me a report,’ he growled.
‘Frank, Frank, Frank!’ the Brotherhood chanted. ‘He’s the one that knows! Let him report!’
Savage huffed away from them, kicked a stack of old examination papers containing, though he didn’t know it, his father’s score of five out of forty in mental arithmetic thirty years ago.
‘A frank report, eh?’ Percy smiled down at them from his throne. ‘Frank is always frank. That’s what you call a pun, lads. I had nobody to tell me these things, that’s why I like to tell you. Shakespeare was very fond of puns, and I like a good pun myself, so I do.’
‘I like a pun too,’ Savage muttered to the dusty sheets. ‘A pun o’ chocolates.’
Frank Garson went back to his place behind the lid of a dual desk, but this time without two warders holding him. He was the only child of a motor-mechanic who worked in the garage at the far end of Bethel Street, an intruder in a gang that respected his intelligence but distrusted his cleanliness. He seemed a cut above them because his father had a good job, and they couldn’t understand why he was so keen to be a member, even ambitious to be a Claviger. It made them suspicious. But they all liked him in the end because he was always straight. His mother had deserted his father for a West Indian bus-driver four years ago, and he could remember her only dimly as a bright-eyed woman with comforting arms and a good kissing mouth. He remembered also a cosy smell, quite different from the smell of chalk that accompanied Miss Elginbrod. But he could never talk of his mother. A boy whose mother had run off with a coloured man inherited a shame, and the fact that he was clever, clean and loyal, and that his father was a non-smoker, non-drinker and churchgoer, merely made him more of an oddity to his mates. Their fathers were drunken, idle and cruel, but they knew their mothers just had to put up with it. What kind of a mother then had Frank Garson that ran away from a good husband? Frank knew she was condemned, and he carried her guilt always with him. Dark-haired, rosy-cheeked, innocent-faced, and well-spoken except when excitement made him stutter a little, he would have suited a choirboy’s collar.
‘The new janny,’ he began, conquering his stutter in the hush that respected his report, ‘he doesn’t know where anything is, so he asked me to help him because the janny in Comely grove asked him for the lend of the gipsy costumes we had in our school concert when your father was the janny because the Comely grove are going to do a gipsy cantata at Christmas in the Bell field Halls and he didn’t know where they were but the janny in Comelygrove knew we had them all right, so the new janny asked me to look for them in the cellar because anything you can’t find must be in the cellar he said. So I asked Jasper, that’s the teacher that came when Miss Elginbrod retired, you’ve seen him, he comes here on a mo’bike and he’s got big bushy eyebrows and a blue chin, that’s what we call him, that or Bluebeard, but his right name’s Whiffen, and he let me come down here at two o’clock to look for them and I came down through the basement, the janny opened the door for me and then left me, and I found them in the tea-chests over there.’
He stopped, his mouth working. He felt his stammer coming on, and he fought against it.
‘End of Part One,’ Savage called out from the rear. He put on a television advert voice and chanted as he performed a Red Indian war dance round the back and flanks of the assembly. ‘Use the new super duper scientific formula automatic aw-tae-buggery Freezing Point. Never go without a Freezing Point. In a man’s world a girl needs a Freezing Point. Washes whiter than black and prevents flavour blur. Get one now, get one tomorrow, get one last week. The time is out of joint till you get a Freezing Point. And now back to Maverick.’
‘I think you’ve got far too much to say,’ Percy reprimanded him severely. ‘And stand still when the court’s in session.’
‘Well, tell him to get to the point then,’ Savage answered shrilly.
‘That’s the point,’ Frank hammered the desk, hating Savage. ‘I found the c-costumes, Percy, and I found something else too, a lot more, in the tea-chests. I gave the c-costumes to the new janny but I didn’t tell him what else I’d seen. I wasn’t sure if I’d seen right so I told Specky. You see there was a big spider came scuttling down the side of the tea-chest when I took the costumes out and I got a fright.’
‘Feart for a spider!’ Savage commented in disgust. ‘Feart for a spider and he wants to get a key one day! That’s the kind of probationer you get nowadays. Before I could get into the gang at all I had to get the Chinese Rub and I had to break seven windows in the scheme and steal a hundred fags and—’
‘I stopped all that,’ Percy interrupted him, frowning at the mention of the barbarous rites used before he civilized the gang. ‘That’s nothing for boasting about. And I’m still waiting to hear what all the excitement’s about.’
‘I hit it with one of those shovels,’ Frank explained, keeping his own course doggedly, ‘and I knocked it on its end, the tea-chest I mean, and a lot of rubbish fell out, paper hats, you know, and decorations and that wand the fairy princess used and I saw a lot of money.’
‘A spider, a big big spider,’ Savage mimicked Frank’s soprano. ‘Andhe lost the heid. I wonder what he would have done if he’d saw one of the rats from the other end up there.’
‘What do you mean, a lot of money?’ Percy asked anxiously. There seemed no escape from dreams of money and talk of money.
‘Pound notes and five-pound notes,’ said Frank. ‘I told Specky. And bags of silver, paper bags and cloth bags, you couldn’t count it. I told Specky at playtime and we came down here after four by the door in the basement to make sure. I couldn’t believe it, I thought maybe it was stage money, but there was too much of it. You couldn’t spend it in years. You remember Miss Elginbrod put on a play about a millionaire that tried to give all his money away in an Alpine village but nobody would take it because they were happier without money. That’s why I thought it was stage money at first. Then I wanted to tell the cops and Sheuch says I was going to break the law you gave us but I would have shared the reward with everybody here, honest I would, cross my throat and spit!’
He went through the actions in his excitement.
‘But Specky said no, report it here,’ he concluded, exhausted by his ordeal. ‘He’ll tell you that’s how it was, you ask him!’
Specky rose from the coal-scuttle, bowed to Percy, turned and bowed to the Brotherhood and went into the witness-desk as willingly as Frank left it. He was going to enjoy this. He liked speaking. He would show them how a formal report ought to be made.
‘Probationer Garson reported to me at afternoon interval,’ he began benignly, ‘that he had seen millions and millions of pounds under the costumes in the tea-chests. He requested me to accompany him in a further visit to procure verification. Immediately following the dismissal of afternoon school we therefore descended together to our present location via the door in the basement when the janny’s back was turned and I personally inspected the receptacles indicated. I ascertained they contained money and I came to the conclusion that the money was genuine currency. However, I differed from Probationer Garson in my estimate of the amount. According to my calculations there are not millions and millions of pounds there at all. There are only—’
‘I didn’t mean millions and millions as millions,’ Frank interrupted him resentfully, clenching his fists to keep his temper. ‘I meant a lot, that was all.’
‘At a tory estimate,’ Specky proceeded, pleased at the chance to use a long-hoarded synonym, ‘I would say there are only thousands of pounds dispersed in three of the six receptacles referred to.’
‘What’s
