Stephen Fry - The Liar

On the last working day before Easter, Maundy Thursday, the four of them had been loading bags onto the trailer in thickening twilight when Adrian caught sight of a gathering of huge birds, as black as priests, pecking at rotten potatoes at the further end of the field.

'Look at the size of those crows!' he had cried.

'Boy,' said Mr Sutcliffe, tugging at a sack, 'when you see a load of crows together, them's rooks. And when you see a rook on its own, that's a fucking crow.'

'Oh,' said Adrian. 'Right. But supposing a rook gets lost or wanders off by itself. What would you call that?'

Mr Sutcliffe roared with laughter.

'Well I don't know about you, lad, but I'd call it a crook!'

II

'A SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL'

or

'The Education of an English Gentleman'

by

Woody Nightshade

The Daisy Chain Club is exclusive. Exclusive because you can only join if you sleep in a junior dormitory, one without cubicles. It isn't hard to become a member. Membership is enforced. If one person refuses, the club cannot meet.

The rules are simply learnt. After lights out you stretch out your right hand until it finds your neighbour's membrum virile. The same is being done to you by the boy on your left. At a given signal from the President of the club (always the Prefect whose duty it is to have to sleep in a junior dormitory), it's all hands to the pumps and last one home's on the bathroom-cleaning roster for a week.

It's a calm, civilised and amiable club, The Daisy Chain. There are ones like it in every house in the school and in every public school in the land. An acquaintance from Ampleforth tells me of the Hot Cupboard Society, another from Rugby of the Milkshake Club, whose name speaks for itself. A Wykhamist friend told me of a pursuit at Winchester called the Biscuit Game. The players stand around in a circle tossing off onto a Wholemeal Digestive. The last one to spit his stuff on the biscuit eats it. A new kind of cream filling well in advance of anything McVitie's have got round to thinking of. Packed with potassium and vitamins, too.

From time to time news of these little entertainments leaks out. A careless word from Bletchley-Titherton to his older sister, a letter home from a young Savonarola and the whistle is "blown. There follow tears, recriminations and hasty expulsions.

This is strange. Let's face it boys, most of our fathers went, if not to this school, at least to others like it. Most of the staff too. Milk-Shake Clubs and their like are as old as the chapel steps.

But this is England, where the only crime is to he Pound Out.

'My dear old fellow, we all know what goes on hut it really doesn't do to shout about it. Upsets the apple-cart, muddies the water, what?'

I can't help thinking of the House of Commons. Six hundred or so men, most of them public school. They pronounce daily on the moral evils of the world, hut just think my dears, just think of the things they have done and continue to do to their bodies and the bodies of others.

We are being groomed for power. In twenty years' time we will see fellow members of The Daisy Chain Club on television talking about oil prices, giving the Church's viewpoint on the IRA, presenting Blue Peter, closing down factories, handing down severe sentences from the bench.

Or will we?

The world is changing. We grow our hair long, we take drugs. How many people reading this have not smoked cannabis on school premises? We are not very interested in power, we are very interested in putting the world right.

Now that is really intolerable. No my-dear-old-fellowing for that kind of crime.

The Daisy Chain Club may provoke tears, recriminations, hasty expulsions and even hastier cover-ups and laughings-off. But long hair, pot and real rebellion, they provoke anger, hatred and madness. When young people shag each other off in the dorms they are engaging in a charming old custom, a time-honoured ritual: the only reason that there are expulsions is that the tradition is hard to explain to tearful mothers and snide newspapers. But when boys say that they would rather be drummers than barristers, gardeners than businessmen, poets than soldiers, that they don't think much of examinations and authority and marriage, that when they are of age they intend to remake the world to fit them, not remake themselves to fit the world, then there is Trouble.

Someone once said that Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man and Communism is the exact reverse. I expect most of us agree with that. I don't know any schoolboy Communists, but I do know hundreds of schoolboy revolutionaries.

In the 60s the ideal was to overthrow by force. I don't know if you've seen the film 'If...' I doubt it, every year the cinema club tries to show it and every year Headman forbids it. The film ends with a band of schoolboys turning into guerillas and assassinating parents and staff. People said that although it was set in a school it was supposed to be a metaphor for real life. Well I don't know about you, but for me school is real life. And probably will be for years. I have no interest in shooting any of the masters dead of course (well, no more than two or three, tops), but I have a lot of interest in challenging their authority. Not wresting it from them, necessarily, but challenging it. Asking where it comes from, how it is earned. If we are told that it is earnt on the basis of age and strength alone, then we know what kind of world we are living in and I hope we will know what to do about it. We are always being asked to show respect. Well, we can show respect with the best of them, what we find it hard to do is to feel respect.

Our generation, the 70s Generation, is calling for a social revolution, not a pol -

'Adrian!'

'Oh, bollocks!'

'We're ready to go now, darling.'

'Go? Go where?' shouted Adrian.

'To church, of course.'

'But you said I didn't have to!'

'What?'

Adrian came out of his room and looked down into the hall. His mother and father were standing by the door swathed in their dominical best.

'I'm in the middle of my school project. You said I didn't have to go to church.'

His father snorted.

'Don't be ridiculous! Of course you do.'

'But I was working . . .'

'You'll put on a tie and come down now!'

III

'You're a fucking maniac,' said Tom. '

'You're a fucking maniac,' said Adrian.

'We're all fucking maniacs,' said Bullock.

They were in Bullock and Sampson's study leafing through copies of Bollocks!

The trunk they sat on felt to them like a powder keg. It contained seven hundred copies ready for. distribution.

'Come on kids,' Bullock had said when Adrian had suggested the title at the end of the previous term, 'BUM is much better. Bullock's Underground Magazine. Bollocks is my nickname for God's sake. Everyone will know I had something to do with it.'

'That's the whole idea, my little love-noodle,' Adrian had replied. 'No one is going to believe that Brainy Bollocks himself would be so stupid as to name a subversive underground magazine after himself.'

So Bollocks! it was. There was no artwork because only Sampson and Tom had much skill at drawing and their styles were too readily identifiable.

The magazine they now looked through was a simple fifteen pages of gestetnered typescript on green paper. No handwriting, no illustrations or distinguishing characteristics of any kind. It could have been done by any person or persons in any House in the school. Bullock had had no trouble typing and reproducing the stencils in total secrecy at home.

After many crossings-out and changes of direction, Adrian's piece had been sent off to Bullock's address in Highgate the Tuesday after Easter: reading it back now he found it rather tame and half-hearted next to the libretto of a rock opera on school life that Bullock had contributed and Tom's frankly hairy analysis of the heroin counter-culture in The Naked Lunch. Sampson's allegory of red and grey squirrels was simply incomprehensible.