school.
‘Hullo, Howes,’ he said.
‘Hullo, Bellamy,’ said Bernard.
‘I say,’ said Robert hurriedly, before Bernard moved on and was lost. ‘Could we meet some time so that you could show me round. It’d be a terrific help.’
‘I’ll see you this afternoon, after early grind,’ said Bernard.
‘After what?’
‘Early grind.’
A master passed by. They said: ‘Hullo, sir.’
‘That’s Stinky R,’ said Bernard. ‘See you on the corner of Lower Broad half an hour after early grind.’
‘Where’s Lower Broad?’
‘Go down the little lagger-bagger behind the ogglers’ tonkhouse, turn right at Pot Harry’s, and you can’t miss it’.
Another master passed by and they said: ‘Hullo, sir.’
‘That was Toady J,’ said Bernard. ‘O.K., see you this afternoon, Bellamy. Bring your iron and we’ll go for a hum.’
Robert didn’t find Bernard. He didn’t take his iron and they didn’t go for a hum, because by the time he had found out what all the school slang meant it was two hours after early grind.
He walked away from the school, anger mingling with depression, the depression urging him to run away, the anger telling him to return and fight it out. He nodded to Clammy L, barely seeing him. Take me away from this horrible place, God, he said.
He walked up the lane towards the heath. I’ll never return. Never never never, he thought. I’ll die of exposure. Then they’ll be sorry.
Twenty minutes later he turned round and went back to school. He got there just in time for late grind.
October, 1948. It was Sunday, he was thirteen years of age, and school wasn’t quite so bad now. He had managed to find Bernard Howes again and this time Bernard had been decent and had given him some useful tips from his Olympian heights. Lessons were quite good and chapel was the best thing of all, although of course you had to pretend that it was absolutely awful.
He went for a walk up the lane again. School wasn’t so good yet that you didn’t need to go off up lanes on your own sometimes.
He reached the heath, and saw one of the older boys walking towards him. He knew that the older boy was up to no good, and expected, being thirteen, that he was going to be beaten up.
‘Hullo,’ said the older boy.
‘Hullo.’
‘You’re a new-bug, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Bellamy.’
The older boy walked along beside him. He was about eighteen and almost six foot. Perhaps nothing was wrong after all.
They were walking down a narrow path which led towards the edge of the heath, through gorse bushes. It was a lonely, windswept place. Robert wished there was someone about.
‘Which house are you in, Bellamy?’ The older boy seemed nervous.
‘Drake.’
‘That’s quite a good house. Spotty D isn’t a bad chap. Where do you come from?’
‘Richmond, but we live in the Cotswolds just now.’
‘What do your parents do?’
‘My father’s dead. My mother’s bought a house in the Cotswolds and she’s modernized it. Now she’s going to sell it, and there’s another place she hopes to get in Sussex.’
The older boy put his arm round him. Robert shrugged it off and began to run. The older boy caught him up and rugby-tackled him. He tried to get up but the older boy overpowered him. He lashed out and struck the older boy one or two good blows, he was the better fighter, but in the end he had to give in because he was more than four years the younger.
The older boy took Robert’s trousers down. The grass was damp and repulsive.
‘I can’t help it, Bellamy,’ said the older boy. ‘I’m sorry.’
It was soon over. The older boy didn’t say anything, just walked away. Robert pulled up his trousers and walked away too. When he got back to school there was bread and peanut butter. He didn’t report the incident.
‘We’re making excellent progress,’ said Dr Schmuck.
April, 1949. It was early afternoon, a traditional April day of sudden spring showers and brief bursts of warm sunshine. Outside, in the traditional churchyard, the traditional rooks were cawing. All was well with the world, except for Mr Randolph Clegg. Mr Randolph Clegg was his mother’s friend, and he looked rather like Hitler.
His mother had bought the potentially charming but ruinously dilapidated Elizabethan cottage for a song – ‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag’ had been the comment of embryonic funster Robert Bellamy, thirteen, to the mild but gratifying amusement of his colleague Bernard Howes, fourteen. Now she was engaged, in company with Mr Clegg, her ‘business associate’, in knocking down a dividing wall.
At the end of the war his mother, her health much improved, had been kept busy looking after poor Nanny, who had retired permanently to bed, a prey to malaria, bronchitis, rheumatic fever, scurvy, Braithwaite’s Disease and fear of lizards. His mother had nursed her devotedly until she died, late in 1946. His mother, who didn’t need the money, had decided that she must occupy herself, and had gone into the business of renovating old houses. Robert had immediately become a boarder.
Now home for the Easter holidays Robert stood awkwardly in an obscure corner of the cottage’s low-beamed living-room, hoping that his mother would notice him and that Mr Clegg wouldn’t.
His mother was up the step ladder, wearing trousers. She was really rather a smasher. He didn’t know what she saw in Mr Clegg. Adults fell for very peculiar people sometimes.
‘If you’re going to hang around here, son, fetch me some nails,’ said Mr Clegg, handing Robert a box of odds and ends.
Robert hunted through the box. There were no nails. Mr Clegg would blame him, silently. Mr Clegg would take one look at the box and find nails galore. Vicious, spiteful, disappearing nails.
Robert liked to help, and at first his mother had encouraged him, but lately, seeing that he was never any help at all, she hadn’t bothered. Robert knew that he wasn’t by nature helpless. He was only helpless when Mr Clegg was around. Mr Clegg rendered him mute and helpless.
‘What do you think this is holding up?’ said Mr Clegg.
‘I was wondering,’ said his mother.
‘Nothing, if you ask me.’
‘I
