Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

One year our neighbours the Paynes attended our firework party, and contributed a massive piece (at the top of the entire Pain’s range) called an Air Raid, which needed to be nailed to a tree. The rumour ran round the party that it had cost £5 3s 8d. It came with an instruction leaflet suggesting that you might like to run indoors after lighting the touch paper. For the adults it must have been like re-living a bit of the War. I’m surprised they didn’t start looking around for an Anderson shelter.

The ‘Air Raid’ scored full points for noise, but Mum had hustled us indoors, so we could hardly assess it for variability or for colour. In the absence of direct evidence, I had to assume that the Pain’s colours were as drab as ever, although it earned a few points for effort. (I knew from school that marks for effort were always insulting.) I hope this cocky dismissal of an expensive present didn’t get back to the Paynes.

Nerve punches

I was an older creature now than I had been when Miss Krüger had ruled CRX with her terror. Now I understood that cruelty was not an official part of education, even in a disabled school. I began to wonder if I could mention Judy Brisby to Mum without breaching the schoolboy code — Judy Brisby and what she did.

She liked to demonstrate what she called ‘nerve punches’, agonising blows to the upper arm which left no mark. She gave one to a very strong boy called Terence Wilberforce (who had slight polio in one leg, I think), and told us with quiet pride that it would go on being extremely painful for a full two weeks. She also said the boys who learned to take it from her would in time be taught the proper technique for delivering such punches. Then they could find others to practise on. I don’t think anyone took her up on the offer to join a prætorian guard of nerve-punching thugs. Toadying could only go so far, and beyond the occasional piece of cold toast from her breakfast entitlement, Judy Brisby had nothing whatever to offer.

Even her nerve-punch technique wasn’t as perfect as she made out — she left a dark mark on Terence’s arm like a tea-bag. Terence called the mark ‘PG Tips’, but it took all the bravado he could muster, and he flinched if he thought anyone was going to touch it.

Judy Brisby seemed to have the confidence of the school authorities, but I’m certain there were staff members who realised that something wasn’t right. I remember dear Gillie Walker, who had a very sunny disposition and used to rush into my arms and call me ‘Darling’, saying to us in an undertone when the subject of Judy Brisby was mentioned, ‘I don’t know how you boys tolerate her.’ Looking back, I would say that darling Gillie, though the nicest of the nice, was far from being the bravest of the brave. We shouldn’t have had to tolerate Judy Brisby. There was nothing to stop Gillie reporting her, unless the rules against telling tales were as strict among matrons, those brooms promoted from splinters, as they were among the schoolboys they were supposed to protect. Even when it came to denouncing a sadistic colleague.

In the end I said nothing to Mum. I wasn’t strong like Terence Wilberforce, and I took some comfort from that. With her medical training Judy Brisby must surely be able to understand the risks. She wouldn’t dare to give me a nerve punch because it would kill me. On the other hand she gave one to Trevor Burbage (the human suitcase) once, saying calmly, ‘Let that be a lesson to anyone who wants to write letters to their parents about how mean certain people are.’

Judy Brisby’s campaign against Roger Stott’s bed-wetting wasn’t helping him to break the habit. Of course it wasn’t meant to. Having made his problem worse she referred him up the power structure, and turned the headmaster into the executive arm of her cruelty.

My feelings for Ben Nevin contained no element of fear, unless awe is by definition the benign form of fear, but my perception of my other secret lover Alan Raeburn became clouded over. The Board of Education, that innocent, sinister object, to be seen on his desk or protruding from his back pocket, began to pose a threat, and my knowledge of its origin in the Ellisdons catalogue wasn’t enough to protect me from fantasies of disaster.

Now at Judy Brisby’s bidding Raeburn was warning Roger Stott that if he didn’t snap out of that dirty habit double quick, it would be time for extreme measures. The Board of Education would be convened on his backside.

A few bed-wets later Roger was told to go to the Headmaster’s office, to be given a lesson he would never forget. A small group of us gathered quietly nearby. The noise of the whacking coming from the office was terrifying, and when Roger came out, he had tears streaming down his face. He couldn’t say anything, and his bottom hurt so much he couldn’t sit. He just went off somewhere by himself and cried for a long time. I felt very forlorn and wished there was something I could do for him, but I had no help to give. I was also terrified that even if this beating ‘cured’ him, it might somehow bring the habit back to me. I wasn’t wrong. Nocturnal enuresis came back from the past to torment me for a period after that.

This was like a death sentence for me. I had seen what had been done to Roger, and I knew that my own body was very fragile. I didn’t see how it could survive that level of corporal punishment. So the you’re-going-to-die feeling, which I thought I’d left behind at CRX, of Death Bed and Vera Cole all lumped together, came back to haunt me again.

I needn’t have worried. Raeburn had telephoned Dr Ansell at CRX to ask if he could beat me in the same way as he beat everyone else — which was very decent of him — and she had said, ‘Not under any circumstances.’ So I was exempt, though I didn’t know it at the time. Raeburn had wanted Ansell to rubber-stamp the Board of Education, but bless her, she wouldn’t do it.

Low blows on our flesh

The next boy to be called up for a beating was James O’Brien, another asthmatic AB but a very different kettle of fish from gentle Roger. I think he was from Irish gentry. He never had less than £20 in his pocket, a staggering sum. There was another boy, Jeremy Fraser, who got a letter from his mother every two weeks with a tenshilling note in it. That was affluence enough by our measure. Julian Robinson did the sums in his head and announced that this added up to £3 per term. I went dizzy at the thought. Jeremy Fraser was rich all right, but James O’Brien was stinking. Rolling in it.

He even had a job all ready for him when he left school, working for his father. James was a rather cocky boy who showed little respect for any of his teachers. He had no fear of Raeburn and his Board of Education. He even laughed at Raeburn in his study, who beat him until the Board broke. Raeburn said it made no difference as he had a spare, but we all reckoned he was shaken by what had happened. James became a hero, not perhaps for the best of reasons.

Still, it gave me some comfort to know that the Board couldn’t duplicate the Fantasia trick known to matrons and enchanted brooms. Reconstituting itself full-size many times over from the splinters.

Not long afterwards Raeburn had an accident. He fell over and took a nasty knock. Subsequent investigation revealed that his sticks had been sawn apart and then carefully glued together to make a seamless join. The co-principals rattled their sabres and put it about that this was a dirty low-down rotten snivelling cowardly thing to do to a man who couldn’t walk properly. They were confident that the perpetrator would be unmasked in short order by a boy with the proper loyalty to the school and its co-principal.

We didn’t sit down and discuss how obscene this suggestion was, that we were expected to expose the saboteur of canes. Its vileness was glaring. The Board of Education was no respecter of disability, it had landed low blows on our flesh, and now we were expected to take the witness stand on its behalf. There were those of us who personally couldn’t stand James O’Brien, but we didn’t have the slightest intention of exposing him. No one came forward. Nothing could be proved anyway, and we showed how well we had learned our lesson about not telling tales. We had been indoctrinated, fully absorbing the ethos of the school. Closing ranks was all the loyalty we knew.