The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler (32 page)

As I was approaching Easy Bridge the mist began to clear slightly so that I found I could now see about a hundred or so yards in front of me. Ahead of me on the track, and barely visible, two people were walking in the same direction as myself, their backs to me. Poor runner that I was, I was overtaking them rapidly and was almost upon them before I realised who they were. A huge bareheaded, white haired old man in a thick black overcoat was walking beside a slim, dark, curly-haired boy in school dress. It was Bloody Bill and Tristram. I stopped running, not wanting to overtake them and risk being recognised. The sight of them together filled me with perplexity and fear. It was bad enough that they should be together, but the horror of it was, they were holding hands.

Even now I cannot fully explain to myself the revulsion I felt. Let me state quite clearly that I did not believe then, nor do I now, that anything like a physical intimacy existed between them. No, what shocked me, I think, was simply the sheer strangeness, the unlikelihood of it all: that this monstrous old man should hold hands with anyone, let alone a fourteen-year-old boy, and that the boy should consent to be held. It sickened me then and, sad to say, it still does.

I cannot exactly remember what I did then, but I know that I turned aside and ran back the way I had come. That day I offended my small, conscientious, unadventurous spirit by ticking a box against my name on the house notice board to declare that I had reached Easy Bridge when I had not.

The following Sunday Bloody Bill came to lunch at my house, joining R.F.N. and the senior boys on the top table. From my lowly vantage point I kept my eye on him throughout the meal, and I think that once he noticed my doing so. He did not appear to say much, but I noticed that he ate and drank voraciously. Later that day I found myself in a position to ask one of those who had lunched at the top table, a boy called Dennis, about the occasion.

‘It was rather unexciting, I’m afraid,’ said Dennis. ‘No famous flogging anecdotes. The one thing that seems to interest Bloody Bill is rowing, so of course Straker, being in the Eight and our resident rowing hero, got his full attention. I can’t say I envied him being subjected to those famous X-ray eyes. Straker of course thinks that Bloody Bill was after his body. Typical Straker vanity. I can’t really see why My Tutor wanted to have him to lunch. Mrs My Tutor says it’s because he feels sorry for Bloody Bill, but I can’t say that’s the impression I got. My Tutor was terribly nervy and jumpy with the old bugger.’

‘Perhaps Bloody Bill knows some frightful secret in My Tutor’s past and is blackmailing him,’ I suggested light-heartedly.

‘You keep your ideas to yourself, please,’ said Dennis, suddenly recollecting his seniority.

About a week later I returned from a run to Easy Bridge to find my room occupied by three boys from my house, Ker, Bullard and Pemberton-Pigott. These three were only a year ahead of me but they were good games players and had set themselves up as arbiters of all that was right and proper in the house. You were either with them or you were an outsider, as a result of which they exerted a kind of unofficial jurisdiction over the manners and morals of anyone junior to them. From the way they were seated on my furniture, I could tell that I was about to be the victim of a tribunal, probably on the subject of my lack of ‘keenness’ at games.

‘What’s this about?’ I said with an attempt at defiance. The answer I received was quite unexpected.

‘We saw your friend Ronaldson having a queer-up with Bloody Bill,’ said Bullard.

‘What!’

‘Yes. They were holding hands on Sheep’s Bridge.’

‘Holding hands is not having a queer-up,’ I countered.

‘Are you the expert on queer-ups then?’ said Ker who had a kind of subtlety that his beefy appearance belied.

‘Bloody Bill is an old man.’

‘That’s what makes it even more disgusting. God! A queer-up with an old man! Ugh! So you approve of queer-ups so long as it’s with old men, do you? God! What kind of a perv are you?’

This was clearly going to be one of those arguments you could never win, so I grabbed a towel and left my own room, to much jeering and laughter from the tribunal. By the time I had returned from a shower, Ker, Bullard and Pemberton-Pigott had gone, but their suspicion and disapproval remained behind like a miasma.

I decided to see Tristram at once. I knew how rumours could spread in the school, and how easy it was to be tarnished with guilt by association. My motives were cowardly and dishonourable, but I told myself that I was going to warn Tristram to curtail his association with Bloody Bill for his own good.

I found him in his room. He was engaged in rolling a pair of dice and writing down the result of each throw in a notebook. I cannot recall what I said to him exactly, I suspect that it was feeble, but he listened patiently as he continued to throw his dice. There was a silence when I had finished, then Tristram said, with apparent inconsequentiality:

‘My pa was afraid of him, but I’m not.’

By now I was ashamed of what I had said so I asked him:

‘Was your father beaten up by him, then?’

‘Oh yes, but it wasn’t just that. Apparently the reason why Bloody Bill was such a holy terror was that he always seemed to know exactly what you were up to. People actually began to think he had some sort of psychic power. Of course that was all bollocks. My father started to get suspicious when he found that his copy of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, which naturally he kept hidden, was missing—a signed limited edition on handmade paper too! Would be worth a bomb today. Bloody Bill was a terrible prude about that sort of thing, you see. Anyway, pa began to suspect that Bloody Bill was poking about in chaps’ rooms when they were out. So he used to fix hairs across the lid of his burry to see if Bloody Bill had been prying. The hairs were often broken but of course there was nothing he could prove. Would you like to have tea with him by the way?’

‘What! Bloody Bill?’

‘Of course. He lives a couple of miles away in a little house in Dorney Wick. We could bicycle out there next half holiday. He’s promised to help us out with the Egyptological society.’

My astonishment had not robbed me of all sense. I knew that Tristram had issued a challenge and that if I refused to take it up he would despise me and I would lose his friendship altogether. Reluctantly I agreed to accompany him, but I had no heart for the adventure.

The following Thursday, I went to My Tutor and obtained permission to visit Dorney Wick by bicycle. When I told him where we were going R.F.N. scrutinised me wordlessly for a while, putting his head only a few inches from mine, a habit of his which I found disconcerting rather than alarming as the proximity of his face was due more to acute myopia than a desire to intimidate. Finally he simply nodded and dismissed me.

It was raining when Tristram and I set out, a slight drizzle only, but enough to lower my spirits and expectations still further. Dorney Wick, a few miles from Eton, is a dull, desultory hamlet that trails along a winding road in the flat meadows of the Thames Valley. The houses were all of brick the colour of dried blood and built at the turn of the last century. Bloody Bill’s house was an isolated detached villa with narrow Gothic windows. It reminded me of an elaborate Victorian mausoleum. There was a short gravel drive up to a front door which had a wooden gabled porch painted dark green. The little front garden was dominated by laurels and other shiny-leaved shrubs which glistened and dripped with the recently abated rain.

Tristram hauled on a bell pull in the porch and I heard a faint clanking from the bowels of the house. Presently the door was opened by a small, bony old woman in an overall whom I took to be Bloody Bill’s housekeeper but later discovered was his wife. Without a word she showed us into the front parlour where Bloody Bill was seated upright in a tall wing chair facing the door.

I had the impression that he had been awaiting our arrival for some time, like a cat at a mouse hole. Tristram began to be very voluble and cheerful, a little more than was quite natural, presenting me to Bloody Bill with elaborate and jocular formality. Bloody Bill made no move but nodded and said: ‘Ah, yes. I have heard a great deal about you,’ words that have always made me feel uneasy.

It was as if Tristram were putting the old man on display for my benefit. He rallied Bloody Bill and eventually persuaded him to show me the many curiosities he had in the room. Besides shelves full of books, mostly Oxford Classical Texts and the occasional Loeb, there were several glass-fronted cabinets full of meticulously arranged objects. Bloody Bill was an eclectic rather than a monomaniacal collector. There were trays of bird’s eggs, impaled butterflies and the bleached skulls of small mammals and reptiles; there were a dozen or so late Imperial Roman coins embedded in dark blue velvet; there was a case of fossils and coprolites. Bloody Bill had something to say on all of these items, but he seemed chiefly interested in interrogating us, gauging the extent of our ignorance and commenting upon it with a kind of sour humour. Tristram showed a very creditable range of knowledge; I was a dunce by comparison.

Presently I noticed that Tristram was becoming restless. Finally he burst out with the words: ‘Come on, sir. Show us your Egyptian stuff. You promised you would, sir, last time I was here.’ I saw a look of pure rage pass across Bloody Bill’s face. He stood for a few moments motionless staring at Tristram, evidently trying to intimidate him, but he did not succeed. For some reason unknown to me Tristram’s will prevailed. Bloody Bill moved towards a black lacquer cabinet which stood against one wall, then opened it with a key from his watch chain. Within the cabinet were two deep shelves lined with pale yellow velvet.

On the lower shelf were four Canopic jars in which, according to the customs of Ancient Egypt, after embalming, the viscera of the deceased were placed, their tops made in the shape of the heads of the four sons of Horus. Bloody Bill had the complete set, one each for the liver, intestines, stomach and lungs. These were impressive enough, but it was the two items on the top shelf which attracted our greatest admiration.

The first was a black bronze statuette, no more than eight inches high, of the jackal-headed god Anubis. He was standing, the left foot extended stiffly in front of the right, in the conventional marching pose. Yet there was something about the set of the god’s bestial head which was thrust unusually far forward, that gave the statue a disturbing, aggressive dynamism.

‘Anubis, the psychopomp,’ said Bloody Bill. Then, turning to us, he said. ‘Do you know what that means?’

‘Conductor of souls to the land of the dead,’ said Tristram as if irritated to be asked such a simple question.

Bloody Bill nodded and took down the second object with great tenderness. It was an ancient terracotta model of a boat, almost a foot long with flakes of paint still clinging to its surface. It was a marvellous object and must have been, like his other Egyptian curios, perhaps as much as three thousand years old. Prow and stern were fashioned in the form of the cow-headed Hathor, guardian of cemeteries. The boat was populated with about twenty figures in all: in the prow eight of them were in the posture of rowers though their oars were missing. Under a canopy in the centre of the boat three or four persons of indeterminate sex reclined and appeared to be playing some kind of board game. In the stern in front of the steersman a half-human creature knelt with arms raised aloft, making a supplicating gesture.

‘Presented to me by the Boat Club when I retired as their coach,’ said Bloody Bill. ‘It was very generous of them, but I doubt if they knew what they were giving me. Do you?’

‘It’s a Neshmet boat, of course,’ said Tristram almost contemptuously.

‘It is a Neshmet boat, as you say. A boat in which the souls of the dead are conducted to the infernal regions. Perhaps Boats did know the significance and were wishing me a speedy journey to the nether world. If that is the case they have been sorely disappointed. It is over twenty years since I was presented with it. Now then, shall we have a dish of tea and play a hand or two of cards?’

Swiftly and delicately Bloody Bill picked up the Neshmet boat, restored it to its place on the shelf and locked the cabinet. We would have liked to stare at it for longer, but he had decided that the entertainment was over.

At that moment, as if responding to a secret signal, Mrs Hexham entered the room with three cups of tea on a tray and a plate of uninteresting looking biscuits. She deposited them on a card table and left without a word. With a little grunt of annoyance Bloody Bill moved the tea to another table, set the card table between us three and took out two packs of cards from one of its drawers. As he was shuffling these he asked me how much money I had on me.

I owned up to seven-and-sixpence. He nodded to Tristram who went to a japanned tin box which stood on the bureau. In it were piles of silver threepenny pieces which had long since ceased to be legal tender. Reluctantly I handed over my seven-and-sixpence and received in return the appropriate number of these makeshift gambling counters. Tristram was made to cash in a ten shilling note with almost as much reluctance.

I cannot now remember the names of the card games we played—Bezique? Gin Rummy? Canasta? Piquet? Vingt-et-un?—I know we played several, but they are just names to me now. What remains with me is the manner in which Bloody Bill played: greedily, with a skill and speed that utterly defeated me. He played only to win, and he did. By the end of an hour or so my seven-and-six, which I could barely afford to lose, was all gone. Tristram lost too but not as quickly or as comprehensively as I had. Bloody Bill looked at me in triumph, then sidelong at Tristram.

‘I am afraid that our friend has been soundly thrashed,’ he said. ‘What say we give him five shillings on account in return for an I.O.U?’

Tristram looked embarrassed. I was silent.

‘Don’t you want your revenge?’ he asked me mockingly, as if the possibility of my obtaining it was too remote to be anything other than laughable. I shook my head and muttered something about being late for Absence, the roll-call that was held at the end of a half-holiday. Tristram rose too, also eager to go, and Bloody Bill grudgingly released us.