The boys cackled; Lumsden had scored a hit. Something broke inside Frank and he leapt at the big boy, swinging his fists and lashing out. He wanted to knock his teeth out, kill him, but his wild fury made him clumsy. Lumsden kicked a leg from under Frank and he crashed down on the asphalt playground. Lumsden leaned over him. ‘You’ve done it now, Monkey,’ he said, his face twisted with anger.
‘Don’t mark him, Hector,’ one of the others warned.
Lumsden straddled Frank and punched him in the stomach, again and again so every last vestige of breath was driven from his body and he almost blacked out. ‘That’s enough, Hector,’ someone called out. ‘You’ll kill the wee squirt.’
Lumsden stood up, his face red. He gave Frank a satisfied leer. ‘That’ll learn ye to remember who ye are.’
Frank knew now that there was nothing he could do; he was quite helpless here. He couldn’t appeal to his brother about the bullies – Edgar would go the other way if he saw Frank coming – or to the masters. They knew – they would have had to be blind and deaf not to – how he was treated, but as Edgar had said, the Strangmans philosophy was that boys must learn to fend for themselves. The masters would do nothing unless they saw a boy with a visible mark. They disliked Frank anyway; in class he couldn’t concentrate, seemed to live in a dream and was often called to account for staring out of the window. Sometimes he got the tawse for it, struck on the hand with the narrow leather belt, a long slit at the end to make it sting more.
So Frank learned to hide, and he became an expert at it. During break and at lunchtimes he would conceal himself in the toilets or in empty classrooms. Best of all, in a corner of the big assembly hall where the boys met for prayers every morning he found an enormous stack of wooden chairs which were only brought out for prize-giving days and other ceremonies. They were covered by a thick old fire curtain. Squeezing in among the stacked-up chairs, Frank found a space in the middle big enough for a little boy to crouch in. He knew it wasn’t very safe but he didn’t care, he had a refuge.
The bullies couldn’t be bothered to come and find him. There were, after all, other fish to fry in such a big school and Frank ignored everyone as much as possible. Although his silent unresponsiveness meant that for most of the time he was left alone, he was often accompanied, as he walked along, by calls of ‘Monkey! Spastic! Gie us a grin, Monkey!’
So things went on, because there was nothing to stop them. The boys were allowed to go out on the hills after school and Frank spent long hours walking alone among the gorse and granite outcrops, over the long grass blown flat by the endless keening winds, always watching the horizon and dodging behind a gorse bush if he saw any other Strangmans boys.
Frank turned twelve, then thirteen and fourteen, and still he had never had a single friend. Edgar turned eighteen in 1931 and left Strangmans, going up to Oxford to read Physics. By now Frank didn’t really live in the real world. The only place he liked was the library. The most popular books – Henty and Bulldog Drummond – didn’t appeal to him much, but he loved science fiction, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells especially. He marvelled at their stories of worlds under the earth and the sea, journeys to the moon and invaders from Mars, visits to the future. During the holidays he had read in a magazine about a German scientist, who predicted that one day rockets would carry men to the moon. When the boys began to learn physics, and about how the solar system worked, Frank’s ears pricked up. The science teacher, who had been told that Muncaster was a problem pupil, found him quick and attentive, able to pick up complex calculations easily. For the first time Frank started getting good marks in a subject. The other masters frowned and tutted; they had always said Muncaster had a brain but was too damn dreamy and lazy to use it. Now he used it to understand Newton and Kepler and Rutherford. He imagined himself travelling to other worlds, where advanced beings treated him with kindness and respect. Sometimes too, asleep on his hard iron bed in the dormitory, he dreamed of Martians invading Earth, one of Wells’ giant tripods aiming a ray gun at Strangmans and shattering it to pieces like a gigantic ruined dolls’ house.
He jerked awake. He had fallen asleep in his chair. The quiet room was cold. Outside the trees and grass were rimed with hoarfrost, the dampness turned to ice. He wondered what time it was; it was starting to get dark so probably it was around four. Ben came back on duty then. He would probably chivvy him about contacting David again. Frank began thinking back to his university days; at least there were no horrors there.
His school science teacher, Mr McKendrick, the only one at Strangmans who had tried to help him, had supervised his coaching for the Oxford entrance exam. ‘I think you’ll pass,’ he had told him. He hesitated, then said, ‘I think you’ll find life better at Oxford, Muncaster. You’ll have to work very hard to excel but you’ll be able to study independently in a way you can’t as a schoolboy. And I think you’ll find life – well – easier. But you’ll have to make an effort if you want to make friends. A real effort, I’m thinkin’.’
Frank arrived at Oxford in 1935 to read Chemistry. Edgar had already graduated and gone on to do postgraduate work in America; good riddance to bad rubbish so far as Frank was concerned. He had walked around Oxford, astonished by the beauty of the colleges. He had hoped for a room on his own, and was worried when they told him he would be sharing. But Frank had learned to judge people on whether or not they were likely to be a threat, and as soon as he saw David Fitzgerald he felt safe. The tall, athletic-looking Londoner was self-contained, but perfectly amiable.
‘What are you studying?’ David asked.
‘Chemistry.’
‘I’m doing Modern History. Listen, which bedroom do you want? One’s a bit bigger but the other’s got a view of the quad.’
‘Oh – I don’t mind.’
‘Take the one with the view if you like.’
‘Thanks.’
Frank was too shy and suspicious to make real friends; he worked with other students in the laboratories but avoided their conversations. He could not help fearing they might suddenly turn on him, calling out ‘Monkey’. But he managed to tag onto the fringes of David’s group, who tended, like David, to be serious, thoughtful, not prone to larking. David had status among the other students, as he had taken up rowing and was in the university team.
Frank always remembered one evening towards the end of his first term. Italy had invaded Abyssinia, and a pact between Britain and France allowing Italy to annex much of the country was raising fierce political opposition. Frank and David were sitting in their rooms discussing the situation with David’s best friend, Geoff Drax.
‘We have to accept Italy’s won the war,’ Geoff said. ‘I wish there had been a different outcome but it’s better to make a settlement now and stop the fighting.’
‘But it’ll be the end of the League of Nations.’ David’s normally quiet voice betrayed unusual emotion. ‘It’s a licence to any country to start an aggressive war.’
‘The League of Nations is finished. It didn’t stop Japan invading Manchuria.’
‘All the more reason to make a stand now.’
Frank had seen, on sixth-form visits to the cinema, what was happening in Europe: the sinister Stalin; the strutting dictators Hitler and Mussolini. Newsreels of Jewish shop windows in Germany being smashed by jeering Brownshirts, the owners cowering inside, aroused an instinctive sympathy in him for the victims. He had begun following the news. He said now, ‘If Mussolini’s allowed to get away with this, it’ll encourage Hitler. He’s already brought back conscription, and Churchill says he’s building an air force. He wants to go to war in Europe again; God knows what he’ll do to the Jews then.’