‘Oh, no, of course it wouldn’t. In that case it would have to be marked. In my time it was always done on odd sheets of paper torn out of old exercises books.’
‘A clear indication of the ephemeral nature of the end product. That brings me to my point. Would not all such sheets of paper have been thrown away on the last day of the term?’
‘Probably not. Most teachers would try to hoodwink the class by bunging the papers into a drawer as though for future reference.’
It was true that specialisation was discontinued during the last couple of days of term at the Sir George Etherege school, but the younger masters had their own ways of getting through the time without the loss of their own or their pupils’ lives. They made private arrangements to swap classes.
The masters most in request were the junior English master — ‘you can find ’em something to read, can’t you? — or you can read aloud to them or something?’; Mr Pybus, the art master — ‘kids are always happy splashing paint about, so do us a favour, Pybie’; and the music master, Mr Phillips, who, although he ranked as senior staff, was always willing to get rid of his own boys and hold gramophone sessions for the boys of others’. The other member of the syndicate was the master who took PE and games. Having no classroom resources, he was an enthusiast for the swap-classes method of getting through the dreaded end of term.
Mr Ronsonby was well aware that these transactions and plottings went on and he had no objection to closing a blind eye to them. In any case, the swap-shop could flourish only on a limited basis and among only a few of his staff. In fact, it was better, he thought, to wink at these unofficial exchanges rather than to put up with the anarchy which he knew would prevail in certain classrooms if a weak teacher was left for several hours in charge of the same set of boys. If this happened, he knew that it would result in boys being sent down to him for punishment just when he was at his busiest and least anxious to be disturbed.
Dame Beatrice’s telephone call found him in conference with Mr Burke and Margaret Wirrell. They were going over the lists of primary-school children who were expecting transference to the Sir George Etherege building at the beginning of the autumn term.
Just before Dame Beatrice’s telephone call came through, Margaret had made coffee for Mr Ronsonby, Mr Burke and herself and Mr Ronsonby had been retailing an amusing anecdote concerning a Catholic junior school which sent a consignment of eleven- to twelve-year-olds to him each September, there being no senior school of their own persuasion in the neighbourhood.
‘You know that our custom is to ask the junior-school heads to come up and see me?’ he said. ‘Of course, when the little boys arrive at the beginning of term they are set an English and a maths test so that we can grade them according to our own ideas and standards, but as a matter of courtesy I always ask the head teacher to place the boys in what the junior school considers to be their order of merit.
‘Well, the head of St Saviour’s happens to be a nun, so when I handed her the list she had sent in to us and asked her to ignore the fact that the names were in alphabetical order and to assess the children she was sending, she refused to look at it. “Oh, Mr Ronsonby,” she said, “nobody but the good Lord could place these children in order of merit.” ’
Mr Burke, who had already heard the story, laughed dutifully.
‘Oh, well, the junior-school assessments often don’t agree with ours,’ he said, ‘so she was probably on a non-collision course there.’
It was at this point that Margaret took Dame Beatrice’s call.
‘Dame Beatrice wants to know whether the second-year boys wrote essays at the end of the term,’ she said, ‘and especially whether Maycock and Travis did any work on paper.’
‘Sure to have done,’ said Mr Burke. ‘Moreover, from staffroom gossip, I happen to know that Waite, who takes the second years for English, set the essays and Pybus got the boys to illustrate them, and that both the compositions and the pictures were then handed over to Scaife as the form master, so, unless he has thrown them away, they are still in his cupboard.’
‘Pybus, eh? What a good-natured man he is, to help the younger fellows!’ said Mr Ronsonby, who knew full well that, far from being good-natured enough to help the junior masters, Mr Pybus was concerned only to get shot of his own form, who neither liked nor respected him and called him, almost to his face, Old Piebald, a slighting reference to his receding hair. The school’s nickname for Mr Pythias had been the Old Python, but this was a tribute, in its way, to a strong disciplinarian of whom it was as well to be wary.
The result of the telephone conversation was that Margaret Wirrell was sent up to Mr Scaife’s room. Here she found him in argument with a boy about the desirability of having to prove that a triangle having the same base and height as a rectangle must of necessity have an area half that of the rectangle in question.
‘It’s obvious to the naked eye, sir,’ said the boy, ‘so why do we have to waste time proving it?’
The form, as always, had risen when Margaret came in. (‘And I hope you do the same at home when your mother, aunt or any other lady comes into a room,’ was Mr Ronsonby’s admonition when he addressed a class of boys new to his school.)
‘Good morning, Mr Scaife. Good morning, 2A,’ said Margaret. ‘We’ve just had a tinkle from Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley,’ she told Mr Scaife, ‘and —’
‘Keep your flapping ears close to your head, Preston! Nothing to do with you what is being said,’ rapped out Mr Scaife to a small boy in the front row.
‘— and she wants to know whether you set any work to be done on paper or in their rough-work books at the end of last term. Not exercise-book things, but, well, you know, end-of-term work.’
‘Mr Waite and Mr Pybus did, sir, and they gave you our paintings and essays,’ said the listener.
‘Really, Preston, how interesting! But really I have no need of your good offices,’ snapped Mr Scaife.
‘They’re in the left-hand drawer of your table, sir.’
‘Preston! Shut up!’
‘Only trying to be helpful, sir.’
‘Forget it!’ Mr Scaife wrenched open the left-hand drawer of the teacher’s table, abstracted bundles of exercise-book paper and half-sheets of drawing paper, ignored a sotto voce ‘I told you, didn’t I?’ from the windmill-eared Preston, and handed the bundles to Margaret. A boy opened the door for her, the form stood up again, and Margaret went back to Mr Ronsonby and Mr Burke, leaving Mr Scaife (judging from the noise which followed her departure) facing a den of lions.
‘Do you want me to take these to the Stone House?’ she asked the headmaster, indicating her haul.
‘Not until we have rung to tell Dame Beatrice that we think we have found what she asked for.’
Upon receipt of this news, Dame Beatrice said that Mrs Gavin would call and collect the papers during the course of the afternoon, and this Laura did and needed to waste none of Mr Ronsonby’s time because Margaret way-laid her in the vestibule and handed over the papers which were now in two carrier bags.
After tea, Dame Beatrice and Laura went through the papers and laid aside the essays and paintings signed by Travis and Maycock. These would receive special attention, but the rest of the collection could not be ignored in case it should reveal any clue to the whereabouts of the missing campers.
The essays ranged from the anticipatory to the disillusioned. Some were lively, some dull, some badly written, some badly spelt. A few were factual and, having described, either joyously or the reverse, Easter holidays of the past, had concluded that ‘It will be much the same this year, I expect, but I like Christmas better because an Easter egg is not so good as a model railway or a bike, though hot cross buns are all right’.
In the majority of cases it was clear that the writer did not expect that the eye of authority would ever peruse his script. One boy had written, ‘I do not expect to have much of a holiday because I never do have much of a holiday. I live with my aunt who is always having babys I hate babys my aunt says babys are a blessing if they are so is having a sore bum when youve been tanned or leprosy or a broken leg or something so I do not have much to tell you about my holiday so I will pertend and tell you I am a clergyman and tell you about all the people I have buried one was buried alive but I did not know till the relations told me and all the babys I have cristend and the baby I dropped in the font the water was rather deep and I dropped him he was my aunts baby I did not mean to do it he just slipped through my fingers all I shall really do in the holidays is take him out in his pram perhaps it will tip over when I get to the river but I will be talking to Empty and pretend not to notice I like to think of dead people including lots of babys I hate babys.’