A Voice Like Velvet

by Donald Henderson

  ‘I knew I wouldn’t be caught,’ he had answered, modestly but firmly.

  ‘Burglars always get caught!’

  ‘No! You only hear about the ones who get caught!’

  He was still sure of this and applied it to every crime. He was quite satisfied that an intelligent person could go all through life and not be caught—providing he wasn’t a fool and used his brains. He believed in the power of circumstances, and Fate, but not in this one direction. He believed a man could achieve anything he really wanted to achieve, if his mind was constantly applied to it. There was no question of getting caught. Yet this did not detract from the thrill—for he had no proof of his belief until life was over.

  Arriving home with these newly forming beliefs after his last term at school, he decided it was time to take his life in his hands so far as his father was concerned. Ever inclined to be impulsive, he took it into his hands after a singularly long silence at breakfast, by hurling Havelock Ellis across the room. It landed with a report like a revolver shot up against the buff wall. Mr Bisham Senior, however, carefully counted four minutes by his gold watch before looking up and saying, economically:

  ‘Well?’

  It was rather bad luck on Ernest to achieve such a discouraging start, especially when he had planned it all so carefully through many agonized nights. But having launched his attack, so to speak, he made a brave attempt to push ahead with it, despite enemy resistance at once hardening. He pleaded, simply, that as his school days were now at an end, he felt he would now like to take his life into his own care and keeping. What he also meant was that he would like a bit of income to do it with, but his nerve went before he could get this out. Deeds didn’t unnerve him, words did. His father looked gaunt, distinguished, eminently successful—and completely unlovable. Ernest knew what he himself must look like in contrast: a pale, scraggy and overgrown youth full of the usual inhibitions and frustrations, and yet at the same time an up-to-date edition of the very man he detested.

  He failed, however, to achieve a bridgehead.

  At any rate, he achieved one ambition that morning: he made his father speak! And it was amusing to remember now that his father told him scathingly—in answer to a remark about refusing to go to college or to any Ministry either: ‘I should have thought you would have wanted the name of Bisham to be a household word! I know I did, when I was your age!’ How queerly prophetic! It was a household word now all right: it went into every room, in cottage and castle; it even went into that very dining-room, likely as not, in that sinister house in Putney! Life, then, had the pleasing habit of righting itself, and apologizing for what it had done before. Did it stay right, and penitent? That was the next intriguing wonder. But in the days of the Putney house, life had seemed, as it often did to worried youth, most unlikely ever to right itself. In a burst of rage and daring he walked out of the house. Rather, he ran out of it. It was brave to think that he had walked out without any money at all, even though he had only gone along to Mrs Clarkson’s peculiarly smelly house off Hammersmith Broadway. He wasn’t the first person to have taken such a risk, and he wouldn’t be the last; but at the time he thought he was, which was the important thing. Mrs Clarkson’s house had green plastered walls, oddly like the walls of his study at school. And, so great was man’s desire for a sense of safety and familiarity, that he pinned up one of his study pictures. It was called Dad’s Girl, a rather out-of-date blonde sucking orangeade through a straw. The picture had often been used for target practice by the cads, and it had dart, boot, and kiss marks on it.

  He hadn’t taken to the idea of a public school, and rather regretted leaving the smaller pond of a preparatory school. He supposed he was rather feeble about it, and not a little ungrateful, yet somehow when the prospectus arrived from the Bursar that morning, he was far more aware of his silent father’s antics with toast and butter and marmalade, than he was of the contents of the illustrated brochure. There were tough-looking boys swinging on ropes, and there was a large matron standing grinning threateningly in a brown doorway. A huge swimming bath looked singularly cold, and deep, and there was an immensely high diving board.

  There was an unnerving picture of the Headmaster, with bull-like features and bulging eyes, with both ears torn to shreds through hearty games of rugger. He seemed to be riddled with learning. Staff: Headmaster (since 1908)—P. H. Quantam, MA, Late Scholar of Emmanuel College, Cambridge; VIth Form Master at Worcester College, Oxford; late Exhibitioner of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

  There followed an imposing list of Assistant Masters to the Senior School, only slightly less riddled with learning, and a list of the Assistant Masters to the Junior School, ‘for boys under fourteen’. In small print at the top, The Visitors were mentioned, and they appeared to be Vice-Chancellors, Presidents and Wardens and Chairmen of Governors. Wardens? A mental picture of Dartmoor came, a little mistily. The pater’s scrunching echoed sharply while he was thinking of Mr Quantam’s birch rod, which he would be sure to have, because here it said: ‘… Any boy failing to take part in school games without special permission in advance from the Headmaster, thus spoiling the game for his fellows, is liable to corporal punishment.’ And it said the playing field was the finest in the whole South of England!

  He spent all that morning staring glassily at the prospectus, and accusing himself of being dreadfully ungrateful and feeble, and not like other boys. Yet he felt queerly pleased to be ‘different’.

  He felt he already knew the school inside out, and it was as chill inside as it was out.

  It was also vast. There were five hundred boys.

  There were four Houses, called North, South, East and West. He was to go to West House, under Mr and Mrs Deem. The pater had evidently already seen them, and he thought Mr Deem ‘a fine man’, and Mrs Deem ‘extremely sensible’.

  There was an OTC, and several vigorous sergeant-majors; there were various quite incomprehensible things printed here and there in Latin, and not only in Latin, but in Roman figures as well; there was a Chapel covered in ivy, lists of places which were out of bounds (penalty—a flogging), lists of Distinguished Old Boys, which appeared to be very broadminded, including abbots, airmen and actors. Nearly all seemed to have been shot in some war or other.

  There was a picture of ‘a lecture room’, and ‘the new laboratory’, and ‘a classroom’, and ‘the cloisters leading to Big School (fifteenth century)’.

  He felt unsettled and uneasy.

  But he liked things to be gentle and settled, he liked reading by the fire better than charging about with heavyweights in the bitter wind. He had never been flogged, and dreaded even meeting Mr Quantam, let alone being flogged by him. He was prepared to loathe everyone. It was a sentence, and he disapproved of prisons.

  Also, the town was associated with his sentence of incarceration. He soon hated the trams and the wide congested Broad Street, and saw nothing picturesque about the Old Prison and the Old Castle, which represented to him nothing but a minimum distance for alternative Sunday walks. There was a smelly tannery on the route, and there was the empty shop where somebody had had his head battered in, though nobody had been hanged for it yet. The police knew who it was, but there wasn’t enough proof. This was to be most attractive for a few terms, but soon it was a bore. It wasn’t even fun any more, then, seeing strange men pass the shop, and thinking: ‘Perhaps you’re the murderer himself—walking about free!’ The town was noted for museums and soap. Nearly every big building was either a museum, or else it was a soap factory. There were hundreds of lime trees and horse chestnut trees, and tram lines wandered everywhere, making cycling slightly dangerous. There were rows of big, dull houses, red and grey, with strong drain pipes, and they were one and all studded with brass plates: doctors, dentists, surgeons and psychologists, for there was a well-known hospital just out of the town of vast dimensions.

  There was a college of dubious repute, several squalid schools one never played or mentioned, and a theatre which
was now given over to the amateurs, when it was not a cinema.

  The trams clanged continually through everything, and you could hear them in the distance at night. They made you feel that you were indeed in a cell. The world was very far away, and your sentence was years yet. You were only fourteen or fifteen, and you wouldn’t leave until you were at least seventeen.

  These were the years which were supposed to decide what a man was going to be and do in the world.

  Queerly, hardly anybody asked Ernest what he was going to be or do.

  There was too much routine, too much going on, for masters to ask that.

  Each new arrival was the same.

  He would reach the school gates and there, up the long lime tree-bordered drive, with the cricket pavilion away over there on the left of School Field, was the school itself spread out in its familiar splendour. You couldn’t see North House or East House, for they were right behind the quadrangle, near the laboratories and the sanatorium. But you could see South House away there on the left, and straight up the drive past ‘porter’s lodge’ was West House. Taxis were going up the drive and down it, and up and down the other drive past the chapel, empty or laden with trunks.

  Rooks sat about dismally on the tower of Big School.

  Porter’s white cat strolled out of the lodge, licking its chops. Porter and his fat old wife came out as if to sniff the smell of the new term. They were called Mr and Mrs Gray, but when you saw Mrs Gray, which was rarely, you said for some reason or other, ‘Hallo, Mrs Porter,’ and when you saw porter, you said, ‘Hallo, Gray.’ He was very popular and nice, and always on your side, even when he came into the classroom with a note from the Head to be read out. While the master was reading it threateningly out, old Gray always winked slyly, and at a certain point in the recitation rubbed what he liked to call ‘yer bum’, with circular motions of his free hand. ‘Boys are reminded of two things: The new school fields in Elliot Road are out of bounds except for prearranged matches; two boys were severely flogged this morning for removing test tubes from the laboratory without permission.’ The Grays’ little cottage was practically hidden by its own drainage system, which was a sea of pipes, all of which dripped and gurgled behind patchy clusters of dirty-looking ivy. The atmosphere within looked pitch black, and smelt vaguely of tea.

  He would say: ‘Hallo, Gray—hallo, Mrs Porter,’ and old Gray would twinkle and call out (he knew absolutely everyone’s name): ‘Ha’r, young Bisham, well, how are we, then, glad to be back? Watch out for yer bum this term, my lad; be sure to do that, sir! I’ve had to get in two dozen new birch rods, ’cos of the way you all went on last term!’

  ‘Oh, get on, Gray,’ one always called out. ‘I know you’re ragging!’

  Mrs Porter would be bending over three square inches of flower border, and revealing parts the size of an elephant.

  Ernest saw his younger self pulling his cap off and start throwing it up and catching it. Once, he had had a fight in the drive, well, a wrestling match, and his enemy had thrown his cap into the bushes, just there by the Head’s garden. In getting his cap, the Head’s face had appeared over the wall. His bulging eyes, thick lips and shredded ears. The moment had been extremely painful for all concerned, for not only were the bushes out of bounds, but it was also Sunday, ‘the day of rest, have you forgotten, may I ask?’ the Head had coldly wondered.

  Both boys had been mesmerized in the drive, usually the scene of happier moments, when one rushed up and down at the school rugger match, shouting hoarsely: ‘Play up, school! Schoo … ool!’

  Old Rags had said through his nose (he always rasped things through his nose):

  ‘Come and see me tomorrow morning at ten o’clock.’

  It had been unusual. Boys who were boarders were rarely dealt with by the Head, they were usually handed over to their Housemaster. Anything was better than having Rags lamming into you. Which would it be, a flogging or a caning? Queerly, it was recognized that when the Head sent round a notice that a boy had been ‘caned’, it was far worse than being ‘flogged’. The former meant six of the very best, and the latter meant only about three. It was freakish.

  Appearing, however, at ten, after a light breakfast, it had appeared necessary to remind Old Rags what they were outside his ghastly study for. He really seemed to have forgotten.

  ‘Er, in connection with an … incident in the bushes, sir, yesterday,’ young Cobalt had got out. His eyes were like the eyes of a snared rabbit. Ernest had a new and odd sensation of being thrilled.

  He had a silk handkerchief down his pants; they said that took off the sting, and wasn’t noticed if he felt you. There had been an interesting pause. Lame Miss Nutley, wearing a green jumper and pince-nez, had come out of the study with a handful of papers. She was the Head’s secretary. She went dot-and-carry-one and vanished, her right hip rather crooked. Mr Friday, short and white whiskered and Bursar, and wearing gold glasses flat on his forehead, and wearing a parson’s collar, came out with his hands, as ever, tucked behind his gown, and walking with his little knees going outwards. The Head’s mortar-board towered above his bull-like features, and he licked at his chops like he always did every morning in chapel, as if he was exploring avidly round his tremendous teeth, in search of juicy bacon rind. There was a glimpse inside the Head’s study—which you could have and welcome. There was the famous cupboard.

  Looking back, it seeemed to be a time full of quaint character studies, and other lessons.

  An amazing time, now and then, but much more often tedious.

  Growing up was a slow affair, and masters never grew up. They had no chance to.

  No, he hadn’t liked his public school as much as he suspected he ought to have liked it. Everyone else seemed to like it, and apart from surface grumbles, nobody else seemed to mind being birched, or made to go for long and stupid walks on Sunday afternoons to some curious woods where shop girls hung about behind bushes and went: ‘Here they come, Doris! I’ll take the tall one!’ It was probably quite fun if you were ready for it, but Mr Bisham hadn’t yet got hair down his front, and so the point was entirely lost. Another thing everyone but himself seemed to be fond of, was rushing about the rugger field in an icy north-east wind, with somebody else doing a hearty tackle and bringing you down with a thud onto the frozen turf. Ernest Bisham’s idea of a thrill was rather different, and he found the only way to achieve it was to search for it in something by Conan Doyle. Another less known author also assisted his desire for drama, and there were moments when he donned a mask, made up out of a handkerchief soaked in school ink, and with a water-pistol tackled the more unmuscular from behind door or hedge. ‘I say, it’s that absolute swine Bisham,’ thin, piping voices would declare, enraged to the Heavens. ‘You scared me out of my wits, man!’ It was humiliating to know that a water-pistol held no fears, and that he was recognized at once solely because nobody else wanted to play this particular game. It was considered childish. Once, holding up Mr Deem, in error for a prefect, Ernest Bisham got six of the best and the advice: ‘If you want to dramatise yourself, Bisham, you’d better join the dramatic society.’ But when he did so they made him play Ophelia, which was somehow or other unsatisfying. Later, he joined the debating society, and although he attacked the public school system with some apparent success, claiming that it deprived chaps of all individual attention at the most critical time of their lives, he was thereafter labelled as a pansy, and for some reason a socialist. His unpopularity was odd, considering his ready manner, and sometimes he would be asked why he deliberately made himself unpopular. He would always explode with a protesting laugh, but, unable to reply adequately, he would wander away to beat a tennis ball up against the wall by himself, and thinking: ‘As soon as I leave here I shall be popular all right!’ He attacked the system of imprisonment, instancing Dartmoor, rather well at another debate, but likened it to the public school system. For that, he had to run the gauntlet of wet towels dressed in his pyjama jacket.

  Now, when he so
metimes sat on a public platform, much more cautiously airing the same views, whatever he said seemed to be greeted with popular applause. He would wait confidently for his cue, knowing whatever he said would be successful. ‘… So I will now call upon Mr Ernest Bisham, the well-known announcer, who has very kindly come all the way to Manchester to be with us today!’ To a storm of applause, he would stand before a sea of curious faces, and he would proceed to get in as much of his views against prison life, and its silly inhumanity, or his views against the repulsive habit of flogging, without letting it be thought he was either a socialist or airing the views of the BBC. At the end, there would be another storm of applause, and silly faces would throng round him and voices would say: ‘We always listen when you read the news, Mr Bisham! My mother-in-law thinks your voice is by far the best!’ Not one of them cared the slightest about his views on anything, least of all sex life in prisons. But it amused him, as life amused him with its odd antics. When magazines asked him if they could print his photograph and an article about his life, he was studiously vague about certain years. It was strange how lumps of years could safely be dropped from an article. It was a technique. And it was often convenient. Impossible to say: ‘Well, as a matter of fact, during those years I was simply appallingly broke. I had the dreariest of jobs—until my father died, you know—mechanic, salesman, oh, and cat-burglar.’ One item would be very colourful. ‘I must tell you about the afternoon I walked into a jewel shop in the city. I asked to see some rings and the bloke showed me about ten on a narrow tray. I said, thanks, chum, and stuffed them in my pocket. I strolled out—you mustn’t run when you’re a professional thief—each moment expecting bells to ring and hands to seize my left shoulder. But the shopkeeper must have had one or two, for in about two seconds I was outside and lost in the crowds.’ An asterisk and italics at the bottom of the page could add, in a dignified way: ‘By the way, I sent the rings back. When I got home that desperate day I found I’d landed a job. And in any case it’s too risky trying to sell jewellery of that kind in London.’ Yes, indeed, and it was still a problem to know what to do with it. The prisons were full of blokes who had tried to solve this unsatisfactory problem. He often thought old Mrs Clarkson might have had some useful suggestion to make. Her house was full of the most shadowy, stooping characters. They would creep furtively up her dark stairs at all hours, not a few going to bed during the day instead of during the night. But he had never risked it. He went on doing various little cat burglaries, just for the thrill, and to prove his beliefs about never getting caught, and in the hopes that one day he would think of what to do with the proceeds. Sometimes he chucked the proceeds into the Thames when he got bored with looking at them. Now and then he sent later proceeds to insurance houses he felt he might have cost too dearly. Mrs Clarkson would be curious about his little newspaper parcels and think they were fish and chips. She would accuse him of not liking her food.