Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  All of this the two boys accepted as part of the natural and universal order of things. It was at least as natural as the endless round of Caesar and Livy and Pliny and Tacitus and Greek verbs and Euclid that filled their official hours. But they grew increasingly aware of the deep gulf between official school, both public and private, and the unofficial sort of school that thrived out of sight of chief and the beaks. The difference was probably less marked in the Houses, where each boy had his own study and slept in his own cubicle in the dormitory and where the hours of seven to nine each evening were passed in supervision.

  But in Old School and in Hospice, beaks were rarely seen after seven, and their absence was certain from lockup at eight until six-thirty the following morning. That hour before eight, when boys were still at liberty to go to Langstroth or walk about the courtyards, was filled with a rising sense of excitement. For years Boy could never see gaslights loom out of the mist without thinking of that moment when the grown-up world could cease to exist. All his experience became tuned to it, everything referred to it, however trivial or everyday—even the crunch of gravel underfoot or the playful shout of a fellow hidden in the dark, over the wall, in another quadrangle, running on the moor; or the chime of the quarter-to-eight bell, rolling over the wet wastes between Langstroth church and the school, drawing boys magically inward…All of these were vibrant with a promise of those glorious hours when outside rules would crumble and ancient traditions supersede them.

  For at eight the King o’ the Barn became a primeval Lord of Misrule. Pharaohs and roes all but ceased to exist as boys naturally sorted themselves into the brave, the foolhardy, the merely willing, and the outright cowards or weeds—categories that cut through all divisions of age and official status.

  A born scholar could lock himself away in one of the cupboards in the outer passages, which he could either inherit by seniority or hire from a less bookish inheritor. There, with a “candlestick” (fashioned from a bent book cover, holed at the ridge thus formed), he could do his Latin and Greek for as long as he could endure the intense cold and damp—and as long as he could tolerate the happy shrieks of his fellows, the smell of grilling chops and cheese, and the sweet, hot aroma of mulled ale.

  But few were so steadfast when Olympic games called. The run up the Barn, the heel-hard launch from a mattress, the mad head-over-heels light, and the cushioned landing in the twenty other mattresses piled against the wall—Homer had no such thrills. And when that game palled, there were buck-buck, piggyback jousting, build the human wall, kill you, where’s Jonah, Jacob’s ladder; the variety of ways to get dirty, tear clothes, bleed, sweat, and laugh and laugh was endless. There were crazes and fads, too. For a couple of weeks that term there was a craze for sliding on one’s back down a flight of stairs holding two brim-full pots of beer—trying not to spill a drop, of course.

  For quieter moments there were ghost stories, told around the dying fire. Several of the fellows could make the blood run cold, but the doyen was Randall, of the lower dorm; he could even frighten himself. In fact, that was his trick. He appeared to be discovering the twists and turns of the story in the very moment he told it. In that way he kept every muscle in every body in his circle of hearers screwed up to a barely endurable tension as they watched him discover terror upon terror, and followed him into that dark. His true greatness lay in the fact that in all his stories—whether about a headless dog upon the moor, a disembodied hand in a vicarage, or a beautiful but deadly ghost-child seen only on bright summer days—the person so haunted or plagued would apparently triumph; the ghost would vanish, its manifestations cease…and then! Randall knew a hundred different ways of saying “then” and rolling his eyes piteously and implying such terrible compassion for the hapless victim, who must now be unmanned, unnerved, and demoralized, whose hair must blanch, whose blood curdle, while nameless horrors were loose once more around him. Randall made boys glad to flee to beds in crowded dorms and pull the blankets down hard over their heads, for flickering gaslight got every shadow pregnant with numinous fears.

  And there were surprising evenings when nothing happened, no special games, no great spinning of yarns. Especially as the end of term and Christmas drew on, evenings of this sort grew more frequent. Boys would sit in groups of ten or so around the fires (either the proper ones or “tramps’ fires” built here and there on the stone floors) and talk of home and the adventures of last summer—visits to Egypt, Greece, the Alps. Boy was popular on these occasions, and his stories of the railways his father had built were always in demand. They loved to hear of quaking bogs subdued, of holes drilled through mountains, of valleys spanned by soaring arches and estuaries ringed with causeways of stone; of the strange customs of the navvies and their extraordinary capacity for labour; of how the French bourgeoisie rode out in their carriages from Rouen to watch the mad English workers moving prodigies of earth and rock; of how tunnels could be driven from opposite sides of a hill to meet not an inch out of line; of steam piledrivers that could crack a nut under a ten-ton weight yet leave its kernel intact; of rolling mills where men with tongs could catch the leading end of a red-hot ribbon of rail, moving at the speed of a galloping horse, and bend it around for a second pass through the rollers that had disgorged it; of machines that punched rivet holes in iron plate in the most complex patterns, controlled not by men but by sequences of holes in little metal plates no bigger than playing cards; of rascally foreigners who wouldn’t pay, and the devious and often terrible ways that Stevenson’s used to extract their dues.

  For many at Old School these were their first, informal lessons in geography and modern history—indeed, in life itself, for what could the sons of gentry and aristocrats and clergymen know of that vast commercial world which now sustained them all? And for Boy’s part, he soon saw the justice of Carnforth’s unthinking remark, the first night, that you couldn’t put anyone you knew, friend or not, through the torture of drumming-in. Those nights of misrule welded bonds between boy and boy that time itself could not sever.

  And that made the official House beatings all the more remarkable. House beatings were at the fixed hour of eight, immediately after the callover that followed lockup. They had been instituted by chief to allow the pharaohs to keep House discipline without undue reference to the beaks; the system had been imposed, willy-nilly, on Old School and Hospice, though both places lacked the organization to sustain it. In the Houses there were deep divisions between juniors and seniors. Juniors were as scullerymaids; seniors were lords of the earth. The sort of discipline inherent in the pharaoh system came naturally with such divisions. But in Old School a pharaoh might find himself called upon to thrash a boy after callover, when half an hour later they would almost certainly be ragging together, sharing toasted cheese, sitting side by side swapping yarns, or fiending in some cupboard or corner. In practice, it meant that some beatings were fairly perfunctory while others were needlessly savage, depending on the relationship between the pharaoh and his victim; and since, according to the ritual, each stroke was given by a different pharaoh, a beating could consist of any permutation of stingers and ticklers.

  In fact, since flesh is quick to mend, the ritual was worse than the caning. Immediately after callover, the day’s tally lined up outside the head pharaoh’s study to sign the beating book, wherein were recorded the offence, the time it was apprehended, and by whom; and there was a blank column where the number of whacks was later filled in. No boy knew how many he was to get until he had got them. There was no set scale; the offence that drew two whacks one day might get four the next. A boy who squirmed or gasped or cried out always got more than one who was rock still and manly about it.

  On signing the book the boy had to say: “I admit this offence and accept the punishment.” There was provision to appeal to chief, but only after the beating. “There’d be no point in going before, would there?” Malaby said. “You’d have nothing to complain about.” When all had signed
they went up to the Barn where the most junior of them had to shout “All out of the Barn!” All the lucky ones then went to the passages, where they could lurk and listen; but to be caught watching was to join the next day’s quota. That was the only good thing about a House beating: None but the pharaohs saw it; even the other victims had to turn their backs.

  Once the Barn had emptied, the boys about to be thrashed had to pull all the tables and chairs to the sides of the room, leaving the centre free for a good run. They had to put a single chair facing the wall at one end and then go to the other end, take off their trousers and underpants (if they wore them), and wait, also facing the wall. Soon—though it could be anything up to five minutes—the four pharaohs, each carrying a cane, came up from their studies. The King o’ the Barn was also there, to spy out strangers and to invite them to the following day’s ceremony.

  The head of pharaohs called the waiting boys out for thrashing one by one, not in their order in the book, not in seniority, not in alphabetical order, not in any order a boy could predict. When a boy’s name was called, he turned and floated through a half-real space and time to the chair at the far end, hung his trousers over its back, bent over it, and grasped the farther pair of legs as low down as he could without lifting his feet off the ground. Usually a pharaoh stood there to whack his wrists with the cane if he didn’t bend taut enough.

  Then a pharaoh would take a run at the bending boy and deal him one fierce thrash. The others would watch closely to see if he squirmed or puckered up the flesh of his buttocks. If he did, they added to the previously agreed tally of strokes. One by one each of the pharaohs, going in strict rotation of their seniority, took his run and gave his thrash. They were actually allowed to run the full length of the Barn but rarely did so—only for truly dreadful offences like cheeking a pharaoh or publicly bringing odium upon the school in front of villains in Langstroth. In any case, the long run added nothing but more terror to the ordeal, for even in a short run a hefty pharaoh could get up enough swing to “tap the claret,” as it was called.

  The thrashes were not regular. Sometimes three or four laughing pharaohs would come down like wagons in a train, right, left, right, within the twinkling of an eye. (This fashion had started when some pharaohs had watched six men with sledgehammers piledriving the stays for a circus tent at Ingleton Fair, at the rate of four hammer blows every second. For a while after that every boy got four thrashes, whatever his offence, until the pharaohs had perfected the technique.) Sometimes the pharoahs would stop and gossip or tell a joke between strokes; and woe betide the boy who, thinking his punishment was over, stood and stretched while this happened.

  Three or four was the usual number of whacks—far more commonly doled out than five or six, or one or two.

  During that first term Caspar got House beatings for fighting without a ring (three times), whistling (twice), singing annoyingly, pretending to smoke a pencil, trespassing on pharaohs’ corridor (in fact, he bent to pick up a book that had dropped just inside the imaginary line dividing pharaohs’ from common corridors, so technically only his fingertips had trespassed), and failing to soak himself well after morning run. He got Barn beatings for wrong buttons, ostentatious tie knot, smiling in prayers, humming, running upstairs when not on a pharaoh’s errand, having both hands in his pockets, and inking an anchor on his forearm. Canes, slippers, and hairbrushes fell upon his naked buttocks eighty-six times between that first Barn beating and the last full day of term. Blenkinsop never again offered his balm.

  Eighty-six was not an unusual number. Boy got ninety whacks for very similar offences. In a way, it hardly interfered with their ordinary school life. They grew used to sitting on blood scabs and bruises of baboon-like hue. That extrasensitive pluck of blue-black flesh when the muscle beneath it grew taut became normal; they would have missed it far more acutely than they noticed its presence. They quickly learned that the sting of the cane was short-lived; Caspar even managed to recite the nine-times table right through to himself, without a break in the rhythm, during one House beating of four whacks. And the ritual of looking at and displaying to the rest of the dorm a particularly fine set of “cuts,” as the bloodlined bruises were called, became one of the fun parts of the day.

  The juvenile mind is so wonderfully adaptive that it was to be many years before the oddity of all this became apparent to Boy and Caspar. The offences they were beaten for were committed between the hours of six in the morning and lockup at eight. Yet after lockup such offences vanished from the criminal calendar; they might be indulged with impunity—often encouraged by the very boys who, moments earlier, had solemnly and sternly punished the identical acts! You might as well wonder why, on a day when you had broken, say, three commandments, God might still send the sun; while, on a day when you were exceptionally pious, the skies might open and the blizzards howl. Justice at Fiennes was every bit as capricious as all the other myriad forms of retribution which flow from mighty but ineffable systems.

  But this is not to say that the hours of school were all dour while those of lockup were all excitement. School had its pleasures, too. Having been privately tutored so long, both Boy and Caspar were ahead of all but the most bookish of their fellows. As latecomers they had taken care not to shine too brilliantly and so had a lot of scholastic capital left to fritter; in short, it soon became clear to them that they could pretty well float along for a couple of terms while they tasted all the delights the school could offer and which no home could ever supply.

  Hours that might have been—that ought to have been—spent in private study in their mess at Purse’s were spent helping “Mrs. Purse,” as they called her. She took in washing from several of the beaks and it was the two young boys’ delight, on a cold winter afternoon, to stoke up the fire under the copper and watch the linen bubble in the grey suds or see the swirling wraiths of steam hurtle at the ceiling when they lifted the clothes up for a dunking. And every splash sent droplets outward in steaming ballistic arcs, like the smoking fragments of an exploding mine.

  If Mrs. Purse caught them at such play, she would haul them roughly about the outhouse as if trying to jerk one of their limbs out of joint. And all the while they would shriek with laughter at her harmless ferocity.

  “Oh, Mrs. Purse,” Caspar would say, “you do cook the most sumptuous tripe!” And he would lift out a shirt of Cossack’s or one of Whymper’s drawers.

  “Be off! Be off!” she would shriek back in a frenzy, fetching him a vicious blow that missed by careful inches.

  “Honestly,” Boy would chime in, “all the fellows would rather have that than our breakfast porridge. You should just try it!”

  And she would run after them in a howling frenzy, pausing to catch her breath whenever it seemed likely she might catch them.

  Later, when they came back for their savoury tea, she would call them “ill-thriven tastrils” and set the food before them as malevolently as if it were poison. And when they wolfed it down, for every day it was the most succulent food they had ever had, she would say they were “all gob and no gawm” as if she spoke a judge’s sentence. They should be “skelped with the spell of a chair,” she would threaten with glowering eyes as she pressed havercakes of treacly parkin into their pockets and watched them run back over the causeway to school.

  Only once did Blenkinsop try to waylay Caspar—in the town, for he knew that in the school Caspar would only call for a ring. Caspar had been hanging around the market, helping to beat the cows from pen to pen, and was hurrying back to a tutorial class when Blenkinsop stepped out from a gateway, saw him, and stood so as to block the path.

  The house within the gate was the doctor’s, so Caspar guessed that Blenkinsop had not deliberately waylaid him; this meeting was sheer chance.

  “Changed your mind about me, young ’un?” Blenkinsop asked. His tone was friendly enough.

  “How, Blenkinsop?”

  “That was pr
etty shent what you did.”

  “I only did it because of what you did to my bro.”

  “Ah! So you won’t do it again?”

  “No!” Caspar cried.

  Blenkinsop grinned. “That’s the lad!” he said, walking away. “See you after dark, same place.”

  Caspar let him get some way away and then shouted: “I won’t! I won’t fiend with you. Ever!”

  Blenkinsop turned, looked at Caspar a long time, then shrugged and walked away. This lack of open threat was somehow even more menacing than any straightforward vow of revenge. For days Caspar went in fear of meeting Blenkinsop at some place where a cry of “ring!” would be useless; every blind corner held the dread of it. But nothing happened and, as day followed day, the fear subsided.

  For Caspar there were his “apprentice hours” at Mr. Ingilby’s workshop, too.

  “Do’st thou want to knock together one or two knickle-knacks?” he asked Caspar right at the outset. “Or learn the trade from A to ampersand?”

  “Learn the trade,” Caspar said without second thought.

  “Five year,” Ingilby warned. “Five year to get the rudiments.” He saw the boy’s face fall. “Happen thou’ll frame to it sooner,” he said comfortingly. “Being son to Lord John.”

  Caspar just knew he would. But by the end of his first lesson he was less sure, for he spent the entire half hour down in the pit at the dusty end of the saw; and all they had to show for it was two eight-inch planks of elm.

  “We’ll cut sapwood off tomorn,” Ingilby promised.

  Caspar groaned and wondered if strength and voluntary movement would ever return to his arms.

  “Nay, see thee,” Ingilby warned and patted the two bits of elm with the stump of his hand. “Them’s thy masters now. Thou’ll stick by them while they’re worked up into aught to be proud of. Thou’ll know every bend and twist of grain, where they’re kindly an’ where they’re stunt. They’ll learn thee! And be glad they’re not oak.”