Vintage Stuff (2 page)

They passed along the Chapel cloisters to the back of the squash court and were greeted by a
volley of shots. A dozen boys with rifles were lying on the ground firing at targets in a
small-bore rifle range.

'Ah, Major,' said the Headmaster to a dapper man who was slapping a swagger stick against
highly polished riding boots, 'I'd like to introduce Mr Clyde-Browne whose son will be joining us
next term.'

'Splendid, splendid,' said the Major, switching his swagger stick to his left arm and shaking
Mr Clyde-Browne's hand while managing almost at the same time to order the boys to down rifles,
unload, remove bolts and apply pull-throughs. 'Your boy a keen shot?'

'Very,' said Mr Clyde-Browne, remembering the incident with Mrs Worksop's cat. 'In fact, I
think he's quite good.'

'Splendid. Having pulled-through, apply an oily rag.' The boys followed his instructions and
oiled barrels.

'I'll leave the Major to show you round,' said the Headmaster and disappeared. Presently, when
rifles had been inspected and the little column moved off to the Armoury, Mr Clyde-Browne found
himself being taken on a conducted tour of the Assault Course. A high brick wall with ropes
hanging down it was succeeded by a muddy ditch, more ropes suspended from trees across a gulley,
a barbed-wire entanglement, a narrow tunnel half-filled with water, and finally, built on the
edge of a quarry, a wooden tower from which a tight wire hawser slanted down to a stake some
thirty yards away.

'Death Slide,' explained the Major, 'Put a toggle rope in water so it won't burn, loop it over
the wire, grasp firmly with both hands and away you go.'

Mr Clyde-Browne peered nervously over the edge at the rocks some fifty feet below. He could
see exactly why it was called a Death Slide. 'Don't you have a great many accidents?' he asked,
'I mean what happens when they hit that iron stake at the bottom?'

'Don't,' said the Major. 'Feet touch down first and they let go. Put them through parachute
landing technique first. Keep knees supple and roll over on the left shoulder.'

'I see,' said Mr Clyde-Browne dubiously, and refused the Major's offer to try it himself.

'Then there's rock-climbing. We're very good there. Lead boy goes up first and fixes the guide
rope and after they've had some training we can get a squad up in two minutes.'

'Amazing,' said Mr Clyde-Browne, 'And you've never had an accident?'

'Couple of broken legs once in a while but they'd get that anyway on the rugger field. In
fact, I think it's fair to say that the boys taking this course are less likely to do themselves
an injury than inflict some pretty nasty ones on other people.'

They went into the gym and watched a demonstration of unarmed combat. By the time it was over,
Mr Clyde-Browne had made up his mind. Whatever else Groxbourne might fail to provide, it would
guarantee Peregrine's entry into the Army. He returned to the Headmaster's study well
content.

'Right, well I think we'll put him in Mr Glodstone's house,' said the Headmaster, as Mr
Clyde-Browne took out his cheque-book 'Marvellous with boys, Glodstone. And as for fees...'

'I'll pay in advance for three years.'

The Headmaster looked at him quizzically. 'You wouldn't rather wait and see if he finds our
atmosphere suits him?'

But Mr Clyde-Browne was adamant. Having got Peregrine into what approximated to a Public
School, he had no intention of having him expelled. 'I've added a thousand pounds for the Chapel
Restoration Fund,' he said, 'I noticed you're making an appeal.'

And having written out a cheque for ten thousand pounds, he left in an ebullient mood. He had
been particularly heartened to learn that the Overactive Underachiever's Course extended into the
summer holidays when Major Fetherington took the group to North Wales for 'a spot of
mountaineering and cross-country compass marching'.

'It will give us a chance to get away on our own,' Mr Clyde-Browne thought happily as he drove
South. But this was not the argument he used to persuade his wife, who had learned from a friend
that Groxbourne was the last school she'd send her son to.

'Elspeth says it's a brutal place and the boys are nearly all farmers sons and the teaching is
appalling.'

'It's either Groxbourne or the local Comprehensive.'

'But there must be other schools...'

'There are. A great many, but they won't take Peregrine. Now if you want your son to mix with
a lot of teenage tarts at the Comprehensive, you've merely to say the word.'

Mrs Clyde-Browne didn't. It was one of her most ingrained beliefs that only the working class
sent their children to Comprehensives and Peregrine must never be allowed to pick up their
deplorable habits.

'It seems such a shame we can't afford a private tutor,' she whined, but Mr Clyde-Browne was
not to be deflected.

'The boy has got to learn to stand on his own feet and face up to the realities of life. He
won't do that by staying at home and being mollycoddled by you and some down-at-heel unemployable
posing as a private tutor.' A remark which said as much for his own view of the world's awful
reality as it did for his apparent conviction that Peregrine had spent the first fifteen years of
his life standing on other people's two feet or perched on one of his own.

'Well, I like that,' said Mrs Clyde-Browne with some spirit.

'And I don't,' continued her husband, working himself up into a defensive fury. 'If it hadn't
been for your insistence on bringing him up like a china doll, he wouldn't be the idiot he is
now. But no, it had to be "Peregrine do this and Peregrine do that" and "Don't get your clothes
dirty, Peregrine." Come to think of it, it's a wonder the boy has half a mind to call his
own.'

In this he was being unfair. Peregrine's peculiarities owed as much of their bias to his
father as to his mother. Mr Clyde-Browne's career as a solicitor with court experience disposed
him to divide the world up into the entirely innocent and the wholly guilty, with no states of
uncertainty in between. Peregrine had imbibed his rigid ideas of good and bad from his father and
had had them reinforced by his mother. Mrs Clyde-Browne's social pretensions and her refusal to
think the worst of anyone in their circle of acquaintances, all of whom must be nice because the
Clyde-Brownes knew them, had limited the range of the entirely good to Virginia Water and the
entirely bad to everywhere else. Television had done nothing to broaden his outlook. His parents
had so severely censored his viewing to programmes that showed cowboys and policeman in the best
light, while Redskins and suspects were shown in the worst, that Peregrine had been spared any
uncertainties or moral doubts. To be brave, truthful, honest and ready to kill anyone who wasn't
was to be good: to be anything less was to be bad.

It was with these impeccable prejudices that he was driven up to Groxbourne and handed over to
Mr Glodstone by his parents who showed truly British stoicism in parting with their son. In Mr
Clyde-Browne's case there was no need for self-control, but his wife's feelings expressed
themselves as soon as they had left the school grounds. She had been particularly perturbed by
the housemaster.

'Mr Glodstone looked such a peculiar man, she whimpered through her tears.

'Yes,' said Mr Clyde-Browne brusquely and refrained from pointing out that any man prepared to
spend his life trying to combine the duties of a zoo-keeper, a prison warder and a teacher to
half-wits could hardly be expected to look normal.

'I mean, why was he wearing a monocle in front of a glass eye?'

'Probably to save himself from seeing too clearly with the other one,' said Mr Clyde-Browne
enigmatically and left her to puzzle over the remark until they got home.

'I just hope Peregrine is going to be happy,' she said as they turned into Pinetree Lane. 'If
he isn't, I want you to promise me...'

'He'll go to the Comprehensive school,' said Mr Clyde-Browne, and put an end to the
discussion.

But Mrs Clyde-Browne's fears were groundless. Peregrine was perfectly happy. Unlike more
sensitive boys, who found the school an intimation of hell, he was in his element. This was in
large measure due to his size. At fifteen, Peregrine was almost six feet tall, weighed eleven
stone and, thanks to the misguided advice of a physics teacher at his prep school who had
observed that even if he did a hundred press-ups every morning, he still wouldn't understand the
theory of gravity, he was also immensely strong. At Groxbourne, size and strength
mattered.

Founded in the latter half of the nineteenth century by a hopelessly optimistic clergyman to
bring Anglo-Catholic fervour to the local farmers' sons, the school had remained so obscure and
behind the times that its traditions were those of an earlier age. There was fagging and beating
and a good deal of bullying. There were also prefects, the ritual of morning and evening chapel,
cold showers, draughty dormitories and wholesome, if inedible, food. In short, Groxbourne
maintained the routine of its founder without achieving his ambitions. For Peregrine, these
abstract considerations had no meaning. It was enough that he was too hefty to bully at all
safely, that the school bell chimed at regular intervals throughout the day to tell him that a
lesson had ended or lunch was about to begin, and that he never had to think what he was supposed
to be doing.

Best of all, his tendency to take things literally was appreciated. In any case, no master
ever encouraged him to take his time. It was always, 'Now shut up and get on with it.' And
Peregrine got on with it to such an extent that for the first time in his life he found himself
nearer the top of the class than the bottom.

But it was on the games field that his ability to take things literally paid off. In rugby, he
hurled himself into scrums with a lack of fear that won him a place in the Junior XV and the
admiration of the coach, himself a Welshman and well qualified to judge murderous tactics.

'I've never seen a youngster like him,' Mr Evans told Glodstone after a match in which
Peregrine had followed instructions to the letter by putting the boot in, heeling the ball out
with a fury that suggested he intended taking the opposing pack's with it, and tackling a
fly-half so ferociously that the fellow was carried off the field with concussion while Peregrine
claimed his shorts as a trophy.

It was the same with boxing. Peregrine brought a violence to the sport that terrified his
opponents and alarmed the instructor. 'When I said, "Now let's see who can shove the other
bloke's teeth through his tonsils," I didn't mean belt the blighter when he's unconscious,' he
protested, after Peregrine, having knocked another boy stone-cold, proceeded to hold him against
the ropes with one hand while punching him repeatedly in the mouth with the other.

Even Major Fetherington was impressed. Mr Clyde-Browne's boast that his son was a keen shot
proved true. Peregrine had an unerring eye. On the small-bore range his bullets so seldom missed
the bull that the Major, suspecting he was missing the target with all but one, put up a large
paper screen behind it and was amazed to find he was wrong. All Peregrine's bullets hit the bull.
And the Assault Course held no terrors for him. He scaled the brick wall with remarkable agility,
dropped cheerfully into the muddy ditch, swung across the gully, and squirmed through the
waterlogged tunnel without a qualm. Only the Death Slide caused him some problems. It wasn't that
he found difficulty sliding down it, clinging to a toggle rope, but that he misunderstood the
Major's instruction to return to the starting point and proceeded to climb back up the wire
hawser hand over hand. By the time he was halfway up and hanging forty feet above the rocks at
the bottom of the quarry, the Major was no longer looking and had closed his eyes in prayer.

'Are you all right, sir?' Peregrine asked when he reached the top. The Major opened his eyes
and looked at him with a mixture of relief and fury. 'Boy,' he said, 'This is supposed to be an
Assault Course, not a training ground for trapeze artists and circus acrobats. Do you understand
that?'

'Yes, sir,' said Peregrine.

'Then in future you will do exactly what you are told.'

'Yes, sir. But you said to return to...'

'I know what I said and I don't need reminding,' shouted the Major and cancelled the rest of
the afternoon's training to get his pulse back to normal. Two days later, he was to regret his
outburst. He returned from a five mile cross-country run in the rain to discover that Peregrine
was missing.

'Did any of you boys see where he got to?' he asked the little group of exhausted Overactive
Underachievers when they assembled in the changing room.

'No, sir. He was with us when we reached the bottom of Leignton Gorge. You remember he asked
you something.'

The Major looked out on the darkening sky it had begun to snow and seemed to recall Peregrine
asking him if he could swim the river instead of using the bridge. Since the question had been
put when the Major had just stumbled over a stone into a patch of stinging nettles, he couldn't
remember his answer. He had an idea it had been abrupt.

'Oh, well, if he isn't back in half an hour, we'll have to send out a search party and notify
the police,' he muttered and went up to his room to console himself over a brandy with the
thought that Clyde-Browne had probably drowned in the river. Twelve hours later his hopes and
fears were proved to be unfounded. The police, using Alsatians, had discovered Peregrine
sheltering quite cheerfully in a barn ten miles away.

'But you definitely told me to get lost, sir,' he explained when he was brought back to the
school at five in the morning.

Major Fetherington fought for words. 'But I didn't mean you...' he began.

'And the other day you said I was to do exactly what you told me to,' continued Peregrine.