He settled himself comfortably at the desk. All day, Brian moaned. “Of course, when they do go and you hear bombers coming over, there’ll be no need to put your gas-mask on. Only when a man comes around the streets with a klaxon do you do that, and when gas is dropped you all act very quickly — except the putty-heads, of course — and pull the masks over your faces. Naturally, if any of you have smaller brothers and sisters you’ll help them with theirs before putting on your own.”
His bloodless head turned from one side of the class to the other, and as his face passed the front, both eyes were blotted out by circles of light as big as his glasses. “Something else,” came from his mouth: “Do any of you know when poison gas was first used in a big battle?”
One hand did: “In the Great War.”
“Ah, so you’re not all putty-heads. Yes, quite right. Fifty thousand Frenchmen (and many British) were gassed by an afternoon breeze at Ypres. All the troops saw was a greenish-yellow fog coming towards them at dusk and soon scores of hundreds of men were choking from it. Those who got away from the trenches were blinded or injured for life, and lines stretched for miles as each man followed the one in front to the hospitals behind the lines. Yes, war is a lamentable business, and it isn’t worth getting excited about, is it? IS IT, THEN, YOU PUTTY-HEADS?” he roared, his gun-burst lifting even the sleepiest from their daydreams.
A few voices sent out a mixture of yes and no.
“It’s hard to tell you what war is, but I can promise one thing: there’ll be plenty of pain flying about. I suppose the easiest pain I can think of in war is when you have to queue all day in the snow for food or coke, and when you have to eat horse flesh at the end of it, and when you have to listen to the noise of sirens. Not much pain there, is there? However, it’s possible that the war will still be on when you’re men, and one of the hardest pains perhaps is when one is left wounded after a battle without water or food. War is taking place in China and Spain at this moment, and happened in Abyssinia not so long ago, so what I’m telling you shouldn’t seem so impossible, though, judging by your faces, you aren’t bright enough to take in much of what I’m saying.”
He knows we’re all waiting to get to the playground for our milk, Brian said to himself, but he’s keeping us in out of spite, the sly bastard. “Do any of you really know what pain is? I suppose you think it’s pain when my fist clouts your putty-heads to make you pay attention? Well, let me tell you, it’s not. It’s nothing to what pain is in war. Ah, yes, I know, you’re all excited about the gasmasks and the war that’s coming. Well, you should be praying to God that by a miracle it doesn’t begin. For war means nothing but pain. Some people escape it, but don’t let that be a comfort to you, because during a war the earth will convulse with pain, and it will get you and me and possibly everyone else. So let’s have no excitement over the thought of war.”
He broke off and strode out of the room, and they heard the next class fall quiet as he went among them.
It’s all lies, Brian thought. Even if it’s the truth, it’s a lie. But he also scoffed at his own fiction of the barricades and pyramids of dead on paving-stones, convinced of nothing except the bursting top of his milk bottle at play-time and the pushing-in of a straw before sucking cool liquid into the dry chalk of his mouth, a liquid that nevertheless still tasted like the dull and sluggish iodine-pain that old Jones had blabbed about.
At four in the afternoon he ran home clutching a cardboard box, and burst into the house as his father was having tea. There’d been a rumour in class, while they were waiting to be served the respirators, that everyone had to pay for them, so much a week, and Brian had been pleasantly surprised to note when it was actually put into his hand that payment hadn’t been mentioned at all, at which he assumed that he had been given an expensive piece of equipment absolutely free. “Look what I’ve got,” he called out, swinging his treasure-box on its string. They were uninterested. Then he saw three others on the floor in a corner, their boxes already bent and battered, a strap hanging from one, Arthur doing his best to break up another. His mother was reading the Post: “There’ll be no peace in our time,” she said scornfully, laying it aside to pour Brian a cup of tea.
“No,” Seaton answered, in splendid gruff prophecy, “nor in any other bloody time, either.”
CHAPTER 14
Mr. Jones walked in with no preliminary spying. Dapper, smart, his jaw like that on a ventriloquist’s dummy, he held up a slip of paper and called, not overloud: “Robertson, come out.”
Brian heard a movement behind, and a gangly eleven-year-old walked to the front. Mr. Jones stood by the blackboard, hid Ceylon with a head as fiercely threatening as the cobra that represented the island. “So you’re Robertson?”
He admitted it, though reluctantly; not knowing where to put his hands, he tried to get them into his trouser pockets but was baffled when their entrances seemed to have closed up against him. “Keep your hands by your side when you speak to me,” Mr. Jones roared, smacking him across the ear. He held the menacing piece of paper up to his nose, chafing it like a fly so that Robertson got a smack on the other ear for trying to brush it off. “I’ve had a complaint about you from a lady who lives nearby. She says you broke her window with a football and used foul language when she came out to you.”
Robertson looked to one side, and said nothing.
“Well?”—in a roar that told the whole school he was on the warpath again. Parts of his face were streaked with tiny purple veins, like rivers on a finely drawn map, though his lips were bloodless. “Have you nothing to say, blockhead?”
Out of a sound of slow choking came: “I didn’t cheek her off, sir.”
Clap! “That’s for being a liar as well. I’ll teach you to use foul language, and lie to me.” He turned to the motionless teacher sitting at the high stool by his desk: “Give me your stick, Mr. Bates.”
The boy did not move when ordered to hold out his hand. “Are you deaf?” Mr. Jones screamed. He’s loony, Brian said to himself. If we all rushed him, though, we’d pulverize ’im. Robertson made as if to turn to the rest of the class, but no one could help him, being arranged at their desks in a helpless dead silence. “If you don’t hold out your hand, I’ll make you hold it out.” He brought the stick back and slashed at the boy’s shoulder with all his strength, but Robertson dodged it and ran, opened the door with unrehearsed dexterity, and slammed it behind him. He was heard clattering to safety along the street, running to the protection of his unemployed father. Mr. Jones threw the stick down and strode out.
Brian missed both verse and chapter from the Bible-reading that followed. On the streets, in your own land when playing at night, you still weren’t safe from the long arm of Mr. Jones. Even miles away in quiet and hedge-bound fields his rage seemed out to get you: next morning in school he might confront you with stick and piece of paper with your name on both demanding to know why you were in a certain field last night when a notice on the gate said quite plainly that trespassers would be prosecuted. Trespassers will be persecuted, more like it, persecuted by bastards like old dead Jones.
The only place he felt safe was at the Nook. Beyond the valley of the Lean and across the new boulevard, he made his way every weekend of the autumn. After the harvest, a pig was killed and the pork salted for Christmas. Mary made a list, in the back of an old laundry book, of those who wanted to buy a piece, and Brian would carry a loaded basket under the railway bridge and deliver to different houses in Radford Woodhouse.