“I didn’t have the money here,” he explained. “I took it bit by bit to the book shop, like a Christmas club.” This was even worse, because he’d made sure that, starving or not, they hadn’t been able to get their hands on it.
“You’d ’ave ’ad more sense to a got yoursen a pair o’ shoes,” Seaton cried. “I’ve a good mind to throw it on the bleddy fire.”
“’E’s got no more sense than ’e was born with,” his mother said. Brian was horrified at his father’s threat, saw flames already at their work. “It’s my book,” he shouted.
“Don’t cheek me,” Seaton said, “or you’ll be for it, my lad.”
Brian’s tears were open, and they saw it. “I hope there’s a war on soon so’s we’re all killed,” he raved.
“What a thing to say,” his mother said. “I don’t know where he gets it from.”
A smack across the head from his father. “Say one more word, and I’ll show yer what I’ll do wi’ yer.”
“Wait till I grow up,” Brian cried.
But Seaton only said: “He’ll be a lunatic one day wi’ reading so many books.”
He sat by the fire while they drank tea, trying to force back the sobs, difficult because he saw too easily how he had done wrong. But hatred and pity for himself surmounted this, and so he couldn’t stop. Vera passed him some tea: “Come on, it ain’t the end o’ the world.” His eyes were drawn to the book cover, where a brave man held a rapier as if he didn’t care for anyone in the world, as though nothing could ever trouble him. And if it did, the face and sword said, it would be an easy matter to fight a duel and dispose of whatever it was.
He ate bread and jam, and went on reading. The story grafted itself to him, slowly becoming him and he becoming it, and he left behind with each second the light and noise in the house and went on wondering footsteps down into the dungeons of the Château d’lf with Edmond Dantès, following the guards and slipping invisibly into the cell, and all night long he listened to the tapping and whispers that came from the granite floor, heard the patient scraping and scratching of freedom, was shown that even dungeons and giant prisons were unable to keep men in for ever, though fourteen years was longer by four than he had so far lived: he listened to the chipping of homemade tools, and voices whispering as if from the dead, which talked of knowledge and freedom and hidden treasure on the Island of Monte Cristo.
CHAPTER 13
Mr. Bates was powerless to stem the tide of commotion in the classroom. With good reason the boys were excited, everyone talking to everyone else. The regular timetable dissolved as if by magic, and the map of South America — in white chalk for the coastline and brown for the long curving rib of the Andes — was being rubbed out by the prefect, who even forgot himself and shook the chalk rag in the classroom, so that brown and white dust-clouds penetrated layers of light slanting in through the windows.
Assembly and prayers had gone by and, to the intense joy of the class, Mr. Bates stayed writing at his desk. Brian was close enough to hear the reedy turmoil of his pen and the rustle of overturned paper. What was he writing on a day like this? For whom could he be using these unique minutes? Maybe it was the best he could do while waiting to see what happened, because had he ordered the class into the hall and set them to singing hymns, they would possibly have mutinied, or acquiesced so truculently that hall-discipline would have been impossible.
“Bosworth!” Mr. Bates cried, glancing icily at the prefect when dust settled on his coatsleeve and notepaper. “How many more times do I have to tell you to shake that thing outside?”
But Bosworth recognized his words as a protest, not a threat. “Sorry, sir,” he said, hung the duster over the easel-lath, and went back to his seat after seeing his apology met only by a bent preoccupied head and the sound of a pen scratching across foolscap like the exploring claws of a badger.
Anybody’d think he was writing a book. The noise rose to a climax, a sea beating against the sound-barrier of Mr. Bates’s pen, until suddenly the stream of his thought was taken in the flank: “Quiet!” he shouted. The sea didn’t fall back, for only those closest, always careful not to make much noise anyway, heard him. “WILL YOU BE QUIET!” he bawled.
The sea-roar stopped, the waves receded, but the unbearable throb of excited unanimous conversation was replaced by a silence that paralyzed Mr. Bates’s pen. He assumed a stern expression and looked at the forty faces before him, adjusted the spectacles chafing the back of his ear: an unnecessary movement, but he could not at that particular moment keep his hands unoccupied. Every face, from four rows of ancient name-scratched desks with two boys frozen at each, converged on the focal point of his own. He knew quite definitely that each one was waiting, with their silent collective gaze, for him to tell them something — and the passing seconds assumed a pandemonic quality because he did not know what to say. He who held his class always within the bounds of discipline — though never tyrannically so — wavered because for once he could not give them their rightful due of words on a subject spreading like a thornbush through every brain.
“I suppose you all know,” he broke out firmly at last, “that gas-masks are to be given out today?”
A question to which no answer was needed. Everyone was relieved that he had addressed them with such satisfactory wisdom. Tension drew from each face, and he was aware of a smile growing like an apple rolling as if before wind among them.
“Also,” he went on, easy now that a beginning had been made, “there won’t be any geography or arithmetic lesson.” The smiles became definite, and Mr. Bates thought of his half-completed letter. “Go on talking, but keep your voices down. Mr. Jones may be in soon.”
Once more his pen scratched, disguising paper with a camouflage of ink, and slowly — like a great hoarse dynamo that has difficulty in starting — the noise of speculation grew until it reached a level that stopped Mr. Bates being aware of it.
“I’m glad there’s a war,” Brian said to Jim Skelton. “Dad says he’ll be able to get a job if there is. Then he’ll give me a penny every Friday. As long as we aren’t gassed, though.”
“I’m not frightened,” Jim replied, “but what about mam and dad and Maureen and Frank and the others? There’s seven of us and we can only just fit into our cellar if bombs start dropping.”
Brian absent-mindedly tipped the viscid contents of one inkwell into another, making a black pool on the wood and almost blotting out the first carved letter of his initials. “But perhaps everybody’ll have guns,” he ventured, dabbing at the ink and wiping it on his jersey.
“We won’t get guns,” Jim said. “Everybody’ll have to stop in their cellars. I can’t think what we’ll do.”
“Your dad’ll have to build bunks,” Brian advised. “He’s a joiner, so it’ll be easy for him. But our house don’t have a cellar to it.”
“You’ll go in air-raid shelters then.” No one had attended to the flowers in the window jars, and their yellow heads drooped for want of water; neither had those detailed entered the temperature or barometer readings on the graphs that stretched in coloured undulations along one wall like a mountain panorama in the geography books; it was inkwell morning and no one had filled them; and no books had been given out. Lack of timetable discipline convinced them that there was no need to be silent, to read, write, or sing, because it was marvellous, miraculous confusion, with all hoping beyond hope that disorganization had come to stay, thinking that if war was this then it wasn’t so bad after all.