Bleak Expectations (6 page)

¹
St Bastard is patron saint of cruelty, hating small boys and, in recent times, TV talent shows. There is no record of any actual school with that name at the time. The most likely candidates for his actual place of education are Thugby School, Beaten College or St Ouch’s.

²
There are three possible explanations for this: the route went via the Arctic Circle during the summer months; the author was confused; or, as proposed by Britain’s only professor of Quantum English, Roger Catchpole, the carriage passed through a space-time wormhole caused by rogue tachyon particles and naughty quarks. Though, as he admits, he was a bit drunk when he thought of the idea and had also just watched seventeen back-to-back episodes of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
.

³
An actual brand name for a cane in the nineteenth century. Part of the ‘Cruel Irony’ range of punishment instruments for children, which also included the ‘Warm Your Cockles’ branding iron and the ‘Gentle Ben’ potty-training rack.

⁴
In 1843, these three joke-forms were melded by the Queen’s chief humour adviser Professor Baron Lord Robert De Monkhouse into the now famous Grand Unified Joke: ‘Knock, knock’, ‘Who’s there?’ ‘It’s two nuns, we’ve come to ask what’s the best way to kill a Frenchman.’

⁵
A reference to the nineteenth-century German ‘Comedy of Agony’ (
Das Agonistische Komedie
).

⁶
A pseudonym for real-life schoolteacher Jeremiah Cruelthwack, inventor of the first fully automatic boy-caning machine or Beating Jenny.

⁷
Some say this line is designed to convey the rhythm of a beating; others suggest the author might just have been in a hurry to get to dinner and therefore sought speed over quality.

Thus began a period of my life so wretched I cannot put it into words. Mathematically it was like this:

x
= 2
y
⁴

Where
x
represents the amount of misery experienced in one day at St Bastard’s and
y
represents the amount of misery experienced over my entire life before arriving at the school.

In onomatopoeia it was like this:

Aaaarrrggghhhh!!!

But beyond that I have not the vocabularic wherewithal to communicate my circumstances.

Although I have just realized that this is a book, so I really should have a go.

Hmmm . . .

The dormitory I inhabited was a bleak, unforgiving place. There was a cold, hard stone floor and the only furniture was cold, hard stone stones. We used the larger ones as beds and chairs and the smaller ones as pillows.

My first night there, a pillow fight broke out: there were nine broken jaws and three fatalities.

The school routine was remorseless and cruel. Every morning at five o’clock we were awoken by being poked with sharp sticks. We were then herded at the end of some sharp sticks to prayers in the school chapel, where instead of pews we had to sit on sharp sticks. More sharp sticks prodded us towards lessons, where if we gave an incorrect answer we were poked with a sharp stick and if we gave a correct answer we were rewarded by being poked with a blunt stick, though a stick which in the greater scheme of things would still seem sharp to most people; that is to say, people who weren’t used to being constantly poked with sharp sticks.

In fact, the only time we were spared the poking with sticks was when we were beaten by the headmaster, which was regularly and often. To say it made a lovely change from the sharp sticks would be a massive lie.

Lessons were rigorously streamed. By which I do not mean that selection was according to ability, but that they took place in a stream. Whenever it rained the stream was in spate, and during one Latin class alone eight boys were swept away by the torrent. If they were lucky enough to survive the watery plummet, they were sure to meet their doom at the end of the stream where it emptied out into the headmaster’s shark pond.

Punishments for infraction of the eight thousand school rules were many and varied, ranging from being sent luging bare-bottomed down the school grater to being made to don hedgehog pants then do vigorous lunges or, most feared of all, being sentenced to the school salt-mines. Once in there the salt could drive boys mad with thirst: they were often found horribly injured having tried to drink their own heads.

I myself was fortunate: I was only ever sentenced to the neighbouring school pepper-mines. This was a far less deadly place – although Chewsby-Forsdyke was once found having sneezed himself inside out.

I think the hunger was maybe the worst. After catching one of the boys smiling without permission or, indeed, reason, Headmaster Hardthrasher had banned meals for the next five months. Worse, though he had banned meals, he had not banned meal
times.
Thus, three times a day we were forced to sit in the dining hall and pretend to eat by means of whatever mime or physical theatre skills we possessed.

These were incredibly dangerous occasions. Not only would the headmaster often hang boys after being unconvinced by their efforts to eat a facsimile of a chop or a simulacrum of soup but, driven mad by pretend food, the larger boys would sometimes try to eat the smaller boys. Usually the headmaster would intervene before they had consumed more than an arm or a leg, but nevertheless one kept one’s wits about one or, if one had a friend to watch one’s back, two kept two’s wits about two.
¹

We were clad in rags, unwashed and hungry, so hungry. At night the dormitory echoed with the sounds of boys trying not to weep, and often failing. One night I heard Arrowby crying. He wept for most of the night, stopping just before dawn. On investigation, we found he was completely desiccated, having cried every bit of moisture out of his young body. When I touched him, he crumbled to dust and blew away on the breeze, and I don’t think there was a single boy there who didn’t in some small way envy him.

And then there were games.

The headmaster took a great delight in team sports. He also had a terrible deep-seated envy of Rugby School and its now world-famous eponymous game of violence. Hence he had invented his own: Bastardball.

The object of the game was to get a ball to the end of the pitch and plunge it head first into a bucket of cold dung, for doing which you scored a Bastard.

Oh, and the ball wasn’t actually a ball: it was the youngest boy in the school.

Each team was divided into five groups: the kickers, whose job it was to kick the ball; the hitters, whose job it was to hit the ball; the punchers, whose job it was to punch the ball; and the pitchforkers and shooters, whose job it was to pitchfork and shoot as many of the opposition as possible. Or pitchfork and shoot the ball.

The youngest boy in the school was unlucky indeed.
²

The risks were not just as I have described above: in the mêlée, boys would again try to eat each other. To this day my elbow bears the scars of a desperate gnaw from Spindlesham minor. Indeed, I would have lost the entire arm to him had he not been distracted by Westington taking a huge bite out of his foot. Yet no boy bore ill-will to any other boy for an attempted eating: each part of you that was consumed was a part that could no longer hurt.

The school’s mortality rate was horrific. It seemed to me just a natural consequence of the barbaric curriculum and lax approach to pastoral care; I suspected no actual machinations or scheming in the daily casualty lists. But that thought was driven from my mind one night. It may have been a night of horrible discovery, but it was also the night my life was lit up by the tiny bit of hope I mentioned in the chapter heading.

At the time, the dormitory was in shock. Earlier, Nesterton had been crying because he was homesick, so the headmaster had come in and beaten him. The beating had made Nesterton cry even more, so the headmaster had beaten him again, and Nesterton hadn’t been able to stop crying so eventually the headmaster had taken him out and shot him. The shooting had proved a protracted process, for the headmaster had provided a blindfold. Alas, the blindfold was for him, not Nesterton, and it had taken him at least fifty-eight shots finally to strike lethally.

With Nesterton’s tears still echoing in my ears and, worse, his sigh of relief as the fatal shot had struck home, I became aware that another of the boys was now approaching me.

‘Psst! Are you still awake, New Bug?’ It was a voice I did not recognize. This was hardly surprising: few of the pupils had the strength to speak.

‘Yes, I am awake. Who are you?’

His face came closer, as did the rest of him – had it not, it would have been strange indeed. He was a boy of about my age, with a curled mop of hair and features that instantly suggested good humour and jollity.

‘The name’s Biscuit. Harry Biscuit. What’s your name?’

‘Pip. Pip Bin.’

His good-humoured face furrowed in thought. ‘Pip Bin, eh? Pip Bin . . .’ He was thinking hard indeed. ‘Pip . . . Bin . . . Pip Bin . . .’ He mused on, rolling my name around his mouth experimentally. ‘Pip Bin . . . hmmm . . . Pip Bin . . . Pip . . . Bin . . .’ His face unfurrowed as some conclusion was evidently reached. ‘Pip Bin . . .’ Or reached yet not. ‘Pip Bin . . . Pip Bin, eh? Then I shall call you . . . Pip Bin.’

‘Oh.’ It seemed a poor conclusion for such long deliberation.

‘For if a nickname you are to have, then it is best if it is the same as your normal name, for otherwise correspondence may go astray.’

I nodded, as this did indeed make sense.

‘May I ask what brings you to St Bastard’s, Pip Bin?’

I did not mind telling him and told him by telling him. ‘After my father died, my mother went insane . . . and my guardian sent me here.’

‘Ah! A familiar story. Exactly the same happened to me. And to Beastleham, Frobisher and Dribblington minor. In fact, every boy at the school has a father who has died, a mother who has gone insane and a guardian who has sent them here. I don’t suppose you’re set to inherit a lot of money when you come of age?’

‘As a matter of fact, yes, I am.’

‘Me too.’

‘You’re not—’ But I could not complete my sentence before he interrupted.

‘Yup, I’m Harry Biscuit of the Warwickshire Biscuits.’

‘Then your father invented the biscuit!’ I knew the name had sounded familiar. This was the son of the man who had finally given the nation something to eat while drinking tea. Other than cake. Or scones. Or muffins, pikelets, crumpets, bumpets,
³
warm fat Yorkshire rascals, cold thin Lancashire scamps, Spudlington garns,
⁴
roast lamb, trifle, tarts, flans, scoopies, jam spaniels,
⁵
pasties, trindlies,
⁶
goobershams
⁷
and cheese.
⁸

‘He did. And there’s a lot of money in biscuits. It seems to me that this is a school for rich boys with no dad, a mad mum and a lot of money in trust. Now, let me ask you a question, Pip Bin: how long do you think you’ll be at this beastly place?’

‘Well, until I’m eighteen, I suppose.’ I assumed that, at that point, I would legally inherit my father’s wealth and proceed to live a life of high-class luxury. But this Harry Biscuit soon disabused me of that notion.

‘Wrong!’ He seemed to invest this single word with great joy at my lack of correctitude. ‘You see, Pip Bin, no one has ever left this school alive. No one. Apart from one boy, and he was dead.’

‘But that’s ridiculous! I know the school is dangerous but . . .’

‘But nothing. If anyone ever survives to the age of eighteen, wallop – that’s their lot. Think back on what you’ve seen while you’ve been here . . .’

Lying there in the darkness, I considered everything I had seen in the past weeks and realized that Harry Biscuit was right. On Thogglesden-Barclay’s eighteenth birthday the headmaster had reported the tragic news that his birthday cake had exploded inside him. When Pistleton turned eighteen, the headmaster had bought him a birthday present and, seeing as it was his eighteenth birthday and he was to become a man, he had thematically bought him a man-trap. Alas, the man it had trapped was Pistleton himself, killing him instantly. Beasley’s eighteenth-birthday treat had been a trip to a cannon factory; all that had returned had been a bucket of what was left of him. Grobisher had had an eighteenth-birthday fight with a tiger and lost; and Ffffffffffffforbes-Twangle had died when his giant iron birthday card in the shape of the number eighteen had accidentally toppled on him after the headmaster had given it a good shove. All dead, and all on their eighteenth birthday; yet I could not believe it was deliberate.

‘But . . . it could just be coincidence,’ I protested.

‘If it is, it’s one so big it’s a Coincid-aurus Rex.’
⁹

That was indeed a large and terrifying coincidence.

‘The thing is, Pip Bin, I turn eighteen in two months and I don’t want to die. So I’m going to need your help to escape.’

‘Me? Why me?’

‘Look at all the others . . . too weak and feeble to do anything.’ He gestured around the dormitory. He was right. The grinding effects of the school’s hideous regime had weakened nearly all the boys to a point at which they could barely carry their own bodies about the place, let alone escape. ‘But you, Pip Bin . . . you’re still strong.’

Again, he was right. I was weakening fast, but as yet I still had some of my youthful vigour and strength. As, it seemed, did this Harry Biscuit. He was far and away the most robust boy in the school, stout and ruddy-cheeked, oozing sap and brio.

‘How come you’re still strong, Harry Biscuit?’

He coughed awkwardly. ‘Because when I arrived here I weighed . . . four hundred and seventy-eight pounds.’

‘That is quite a lot.’

‘Well, when you’re the son of a big biscuit magnate, there are lots of free biscuits lying around . . . It happens.’