As I said, it’s hard to explain St. Oswald’s; the sound of the place in the mornings; the flat echo of boys’ feet against the stone steps; the smell of burning toast from the Refectory; the peculiar sliding sound of overfilled sports bags being dragged along the newly polished floor. The Honors Boards, with gold-painted names dating back from before my great-great-grandfather; the war memorial; the team photographs; the brash young faces, tinted sepia with the passing of time. A metaphor for eternity.
Gods, I’m getting sentimental. Age does that; a moment ago I was bemoaning my lot and now here I am getting all misty-eyed. It must be the weather. And yet, Camus says, we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Am I unhappy? All I know is that something has shaken us; shaken us to the foundations. It’s in the air, a breath of revolt, and somehow I know that it goes deeper than the Fallow affair. Whatever it may be, it is not over. And it’s still only September.
EN PASSANT
1
Monday, 27th September
In spite of the Head’s best efforts, Fallow made the papers. Not the News of the World—that would have been too much to expect—but our own Examiner, which is almost as good. The traditional rift between school and town is such that bad news from St. Oswald’s travels fast, and is received for the most part with a fierce and unholy glee. The ensuing piece was both triumphant and vitriolic, simultaneously portraying Fallow as a long-term employee of the school, dismissed (summarily and without Union representation) for a crime as yet unproved and, at the same time, as a likeable rogue who for years had been getting his own back on a system comprising Hooray Henrys, faceless bureaucrats, and out-of-touch academics.
It has become a David and Goliath situation, with Fallow as a symbol of the working classes fighting the monstrous machines of wealth and privilege. The writer of the piece, who signs his name simply as Mole, also manages to convey the impression that St. Oswald’s is filled with similar scams and small corruptions, that the teaching is hopelessly out-of-date, that smoking (and possibly drug abuse) is rife, and that the buildings themselves are so badly in need of repair that a serious accident is almost inevitable. An editorial, entitled “Private Schools—Should They Be Scrapped?” flanks the piece, and readers are invited to send in their own thoughts and grievances against St. Oswald’s and the Old Boy network that protects it.
I’m rather pleased with it. They printed it almost unedited, and I have promised to keep them informed of any further developments. In my e-mail I hinted that I was a source close to the school—an Old Boy, a pupil, a governor, perhaps even a member of staff—keeping the details fluid (I may have to change them later).
I used one of my secondary e-mail addresses—Mole@hotmail.com, to foil any attempt to discover my identity. Not that anyone at the Examiner is likely to try—they’re more accustomed to dog shows and local politics than investigative journalism—but you never know where a story like this is going to end. I don’t entirely know myself; which is, I suppose, what makes it fun.
It was raining when I arrived at school this morning. Traffic was slower than usual, and I had to make an effort to control my annoyance as I inched through town. One of the things that makes the locals resent St. Oswald’s is the traffic it generates at rush hour; the hundreds of clean, shiny Jags and sensible Volvos and four-wheel drives and people carriers that line the roads every morning with their cargo of clean, shiny boys in blazers and caps.
Some take the car even when their home is less than a mile away. God forbid that the clean, shiny boy should have to jump puddles or breathe pollutants or (worse still) experience contamination by the dull, grubby pupils of the nearby Sunnybank Park; the loudmouthed, loose-limbed boys with their nylon jackets and scuffed trainers; the yawping girls in their short skirts and dyed hair. When I was their age I walked to school; I wore those cheap shoes and grubby socks; and sometimes as I drive to work in my rented car I can still feel the rage mounting in me, the terrible rage against who I was and who I longed to be.
I remember a time, late that summer. Leon was bored; school was out, and we were hanging around the public playground (I remember the roundabout, its paint worn clean through to the metal by generations of young hands), smoking Camels (Leon smoked, so I did too), and watching the Sunnybankers go by.
“Barbarians. Rabble. Proles.” His fingers were long and slender, deeply stained with ink and nicotine. On the path, a little knot of Sunnybankers approaching, dragging their schoolbags, shouting, dusty-footed in the hot afternoon. No threat to us, though there were times when we’d had to run, pursued by a gang of Sunnybankers.
Once, when I wasn’t there, they’d cornered Leon, down by the bins at the back of the school, and given him a kicking. I hated them all the more for that; even more than Leon did—they were my people, after all. But these were just girls—four of them together and a straggler from my own year—raucous, gum-chewing girls, skirts hiked up blotchy legs, giggling and screaming as they ran down the path.
The straggler, I saw, was Peggy Johnsen, the fat girl from Mr. Bray’s Games class, and I turned away instinctively, but not before Leon had caught my eye and winked.
“Well?”
I knew that look. I recognized it from our forays into town; our record shop thefts; our small acts of rebellion. Leon’s gaze brimmed with mischief; his bright eyes pinned Peggy as she half ran to keep up.
“Well what?”
The other four were far ahead. Peggy, with her sweaty face and anxious look, was suddenly alone. “Oh no,” I said. The truth was I had nothing against Peggy; a slow, harmless girl only a step removed from mental deficiency. I even pitied her a little.
Leon gave me a scornful look. “What is she, Pinchbeck, your girlfriend?” he said. “Come on!” And he was off at a run, arcing across the playground with an exuberant whoop. I followed him; I told myself there was nothing else I could have done.
We snatched her bags—Leon took her games kit in its Woolworth’s carrier, I grabbed her canvas satchel with the little hearts drawn on in Tipp-Ex. Then we ran, far too fast for Peggy to follow, leaving her squalling in our dust. I’d simply wanted to get away before she recognized me; but my momentum had sent me crashing against her, knocking her to the ground.
Leon had laughed at that, and I did too, viciously, knowing that in another life it could have been me sitting there on the path, it could have been me yelling “Ah, come on, you buggers, you lousy bastards” through my tears as my gym shoes, tied by the laces, were flung into the highest branches of an old tree and my books fluttered their pages like confetti on the warm summer air.
I’m sorry, Peggy. I nearly meant it too. She wasn’t the worst of them, not by a long way. But she was there, and she was disgusting—with her greasy hair and red angry face, she could almost have been my father’s child. And so I stomped her books; emptied her bags; scattered her PE kit (I can still see those navy blue knickers, baggy as my fabled Thunderpants) into the yellow dust.
“Ozzie bastards!”
Survival of the fittest, I replied silently, feeling angry for her, angry for myself, but fiercely elated, as if I’d passed a test; as if by so doing I had narrowed the gap still more between myself and St. Oswald’s, between who I was and who I meant to be.