do that because it’s so steep that no one can go fast. There’s a sign at the top, in the High Street, that warns drivers to go as slowly as they possibly can. It’s a very narrow street of tall houses on both sides with their front doors right on the pavement and no space for front gardens. You can hear the echo of the engine as the car comes down right from the very top, getting louder and louder. Last term, when I was in Northumberland, which looks down onto the street, I would wake up when a car came along in the middle of the night because it would be so loud that I thought it must be a tank from the Second World War.

  The car’s gone past the front door. The noise of it is disappearing quickly because the street gets wider after the school, and the cars can begin to speed up. It’s not Mummy arriving.

  But there is someone at the door now, trying to get in. As I watch it, the great brass doorknob is turning ever so slowly, first one way, and then the other, and it’s making a little clinking sound. The double doors are shaking a bit because the person outside is pushing them inwards, then trying to pull them outwards, and the wind’s making them shudder a bit at the same time. But still they don’t want to open. Then it happens all over again, but even slower this time. And now it’s gone still again. I’m sitting up, waiting, staring at the door and clasping the arms of the chair as hard as hard can be, wondering what I should do. It’s not my job to open the door, after all. I might get into trouble if it’s a person who shouldn’t be allowed in. Now it’s gone dead quiet again, and the doorknob isn’t moving. I think that whoever was there has given up and decided to go away, perhaps to the kitchen door. That’s farther down the street. It’s probably the grocery man who comes from Gloucester in his van bringing things for Mrs. Ridgeley, the fat old cook.

  Suddenly the doorbell rings, and that’s a huge clanging noise that sounds like an emergency as though the school might be burning down. It’s got a stuttery sort of sound like a machine gun because I think you have to press it really hard to make it go. This bell is something I’ve only ever heard in the distance and even then not at all often because people just don’t ring it on account of there being a big door knocker with a lion’s head. But if you’re right here in the hall like I am, it’s one of the loudest things ever, and it makes me jump right out of the big chair. My boater and the empty Duralex glass fall off my lap onto the floor. The glass doesn’t smash, because of being hard and unbreakable, and it rolls along the floorboards making a noise until it stops by the bookcase under the picture of King George IV.

  So now I’m standing up and thinking I’ll have to open the door quickly to stop the person who’s doing the ringing. I take one step towards it, and then there’s silence again. But everyone in the whole school must have heard the noise, people will be coming along any minute now, and they’ll see me standing here and think how stupid I look.

  It’s gone quiet again, and I hope that the person has gone away.

  A tiny chink of light comes through the bottom shutters which are meant to be closed tight but don’t properly meet up because they’re a bit wonky from old age. Through the gap, I can see the shadow of a person trying to look through. Now there’s tapping on the window—not very loud at first, just like a polite question to find out if anyone’s inside. Then there’s a pause, and now it’s louder, angry tapping because no one answered the first time. I wish this person would go away.

  My heart beats really fast, and I tiptoe into the corridor and look through the gloom towards the Assembly Hall and then the other way down towards where the kitchen, dining room, and staff room are. There’s no one coming along yet, but everyone in the whole school must have heard the terrible racket.

  The doorknob’s moving again but this time not so shyly, so I know the person’s definitely wanting to come in, and I start to walk back into the hall and decide that it’s best that I should go to the front door after all, before there’s any chance of the bell ringing again.

  But all of a sudden both doors open just the tiniest little bit and immediately the wind catches hold of them, and they swing wide open as though they’ve been hit by a battering ram. One door crashes into the wall and the other knocks over a stand which has lots of walking sticks and umbrellas in it and the noise it makes when they all spill onto the floorboards is even worse than the bell ringing.

  At that very moment the sun comes out again from behind the clouds and shines straight in through the door, and the brightness and the wind rush into the hall at the same time. Mr. England’s papers for his music class that are on the tape recorder swirl around in the air and then begin to settle on the ground like snow on a freezing cold day.

  A dark silhouette of a person is in the doorway.

  I know it’s Mummy even though I can’t see her properly. She’s holding her arms out to the side and the palms of her hands are open as though she’s saying ‘Here I am at last.’ The sun shines through her mass of curly hair blowing in the wind, and it looks as though she’s got a halo. It makes me think of the picture of the Virgin Mary in the church hall where we go for choir practise. She looks ever so small in the big doorway just as though the wind has blown her in before she was properly ready. Now I’m getting used to the light and can see her better. She smiles at me, and we both look surprised as though we weren’t expecting to see each other—even though I’ve been waiting for hours and hours and hours. I don’t know what to say to her because I’m so worried about what is going to happen next, and I wonder when someone’s going to come along from the staff room to see what was making all that noise.

  Q

  Mr. Burston rang the bell at the end of the breakfast after the big storm, though he didn’t really need to because after I’d shouted out about the chicks everything went ghostly silent, and no one was interested in eating anyway. He said grace and as soon as he’d finished, he
left the table without saying ‘Dismiss’ to us. We were all left standing there not knowing what to do because usually we start filing out, table by table, to go upstairs to make our beds and get ready for Morning Assembly. Then Miss Carson and Miss Newman both sat down so everybody else did as well. All the talking started again, which is a thing that never happens after grace, but this was a very different day with no one telling us to be quiet. It was getting louder and louder and didn’t even stop when Mr. Burston came back in.

  He went straight to the windows and unlocked them with the key that he’d fetched from his study. When he pushed the first one open, he popped his head out and looked up and a bit of mud from the storm plopped onto his forehead. I had to put my hand over my mouth because I was smiling about it a bit.

  By the time he opened the other two windows, everybody had completely shut up again. Mr. Tulley, the science master, had come in from the staff room to see what was going on, and he was the first one to step out onto the balcony. He teaches biology to the sixth form, and so the Headmaster thought he should be the one to have the first look. We all tried to get a better view and slowly we started moving forward bit by bit. Mr. Tulley beckoned to Henry Pugh and another prefect, and they stepped outside to join him. There was a great crowd of boys jostling round the windows until the ones at the front were nearly being pushed out.

  ‘Prefects only on the balcony,’ shouted Mr. Burston, ‘Prefects only. Everybody else, upstairs to your dorms, please.’ Then he looked at his watch and said, ‘Morning Assembly in twenty minutes.’

  There were eighteen chicks to start with; eighteen that hadn’t died when they fell down from the nests. The five prefects who went out onto the balcony missed the Morning Assembly because they must have been making arrangements to look after them all with Mr. Tulley. The rest of us didn’t get to hear about it until we were in the queue for milk during break, which is after French and history class on Mondays.

  Mr. Tulley was sitting on the steps outside the Assembly Hall with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. He was being very chatty which is quite unusual.

  ‘It’s a fairly hopeless situation, I’m afraid. They need quite a specialised diet, you see,’ he said, ‘but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t try to save them, though I doubt you’ll succeed.’ When we were going into Scripture class after the break, Whickham said to me he thought Mr. Tulley was a bit like Pontius Pilate washing his hands of the whole thing. So then it was just up to us to do something about it because the teachers weren’t interested.

  It was Ford, the Head boy, and Henry Pugh who were the ones who decided who was going to have the chance to look after them, so they called a meeting just before high tea, and nearly every boy in the school turned up in the Assembly Hall. Everyone was there on account of the fact that there were no games that day because of the mess that the storm had made to the playing field. There was so much talking that you couldn’t really hear what was being said. It’s a very big echoey and noisy room in the annex built onto the side of the house when it became a school. It’s got high ceilings and rafters where you can see lots of paper darts which have been stuck up there for years and years. Sometimes they fall down unexpectedly, like in the middle of our history exam last year when one came down and went straight into Mrs. Marston’s hair. Theo and I laughed out loud and got a detention.

  I’d already decided that I didn’t really want to have a chick to look after for myself, because I wasn’t sure I’d be very good at it. Really I’m quite squeamish about things, and I’d absolutely hate it if the one I had died. I thought I’d be more use if I helped someone who was doing the looking after. When they asked us to put our hands up if we wanted one, I kept mine down. So many hands went up, and there was such a lot of shouting that in the end Ford and the other prefects decided that it had to be turned into a proper debate and then the senior low and senior high formers—who’ve got their very own debating society—started using words like ‘overruled’ and ‘motion carried’ and ‘committee’ and stuff like that. Then a group from senior low started shouting out ‘objection’ over and over again, and it all began to get as unruly and rough as it was in the beginning before it was turned into a debate. Ford was shouting out ‘Order! Order!’ in quite a loud cross voice and banging the floor with the pole that’s used to open the top of the tall windows.

  In the end a motion was passed that said only senior high and senior low would be given chicks. They were made into ‘guardians’ and what they were doing was ‘in loco parentis’, which is Latin and means in the place of the chicks’ mothers and fathers.

  Giles Webster put his hand up right at the wrong moment, way after the voting had finished and when Ford was just about adjourning the meeting. He hushed everybody up and said, ‘Yes, Webster—what is it?’ and he said, ‘Could I be a “local apprentice”, please?’ and there was a gale of laughter.

  ‘No, Bat Boy, you’re just a little too young, I’m afraid.’ It’s unfair that they call him ‘Bat Boy’ still, and anyway he hasn’t really got the bat anymore. Hapgood has borrowed it for so long that he’s just about started keeping it, if you ask me. Webster’s too frightened to ask for it back, and I know I should do something about it soon, because I did give a promise to his mother.

  The fourth form was given the job of finding the food for the chicks, which meant they had to go round collecting dead spiders and flies and other yucky stuff, and we in the third form were to bury all the birds that had died. When that was decided on, we had our own little meeting of 3a and 3b. Actually that’s quite a lot of boys—about twenty, in fact—and that’s when six of us were chosen to be the Graves Committee. I was made chairman on account of the fact that I had been the one to first notice the chicks on the balcony during breakfast. It was an ‘honorary’ position and quite important. Apart from me, there was Morrison from 3a who’s very popular and always voted on to everything; Rooke from 3b who’s top at art so was probably going to be good at making the graves look all nice; Fisheye because he spoke quite well at the meeting; Harvey Junior from 3a just because his brother’s a strict prefect in senior high, and it’s best that he’s kept pleased; and Theodorakis. He’s on because he was looking all upset when no one voted for him, and I said that I thought he’d be jolly useful. I’m influential on account of my being chairman, so he was voted on. That was quite nice of me actually, because I don’t always get on with him, and it really was a bit of a favour. I think he’s very grateful to me.

  After prep finished and before bed, the Graves Committee went outside to look for dead birds. Fisheye didn’t come, though. He’d liked all the debating about third formers’ rights being taken into consideration and stuff like that, but now that the hard work of burying was starting, he was nowhere to be seen. That’s typical of him.

  We didn’t have very long to search because it was quite late and at any minute the bell was going to be rung for bedtime, but we couldn’t find very many birds because Mr. Benson, who’s the odd job man and the husband of the lady in the laundry, had cleared most of them away when we were in class in the morning. During the day, he’d tidied up quite a lot of the damage from the storm, in fact. By the time we did the burying just on the other side of the cricket nets, most of the branches from the trees and other bits and pieces that had landed on the grass were being collected together for a big bonfire by Mrs. Ridgeley’s silly old vegetable garden. He’d even started repairing some of the fences. There was a terrible noise going on while we were doing the burying because there were three or four workmen with Mr. Benson who were using machine saws cutting up some of the bigger branches that were scattered around.

  We found thirteen dead house martins all together—eight chicks and five grown-ups. I didn’t touch them, though. I don’t like things like that, and I noticed that I wasn’t the only squeamish one. Nobody wanted to do that. In the end, I went to get Chirl who was making a model battleship in the library. He came straight out with
me and picked them all up. He used his bare hands to do it. He can do all that sort of thing on account of the fact that he’s lived on a farm all his life. Once he told me that when they’re going to eat a chicken at his house, he goes and finds a nice fat juicy one from the yard and wrings its neck. Can you believe it? I’d never be able to do anything like that! Anyway, he wrapped the dead house martins up in The Daily Telegraph from the library—without asking permission to use it—and brought them over to where the graves were going to be. Straightaway I put forward a motion to vote him onto the committee and to get rid of Fisheye. Theodorakis seconded it, and the motion was carried. It was a unanimous decision.

  Mr. Benson allowed Morrison to borrow his spade to dig the graves, but the ground was very hard just there, and it took quite a long time before it was ready. We knew that we were going to have to go upstairs to bed at any minute, so we just had to get on with it and bury them and then make it look nice the next day. That often happens with real life graves, actually. You bury someone, and then when everything’s settled down you go back and tidy it up and put a gravestone on it later.

  Just as they were safely buried the bell went, and Morrison said that there had to be a prayer and that since I was the Honorary Chairman of the Graves Committee, it was my job. I didn’t know what to say but decided to just do a quick one because we were in a hurry and anyway, it didn’t really matter because the saws were making such a racket that I thought no one could hear me properly.

  I said, ‘For what we have just buried, may the Lord make us truly sorry, and may the Lord look after their mortal souls, for ever and ever, Amen.’ The others nodded at me to show I’d done it right.

  At Assembly the next morning, Mr. Burston was doing his funny singing—very loudly. Sometimes, in the middle of a hymn—we were doing Guide Me Oh Thou Great Redeemer—he starts singing something different to everyone else but using the same words. It sounds so funny that it’s very difficult for me not to laugh and get told off. I’m not the only one. Even Mrs. Marston can’t help smiling when that happens, and that’s quite funny too, because she’s standing right bang next to him for everybody to see. One time when he was doing it, loads of us couldn’t help it and started giggling and after, we had to go to the study for a telling off. ‘Haven’t you ever heard of harmonising? Do you not know what a descant is?’ he said to us. Sounds dead funny to me. When I asked Mr. England about it, he went red, put his head down, and was trying not to laugh himself. He is the school choirmaster and knows every single thing about music and singing so that just proves what Mr. Burston does is a bit odd.