Vintage Stuff (3 page)

'God help us,' said the Major.

'Yes sir,' said Peregrine, and went off with the School Sister to the Sanatorium.

But if his consistency was a pain in the neck to the Major, his popularity with the boys
remained high. Not only was Peregrine never bullied, but he guaranteed the safety of other new
boys who could always look to him to fight for them. And thanks to his size and his looks his
battered appearance as a baby had been aggravated by boxing not even the most frustrated sixth
former found him sexually inviting. In short, Peregrine was as prodigiously a model public
schoolboy as he had previously been a model child. It was this extraordinary quality that first
drew the attention of Mr Glodstone to him and shaped his destiny.

Mrs Clyde-Browne had been right in her assessment of the housemaster. Mr Glodstone was
peculiar. The son of a retired Rear-Admiral of such extreme right-wing views that he had
celebrated the blitz on London by holding a firework display on Guy Fawkes Night, 1940, Gerald
Glodstone had lost not only the presence of his father, but that of his own left eye, thanks to
the patriotic if inept efforts of a gamekeeper who had aimed a rocket at his employer and missed.
With the eye went Glodstone's hopes of pursuing a naval career. Rear-Admiral Glodstone went with
the police to be interned on the Isle of Man where he died two year later. The subsequent
punitive death duties had left his son practically penniless. Mr Glodstone had been forced to
take up teaching.

'A case of arrested development,' had been the Headmaster's verdict at the time and it had
proved true. Mr Glodstone's only qualifications as a teacher, apart from the fact that his late
father had been Chairman of the Board of Governors at Groxbourne, had been his ability to read,
write and speak English with an upper-class accent. With the wartime shortage of schoolmasters,
these had been enough. Besides, Glodstone was an enthusiastic cricketer and gave the school some
social cachet by teaching fencing. He was also an excellent disciplinarian and had only to switch
his monocle from his glass eye to his proper one to put the fear of God up the most unruly class.
By the end of the war, he had become part of the school and too remarkable a personage to lose.
Above all, he got on well with the boys in a wholesome way and shared their interests. A model
railway addict, he had brought his own elaborate track and installed it in the basement of the
gym where surrounded by his 'chaps' he lived out in miniature his earliest ambition without the
ghastly fatalities that would evidently have resulted from its fulfilment on a larger scale.

It was the same with his intellectual interests. Mr Glodstone's mental age was, as far as
literature was concerned, about fourteen. He never tired of reading and re-reading the classic
adventure stories of his youth and in his mind's eye, forever searching for a more orthodox hero
than his father on whom to model himself, found one in each old favorite. He was by turns
D'Artagnan, Richard Hannay, Sherlock Holmes, The Scarlet Pimpernel (who accounted for his
monocle), and Bulldog Drummond, anyone in fiction who was a courageous and romantic defender of
the old, the good and the true, against the new, the wicked and the false, as he and their
authors judged these things.

In psychological terms, it could be said that Mr Glodstone suffered from a chronic identity
problem, which he solved by literary proxy. Here again, he shared his enthusiasms with the boys,
and if his teaching of English literature was hardly calculated to get them through O-level, let
alone A, it had at least the merit of being exciting and easily understood by even the dullest
fifteen-year-old. Year after year, Groxbourne turned out school leavers imbued with the
unshakeable belief that the world's problems, and particularly the demise of the British Empire,
stemmed from a conspiracy of unwashed Bolsheviks, Jews in high finance and degenerate Black men
and Germans with hooded eyelids who tapped their fingers on their knees when at all agitated. In
their view, and that of Mr Glodstone, what was needed was a dedicated band of wealthy young men
who were prepared to reinforce the law by 'going outside it' to the extent of bayonetting
left-wing politicians in their own cellars or, in more extreme cases, tossing them into baths
filled with nitric acid. That they didn't put Bulldog Drummond's remedies into practice was
largely due to lack of opportunity and the need to get up at dawn to do the milking and go to bed
before the criminal world was fully awake. But above all, they were saved by their own lack of
imagination and later by the good sense of their wives.

Mr Glodstone was less encumbered. His imagination, growing wilder with age, could imbue the
most commonplace events with arcane significance, and successive school matrons with charms they
most certainly did not possess. He was only prevented from proposing to them by an exaggerated
sense of his own social standing. Instead, he was sexually self-sufficient, felt guilty about his
partially enacted fantasies and did his damnedest to exorcise them by taking a cold bath every
morning, summer and winter. During the holidays, he visited one or other of his numerous and, in
some cases, still wealthy relatives or followed, as far as changed circumstances allowed, in the
footsteps of his fictional heroes.

Thus, like Richard Hannay in The Thirty-Nine Steps, though without the incentive of a murdered
man in his rooms, he took the morning train from London to Scotland and spent several exceedingly
uncomfortable nights trying to sleep in the heather, before deciding he was more likely to catch
pneumonia than find adventure in such a bleak and rain-sodden part of the world. The following
summer he had followed Richard Chandos' route to Austria, this time on a motorcycle, in the hope
of locating The Great Well at Wagensburg, only to discover Carinthia was packed with coach-loads
of tourists and German holiday makers. Mr Glodstone retreated to side roads and walked forest
paths in a vain attempt to invest the area with its old magic. And so, each summer, he made
another pilgrimage to the setting of an adventure story and came home disappointed but with a
more fanatical gleam in his eye. One day he would impose the reality of his literary world on
that of the existing one. In fact, by the time Peregrine came under his care, it was extremely
doubtful if the housemaster had any idea what decade he was living in. The rolling stock and
carriages of his model railway suggested the nineteen-twenties with their Wagons Lits and Pullman
cars which were all pulled by steam engines.

But his proudest and most dangerous possession, acquired from a dead uncle, was a 1927
Bentley, in which, until he was asked by the Headmaster to spare the school a multiple tragedy,
he terrified a few favoured boys and every other road-user by hurtling at tremendous speed along
narrow country lanes and through neighbouring villages.

'But it was built for speed and eats the miles,' Glodstone protested, 'You won't find a car to
equal it on the road today.'

'Mercifully,' said the Headmaster, 'and it can eat as many miles as it wants out of term time,
but I'm not having the School Sanatorium turned into a mass morgue as a result of your insane
driving.'

'Just as you say, Headmaster,' said Glodstone and he had kept the Bentley in immaculate
condition, locked away in his garage, awaiting the day when it would, as he put it, come into its
own.

With the arrival of Peregrine Clyde-Browne at Groxbourne, that day seemed to have come closer.
Mr Glodstone had found the perfect disciple, a boy endowed with the physique, courage and mental
attributes of a genuine hero. From the moment he had caught Peregrine in the school bogs beating
Soskins Major to a pulp for forcing a fag to wipe his arse for him, Mr Glodstone had known that
his involuntary calling had not been wasted.

But, with a discretion that came from having seen what had happened to several masters in the
past who had shown too early an interest in particular boys, he demonstrated his own impartiality
by speaking to the House prefects. 'I want you chaps to keep an eye on Clyde-Browne,' he told
them, 'we can't have him getting too big for his boots. I've known too many fellows spoilt
because they're good at games and so on. Popularity goes to their heads and they begin to think
they're the cat's whiskers, what!'

For the rest of the term, Peregrine's presumed ambition to be any part of the cat's anatomy
was eradicated. When he wasn't doing a thousand lines for not polishing a prefect's shoes
properly he was presenting his backside to the Head of House wielding a chalked cane for talking
in dormitory after Lights Out, when he hadn't been, or for taking too long in the showers. In
short, Peregrine was subjected to a baptism of punishment that would have caused a normally
sensitive boy to run away or have a nervous breakdown. Peregrine did neither. He endured. It
simply never crossed his mind that he was being singled out for special treatment. It was only
when he was accused of a singularly beastly sin against Nature by the Matron, who had found blood
on his pyjama trousers, that he was forced to explain.

'It's just that I got twelve strokes yesterday and eight the day before,' he said. 'A chap
can't help bleeding.'

'You mean you've had twenty strokes since Tuesday?' said the Matron, utterly appalled.

'You can count them if you like,' said Peregrine matter-of-factly. 'Though actually I had
sixteen last week and they're still showing so it'll be difficult to sort them out.'

Half an hour later, after his backside had been inspected by the Matron and the doctor,
Peregrine was lying face down in bed in the San. and the Headmaster had sent for Mr Glodstone.
Since he was rather more progressive than his predecessor and held strong views on corporal
punishment, and had been waiting to have a row with Glodstone, the meeting was acrimonious.

'Do you realize we could be sued for damages for what's been done to that poor boy?' he
demanded.

'I don't see how,' said, Glodstone, lighting his pipe nonchalantly. 'Clyde-Browne hasn't
complained, has he?'

'Complained? No, he hasn't. Which only goes to show how brutally you run your house. The poor
boy's clearly too terrified to say anything for fear he'll get another thrashing if he does.'

Mr Glodstone blew a smoke ring. 'Is that what he says?'

'No, it isn't. It's what I say and what I mean '

'If he doesn't say it, I don't see how you can argue that he means it,' said Mr Glodstone.
'Why don't you ask him?'

'By God, I will,' said the Headmaster, rising to the bait, 'though I'm not having him
intimidated by your presence. I'll speak to him alone and you'll kindly wait here while I
do.'

And leaving Mr Glodstone to browse through his personal correspondence with a curiosity the
Housemaster would have found disgusting in one of his 'chaps', he marched off to the San. By the
time he returned, Glodstone had put some more wood on the fire, together with two unopened
envelopes for the hell of it, and the Headmaster was forced to temporize. Peregrine had refused
to complain about his treatment and, in spite of the Headmaster's pleading, had said he was jolly
happy in Gloddie's house and anyway, chaps ought to be beaten.

'What did I tell you?' said Glodstone, and sucked noisily on his pipe. 'Boys appreciate a firm
hand. And Clyde-Browne's made of the right stuff.'

'Perhaps,' said the Headmaster morosely. 'But whatever stuff he's made of, I don't want any
more of it beaten this term. It may interest you to know that his father is a leading solicitor
and has paid his son's fees in advance. A man in his position could bring a court action that
would bankrupt the school.'

'Just as you say, Headmaster,' said Glodstone and took his leave, while the Headmaster went
back distraughtly to his depleted correspondence and considered desperate measures for getting
rid of the ghastly Glodstone.

Outside the study, the Housemaster knocked his pipe out into a bowl of hyacinths and returned
to his rooms. There he selected one of his favourite books, Mr Standfast by John Buchan, and took
it up to the San.

'Thought you might like something to read, old chap,' he said to the back of Peregrine's
head.

'Thank you very much, sir,' said Peregrine.

'And jolly good show on your part not letting the side down,' continued Mr Glodstone. 'So when
you've finished that, tell Matron and I'll bring you another.'

The literary infection of Peregrine had begun.

It continued. By the time he was allowed out of the Sanatorium, Peregrine had finished all the
Adventures of Richard Hannay and was well into Bulldog Drummond's. He went home for the holidays
with several volumes from Glodstone's library, a letter from the Headmaster explaining that he
intended to abolish corporal punishment and apologizing for Peregrine having to be beaten at all,
an excellent report on his term's work and a positively glowing testimony from Mr Glodstone. Mr
Clyde-Browne read the Headmaster's letter with mixed feelings and didn't show it to his wife. In
his opinion there was a great deal to be said for beating Peregrine, and in any case, it seemed
to suggest that the brute had at last taken it into his head not to do what he was told. Mr Clyde
Browne took that as a good sign. His views of the excellent report and Glodstone's testimony were
different.

'He seems to be doing extremely well at his work,' said Mrs Clyde-Browne, 'He's got an Alpha
for every subject.'

'One hesitates to think what the Betas must be like,' said Mr Clyde-Browne, who was surprised
to learn that any of the masters at Groxbourne knew enough Greek to use Alpha.

'And Mr Glodstone writes that he has shown remarkable character and is a credit to the
House.'

'Yes,' said Mr Clyde-Browne, 'He also says Peregrine is a born leader and that's a downright
lie if ever I heard one.'

'You just don't have any faith in your own son.'