First story in the K City Sagas
It is a scientific fact that the behaviour of adolescent boys and dogs is affected by the weather. Just as blustery winds and the full moon will turn an affectionate poodle into a howling banshee, a hot summer night at the end of term will transform a dormitory of cowed and obedient boarders into a baying wolf pack. In such a night it is advisable to turn down the lamps, lock the windows, and ignore the insistent scratching at the door. It is a pity the bishop did not heed this advice.
Bert Fowles arrived at Saint Cuthbert’s Anglican Boys Hostel in K City halfway through the term. Matron announced to us at dinner that the new boy’s father had just died, and we should “Go easy on the poor orphaned lad.”
Try saying that to a dingo pack when you’re holding a rabbit.
Any boy named Fowles is going to be nicknamed “Chooky” and be greeted by the sound of clucking. Bert had other flaws that marked him out for nicknames: a polio limp that disqualified him from sports (“Hopalong Cassidy”), Coke-bottle glasses for myopia (“Goggle Eyes”), and acne, which he tried to cover up with pink zinc cream (“Max”—as in Factor).
K City was a university town with mick and prod cathedrals and expensive boarding schools for the sons and daughters of the squattocracy. Saint Cuthbert’s Hostel billeted the sons of soldier-settlers, small shopkeepers and war widows who lived further than a bus ride from the state high school. Our dormitory was a converted army barracks, as cold as a meat fridge in winter and as stifling as a bread oven in summer. Bert was allotted the bed next to mine and we became best friends and allies in the war of attrition between the boys and the adults charged with keeping us in line.
No-one seemed to know the warden’s real name or his qualification to supervise adolescents. He was a shadowy figure, as skinny as a rake, with a stringy moustache and corduroy trousers, who nibbled Sao biscuits while he talked and avoided looking you in the eye. He sometimes disappeared for days at a time and was delivered home after dark in the bishop’s Morris Minor. He once said he would rather walk twenty miles in the rain than ride in a Japanese car.
Matron, the warden’s alleged wife, dispensed Bex powders for pain and fever, kerosene in a bathing cap for nits, and black ointment for boils, but she preferred dispensing punishments. Before school each morning we stood to attention at the foot of our beds, while Matron inspected ears and fingernails, bounced a coin on the blanket and measured the folds of hospital corners, sniffed out dust balls under the mattress and pounced on illegal items in lockers. Insubordination, AWOL and dandruff earned weekend detentions. Bed wetters were assigned to wringer duty in the laundry. Picky eaters spent the free hour after dinner sorting slops for the pig swill. Blasphemers and masturbators wrote out the relevant verse from the Book of Leviticus 100 times.
Stafford Slipper, our dormitory prefect—a rugby forward with a neck as wide as his head—never tired of warning us that his surname was a reminder of the slipper he would apply to the backside of any boy who brought shame to “his” dormitory. The slipper in question was a canvas tennis shoe with a rubber sole, sliced across with a razor blade so that every thwack pinched as well as stung.
The bishop was our spiritual mentor. He presided over dinner once a fortnight, for which we were grateful, because it meant meat and two veg rather than the usual macaroni and something brown. In those pre-woke days, no-one thought it unusual for a bishop to make surprise dormitory visits at ‘starkers hour’, when boys were either undressing for bed or lining up for the weekly hot shower. He was adept at delivering a flick with a rolled, wet towel to the steaming rumps of naked tearaways.
Warden, Matron, Bishop and Stafford were a formidable quartet, but they met their match in Bert. Demerits and punishments bounced off him like arrows off a turtle’s shell because Bert was a master of the art of the bald-faced lie. He convinced Stafford that he suffered from Von Willebrand disease, like the Russian royal family, and could bleed to death from slippering. He persuaded the bishop that his Christian name was not Herbert, but Cuthbert, “Same as our patron saint, Your Holiness.” He had Matron in tears when he described how his father had gone out to the dunny one night, tucked the barrel of his army .303 rifle under his chin and pulled the trigger with his toe. Although later, when the warden reminded Bert about overdue fees, he said his father had died trying to stop a runaway horse, leaving his mother with Bert and five sisters, the youngest still in nappies, the eldest aged 16 and up the duff, on a farm that couldn’t even grow weeds. And later still, he told me that his father was a drunkard, and when the Parish Council offered Bert a place at Saint Cuthbert’s, he’d said, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
In the days before social media, let alone television, our world view was formed by the gossip that did the rounds after lights-out. The nocturnal telegraph in our dormitory hummed with wild stories about pig hunting and buffalo catching, speculations about girls and sex, and the ghastly diseases that lurked on toilet seats, as well as rumours about what the warden got up to when he disappeared. Bert soon became the star of the show: he could tell a ghost story that had the junior boys squeaking in terror, he was an accurate and cruel mimic of teachers and prefects, and he had an inexhaustible fund of bawdy jokes. The nightly scuttlebutt was fun, but risky. Talking after lights-out was an offence punishable by a week of “mop dancing” in the dining room if Matron caught you, or “emu parade” in the yard if it was the warden. But if Stafford was eavesdropping outside the window, it would be trial by torchlight followed by a summary slippering.
Why did we put up with it? Why didn’t we rebel, or complain to our parents about the lack of privacy, the finger-numbing cold and oppressive heat of the dormitories, the bullying prefects, the inept adults, the inedible food?
Because it was the 1950s.
How could we bellyache to men who had spent months swaying in hammocks in the stinking bowels of battleships, or scratching tropical ulcers under dripping canvas in muddy jungles, or shivering with malaria on the Kokoda track? How could we protest about unfair prefects to men who’d been subjected to the mind-numbing stupidity of military discipline? Or to mothers whose husbands had returned mentally damaged. Or not returned at all.
#
Bert was the Scarlet Pimpernel when it came to dodging punishment. He could always prove he had been somewhere else when the stink bomb was thrown, or that his withered leg made it impossible to kick the rugby ball that broke the window. As holder of the Year 8 Spelling Prize, he couldn’t possibly be the author of the latest illiterate doggerel in the toilet stall. On the occasions the evidence was against him, Bert might plead that he was on an urgent secret errand for Matron, or fetching the puncture kit for Warden’s bicycle, or on his way to wash Bishop’s Morris Minor. Acts such as these attracted merit points and surely cancelled out the crime. And if all else failed, von Willebrand kept him safe from slippering
For most of us, escape from weekend tedium meant team sports; being dragged through the mud in a rugby scrum was preferable to the boredom of the study hall or the “little jobs for idle hands” that Matron devised. Bert’s myopia and lopsided gait excluded him from ball games, but when we heard about Saturday confirmation classes, which included hot chocolate and biscuits afterwards, Bert put our names down. The classes were taught by Calvin the Curate, a pale young man not long out of school. The syllabus covered the sacraments, the catechism and how to live a Christian life. Colonel Liversidge, a one-legged ex-army chaplain drilled us on the begats in Genesis, and the Nicene Creed. The octogenarian Miss Guilfoyle read us Bible stories, though Bert could usually persuade her to lay aside the holy book and spend the hour relating hair-raising tales of her youth as the only female missionary in New Guinea.
When the bishop announced he was recruiting altar boys, Bert and I were again first to volunteer. Altar boys didn’t have to dress in school uniform on Sundays and march to the cathedral and back behind Warden and Matron; we could ride our bikes, dress up in scarlet and lace cassocks and play supporting roles in the great theatrical performance known as Holy Communion. If he was in a generous mood, the bishop would shout us each an ice cream from the Olympus Café, and we would consume it on a bench in the cemetery before ambling back to the hostel in time for Sunday macaroni.
The bishop was short-sighted and too vain to wear glasses in church, so he relied on his altar boys to estimate the size of the congregation and calculate the amount of bread and wine that must be blessed for communion. Once consecrated, any surplus wafers and McWilliam’s Muscat (now miraculously transformed into flesh and blood) could not be thrown away—they must be consumed by the priest himself or shared with the other actors in the liturgical drama. Bert calculated that if we inflated the count by 5%, the bishop would polish off the leftovers himself, but if we bumped the estimate up by 10%, he would be forced to invite us to help him out. On those Sundays, Bert and I cycled home tipsy.
When Bert let slip that he had mastered the Qwerty keyboard, the bishop employed him to type his handwritten sermons into manuscripts suitable for filing and re-use. Bert was, in fact, a fast though careless typist. He sometimes missed a page or assembled them in the wrong order. Only Calvin was counting when the sermon listed twelve Commandments, but on the Sunday the sermon conflated the Garden of Eden with Sodom and Gomorrah, Miss Guilfoyle had to dash outside for fresh air, and Colonel Liversidge huffed that the lesson was more appropriate for an address to troops about to go on leave in Cairo.
When too many complaints reached the bishop’s ears, and he finally cottoned on to our congregation estimation scam, he informed us that in future, Calvin would be handling the altar boys’ duties.
#
Christmas holiday eve was oppressively hot, and a blustery wind was exciting the neighbourhood dogs. Warden was hosting the annual sherry party for the bishop and the parish council, and the prefects were holding a party of their own with a purloined bottle of Johnny Walker. In the dormitory, our bags were packed, and the nightly telegraph was abuzz with excited holiday plans.
Suddenly, the door burst open, and the lights snapped on. It was Stafford, red-faced and angry.
“Chooky you little bastard. I’m going to kill you!”
“What’s he done now?” yawned Stevo, the senior boy in the dorm.
“He’s bloody well poisoned me, that’s what. If I die, he’s coming with me.” Stafford pulled back Bert’s blankets and hauled him out of bed. “Show me them pills again, you ugly little cripple.”
“Calm down Staff,” said Stevo, “What’s the problem?”
“I’ve been glued to the dunny for the last hour shitting my guts out, and my piss has turned blue. I reckon my kidneys are fucked.”
It was a convoluted story, made difficult to follow because Stafford was apoplectic and jumping from one foot to the other in physical pain. It seems the school rugby coach had told Stafford he was getting fat, and unless he lost a few stone by the end of the holidays, he’d be relegated to the reserves. Bert told Stafford that his sister had lost three stone in a week, and he offered to sell him some of Beckie’s pills. Stafford took three before dinner, with the aforesaid consequences.
“Show us the packet Chook,” demanded Stevo.
Bert dug around in his locker and held up a yellow tube of Ford Pills.
“These are shit pills,” read Stevo.
“Beckie’s boyfriend’s a jockey,” said Bert with a straight face, “He uses them to lose weight before a race.”
Stafford seized hold of Bert’s pyjama shirt, “It doesn’t say anything about pissing blue though.”
“OK Staff, show us,” demanded Stevo, and led the way to the toilet block.
Which is how 18 boys happened to be crowded around the urinal, pushing and shoving to get a glimpse of Stafford’s miraculous turquoise micturition. Which is why the warden’s guests abandoned their sherries and trooped down to the toilet block to investigate the disturbance.
“Who’s responsible for this riot?” shouted Matron.
Stafford pushed Bert forward. “Chooky Fowles tried to poison me.”
“Why did you do that Cuthbert?” asked the warden.
“Revenge,” Stafford spluttered, “Because I gave him a detention…” Then he bolted for the nearest toilet stall.
“What’s that in your hand, Herbert?” demanded Matron and prised the tube of Ford Pills from Bert’s fingers. She read the label, “How many did he take?” She banged on the door of the Stafford’s toilet stall, “It says here you shouldn’t take more than one!”
The bishop had already attended several sherry parties that day and his face was as purple as his shirt. He pointed at Bert and thundered, “Cuthbert Fowles, if that is your real name, you’ve exhausted my patience. I’ve offered you trust and vouchsafed you every consideration on account of your poor mother, but you have betrayed the hand that feeds you once too often. It’s time you glimpsed the wrath of the Lord!”
He took Bert by the ear and led us back to the dormitory. We stood to attention at the end of our beds. Stafford (looking green about the gills) was dispatched to bring Warden’s cane.
“Six of the best,” pronounced the bishop.
“Pyjama pants down and bend over please boy,” instructed the warden.
“I won’t,” replied Bert calmly.
Shocked silence.
“How dare you refuse the warden’s clear instruction!” fumed Matron.
Bert looked the warden in the eye, “It’s against the law.”
The bishop’s finger pointed like God’s digit on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, “What would you know about the law, you filthy little blasphemer?”
“My uncle’s a solicitor,” Bert lied. “The United Nations has passed a law that corporeal (sic.) punishment must not be administered on the bum. Only on the hand.”
The bishop snatched the cane and brought it down with a crack on the iron bedstead, “Six of the best I promised and six of the best you’ll get, Cuthbert Fowles! Hold out your hand.”
Matron whispered to the bishop, “Your Eminence, should you be both judge and executioner?”
The bishop shoved the cane back into the warden’s hand, “All right Gordon, you do it. I’ll settle for Pontius Pilot.”
Bert’s hand was steady, but we could see the warden’s was shaking and he was sweating. (At the inquiry three months later, he said that, in his mind, he was back on the Burma railway, forced to watch Lieutenant Itamura take a two-fisted grip on the samurai sword and raise it above a prisoner’s bare neck.) He closed his eyes.
“What are you waiting for, you weakling?” Matron snapped.
With a strangled shout of “Banzai!”, the warden brought the cane down across Bert’s outstretched fingers…
No-one had noticed that when the bishop struck the iron bed frame with the bamboo cane, the business end had split in two, creating an edge as sharp as a knife. Blood spurted from Bert’s hand, down his pyjamas, over his bed and across the warden’s face. He dropped the cane and collapsed to his knees, moaning and shaking uncontrollably. Matron turned her back in disgust.
“Help him up!” the bishop shouted to the frozen watchers. But we couldn’t take our eyes off Bert’s severed pinky finger, twitching like a white grub on the bloodstained floorboards.
An ambulance took Bert to hospital. The parents took their sons home and wrote angry letters to the parish council. The warden was dismissed. The bishop was encouraged to retire.
#
Bert didn’t come back to school after the holidays. I heard he went to Sydney and fell into the drug scene, but he came out the other side and was briefly notorious as a thrashing rock guitarist known as “Three-finger Chookie”. I went to university, and some years later I passed through K city on the way to my first teaching appointment. I bought an ice cream from the Mount Olympus Café and sat down to eat it on a park bench in the cemetery beside the cathedral, where Bert and I used to park our bicycles. An elderly gardener was fastidiously raking the gravel around the war memorial into the concentric circles of a Zen Garden. I noticed another man watching the gardener from a bench on the other side of the obelisk. He unscrewed the lid of a thermos and poured two cups of tea, added milk and sugar from Tupperware containers, then laid out two buttered scones on the bench beside him. He looked up and quietly called to the gardener.
“Gordon, time for tea.”
I watched the warden and the bishop, seated side-by-side, blowing on their cups to cool the tea and chewing on pumpkin scones. Wordlessly, contentedly, at ease, like an old married couple.
Ian Hart 2021
It is a scientific fact that the behaviour of
adolescent boys and dogs is affected by the weather. Just as blustery winds and
the full moon will turn an affectionate poodle into a howling banshee, a hot
summer night at the end of term will transform a dormitory of cowed and
obedient boarders into a baying wolf pack. In such a night it is advisable to
turn down the lamps, lock the windows, and ignore the insistent scratching at
the door. It is a pity the bishop did not heed this advice.
Bert
Fowles arrived at Saint Cuthbert’s Anglican Boys Hostel in K City halfway
through the term. Matron announced to us at dinner that the new boy’s father
had just died, and we should “Go easy on the poor orphaned lad.”
Try
saying that to a dingo pack when you’re holding a rabbit.
Any
boy named Fowles is going to be nicknamed “Chooky” and be greeted by the sound
of clucking. Bert had other flaws that marked him out for nicknames: a polio
limp that disqualified him from sports (“Hopalong Cassidy”), Coke-bottle
glasses for myopia (“Goggle Eyes”), and acne, which he tried to cover up with
pink zinc cream (“Max”—as in Factor).
K
City was a university town with mick and prod cathedrals and expensive boarding
schools for the sons and daughters of the squattocracy. Saint Cuthbert’s Hostel
billeted the sons of soldier-settlers, small shopkeepers and war widows who
lived further than a bus ride from the state high school. Our dormitory was a
converted army barracks, as cold as a meat fridge in winter and as stifling as
a bread oven in summer. Bert was allotted the bed next to mine and we became
best friends and allies in the war of attrition between the boys and the adults
charged with keeping us in line.
No-one
seemed to know the warden’s real name or his qualification to supervise
adolescents. He was a shadowy figure, as skinny as a rake, with a stringy
moustache and corduroy trousers, who nibbled Sao biscuits while he talked and
avoided looking you in the eye. He sometimes disappeared for days at a time and
was delivered home after dark in the bishop’s Morris Minor. He once said he
would rather walk twenty miles in the rain than ride in a Japanese car.
Matron,
the warden’s alleged wife, dispensed Bex powders for pain and fever, kerosene
in a bathing cap for nits, and black ointment for boils, but she preferred
dispensing punishments. Before school each morning we stood to attention at the
foot of our beds, while Matron inspected ears and fingernails, bounced a coin
on the blanket and measured the folds of hospital corners, sniffed out dust
balls under the mattress and pounced on illegal items in lockers.
Insubordination, AWOL and dandruff earned weekend detentions. Bed wetters were
assigned to wringer duty in the laundry. Picky eaters spent the free hour after
dinner sorting slops for the pig swill. Blasphemers and masturbators wrote out
the relevant verse from the Book of Leviticus 100 times.
Stafford
Slipper, our dormitory prefect—a rugby forward with a neck as wide as his
head—never tired of warning us that his surname was a reminder of the slipper
he would apply to the backside of any boy who brought shame to “his” dormitory.
The slipper in question was a canvas tennis shoe with a rubber sole, sliced
across with a razor blade so that every thwack pinched as well as stung.
The
bishop was our spiritual mentor. He presided over dinner once a fortnight, for
which we were grateful, because it meant meat and two veg rather than the usual
macaroni and something brown. In those pre-woke days, no-one thought it unusual
for a bishop to make surprise dormitory visits at ‘starkers hour’, when boys
were either undressing for bed or lining up for the weekly hot shower. He was
adept at delivering a flick with a rolled, wet towel to the steaming rumps of
naked tearaways.
Warden,
Matron, Bishop and Stafford were a formidable quartet, but they met their match
in Bert. Demerits and punishments bounced off him like arrows off a turtle’s
shell because Bert was a master of the art of the bald-faced lie. He convinced
Stafford that he suffered from Von Willebrand disease, like the Russian royal
family, and could bleed to death from slippering. He persuaded the bishop that
his Christian name was not Herbert, but Cuthbert, “Same as our patron saint,
Your Holiness.” He had Matron in tears when he described how his father had
gone out to the dunny one night, tucked the barrel of his army .303 rifle under
his chin and pulled the trigger with his toe. Although later, when the warden
reminded Bert about overdue fees, he said his father had died trying to stop a
runaway horse, leaving his mother with Bert and five sisters, the youngest
still in nappies, the eldest aged 16 and up the duff, on a farm that couldn’t
even grow weeds. And later still, he told me that his father was a
drunkard, and when the Parish Council offered Bert a place at Saint Cuthbert’s,
he’d said, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
In
the days before social media, let alone television, our world view was formed
by the gossip that did the rounds after lights-out. The nocturnal telegraph in
our dormitory hummed with wild stories about pig hunting and buffalo catching,
speculations about girls and sex, and the ghastly diseases that lurked on
toilet seats, as well as rumours about what the warden got up to when he
disappeared. Bert soon became the star of the show: he could tell a ghost story
that had the junior boys squeaking in terror, he was an accurate and cruel
mimic of teachers and prefects, and he had an inexhaustible fund of bawdy
jokes. The nightly scuttlebutt was fun, but risky. Talking after lights-out was
an offence punishable by a week of “mop dancing” in the dining room if Matron
caught you, or “emu parade” in the yard if it was the warden. But if Stafford
was eavesdropping outside the window, it would be trial by torchlight followed
by a summary slippering.
Why
did we put up with it? Why didn’t we rebel, or complain to our parents about
the lack of privacy, the finger-numbing cold and oppressive heat of the
dormitories, the bullying prefects, the inept adults, the inedible food?
Because
it was the 1950s.
How
could we bellyache to men who had spent months swaying in hammocks in the
stinking bowels of battleships, or scratching tropical ulcers under dripping
canvas in muddy jungles, or shivering with malaria on the Kokoda track? How
could we protest about unfair prefects to men who’d been subjected to the
mind-numbing stupidity of military discipline? Or to mothers whose husbands had
returned mentally damaged. Or not returned at all.
#
Bert
was the Scarlet Pimpernel when it came to dodging punishment. He could always
prove he had been somewhere else when the stink bomb was thrown, or that his
withered leg made it impossible to kick the rugby ball that broke the window.
As holder of the Year 8 Spelling Prize, he couldn’t possibly be the author of
the latest illiterate doggerel in the toilet stall. On the occasions the
evidence was against him, Bert might plead that he was on an urgent secret
errand for Matron, or fetching the puncture kit for Warden’s bicycle, or on his
way to wash Bishop’s Morris Minor. Acts such as these attracted merit points
and surely cancelled out the crime. And if all else failed, von Willebrand kept
him safe from slippering
For
most of us, escape from weekend tedium meant team sports; being dragged through
the mud in a rugby scrum was preferable to the boredom of the study hall or the
“little jobs for idle hands” that Matron devised. Bert’s myopia and lopsided
gait excluded him from ball games, but when we heard about Saturday
confirmation classes, which included hot chocolate and biscuits afterwards,
Bert put our names down. The classes were taught by Calvin the Curate, a pale
young man not long out of school. The syllabus covered the sacraments, the
catechism and how to live a Christian life. Colonel Liversidge, a one-legged
ex-army chaplain drilled us on the begats in Genesis, and the Nicene Creed. The
octogenarian Miss Guilfoyle read us Bible stories, though Bert could usually
persuade her to lay aside the holy book and spend the hour relating
hair-raising tales of her youth as the only female missionary in New Guinea.
When
the bishop announced he was recruiting altar boys, Bert and I were again first
to volunteer. Altar boys didn’t have to dress in school uniform on Sundays and
march to the cathedral and back behind Warden and Matron; we could ride our
bikes, dress up in scarlet and lace cassocks and play supporting roles in the
great theatrical performance known as Holy Communion. If he was in a generous
mood, the bishop would shout us each an ice cream from the Olympus Café, and we
would consume it on a bench in the cemetery before ambling back to the hostel
in time for Sunday macaroni.
The
bishop was short-sighted and too vain to wear glasses in church, so he relied
on his altar boys to estimate the size of the congregation and calculate the
amount of bread and wine that must be blessed for communion. Once consecrated,
any surplus wafers and McWilliam’s Muscat (now miraculously transformed into
flesh and blood) could not be thrown away—they must be consumed by the priest himself
or shared with the other actors in the liturgical drama. Bert calculated that
if we inflated the count by 5%, the bishop would polish off the leftovers
himself, but if we bumped the estimate up by 10%, he would be forced to invite
us to help him out. On those Sundays, Bert and I cycled home tipsy.
When
Bert let slip that he had mastered the Qwerty keyboard, the bishop employed him
to type his handwritten sermons into manuscripts suitable for filing and
re-use. Bert was, in fact, a fast though careless typist. He sometimes missed a
page or assembled them in the wrong order. Only Calvin was counting when the
sermon listed twelve Commandments, but on the Sunday the sermon conflated the
Garden of Eden with Sodom and Gomorrah, Miss Guilfoyle had to dash outside for
fresh air, and Colonel Liversidge huffed that the lesson was more appropriate
for an address to troops about to go on leave in Cairo.
When
too many complaints reached the bishop’s ears, and he finally cottoned on to
our congregation estimation scam, he informed us that in future, Calvin would
be handling the altar boys’ duties.
#
Christmas
holiday eve was oppressively hot, and a blustery wind was exciting the
neighbourhood dogs. Warden was hosting the annual sherry party for the bishop
and the parish council, and the prefects were holding a party of their own with
a purloined bottle of Johnny Walker. In the dormitory, our bags were packed,
and the nightly telegraph was abuzz with excited holiday plans.
Suddenly,
the door burst open, and the lights snapped on. It was Stafford, red-faced and
angry.
“Chooky
you little bastard. I’m going to kill you!”
“What’s
he done now?” yawned Stevo, the senior boy in the dorm.
“He’s
bloody well poisoned me, that’s what. If I die, he’s coming with me.” Stafford
pulled back Bert’s blankets and hauled him out of bed. “Show me them pills
again, you ugly little cripple.”
“Calm
down Staff,” said Stevo, “What’s the problem?”
“I’ve
been glued to the dunny for the last hour shitting my guts out, and my piss has
turned blue. I reckon my kidneys are fucked.”
It
was a convoluted story, made difficult to follow because Stafford was
apoplectic and jumping from one foot to the other in physical pain. It seems
the school rugby coach had told Stafford he was getting fat, and unless he lost
a few stone by the end of the holidays, he’d be relegated to the reserves. Bert
told Stafford that his sister had lost three stone in a week, and he offered to
sell him some of Beckie’s pills. Stafford took three before dinner, with the
aforesaid consequences.
“Show
us the packet Chook,” demanded Stevo.
Bert
dug around in his locker and held up a yellow tube of Ford Pills.
“These
are shit pills,” read Stevo.
“Beckie’s
boyfriend’s a jockey,” said Bert with a straight face, “He uses them to lose
weight before a race.”
Stafford
seized hold of Bert’s pyjama shirt, “It doesn’t say anything about pissing blue
though.”
“OK
Staff, show us,” demanded Stevo, and led the way to the toilet block.
Which
is how 18 boys happened to be crowded around the urinal, pushing and shoving to
get a glimpse of Stafford’s miraculous turquoise micturition. Which is why the
warden’s guests abandoned their sherries and trooped down to the toilet block
to investigate the disturbance.
“Who’s
responsible for this riot?” shouted Matron.
Stafford
pushed Bert forward. “Chooky Fowles tried to poison me.”
“Why
did you do that Cuthbert?” asked the warden.
“Revenge,”
Stafford spluttered, “Because I gave him a detention…” Then he bolted for the
nearest toilet stall.
“What’s
that in your hand, Herbert?” demanded Matron and prised the tube of Ford Pills
from Bert’s fingers. She read the label, “How many did he take?” She banged on
the door of the Stafford’s toilet stall, “It says here you shouldn’t take more
than one!”
The
bishop had already attended several sherry parties that day and his face was as
purple as his shirt. He pointed at Bert and thundered, “Cuthbert Fowles, if
that is your real name, you’ve exhausted my patience. I’ve offered you trust
and vouchsafed you every consideration on account of your poor mother, but you
have betrayed the hand that feeds you once too often. It’s time you glimpsed
the wrath of the Lord!”
He
took Bert by the ear and led us back to the dormitory. We stood to attention at
the end of our beds. Stafford (looking green about the gills) was dispatched to
bring Warden’s cane.
“Six
of the best,” pronounced the bishop.
“Pyjama
pants down and bend over please boy,” instructed the warden.
“I
won’t,” replied Bert calmly.
Shocked
silence.
“How
dare you refuse the warden’s clear instruction!” fumed Matron.
Bert
looked the warden in the eye, “It’s against the law.”
The
bishop’s finger pointed like God’s digit on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, “What
would you know about the law, you filthy little blasphemer?”
“My
uncle’s a solicitor,” Bert lied. “The United Nations has passed a law that
corporeal (sic.) punishment must not be administered on the bum. Only on the
hand.”
The
bishop snatched the cane and brought it down with a crack on the iron bedstead,
“Six of the best I promised and six of the best you’ll get, Cuthbert Fowles!
Hold out your hand.”
Matron
whispered to the bishop, “Your Eminence, should you be both judge and
executioner?”
The
bishop shoved the cane back into the warden’s hand, “All right Gordon, you do
it. I’ll settle for Pontius Pilot.”
Bert’s
hand was steady, but we could see the warden’s was shaking and he was sweating.
(At the inquiry three months later, he said that, in his mind, he was back on
the Burma railway, forced to watch Lieutenant Itamura take a two-fisted grip on
the samurai sword and raise it above a prisoner’s bare neck.) He closed his
eyes.
“What
are you waiting for, you weakling?” Matron snapped.
With
a strangled shout of “Banzai!”, the warden brought the cane down across Bert’s
outstretched fingers…
No-one
had noticed that when the bishop struck the iron bed frame with the bamboo
cane, the business end had split in two, creating an edge as sharp as a knife.
Blood spurted from Bert’s hand, down his pyjamas, over his bed and across the
warden’s face. He dropped the cane and collapsed to his knees, moaning and
shaking uncontrollably. Matron turned her back in disgust.
“Help
him up!” the bishop shouted to the frozen watchers. But we couldn’t take our
eyes off Bert’s severed pinky finger, twitching like a white grub on the
bloodstained floorboards.
An
ambulance took Bert to hospital. The parents took their sons home and wrote
angry letters to the parish council. The warden was dismissed. The bishop was
encouraged to retire.
#
Bert
didn’t come back to school after the holidays. I heard he went to Sydney and
fell into the drug scene, but he came out the other side and was briefly
notorious as a thrashing rock guitarist known as “Three-finger Chookie”. I went
to university, and some years later I passed through K city on the way to my
first teaching appointment. I bought an ice cream from the Mount Olympus Café
and sat down to eat it on a park bench in the cemetery beside the cathedral,
where Bert and I used to park our bicycles. An elderly gardener was
fastidiously raking the gravel around the war memorial into the concentric
circles of a Zen Garden. I noticed another man watching the gardener from a
bench on the other side of the obelisk. He unscrewed the lid of a thermos and
poured two cups of tea, added milk and sugar from Tupperware containers, then
laid out two buttered scones on the bench beside him. He looked up and quietly
called to the gardener.
“Gordon,
time for tea.”
I
watched the warden and the bishop, seated side-by-side, blowing on their cups
to cool the tea and chewing on pumpkin scones. Wordlessly, contentedly, at
ease, like an old married couple.