Tom Sharpe - Grantchester Grind

'I think we should allow the Master to sit with him,' said the Matron as the gibbering Bursar tumbled through the door. 'He usually has a definitely calming effect on the patient and I'll phone Dr MacKendly. I think it would be best if he were given something to quieten him down.'

'I've always been amazed at the Master's ability to exert his authority over the most unpleasant people,' said the Praelector a few minutes later as he and the Senior Tutor went downstairs in the wake of the Bursar who was being comforted by the Chaplain.

'That wasn't an unpleasant person,' said the Senior Tutor, 'the swine is a bloody gangster.'

'I knew that from the very moment I set eyes on him,' said the Praelector, 'but what a very useful gangster he is proving to be.'

Above them Dr Buscott was carefully removing the long reel of tape on which every word Kudzuvine had said had been recorded and was replacing it with a fresh reel. But before doing so Dr Buscott had taken the additional precaution of ending the recording with his own sworn statement and that of the Chaplain that what had been heard was a true and authentic record of what had been said at the time and date.

To Purefoy Osbert the comings and goings at the Master's Lodge were of only visual interest. He had no idea what was going on over there but from the window of his room he watched the Senior Tutor and the Praelector and the Chaplain come and go across the lawn and past the Master's Maze in their various ways. The Senior Tutor strode now that he felt better, the Praelector stalked slowly and meditatively with his head bent like some long-legged water bird, possibly a heron, watching for a fish. The Chaplain trotted, and the Bursar had to be helped. But the strangest figure to emerge from the Lodge was the Master himself who came, usually at dusk, though occasionally, when his presence by Kudzuvine's bedside was not required, in the morning or afternoon to sit by the Back Gate as he had done when he had been Head Porter, watching and waiting for the young gentlemen, as he still called the students, to climb in after hours. Not that 'after hours' could be said to exist any longer. The College gates, when not closed against intruders, were left unlocked all the time. But traditional ways persisted at Porterhouse to the point where the Night Porter kept a list of every undergraduate who came in after midnight and the list went to the Dean who would summon persistent late-nighters and threaten them with fines or even rustication if they continued staying out late. Not that the Dean really objected. As he put it many times to culprits, 'There is a right way of doing things and a wrong way. And the right way after midnight is over the back wall next to the Master's Lodge.' The fact that the back wall was topped with a double bank of revolving spikes to prevent undergraduates climbing in provided the sort of challenge the Dean approved of.

'Besides, it provides the Master with an interest and something to concentrate his mind on,' he had said at a meeting of the College Council when one of the younger dons had proposed that the spikes be removed as constituting a dangerous relic from the past. That proposal had been defeated and the spikes remained along the top of the wall and the great wooden gates. Below them Skullion did too, sitting in his wheelchair or sometimes managing to hobble across to lean where he had leant so many years before against the trunk of an old beech tree with the words 'Dean's report in the morning, sir' ready on his lips. With the full moon Purefoy Osbert could make out that dark shape even at one o'clock in the morning when he turned his lights out, and he found it sinister. He couldn't begin to fathom what went on in the former Head Porter's mind, or the sheer persistence of the man. But then Porterhouse baffled him completely. It wasn't simply that it was unlike any other college in Cambridge. It was that Porterhouse seemed to refuse to accept that any changes had occurred since…well, since before the First World War, or to recognize the astonishing achievements in science and medicine that were being made year after year by people in Pembroke and Christ's, in Queens' and Sidney Sussex, in fact in every college in Cambridge. Except Porterhouse. In Porterhouse the emphasis was always on the Arts and, if the War Memorial was anything to go by, on the Martial Arts. Hundreds of Porterhouse men had gone to their deaths obediently on the Somme and at Loos and again in the Second World War. And everywhere he went in his exploration of the College he encountered large muscular undergraduates who greeted him politely or, in the case of those who hadn't heard he was the new Sir Godber Evans Memorial Fellow, as though he were one of the College servants.

'Hey, you with the face,' one young lout had called out to him, 'come and help me shift the desk in my room. It's too damned heavy for me.' And Purefoy had obliged him, only to point out most coldly and politely that he was in future to be addressed as Dr Osbert and not as The Face, if you don't mind. But his main interest lay in fulfilling his mandate and doing his research into the life and times of Sir Godber Evans. As usual his first visit was to the College Library, an oddly shaped octagonal structure of stone standing apart from the other buildings in its own walled garden behind the Chapel. Inside, a central iron circular staircase went up from floor to floor and the shelves radiated out from it. At the very top a lantern let in the light.

Purefoy Osbert recognized the system immediately. 'Bentham's Panopticon,' he said to the Librarian, who ought to have been sitting at the circular desk under the staircase but who had made himself more comfortable in a small side office.

'Quite right, but, since no one ever bothers to read in here or to take books out, it seems an unnecessary precaution,' the Librarian told him. 'I can't imagine that it crosses anyone's mind to steal a book. The only thing I have to do round here is dust the shelves occasionally and turn the lights on and off in winter.'

'But how do you occupy your time? I see you are writing something,' Purefoy said. An ancient black enamel typewriter with glass panels on the sides stood to one side of the desk, and there were typed pages in a wire basket.

'Oh, I'm mucking about trying to revise Romley's _History of Porterhouse,_ which is completely out of date-it was published in 1911-and full of the most dreadful inaccuracies. For instance, he actually goes so far as to claim that Porterhouse predates Peterhouse which was the first college in Cambridge as everyone knows. Not the late Mr Romley. No, he's convinced the original foundation was Porterhouse and that a school for Franciscan monks was established here in 1095.'

'But the Franciscan Order wasn't founded until the thirteenth century,' said Purefoy. 'That can't be right. He must have meant some other Order, like the Benedictines who were founded much earlier.'

'In AD 529, to be precise,' said the Librarian, and immediately won Purefoy's heart. The Librarian was obviously a man who placed a special emphasis on certainties.

'But surely this man Romley must have known that?'

'Heaven alone knows what he knew. From what I've seen of the older Fellows he probably thought Benedictine was only a liqueur.'

'Well, if all his facts are as bad as that I should forget the revision and write your own history of the College, warts and all.'

'I have more or less decided to, though I think I won't mention warts. That's what really brought me here. Warts and eczema and skin diseases in general. Actually I graduated from Glasgow as a medical doctor. It was a great mistake. I wasn't cut out for the contemplation of skin conditions and I wasn't any good in any case. I saw this post advertised and I thought it would be a much pleasanter life and I've always loved reading and I cannot stand inaccuracies. That was another reason for not staying in medicine. Diagnosis is largely guesswork and while the effect is obvious the cause very seldom is. No one really knows what causes eczema and I don't think they understand very much about warts either. Some people can charm the things away. Well, I just wasn't prepared to be a medical water-diviner. Or I suppose I should say a blood-diviner.'