The Complete Pratt (25 page)

Henry had returned for his tuck box, which was also quite heavy, containing, among other delights, twelve jars of Gentleman’s Relish, one for each week of term.

Aunti Doris had clasped him in a perfumed embrace, and smacked a great kiss onto his cheek, and
she
had cried. He had waved as she drove off half-blinded by tears, and he had felt empty of emotion. Then he had picked up his tuck box and struggled into the bowels of Orange House, a plump, nervous boy with a south Yorkshire accent, who smelt like a perfume factory and had a large smear of lipstick on his right cheek.

Henry had found his junior study, which he would share with seven other boys, each having a partition which he could decorate as he wished, within the confines of decorum. Senior boys had a study between two. Junior boys fagged for senior boys for two years. The roster informed Henry that he was to fag for Davey and Pilkington-Brick.

‘You’d better go straight along,’ the fair-haired boy in the next partition had advised him.

And so he had presented himself, nervously, at the second study from the end on the left upstairs.

Davey, tall, slim, dark, with a long, sad face, only sixteen but looking immensely grown up to Henry, had said, ‘You’ve got lipstick on your cheek.’

Pilkington-Brick, even taller, and massive, with a large
moon
-shaped, cheerful face, also only sixteen, also looking immensely grown up to Henry, had said, ‘You smell like a Turkish brothel.’

Davey had said, ‘Have we a sex maniac for our fag, Tosser?’

Pilkington-Brick had said, ‘It could be an interesting couple of years, Lampo.’

Davey had said, ‘Henry Pratt. What a deliciously uncompromising name. How proudly banal.’

Pilkington-Brick had said, ‘Don’t you worry about a thing, young Pratt. You’ve got a plum position here.’

Davey had said, ‘It’s true. Tosser is good-natured to the point of terminal boredom, and I’m just a clapped-out old roué.’

Lampo Davey had smiled. His mouth was slightly twisted when he smiled. Henry had left the room clumsily, in total bewilderment, utterly out of his depth.

He had welcomed bedtime, not knowing what horrors it would bring. Now he lay on top of his sheets, taking stock. Dead birds, to date, three. Parrot. Song thrush. Mistle thrush. What more did life hold in store for him? A rotting blackbird in his desk? A headless cormorant stuffed down his trousers?

There was a symphony of deep breathing, grunting and near-snoring. The odd whistle of breath. An occasional roar from a lorry on the main road. Should he run away and hitch-hike back to Cap Ferrat? How thrilled Uncle Teddy and Auntie Doris would be!

At last, shortly before the clock of St Peter’s Church struck four. Henry fell into a light, uneasy crud.

The next day, as he walked up the main road, away from the little stone-built market town, towards the school, Henry found himself beside Paul Hargreaves, the fair-haired boy from the next partition in his junior study. Paul Hargreaves told him that his father was a brain surgeon. Henry told Paul Hargreaves that his father was a test pilot.

The school was set in a valley, surrounded by lush, wooded hills. It was a real jumble, with the original stone Queen Anne mansion flanked on one side by a high-roofed Victorian chapel which cried out for a spire and on the other by a two-storey block
in
the Bauhaus style, designed by an old Daltonian who died when the avant-garde squash court that he had designed collapsed on him in 1934. Many people thought it just retribution for a man who had done more than anybody else to ruin the look of the school.

In the chapel the boys sat in long rows, facing each other across the central aisle. In the middle of the first prayer, fruitily intoned by the chaplain, the Reverend L. A. Carstairs (known to the boys as Holy C), Henry had a nasty shock. He caught sight of Tubman-Edwards, who winked at him.

Henry was in Form 1A, the form for the brightest of the new boys. So was Paul Hargreaves. Tubman-Edwards wasn’t.

And so there began again the process of finding classrooms and going through endless roll-calls, which made the first day a relatively undemanding exercise, a breather before the rigours to come. When lessons proper began, and his Maths teacher (Loopy L) picked up a text-book, Henry instinctively ducked. He found that he was backward at Maths, but a star performer at Latin, thanks to Mr Belling. And all the time he felt a sense of security that had come to him rarely in his school life. Friendship, which had so often proved so difficult, was suddenly easy here. Henry and Paul kept finding themselves next to each other. They were both sensitive and shy. Already, by Friday evening, Paul Hargreaves was his best friend ever.

That Friday evening, after tea (sausage and lumpy mash, served by the wheezing Gorringe), Henry and Paul were beginning the decoration of their partitions in the junior study. Paul was favouring a kind of collage of works of art which had a significance for him. There were postcards of works by people Henry had never heard of, like Salvador Dali and Braque. His own display promised to be slightly less sophisticated, consisting as it did entirely of cuttings from the
Picturegoer
. Uncle Teddy and Auntie Doris had arranged for him to receive the
Picturegoer
every week, and his growing interest in films blossomed into an obsession at a time when it was impossible for him to go out and see any.

Suddenly a cry rent the air. ‘All new-bugs to the shower room.’

The sixteen new-bugs in Orange House assembled slightly uneasily in the bleak, stone-walled shower room, with its ten
showers
.

They were met by Hertford-Jones.

‘O.K., you blokes,’ said Hertford-Jones. ‘Line up against the wall.’

They lined up against the wall, their uneasiness growing. Nothing pleasant in life is preceded by being lined up against a wall.

‘O.K. Drop your shonkers,’ said Hertford-Jones.

They stared at him blankly.

‘Shonkers are trousers,’ said Hertford-Jones impatiently, as if everybody knew that.

They dropped their shonkers.

‘Ready, doctor,’ sang out Hertford-Jones.

A cold autumn wind whistled through the shower room, lifting their shirts like cat-flaps.

A young doctor entered, in a white coat. He carried a small torch and a notebook. He examined their genitalia and surrounds with his torch and said either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to Hertford-Jones, who put either a tick or a cross against their names. Henry and Paul both got ticks. Feltstein, who was Jewish, got a cross.

‘Right,’ said the doctor. ‘The following thirteen boys – Keynes, Wellard, Curtis-Brown, Pratt, Hargreaves, Mallet, Needham, Renwick, Pellet, Forbes-Robinson, Bickerstaff, Tidewell and Willoughby – will be circumcised tomorrow. Be at the bottom of house drive at seven-thirty. Bring an overnight bag, just in case.’

‘Please, sir,’ said Paul Hargreaves, going red. ‘My father’s a doctor. I don’t think he’d like me to be circumcised without his permission.’

‘We have parental permission,’ said the doctor. ‘We wouldn’t dream of doing it without.’

The doctor and Hertford-Jones departed, and the new-bugs debated. Could it be a hoax?

‘It sounds like a hoax to me,’ said Paul. ‘I’m going to see Mr Satchel.’

Paul walked straight through the library and into the housemaster’s part of the building.

Quite soon he returned, a little abashed.

‘It’s genuine,’ he said.

That night, in South Africa, Nattrass tried to ease Henry’s worries.

‘I’ve had it,’ he said. ‘Nothing to it. Snip snip, thank you very much. They use a local anaesthetic and you don’t have to look.’

After lights-out, Fletcher whispered to Henry from the next bed.

‘Pratt?’

‘Yes?’

‘Good luck tomorrow. There’s nothing to worry about. Doctor Wallis at Taunton General is the second best circumcision man in England. Only old Thursby at Barts is better. He hasn’t had
any
cock-ups.’

‘Has Doctor Wallis had cock-ups, then?’

‘Only the one.’

‘What happened?’

‘Let’s just say it was a bit of a balls-up, and leave it at that.’

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t think you ought to know. It might spoil your crud.’

But Henry’s crud was already spoilt. So was Keynes’s, Wellard’s, Curtis-Brown’s, Hargreaves’s, Mallet’s, Needham’s, Renwick’s, Pellet’s. Forbes-Robinson’s, Bickerstaff’s, Tidewell’s and Willoughby’s.

In the morning, the tremulous thirteen set off down the drive with three bags each, one in their hands, and one under each eye.

Shortly after eight o’clock, they trudged back, sheepish and red-faced, but also relieved, to cheers from the faces at the dormitory windows. It turned out that the doctor was Hertford-Jones’s older brother.

That night, in South Africa, Nattrass explained that the ritual of the thirteen circumcisees of Orange House went back over a hundred years. It was mildly unpleasant when it happened to you, perhaps, but a real hoot in the years to come.

‘But even Mr Satchel pretended it was true,’ said Henry, puzzled.

‘It’s a tradition,’ explained Nattrass, but he wasn’t sure that Henry understood.

In the next weeks, a chain of events occurred concerning Henry’s
parentage
.

When Paul had said that his father was a brain surgeon, Henry had only half believed it. He had said that his father was a test pilot on impulse, half thinking that he was involved in a joke routine. But Paul’s father
was
a brain surgeon. Henry hoped that Paul had forgotten that his father was supposed to be a test pilot.

The first link in the chain was forged during a French lesson, given by Mr Wrigley (Sweaty W). His classroom was light and airy, in the Bauhaus block.

‘No, Mallender,’ said Sweaty W. ‘It’s a
pris
. The perfect of
prendre
takes
avoir
, as in “
Le mecanicien a pris le livre tout de suite
”.’ Sweaty W wrote the sentence on the blackboard. ‘What does that mean, Pratt?’ he said.

Henry’s heart sank.

‘The mechanic…’ he began.

‘Yes?’

‘The mechanic has put the hare all over the furniture.’

‘Are you trying to be funny, Pratt?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Hargreaves?’

‘The mechanic…has taken…the book…at once,’ said Paul, pretending that he found it difficult, so as not to humiliate his friend.

‘The mechanic took the book at once,’ said Sweaty W. ‘What did you learn in French at your prep school, Pratt?’

‘How to take out tonsils and gall-stones, sir.’

‘What???’

‘He means he went to Brasenose College, sir,’ said Mallender.

Sweaty W stared at Mallender.

‘What?’ he said.

‘The French master at Brasenose is a failed doctor, sir. He spends most of his time telling the boys how to do operations, in English,’ said Mallender. ‘My father teaches English there.’

Henry stared at Mallender in surprise, and wondered if he’d ever had to copy out the whole of Keats’ ‘Endymion’.

Sweaty W believed in improvisation, to give a certain vitality and edge to his French lessons. Should a window-cleaner ever fall off his ladder and drop head-first past the window onto the
asphalt
, no boy would have been allowed to go to his assistance until the class had produced the French for ‘a window-cleaner has just fallen off his ladder and dropped head-first past the window onto the asphalt’.

‘In French, Mallender,’ said Sweaty W now. ‘In French. My father is an English teacher.’

‘
Mon père est un professeur de l’Anglais
.’

‘Yes, though perhaps
professeur
’s putting it a big high for Brasenose College, and the French don’t use
un
before an occupation. It’s “
Mon père est professeur
”.’

They went briefly round the class then, saying what their fathers did. ‘
Mon père est fermier.’ ‘Mon père est aussi fermier
.’ (‘No, he isn’t, Fuller.’ ‘I know, sir, but I don’t know the French for estate agent.’) ‘
Mon père est…il
…he’s a lawyer, sir.’ (‘
Votre père est avocat
, Tremlett.’) ‘
Mon père a laissé mon mère pour cinq ans
.’ (‘It’s
ma mère
, and
depuis cinq ans
, and I’m sorry, Bairstow.’) ‘
Mon père
. . .’ Henry hesitated. Did Paul remember that he’d said that his father was a test pilot? Whether Paul remembered or not, should he now tell the truth? How could he, since he didn’t know the French for a cutler, or a maker of penknives? Wasn’t it an academic point, since he didn’t know the French for test pilot either? Wouldn’t it be simpler just to say that his father was dead?

‘
Il essaye les avions
,’ said Paul. ‘He’s a test pilot, sir.’

‘
Votre père est pilote d’essai
, Pratt,’ said Sweaty W.

Fair enough, thought Henry.

The second link occurred in Dalton Town. Boys were allowed into the town at certain times, and one of Henry’s duties as a fag was to shop for Lampo Davey and Tosser Pilkington-Brick. On this occasion, as it chanced, he required writing paper, envelopes, instant coffee, condensed milk, drinking chocolate, a loaf and a tin of sardines.