Vintage Stuff (4 page)

Mr Clyde-Browne shook his head. 'I have every faith in him except when it comes to leading.
Now if that damn fool housemaster thinks...oh, never mind.'

'But I do mind. I mind very much, and I'm thankful that Peregrine has at last found someone
who appreciates his true gifts.'

'If that's all he does appreciate,' said Mr Clyde-Browne with rather nasty emphasis.

'And what exactly does that mean?'

'Nothing. Nothing at all.'

'It does, or you wouldn't have said it.'

'I just find the letter peculiar. And I seem to remember that you found Mr Glodstone peculiar
yourself.'

Mrs Clyde-Browne bridled. 'If you're thinking what I think you're thinking, you've got a
filthier mind than even I would have supposed.'

'Well, it's been known to happen,' said Mr Clyde-Browne, among whose guiltier clients there
had been several seedy schoolmasters.

'Not to Peregrine,' said Mrs Clyde-Browne adamantly, and for once her husband had to agree.
When next day, on the pretence of having to mow the lawn in December, he questioned Peregrine on
the subject, it was clear that he took a robust attitude towards sex.

'Onanism? What's that?' he shouted above the roar of the lawn-mower.

Mr Clyde-Browne adjusted the throttle. 'Masturbation,' he whispered hoarsely, having decided
that auto-eroticism would meet with the same blank look.

'Master who?' said Peregrine.

Mr Clyde-Browne dredged his mind for a word his son would understand and decided not to try
'self-abuse'. 'Wanking,' he said finally with a convulsive spasm. 'How much wanking goes on at
school?'

'Oh, wanking,' Peregrine shouted as the lawn mower destroyed Mr Clyde-Browne's cover by
stopping, 'well, Harrison's are a lot of wankers and Slymne's go in for brown-hatting, but in
Gloddie's we '

'Shut up,' yelled Mr Clyde-Browne, conscious that half the neighbours in Pinetree Lane were
about to be privy to what went on in Gloddie's, 'I don't want to know.'

'I can't see why you asked then,' bawled Peregrine, still evidently under the impression that
the lawnmower was purely incidental to the discussion. 'You asked if there was a lot of wanking
and I was telling you.'

Mr Clyde-Browne dragged lividly at the mower's starting cord.

'Anyway, Gloddie's don't if that's what you're worried about,' continued Peregrine, oblivious
of his father's suffering. 'And when Matron thought I'd been shafted, I told her '

Mr Clyde-Browne wrenched the lawnmower into life again and drowned the rest of the
explanation. It was only later in the garage, and after he'd warned his son that if he raised his
voice above a whisper, he'd live to regret it, that Peregrine finally established his innocence.
He did so in language that appalled his father.

'Where the hell did you learn the term "brown-hatter"?' he demanded.

'I don't know. Everyone uses it about Slymne's.'

'I don't use it,' said Mr Clyde-Browne. 'And what's slime got to do with it. No, don't tell
me, I can guess.'

'Slymne's a shit,' said Peregrine. Mr Clyde-Browne turned the statement over in his mind and
found it grammatically puzzling and distinctly crude.

'I should have thought it was bound to be,' he said finally, 'though why you have to reverse
the order of things and use the indefinite article into the bargain, beats me.'

Peregrine looked bewildered. 'Well, all the other chaps think Slimey's wet and he's sucking up
to the Head. He wears a bow tie.'

'Who does?'

'Mr Slymne.'

'Mr Slymne? Who the hell is Mr Slymne?'

'He's the geography master and there's always been a feud between his house and Gloddie's ever
since anyone can remember.'

'I see,' said Mr Clyde-Browne vaguely. 'Anyway, I don't want you to use foul language in front
of your mother. I'm not paying good money to send you to a school like Groxbourne for the
privilege of having you come home swearing like a trooper.'

But at least Mr Clyde-Browne was satisfied that Mr Glodstone's extraordinary enthusiasm for
his son was not obviously based on sex, though what cause it had he couldn't imagine. Peregrine
appeared to be as obtuse as ever and as unlikely to fulfil the Clyde-Brownes' hopes. But he
seemed to be happy and rudely healthy. Even his mother was impressed by his eagerness to go back
to school at the end of the holidays, and began to revise her earlier opinion of Groxbourne.

'Things must have changed with the new headmaster,' she said, and by the same process which
saw no bad in her acquaintances because she knew them, she now conferred some distinction on
Groxbourne because Peregrine went there. Even Mr Clyde-Browne was relatively satisfied. As he had
predicted, Peregrine stayed on in the summer holidays and allowed his parents to have an
unencumbered holiday by going on Major Fetherington's Fieldcraft and Survival Course in Wales.
And at the end of each term, Peregrine's report suggested that he was doing very well. Only in
Geography was he found to be wanting, and Peregrine blamed that on Mr Slymne. 'He's got it in for
everyone in Gloddie's,' he told his father, 'you can ask anyone.'

'I don't need to. If you will insist on calling the wretched man Slimey, you deserve what you
get. Anyway, I can't see how you can be doing so well in class and fail O-levels at the same
time.'

'Gloddie says O-levels don't matter. It's what you do afterwards.'

'Then Mr Glodstone's notion of reality must be sadly wanting,' said Mr Clyde-Browne. 'Without
qualifications you won't do anything afterwards.'

'Oh, I don't know,' said Peregrine, 'I'm in the First Eleven and the First Fifteen and Gloddie
says if you're good at sports '

'To hell with what Mr Glodstone says,' said Mr Clyde-Browne, and dropped the subject.

His feelings for Glodstone were but a faint echo of those held by Mr Slymne. He loathed
Glodstone. Ever since he had first come to Groxbourne some fifteen years before, Slymne had
loathed him. It was a natural loathing. Mr Slymne had, in his youth, been a sensitive man and to
be christened 'Slimey' in his first week at the school by a one-eyed buffoon with a monocle who
professed openly that a beaten boy was a better boy had, to put it mildly, rankled. Mr Slymne's
view on punishment had been humane and sensible. Glodstone and Groxbourne had changed all that.
In a desperate attempt to gain some respect and to deter his classes from calling him Slimey to
his face, he had devised punishments that didn't include beating. They ranged from running ten
times to the school gates and back, a total distance of some five miles, to learning Wordsworth's
Prelude off by heart and, in extreme cases, missing games. It was this last method that brought
things to a head. Groxbourne might not be noted for its academic standards but rugby and cricket
were another matter, and when boys who were fast bowlers or full-backs complained that they
couldn't play in school matches because Mr Slymne had put them on punishment, the other masters
turned on him.

'But I can't have my authority undermined by being called nicknames to my face,' Slymne
complained at a staff meeting convened after he had put six boys in the First Eleven on
punishment two days before the Bloxham match.

'And I'm damned if I'm going to field a side consisting of more than half the Second Eleven,'
protested the infuriated cricket coach, Mr Doran. 'As it is, Bloxham is going to wipe the floor
with us. I've lost more practice time in the nets this term than any summer since we had the
mumps epidemic in 1952, and then we were in quarantine and couldn't play other schools, so it
didn't matter. Why can't you beat boys like any decent master?'

'I resent that,' said Mr Slymne. 'What has decency to do with beating '

The Headmaster intervened. 'What you don't seem to understand, Mr Slymne, is that it is one of
the occupational facts of teaching life to be given a nickname. I happen to know that mine is
Bruin, because my name is Bear.'

'I daresay,' said Mr Slymne, 'But Bruin's a pleasant name and doesn't undermine your
authority. Slimey does.'

'And do you think I like being called the Orangoutang?' demanded Mr Doran, 'Any more than
Glodstone here enjoys Cyclops or Matron's flattered by being known as Miss World 1914?'

'No,' said Mr Slymne, 'I don't suppose you do, but you don't get called Orangoutang to your
face.'

'Precisely,' said Mr Glodstone. 'Any boy foolish enough to call me Cyclops knows he's going to
get thrashed so he doesn't.'

'I think beating is barbaric,' maintained Mr Slymne, 'It not only brutalizes the boys '

'Boys are brutal. It's in the nature of the beast,' said Glodstone.

'But it also brutalizes masters who do it. Glodstone's a case in point.'

'I really think there's no need to indulge in personal attacks,' said the Headmaster, but Mr
Glodstone waved his defence aside with a nasty smile.

'Wrong again, Slymne. I don't beat. I know my limitations and I leave it to the prefects in my
house to do it for me. An eighteen-year-old has an extremely strong right arm.'

'And I suppose Matron gets boys to do her dirty work for her when she's called Miss World
1914,' said Slymne, fighting back.

Major Fetherington spoke up. 'She doesn't need to. I remember an incident two or three years
ago involving Hoskiss Minor. I think she used a soap enema or was it washing-up liquid? Something
like that. He was off games for a week anyway, poor devil.'

'Which brings us back to the main point of contention,' said the Headmaster. 'The Bloxham
match is the high point in our sporting calendar. It is of social importance for the school too.
A great many parents attend and we'd be doing ourselves no good in their eyes if we allow
ourselves to lose it. I am therefore overriding your ban, Mr Slymne. You will find some less
time-consuming means of imposing your will on the boys. I don't care how you do it, but please
bear in mind that Groxbourne is a games-playing school first and foremost.'

'But surely, Headmaster, the purpose of education is to '

'Build character and moral fibre. You'll find our purpose set out in the Founder's
Address.'

From that moment of defeat, Mr Slymne had suffered further humiliations. He had tried to get a
job at other, more progressive, schools, only to learn that he was regarded as totally unsuitable
precisely because he had taught at Groxbourne. Forced to stay on, he had been despised by the
boys and was made an object of ridicule in the common-room by Mr Glodstone who always referred to
him as 'our precious little conscientious objector.' Mr Slymne fought back more subtly by raising
the level of geography teaching above that of any other subject and, at the same time, exercising
his sarcasm so exclusively on boys from Glodstone's house that they failed their O-levels while
other boys passed.

But the main thrust of his revenge was confined to Glodstone himself and over the years had
developed into almost as demented an obsession as Glodstone's lust for adventure. Mr Slymne's was
more methodical. He observed his enemy's habits closely, made notes about his movements, watched
him through binoculars from his room in the Tower, and kept a dossier of boys to whom Glodstone
spoke most frequently. Originally, he had hoped to catch him out fondling a boy Slymne had bought
a camera with a telescopic lens to record the event incontrovertibly but Glodstone's secret sex
life remained obstinately concealed. He even failed to rise to the bait of several gay magazines
which Mr Slymne had ordered in his name. Glodstone had taken them straight to the Headmaster and
had even threatened to call the police in if he received any more. As a result, Mr Slymne and the
entire school had had to sit through an unusually long sermon on the evils of pornography, the
detrimental effects on sportsmen of masturbation, referred to in the sermon as 'beastliness', and
finally the cowardly practice of writing anonymous letters. The sermon ended on the most sinister
note of all. 'If any of this continues, I shall be forced, however unwillingly, to refer these
matters to the police and the long arm of the law!'

For the first time in his agnostic life, Mr Slymne prayed to God that the sex-shop owner in
Soho to whom he had sent his order wouldn't solicit Mr Glodstone's custom again, and that the
Headmaster's threat wasn't as all-inclusive as it had sounded. It was a view evidently shared by
the boys, whose sex life over the next few days became so restricted that the school laundry was
forced to work overtime.

But it was thanks to this episode that Mr Slymne first glimpsed Mr Glodstone's true weakness.
'The damned scoundrel who sent that stuff ought to have known I only read decent manly books.
Rider Haggard and Henty. Good old-fashioned adventure yarns with none of your filthy modern muck
like Forever Amber,' Glodstone had boasted in the common-room that evening, 'What I say is that
damned poofters ought to have their balls cut off, what!'

'Some of them appear to share your opinion, Glodstone,' said the Chaplain, 'I was reading only
the other day of an extraordinary case where a man actually went through some such operation and
turned himself into a woman. One wonders...'

But Slymne was no longer listening. He put his coffee-cup down and went out with a strange
feeling that he had found the secret of Glodstone's success and his popularity with the boys. The
wretched man was a boy himself, a boy and a bully. For a few extraordinary seconds things
reversed themselves in Mr Slymne's mind; the boys were all adults and the staff were boys, boys
grown larger and louder in their opinions and the authority they wielded but still small, horrid
boys themselves in their innermost being. It was as though they had been stunted in perpetual
adolescence, which explained why they were still at school and hadn't dared the risks and dangers
of the outside world. As he crossed the quad with this remarkable insight, as curious in its
transposition of his previous beliefs as one of the negatives held up to the light in his
darkroom, Mr Slymne felt a sudden relief. He was freed from the responsibilities of his career.
He was no longer a schoolmaster, no longer an elderly thirty-eight, he was eighteen, no, fifteen,
and entitled to a fifteen-year-old's ebullient spirits and unfeeling harshness, but with the
marvellous difference that he had years of adult experience and knowledge on which to rely in his
war with Glodstone. He would destroy the bully before he had finished.