Chapter
1:
Sebastian’s
house
“Have you ever noticed,” I said to Amanda, that all
the
other drivers on the motorway are either shits or turds.
They’re either trundling along at 45 in the middle lane, or
they’re passing everything in sight and cutting in like
…
well like the shits they are. Oh-oh, here comes one
now.”
I could see him approaching in the fast lane. King of the
road? That’s what he
thinks. I accelerated a bit to catch up on the truck ahead,
then
pulled out into the outside lane causing the shit to brake. I
drew level with the truck – he was engaged in one of those
interminable battles of the leviathans, trying to pass another huge
truck – the buggers shouldn’t be on the motorway
–
and it would take him about five minutes.
Well, on this occasion that suited me fine. I slowed and
cruised
alongside the trucks. In the mirror I could see the shit
looking
furious. Well, serve him right. If one truck has
the right
to pass another, I have the right to pass both, and being a law-abiding
sort of bloke – when it suits me – I certainly
wasn’t
going to break the law just so that a purple-faced shit could get to
his golf-club three minutes early.
The truck pulled in, and I cruised on in the fast lane – no
sense in pulling in too early.
“Aha!” I said.
“Shit’s about to pass on
the left. That’s naughty.”
So I pulled back into the middle lane just in time to stop
him.
It worked perfectly. Shitto had to brake again, and before he
could pull out into the fast lane a whole stream of cars that were
behind us went sailing past.
I waited till the road was clear, then, as he pulled out, I speeded
up. Shitto had to work damned hard to get past, but
eventually he
went roaring off into the distance at about a hundred, just where I
knew there were speed cameras. By the time I reached them, of
course, I was travelling at just a fraction under 70.
Amanda was squeaking all the time. Words like dangerous
and not
safe were popping out, but
all the time I knew the little bitch was revelling in it.
She knows what side her bread’s buttered – or she
thinks
she does, but I’m already supporting two grasping ex-wives
and
there’s no way any of my new squeezes are going to get their
claws on what remains of my hard-earned cash.
There’s
enough there to attract them, and once they’re attracted I
can
satisfy their urges. You see the difference between an
experienced stud like me and some callow youth is that, while
he’s finished and done in a few seconds I can roger a female
for
long enough without a pause to give her multiple orgasms. I
get
randier as I get older, and I have Amanda gasping and grunting and
begging for mercy before I come to my triumphant climax. She
enjoys it really, just like she enjoys my driving and hopes that one
day she’ll enjoy my money.
Another shit! Tally ho!
I’m driving north, to Halden, my home town – not
that
I’ve thought of it as home for many a year, but with
retirement
coming up and those two greedy bitches sucking my bank account dry, I
need to find a part of the country where property’s cheaper
if
I’m to maintain my lifestyle.
I looked on the Internet for suitable properties in Swardale, and what
I came up with nearly took my breath away: Odderby House: A
fine period home circa 1895 offering generous five bedroomed
accommodation, situated in a unique, elevated position with extensive
views across Halden and to the fells beyond.
It was a
house I knew well and had visited many times without ever dreaming that
one day I might be able to afford it. It was the house of my
old
school friend Sebastian, an many a time I had stood in that little
octagonal turret that formed a sort of corner bay window in his
bedroom, and looked down on Halden: the castle and the cathedral to the
right, the main shopping centre straight ahead, then the university and
then my own school as the panorama swung round to the main bridge over
the Swar.
There were pictures of the sitting rooms and the dining room, and of
the extensive gardens, where I had strolled with Sebastian. I
knew that I had to have it. I e-mailed the agent then phoned
him
and made an appointment. I can’t say Amanda was all
that
pleased at the prospect of my moving north, but she came –
perhaps calculating that if we both moved north she’d move in
permanently and establish more of a claim. I suppose I could
buy
her a flat somewhere in Halden, but if she doesn’t come,
I’m sure there are plenty more eager to share the bed of a
wealthy retired businessman from down south.
I didn’t really take much notice of Sebastian until we
reached
the lower VIth. He and his friends were on the science side
while
I did languages. I knew he was drawing attention to
himself
in the fifth form, with his absurd posturings, and some of his friends
were totally weird, Lulu Greatbatch for instance. He
continued in
the VIth, posing as some sort of aesthete, which we on the arts side
thought quite unsuitable conduct for a scientist.
Aren’t
they supposed to be hard-working grey gnomes, tied to their
laboratories and not interested in anything they couldn’t put
in
a test-tube and analyse. We
seemed to be the colourless ones, beavering away at our essays and our
translations, while they
had all the fun of posing as artists.
I was in the school library one day, beavering away, as was my wont, at
an essay in the French language, when suddenly the door was flung open
and Lulu Greatbatch hurtled in squealing, “No!
No!
You shan’t have my trousers! You naughty
boys!”
Sebastian and his science cronies came crashing in after him.
Lulu dodged around the tables, squealing all the while, and the others
pursued him, sometimes round the tables knocking over piles of books,
sometimes over the tables, sending books and papers cascading onto the
floor. I wanted to protest, but I couldn’t make
myself
heard in the din.
At last they had him, and, before I could say anything, they hoisted
him onto my table, and while he struggled and squirmed, they held him
pinned to it, while Sebastian unhooked his waistband and unbuttoned his
flies.
Lulu looked up at me and giggled.
“They’re such naughty
boys,” he said. “They can’t
keep their hands
off poor Lulu’s trousers, but I love them all in spite of
it.”
“You mean because
of it,
don’t you Lulu?” said Sebastian, with a
grin.
“If you want your kegs back you’ll find them
hanging on the
banister of the main stairs.”
“Oooh, that’s not fair,”
wailed Lulu. “You know poor Lulu will get into
trouble if
the masters see him running round school without his
trousers.
Give’em back. Please give ’em
back.”
Sebastian grinned. “OK, we’ll have mercy
on you this
time Lulu. Much as we love seeing your beautiful pudgy white
legs
twinkling along the corridor you’d better have your nether
garments back. All in fun?”
“All in fun, darlings,” said Lulu, pulling on his
trousers. “You know Lulu always forgives you, dear
boys, no
matter how badly you treat her.”
“She loves it really,” said Sebastian to me.
“Look at my essay,” I spluttered.
“It’s ruined.”
“Oh dear,” said Sebastian.
“You’d better
write another one. You can’t hand that
in. It’s all crumpled.”
“You crumpled it,” I said crossly.
“It was a
good essay, one of the best I’ve ever written – and
now I
can’t even read it well enough to copy it out
again.
I’ve a good mind to go straight to Mr Watkyns and tell him
you
destroyed it by acting like hooligans in the library.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” said Sebastian,
with a
glint in his eye. “If the gang thought someone was
going to
shop them to the beaks, well, all hell might break out. You
see
how overexcited they are. Best say nothing more about
it.
Besides, you’ve had a ringside seat at a very entertaining
debagging. Surely that’s worth a bit of extra
work?”
I couldn’t help grinning back.
“OK,” I said. “I’ll
do the beastly thing
again. I can probably remember most of it, and it
doesn’t
have to be in till Thursday.”
“Not till Thursday?” said Sebastian.
“See you
tonight then? Chip shop in Crompton Street.”
“Yeah, OK.”
I met them at the chip-shop, and I became part of Sebastian’s
circle. I hung around with them in break, at lunchtimes and
after
school. I became an aesthete, a scorner of everything
bourgeois
and ordinary. Sebastian was our leader and there
wasn’t one
of us not prepared to do anything he asked. From time to time
we
debagged Lulu Greatbatch. He stayed around as part of the
gang
and accepted that frequent detrousering was the price he paid to be one
of us – or rather to be a friend of
Sebastian’s. As I
said, we’d do anything for Sebastian. If
he’d ordered
us all to go to school in our underpants, I don’t think any
of us
would have disobeyed. There was just something about him that
demanded absolute loyalty; and, of course, as a leader loyal to his
followers he never did demand anything of us that he wouldn’t
do
himself – but that left a wide field open.
I remember Sebastian started wearing his cricket whites to
school. The Masters weren’t pleased. They
wanted him
to wear the standard charcoal grey flannels, but he pointed out that
the school rules said that, while school blazers and ties were
compulsory, grey trousers were optional. “I could
come into
class in my shirt-tails,” he said, “or Lulu hear
could wear
his favourite skirt.”
They were flummoxed – silly bastards – and the next
week
all of us were in cricket whites, with our school ties threaded through
the belt-loops instead of belts.
It was while this was going on that Sebastian asked me to pop round to
his house after school. I’d never been up Odderby
before:
that was where the posh people lived. In fact until I met
Sebastian I’d never even met anyone from Odderby –
at least
as far as I knew.
We cycled out of school, took a short cut along Queen Anne Street, came
out onto the main road, crossed the bridge, then up the steep bank on
the far side. I was labouring a bit on my old Hercules, but
Sebastian sailed up it on his Raleigh with its Sturmey-Archer
three-speed. We both had to walk up Odderby Road, of course,
but
then we mounted again for the loop of Odderby Lane that brought us
round to the front of Odderby Crag and to Odderby House.
The Soare family home was perched on the very top of Odderby Crag,
overlooking the town. It was one of a group of late Victorian
villas, but it was the pick of the bunch and took its name from a
earlier manor house that had stood there since some time in the Middle
Ages. Sebastian told me that Odderby had been settled in
Viking
times.
We abandoned our bikes in the front drive and entered through a side
door. Sebastian beckoned me to follow, and we slid quietly up
the
stairs and into his room. That was the first time I saw
it.
I was pretty impressed, I can tell you: at least four times the size of
my own little bedroom. I had crammed into a tiny space a bed,
a
little wardrobe, a whitewood chest of drawers, and a little table, no
bigger than a card-table, where I did my homework.
Sebastian’s room had a very luxurious bed, a huge wardrobe
with
matching chest of drawers in some lustrous dark wood that was probably
mahogany, acres of floor-space between these massive pieces of
furniture, with expensive-looking Persian rugs, and – best of
all, a huge bay window, a sort of octagonal turret stuck on to his room
where the south-east corner should have been, and big enough for a
leather-topped writing desk in the same dark wood.
The view from Sebastian’s eyrie was magnificent.
The tower
and spires of the cathedral rose above the rooftops of Halden, traffic
could be seen moving along the distant streets, and in the foreground,
below the Crag, the River Swar wound through the green parks that,
luckily, were too much subject to flooding ever to be built on.
“Well?” said Sebastian.
I turned. He was sprawled on the bed, smiling that
mischievous
smile of his. He had taken off his blazer and was clad all in
white, white shirt, white cricket flannels, the only colour being the
black and yellow school tie round his waist. Lulu Greatbatch
would have flung himself on Sebastian with excited squeaks,
I’m
quite sure, and probably tried to rip his trousers off. Even
Rob
Muncaster, who was going out with that girl from the High School that
the lads said used to let him go all the way – even Rob
Muncaster
would have been hard put not to react in some way.
Was it a test? Make just one false move and you’re
condemned as a queer and beaten up, or made a fool of like
Lulu.
If it was, I passed it with flying colours.
“Very impressive,” I said coolly, turning back
towards the
terrace. “You must feel like the lord of all you
survey,
sitting up here with that panorama spread out before you.”
“Oh, you get used to it, you know,” he
said.
“Let me show you my record-collection. Do you know
Lonnie
Donegan?
I must have been a couple of weeks after that that Sebastian asked me
to tea to meet his mother and sister. I was determined not to
seem common, and I’m quite sure that I impressed them with my
sophistication. I lit a cigarette as we sat around the
tea-table,
and I made a point of making points in the discussion, showing that I
knew all about the current political scene and the latest films and
music. Whenever I scored over one of the women I leaned back
in
my chair, appraised her coolly, and blew a stream of smoke towards
her. I knew that women can’t resist a
man’s tobacco
smoke. We’d seen it in the pictures. The
hero would
lean back, his eyes would twinkle, and he’d blow a waft of
smoke
into the face of his interlocutrix. Her knees would go
wobbly,
she’d smile at him, and they’d go off together into
the
sunset – and into bed. Even if the film-makers
couldn’t say it because of the censorship laws, we knew
that’s where they were headed.
So I blew smoke in Mrs Soare’s face and in Julie’s,
and let
it charm them. They were duly charmed. My
sophistication
impressed them, and my smoke made them weak at the knees. I
began
to feel that if Sebastian hadn’t been there they
couldn’t
have controlled themselves – but you can’t rip your
son’s best friend’s trousers off and make mad,
passionate
love to him in front of your son, so they had keep themselves in check.
Sebastian knew it too. How embarrassing to have your mother
and
sister drooling over your best friend. How embarrassing to
know
that, if you hadn’t been there, they’d have leapt
on him,
torn off his kegs, and forced him to make love to them. After
that, whenever I visited him, we slipped quietly up to his room and put
on a record from his ever-growing collection.
Chapter
2:
Sebastian’s gang
I remember that, as soon as he turned
seventeen,
Sebastian was given his own car. It was a sporty little
number,
bright red, and it got us into quite a few scrapes.
There was Rob Muncaster’s
birthday, for
example. I suppose we must have been a bit drunk, for we all
ended up trouserless and drove through the town, singing and hooting,
until Sebastian’s foot slipped on the accelerator and he
drove
through a red light, swerved to avoid a lorry, skidded and ended up
sideways across the road.
Luckily the policeman, who came plodding
over to see
what had happened, was a friend of Rob’s father’s,
so he
just got us straight again, and back into our nether garments, and told
us to go home and not do it again or we’d be in serious
trouble.
By then we had a name for our group: Les Épatants.
It was a sort of pun in French: we were the stunningly wonderful ones
and also the ones who set out to shake the bourgeois out of his
tranquillity. We were startling in two different senses, and
our
Weltanschauung was a sort of modernist liberationism based on
Surrealism. We believed the supreme aesthetic achievement was
the
acte
gratuit. With
André Breton we believed that the simplest surrealist act
would
be to walk down a street, or into our school yard, with guns in our
hands, and shoot as many people as possible – simply because
we
chose to do it and for no other reason. There have been
massacres
in American high schools since then, but they were carried out by
disgruntled loners with a grudge against society. We
weren’t disgruntled. We weren’t
loners. We
weren’t unhappy, inadequate losers. On the
contrary, we
were Les
Épatants, the
most glorious manifestations of youthful modernism it’s
possible
to conceive. If Sebastian had ordered us to carry out a
massacre,
we’d have done it as an acte
gratuit,
because we wanted to show that we were not bound by any of the
conventions held our parents’ generation in thrall to the Mrs
Grundys of the world.
Like Gide’s hero who pushed a
man from a train, just to show he could, or Camus’ Étranger,
who killed an Arab for no reason, we stood outside society, ready to
remake it in our own image. How often did I stand in that
octagonal bay in Sebastian’s room, looking down on Halden,
like
Rastignac looking down on Paris from the cemetery – Père Lachaise,
was it? – and silently mouthed my defiance at the city and
the world. That was how we were: the startling ones, Les Épatants.
Taking off our trousers on Rob
Muncaster’s
birthday for a bare-bummed drive round Halden was part of it, though
admittedly a rather childish part. We objected violently to
censorship, you see. Cinema belonged to the 20th Century, but
Hollywood, even in the fifties was still following the Hays code from
some time in the thirties: no nudity, no sex, nothing that could
possibly offend Aunt Maud – and, in this country, the Lord
Chamberlain’s Office was even more hidebound. So a
bit of
nudity on our part was conceived as a protest against
prudery. We
were just lucky in the constable who caught us.
A far more serious attack on the
prevailing
standards of bourgeois morality was our decision to distribute adult
magazines to the rest of the school. We decided it was every
boy’s right to lust after sex and that the way our
parent’s
generation hid it all away was likely to make us all grow up as twisted
as they
were.
As it happened we knew that Gareth
Radcliffe had a
stock of dirty books and magazines. Someone had seen them in
his
locker, and someone else had seen him reading one hidden inside a
school book. He thought his little hobby was a total secret,
but
at least half the sixth form knew about it. What we needed to
know was where he got them from.
That bit was easy. Rob
Muncaster and Gerry
Bulman ambushed him after school one day. A few threats and a
bit
of arm-twisting were all it took. Radcliffe was a right weed
as
well as a weirdo.
“Greatbatch gets them for
me,” he bleated.
“Lulu?”
“No, not Lulu –
Winston.”
“Winston? But
he’s a prefect.”
“Imagine that: a prefect
getting dirty books.”
“He’s a
pornographer.”
“Where’s he
get’em?”
“I don’t
know! I really
don’t,” wailed Radcliffe.
“He brings them
to school and I buy them off him.”
“Does he give you them for
what he pays.”
“No. He says he has
to have danger money for getting them.”
“How much?”
“Ten percent.”
“Orright. You can
go.”
And off he scuttled. Given our
reputation he was probably glad to escape with his trousers.
The next step was up to
Sebastian. He sidled
up to Winston Greatbatch one morning and gave him one his famous
grins. Greatbatch was suspicious. He knew Sebastian
as a
trouble-maker and, worse than that from his point of view, a friend of
his cousin, Lulu – or Hugh as he’d actually been
christened. You see, Winston was one of the lads,
and, to have people know that that mincing poofter that everyone called
Lulu was actually his cousin, was a massive embarrassment to
him.
I really couldn’t see why Sebastian kept him in the
gang.
OK, he was funny when he wanted to be, and he did wonderful Goon-Show
impressions – his Minnie Bannister was especially good, as
you
might expect: “O-o-oh Henry-y-y, we’ll all be
murdered in
our beds … nnnnh!” But then we all did
Goon-Show
impressions – and he wasn’t all that brilliant as a
skiffle
player.
Anyway, Sebastian gave Winston
Greatbatch one of his
most dazzling smiles, and pretty soon he had him eating out of his
hand. Sebastian really made him feel that if he did us this
one
little favour he’d be more or less an honorary
Épatant.
“And,” said
Sebastian, “ because
we know it’s a risk for you to get this stuff,
we’ll pay
you five percent above the cover price.”
“Ten,” said
Greatbatch before he could stop himself.
“Done!” said
Sebastian. “Ten it is. When can you get
the stuff?”
The deal was made. Sebastian
handed over the
cash, and a couple of days later Greatbatch passed him a plain brown
carrier-bag stuffed with the filthiest magazines any of us had ever
seen.
“Cor! Look at
that!” said Rob,
passing Gerry a magazine with a couple engaged in a bit of naked
sex-play.”
“What-what-what-what?” said Sebastian as
Neddy Seagoon. “I don’t wish to know
that.
Kindly leave the world.”
“Can’t we just
look?” said Rob.
“You silly, twisted
boy,” murmured
Sebastian, swiftly changing character. “No time for
ogling
female flesh. We’ve got to get these distributed
pronto.”
So the porno mags were distributed about
the school,
and all that day there were little knots of sniggering boys all over
the yard and the field, perusing their porn-mags and ogling the
pictures.
“Lads!” said
Sebastian.
“Today we have struck a mighty blow for freedom.
Today we
have brought education and enlightenment to our fellow boys and saved
them from the benighted ignorance that blighted our own formative
years. Next week more of the same.”
The next week and the one after Winston
brought us
more filthy books and we distributed them round the classrooms before
school started. The same happened the following week, and
would
have happened the week after but for the art exhibition.
You see, it wasn’t just sexual
liberation that
motivated us: we had a total aesthetic. Surrealism and
Dadaism
were our ideals: they freed art from the hidebound aesthetics of the
fusty old academicians. Our artistic hero was Marcel Duchamp,
and
we considered that his urinal was the most important work of art of the
twentieth century. No longer did artists have to slave away
at
the techniques of drawing and painting or concern themselves with the
imitation of life and such old-hat fuddy-duddy topics as
perspective. Anybody could be an artist and anything could be
a
work of art if an artist said it was.
Art was liberated, just as music was
liberated by
skiffle: even the poorest lads could make double basses out of
tea-chests, broom-handles and string, while washboards could be found
in any junkshop for a couple of bob or pinched from
wash-houses.
Thimbles could be found all over the place and, since they were always
getting lost, would never be missed. Even guitars
weren’t
that dear, and because all this gear was easily portable, you could
practise anywhere. We used the cellar in
Sebastian’s house:
set up the stuff, open the beer, whip Lulu’s trousers off to
get
us in the mood, play a couple of Lonnie-Donegan records, then we were
away – only pausing to listen to the Goon Show.
That was
liberating too: humour in surreal mode. It seemed to be all
of a
piece: modern youth in revolt against the has-been generation.
Our next – well, I suppose
nowadays, looking
back, I’d call it a prank, but then I’d have said:
our next
revolutionary act was our contribution to the art exhibition at
school. The hall had been cleared of chairs and temporary
boards
were set up all round the edges to display the paintings of our
school’s so-called artistic output: realistic daubs showing
sunsets and still-lifes and portraits and street scenes.
We prepared our own work of
art. Early on the
morning of the exhibition we sneaked into the hall, removed a
particularly prominent and very traditional painting of the front of
the school and replaced it with our own piece of surrealist
found-art. Pinned to our board were three pieces of
paper.
The first had at the top the words Cher
ami,
and at the bottom bien
amicalement,
Les
Épatants, the
second Ma
chère, je t’adore
and au
revoir, jusqu’a ce soir,
while the third had Madame,
Pas ce
soir,
Joséphine, and at
the bottom alarge imperial N.
Glued to the centre of each of these pages was a used condom.
The title we gave it was À-â-é-è-ê-ô.
It was another French pun: it meant French
letters.
Quite a number of parents saw it before
somebody
went to complain to the Beak, and dozens of boys had a good laugh
before it was taken down and destroyed. That was a
Friday.
The hall was back to normal by Monday morning, and after the usual
prayers the beak lectured us for about twenty minutes on the disgusting
and suggestive exhibition that certain boys had perpetrated, assuring
us vehemently that the culprits would be identified and punished in
exemplary fashion.
A couple of days later, when Sebastian
tried to give
Greatbatch money for more porn-mags, Greatbatch refused.
There
would be no more ever again, he said. He didn’t
want to be
associated with us. Not even Sebastian’s most
dazzling
smile would change his mind, but it did persuade him to talk.
The
Head had lectured all the prefects on the absolute necessity of
identifying the miscreants who had sabotaged the art exhibition,
exposed the school to scandal and ridicule, and who were probably the
same filthy-minded guttersnipes behind the distribution of pornographic
material to the innocent junior forms, the same subversive elements who
were encouraging his pupils to demand an end to school uniform,
compulsory Latin and their confinement to the school premises during
the day.
How useful to have an inside source of
information. Sebastian’s charm had done it
again. It
wasn’t just us Épatants that were fascinated by
him.
He could have charmed the knickers off vicars if he had set his mind to
it.
We had the information. We
knew they were
after us. What could we do? Well, as members of the
Halden
avant-garde we were pretty resourceful, and with a genius like
Sebastian at our head, naturally we came up with a plan.
It was put into action the next time the
school
captain was on yard duty. I’ve forgotten his name,
but I
remember he was a big lad, heavily built, a useful prop-forward those
of an athletic disposition called him. I gather his weight
added
significantly to the forward momentum of a scrum, but even as a
schoolboy he was already running to fat.
Anyway, this fattish fellow was
patrolling the yard
and the field, enjoying his own importance, when his attention was
suddenly attracted by a commotion. Sebastian had grabbed a
third
former and stared dragging him off to the far side of the
field.
Youngster protested, of course: “Hey! Lemme
go!
What’re you doing?”
“There’s going to be
a debagging,” said Sebastian.
Well, naturally that set the third
former kicking
and screaming, and that in turn set the school captain lumbering over
to investigate.
“What’s going
on?” he bellows, and
then he’s floored by the combined weight of Rob Muncaster,
Gerry
Bulman and me.
“Told you there’s
going to be a
debagging,” says Sebastian to the third former,
“but not
you.
You were only the bait.
Sorry if I scared you
…” – here he gave one of his dazzling
smiles –
“Stay and watch if you like. Bring all your
friends.”
He did stay to watch, I
couldn’t tell at the
time, because, as I told you, the school captain was a big, heavy
rugby-player and he put up quite a fight. We hadn’t
any
time to see who was watching, but eventually we had him immobilised
– then we took his trousers off.
Somebody, probably Sebastian, climbed up
onto the boundary wall and waved the trousers.
“Listen!” he said to
the school captain,
who was roaring and spluttering with rage. “Shut up
and
listen! We are Les Épatants.
We’re the
startling stunners. We are the avant-garde, the
future.
Now, you’re going to promise that our identities will never
be
revealed to the Beak – whatever we do – because, if
you
don’t, your trousers are going over the wall into the
girls’ school!”
Fatboy spluttered and protested and said
things like “You wouldn’t dare!”
Sebastian waved the trousers again and
said,
“The question is, do you dare risk it.
Ahah! I think
some of the girls have spotted that I’m waving a pair of
trousers. Here they come to get a closer look. More
and
more of them. Hundreds of them! Last chance!
Promise, or I
throw them over!”
That was the end of Fatboy’s
resistance.
“No-o-o-o!” he
moaned. “Please, no.”
“Promise!”
“Yes … yes
… I promise.”
“No matter what we
do!”
“No matter what …
please … please give me my trousers.”
“OK, but you’ve
sworn an oath. If
you break it there’ll be no mercy. The
girls’ll have
your trousers – and I don’t know how
you’ll ever get
them back!”
So the school captain pulled on his
nether garments
and stumbled away through the laughing throng of spectators, knowing
that his word was no longer law, and that, no matter how many tries he
scored or scholarships he won, he would always be remembered as a fat
boy in his shirt-tails, with tears streaming down his face, pleading to
be spared the ultimate humiliation of having to beg the girls to return
his trousers.
As for us, we were triumphant.
No matter what
we did, the prefects wouldn’t touch us. Now was the
time to
prepare for a major coup, something that would really make the
hidebound old fuddy-duddies, the croulants
as the French called them,
sit up and take notice as avant-garde of youth assumed control of the
world.
Chapter
3:
Sebastian’s
project
As youthful avant-garde activists,
determined to
startle the world out of the old-fashioned hidebound attitudes of
previous generations, we had strong views on everything. We
were
against school uniforms because we believed boys, and girls too, should
have the right to express their personalities through their choice of
clothing. We were against censorship because we believed that
keeping children ignorant of sex would make them grow up inadequate and
twisted, as we believed our parents and their contemporaries to
be. We were against realism and technique in art because we
believed that art should express the irrational aspects of humanity
through surrealistic experiences. If there had been drugs
around
in those days we would have believed that young people should have the
right to experience mind-expanding substances, and we certainly
believed in our right to smoke tobacco and drink whatever alcohol we
could get our hands on.
We believed in the liberating
irrationality of Dada
and Surrealism, we believed in the necessity of expressing our desire
to be
through some acte
gratuit
with no possible advantage to ourselves
or to anyone else, we believed in the freedom of subversive humour and
of music that teenagers – was the word invented then?
– could produce for themselves without the need to
learn
rules of composition. We believed in ourselves as the
ultimate
artists, and, for us, the absolutely ultimate aesthetic insult was
encapsulated by the word Victorian.
Victorian morality imposed censorship,
called nudity
unclean, hid sexuality away. Victorian art blended realism
with
cloying sentimentality. Victorian architecture cluttered the
clean lines of functionality with decorative folderols, with
pseudo-medieval arched windows, with pinnacles and
flourishes. It
used stone or patterned brickwork instead of honest concrete, and its
window panes, instead of being practical sheets of plate glass, were
cut up into little diamonds held in place by strips of lead.
If
there was one thing we hated more than anything else it was Victorian
architecture, and a most nauseating example was foisted onto our sight
almost every day of our lives – the school hall.
We thought it a truly hideous building.
It was built
of stone. Its windows were set in pointed Gothic arches
between
solid buttresses. The entrance door to the corridor alongside
it
was at the top of a short flight of shallow steps, and it too was set
in a Gothic archway. But if we thought it aesthetically
horrible,
we also considered it morally intolerable, for in its arches and leaded
lights, its buttresses and its pinnacles, it announced to the world
that the ethos of our school was of the most repressive Victorian
“decency”. There was nothing for it: that
hall would
have to go.
The first thing to do was to compose a
song.
Back to Sebastian’s cellar, beer out, Lulu’s
trousers off
and hung up on the wall behind us like a flag, then the improvisation
began.
Our
school hall is Victorian,
that
school hall has to go.
It’s
ancient, dinosaurian.
T’will
cover us with glory an’
honour
if we blow
it
into tiny particles,
to
atoms and to dust,
that
fustiest of articles
that
mustiest of farticles,
and
so it is our lust,
it
is our wild desire
to
set the hall on fire,
to
see that hall combust –
we
just … must.
That was more or less how it went, with
lots of
booming on the double bass, rattling on the washboard and strumming on
the guitars.
Then we talked for what seemed like
hours on the
practicalities of getting hold of petrol and explosives and smuggling
them into the storerooms underneath the hall. Sebastian
thought
he could easily fill up a couple of cans with petrol every time he
filled his car, and, since they were all in the science sixth it
wouldn’t be difficult to nick odd jars and packets of this
and
that from the labs. They knew what would be useful and how to
combine them for maximum explosive effect. It was all Greek
to
me. After that we improvised a Goon Show in which
Grytpype-Thynne
passed lighted sticks of dynamite to Neddy, who quickly passed them to
Eccles, who dallied for a while then passed them to Bluebottle, leading
of course to the sound-effect-explosion and the immortal line,
“You dirty rotten swine! You deaded me!”
Weeks passed. We made up more
songs about the
destruction of Victorian buildings and the overthrow of Victorian
morality, and we improvised more Goon Shows, but I began to get more
and more uneasy. It seemed to me that Sebastian and the
others
were actually taking our fantasy plot seriously. Sebastian
was
completely wound up and over-excited, and the others would do anything
he asked without question – he was just that sort of
boy.
They talked about cans of petrol in the basements under the hall as if
they actually existed, and their discussion of the explosive qualities
of various combinations of chemicals, though I didn’t
understand
most of it, seemed decidedly practical. I began voicing a few
reservations about what we were doing, and I suppose they must have
realised that I wasn’t really up for translating our
fantasies
into reality. They were more circumspect after that, so it
wasn’t for some weeks that I became aware that, as far as
they
were concerned, the plot was real.
They tried not to talk about it when I
was present,
but I overheard one or two hints, and I began keeping my ears open and
putting two and two together until I was pretty sure that they were
rally making preparations for a massive explosion to destroy the hall.
I stayed in the school library a bit
later than
usual one day until I could be pretty sure that Sebastian and the
others were well away, then I went out into the yard as if I were on my
way home that way. I peered in at the windows of the
storerooms,
but they were protected by wire grilles and the glass was dirty, so I
couldn’t see anything. I went back round the
corner, looked
around to make sure no one was watching, then hopped down the steps to
the basement door.
It was unlocked. I slipped
inside, closed it
behind me, waited a moment for my eyes to adjust to the gloom, then
picked my way through the lumber and junk that was stored
there.
In the very middle of the basement I found a pile of petrol
cans.
I picked one up. It was full. I opened the cap and
sniffed. No doubt at all: petrol. There was also a
box
packed with chemicals that I didn’t recognise, and, quite
obviously, a fuse, leading back towards the door. When the
time
came, all the conspirator would have to do would be to light this fuse,
slip back outside, then he would have time to run across the yard and
take cover behind another building, where, no doubt, the others would
be waiting to enjoy the fireworks.
I opened the door, checked that all was
clear,,
sneaked round the corner of the hall building, then ran for the yard
gate.
What was I to do? Go to
Sebastian’s
house, catch him on his own and plead with him to come to his
senses? I knew he wouldn’t. He was living
entirely in
a fantasy world. Find one of the others? Gerry
Bulman lived
out on a farm in the middle of nowhere near Geddonby, and Lulu was
quite impossible. That left Rob Muncaster, who lived
somewhere
near the University in one of those big houses overlooking the
park. I set off in that direction, but I hadn’t
gone very
far before I knew it was hopeless. Rob, like all of them
–
like me too before I realised how far they’d gone –
was
completely mesmerised by Sebastian. If I talked to him,
he’d probably agree with me, just to put me off the scent,
then,
as soon as I had gone, he’d phone Sebastian.
They’d
blow up the hall that very night.
I went home. I had my
tea. I did my
prep. I went to bed. I even prayed – and
I made up my
mind.
Next morning, after assembly, I went to
the Headmaster’s study and knocked.
“Can I see you sir?”
“If your eyes are open, I dare
say you can,
but if you wish to consult me, Walker, you should make an appointment
with Miss O’Reilly.”
“It’s …
very important, Sir, and urgent.”
“Very well. Come in
and tell me briefly
what the trouble is. If I can solve your problem quickly, I
will,
otherwise you must see Miss O’Reilly. I’m
afraid I
haven’t much time at present.”
“I think there’s a
plot to blow up the hall, Sir.”
“I have no doubt, Walker, that
boys talk about
such things – I even talked about something similar myself
when I
was your age. I think we were planning to kidnap our
headmaster
and hold him to ransom until he agreed to our demands, but what those
demands were I have long forgotten. It’s just
adolescent
fantasy, Walker. You have no need to worry.”
“But I do,
Sir. I was one of the
conspirators. I was one of the Épatants,
Sir. I was
one of the boys who sabotaged the art exhibition, for which
I’m
truly sorry, Sir. After that I tried to keep us within
bounds,
Sir, and I thought, just like you said, Sir. I thought that
when
they talked about getting rid of the hall because it’s a
symbol
of Victorian attitudes, I thought it was just fantasy. I went
along with them, Sir, and helped them make up songs about it, and we
improvised little scenes like Goon Show episodes –
it’s a
comedy show on the wireless, Sir, the Goon
Show,
with Harry Secombe and
…”
“Yes, Walker. I have
heard of the Goon
Show, though you would do far
better to think of more cultural
pursuits, still, I suppose each generation has its comedy …
Proceed.”
Well, Sir, I began to think they were
taking our
fantasies a bit too seriously, so I tried to warn them, but after that
they froze me out, and it wasn’t until yesterday that I found
out
they really meant to do it. Sir, the store-rooms under the
hall
are full of petrol and explosives.”
The Headmaster switched on his
intercom.
“Miss O’Reilly,” he said,
“please find Mr
Ferris and ask him to come here at once.”
He hung up. “You say
you were one of Les
Épatants,
Walker” he said. “Perhaps you
wouldn’t mind telling me the names of the others. I
see you
hesitate, not wishing, I suppose, to implicate your friends, but they
are
implicated, Walker. If what you say is true, they have
undertaken a criminal action which would normally lead to their being
apprehended by the police, tried in a court of law, and
imprisoned. I would hope to deal with his matter internally,
for
the good of the school and to make life easier on these misguided,
foolish boys. Their names, Walker.”
“Soare is the leader, Sir,
then there’s Muncaster, Bulman and Greatbatch.”
“Hugh Greatbatch, I take it,
since he’s
a friend of Soare’s and in the same form, not
Winston.”
“Yes, Sir, Hugh.”
At that moment Scadger Ferris appeared,
and the
Headmaster sent him to investigate the storerooms under the
hall.
He came back a few moments later and confirmed what I had
said.
The Headmaster dismissed him and summoned Miss O’Reilly, the
school secretary. He instructed her to find a prefect with a
free
period to supervise Mr Corcoran’s class and ask Mr Corcoran
to
come to his office, and then to fetch Soare, Muncaster, Bulman, G. and
Greatbatch, H. from their classes. They were to wait in the
corridor outside until called in.
While we waited the Head asked me a few
more
questions, and I filled him in on the aesthetic, moral and political
outlook of Les
Épatants.
I was surprised how calmly he
took it, but now I know that our views were nothing out of the ordinary
among adolescents, and, but for Sebastian’s extraordinary
ascendancy over the rest of us, would have passed away as these
revolutionary opinions always do.
Mr Corcoran, the Deputy Head arrived,
and the Headmaster told him briefly what had been discovered.
“What?!” snapped
Corcoran. “What?!!”
“As I have said,”
repeated the
Headmaster, “a group of lower-sixth-form boys has planned to
blow
up the school hall as a protest against the alleged Victorian character
of the ethos of the school.”
Corcoran spluttered and gave vent to
several more
What!s.
He wasn’t asking for information, he was just
expressing his surprise.
“Walker here has, fortunately
for all
concerned,” said the Head, “discovered the plot,
which he
had originally thought was mere adolescent fantasy, and has made haste
to alert me to the danger. The plotters themselves should by
now
be waiting outside. As I understand it from Walker, they had
formed a secret society called Les
Épatants
with the express
purpose of undermining what they conceive of as the bourgeois outlook
of our generation, and have already perpetrated a number of rather
foolish pranks, notably the substitution of an indecent artefact for
one of the paintings in the recent art exhibition, and I believe they
are also responsible for the distribution of pornographic magazines
about the school. Am I right, Walker?”
“Yes, Sir,” I said.
“Am I also correct in
thinking, Walker,”
said the Headmaster, that all these pranks were perpetrated under the
leadership of Soare?”
“Yes, Sir,” I
said. “He sort
of fascinates the others. We’d do anything he
asks.
I’m sorry, Sir.”
“Sorry, Walker?
“For my part in all this,
Sir. I should have known better.”
“You should indeed,
Walker. You have
committed grave errors, but I am prepared to believe they were errors
and that you now see that they are.”
“Yes, Sir,” I said
miserably.
“Ask the others to come in now
would you, Mr
Corcoran,” said the Head, and Sebastian, Rob, Gerry and Lulu
filed into the room.
Aided by threatening cries of
“What?!
What?!!” from Mr Corcoran, the Headmaster rapidly secured
from
the others a confession that they had indeed planned to blow up the
school hall, that, as I had said, they regarded the hall as a symbol of
the repressive moral code and the outmoded aesthetic outlook of the
older generation, and that they intended to destroy it in a spectacular
acte gratuit to show that the younger generation would have no truck
with the past. They also admitted sabotaging the art
exhibition,
distributing pornography, encouraging younger boys to rebel against
school uniform and a variety of other minor acts of rebellion that I
have forgotten in the intervening years.
The headmaster’s judgment was
swift and
merciless. “You will all go with Mr
Corcoran,” he
said, and receive six strokes of the cane, trousers lowered.
You
Soare, as the leader of this conspiracy, will receive eight, and Walker
shall have two strokes of the cane, but will be allowed to retain his
trousers. All except Walker will be expelled.
Immediately
after your caning you will clear your lockers and leave the school
premises. Walker, I am punishing you for your part in the
conspiracy, but, as a reward for your bravery in confessing what was
intended before the disaster occurred, I shall make you a sub-prefect
with effect from the first day of next term. Mr Corcoran, I
am
sorry that your last year with us should include the necessity for
punishments on such a scale, but I am sure your right arm is as strong
as ever.”
“It is,” said Mr
Corcoran grimly, as he
ushered us out and up the stairs to the small room where he kept his
cane.
Chapter
4:
Sebastian’s
revenge
That was the end of Les Épatants.
Sebastian, Rob, Gerry and Lulu all left the school premises after Mr
Corcoran had flogged us. He wasn’t wrong in saying
that his
arm was as strong as ever. I only got two, and I was hard put
to
it not to cry and to walk normally for the rest of the day.
The
others kept stiff upper lips, except for Lulu, who blubbered like a
girl. As we were going out, Sebastian even turned back and
thanked Mr Corcoran with something like one of his famous smiles.
I went back to the arts building, and
they went off
to the science block, where I suppose, they cleared their lockers then
left by the yard gate. I don’t suppose any of them
felt
like riding his bicycle. I thought it would be the last I
ever
saw of them, and I wasn’t entirely sorry. Sebastian
fascinated me, but I had come to see that his influence was not healthy.
Next term I became a sub-prefect, one of
only three
from the lower sixth. I was on yard duty one day when a
second-former came up to me.
“There’s a lad
fallen off the
wall” he said, “pointing across the
field. “I
think he’s hurt. Can you come.”
I went, of course, only to find that
there was no
injured boy – only Sebastian, Rob, Gerry and Lulu.
It was
Rob and Gerry who grabbed me.
“Thanks,” said
Sebastian to the
second-former. “Stick around if you want.
It’ll
probably turn out quite interesting”
“What do you want?”
I said.
“You’re not supposed to be on school
premises.”
“Quite the little prefect,
aren’t
we?” sneered Sebastian. “Are you going to
report us
to the Head? Sir,
Sir, those
naughty
boys have been doing bad
things, Sir. Why
did you betray us, traitor?”
I struggled to explain that if I
hadn’t told
the Headmaster they’d have blown up the hall, then
they’d
have been arrested, and they would have been in prison instead of free
to find jobs – but they wouldn’t listen.
“You
stopped us doing A-levels. You
prevented us from going to university,” they said.
“I kept you out of
prison,” I said.
Still they wouldn’t
listen. They called
me traitor and slimy snake and all sorts of other insults, then
Sebastian said, “We’re going to punish you for
betraying
us. Remember what we told the school captain would happen to
him
if he blabbed to the Head? Get him lads!”
I struggled but they were too much for
me.
Muncaster and Bulman pulled me onto the ground and sat on me, while
Sebastian, sniggering in a disgusting way, unbuttoned my trousers and
pulled them down, and Lulu capered about, clapping his hands and
giggling. My trousers caught on my shoes, and Lulu dived in
to
help Sebastian disentangle them and pull them off.
Then Muncaster and Bulman hauled me onto
my feet and
made me watch while Sebastian climbed on top of the wall and began
whooping and waving my trousers. I could hear a high-pitched
humming and buzzing, getting louder, and I knew the girls from the
school next door, were homing in on the trousers, hoping for a sight of
the victim – I knew too that Sebastian was going to throw my
trousers over to the female mob and that I either have to face them and
plead for the restoration of my dignity, or sneak away, and hope I
could hide until after dark and then get home without too many people
seeing me. How I could explain the loss of my trousers to my
mother I had no idea.
I was wrong. That
wasn’t
Sebastian’s intention at all. The four of them
heaved me up
on top of the wall. Below me I saw the excited crowd of
high-school girls, laughing and pointing, then the lads gave one last
heave, and I plunged down onto the grass on the girls’ side
of
the wall.
I scrambled to my feet to run, but the
swarm was all
around me. I hurled myself at the wall, seeing the grinning
faces
of Soare and his gang, all ready to push me back if I managed to grab
the top of the wall, and dozens of other faces appearing too, all along
the wall, cheering the girls on.
Not that they needed any
encouragement. To
have a trouserless boy thrown to them, completely at their mercy
– it was like throwing a lamb to ravening wolves.
There were hands all over me.
My blazer was
torn off. I was half strangled by a dozen or so pulling at my
tie. My shirt was up round my ribs, and my underpants came
half
way down my thighs before ripping into shreds.
A squeal of excitement greeted the
exposure of my
private parts, and more hands came at me. My legs, back and
chest
were scratched, my hair was pulled, my shirt torn as I was turned this
way and that by pulling hands as they fought to see and to touch, to
prod and to poke, to grab and to tug.
The bells of both schools began to ring,
cutting
break short as the authorities realised something like a riot was going
on. Prefects appeared, calling the mob of eager girls and the
cheering boys at the wall back to their classes, and I was left, lying
alone on the grass where I had fallen, exhausted, and, luckily,
unnoticed.
Let no-one tell you being stripped and
assaulted by
an excited mob of girls is an experience that any lad would
treasure. It was terrifying, and, if I hadn’t been
so
red-bloodedly heterosexual it might have put me off women for life.
I climbed back over the wall before
anyone in
authority came over to investigate. If I was going to be
caught
trouserless it would at least be better to be caught in my own school
rather then the girls’ High School.
I collapsed over the wall and sat
slumped against it
with my head in my hands. What should I do? Stagger
over to
the Head’s office and denounce my assailants, have them
charged
with indecent assault? Then it would be in all the papers and
I
didn’t want the adult world to know of my
humiliation.
Sneak down to the bottom of the field, climb over the fence and hide in
what we used to call the cockpit until dark? Then I had an
idea:
sneak over to the gym. If I was lucky I might find a pair of
trousers to fit me, then some other poor sod could go home
bare-legged. At least he’d have his gym shorts to
cover the
essentials.
I got up cautiously and peered
around. All was
quiet. I was about to cross the field when I spotted a dark
bundle – my trousers. In their excitement they had
just
thrown them aside, then, when the prefects came, they had run off and
forgotten them – for I was sure that Sebastian, in his
fanatical
hatred of me, would, if he had remembered, have taken them away with
him to cause me maximum embarrassment.
I put them on and limped across the yard
to take refuge in the prefects’ study.
That was Sebastian’s
revenge. But for me
he would have been in borstal, where, because he was a nice-looking
boy, he would no doubt have attracted the attention of homosexual
thugs, where he would have been expected to indulge in filthy
homosexual practices, where he would have been raped, where he would
have been forced to accept the protection of a gang-leader and in
return submit to regular buggery. I saved him from all that,
I
saved all of them, and this was my reward: to be debagged and thrown to
an over-excited mob of girls who were cheered on by Sebastian and his
henchmen. I was scratched and bleeding. Half of my
clothes
were lost or ripped to pieces. If the prefects
hadn’t come
on the scene so quickly, obliging Sebastian and company to retire, all
I would have had to wear would have been my ripped and tattered shirt.
If the prefects hadn’t come so
quickly, who
knows what might have happened? With the mob of girls
grabbing
and pulling on everything they could I might have lost valuable body
parts. As it was I was sore all over.
On the other hand, I reflected, I was
still in one
piece. I had recovered my trousers. My coat would
cover the
tattered shirt. I could go home with my dignity restored.
More importantly, I was still at
school. Next
term I would be a full prefect. It would look good on my
application forms: full prefect while still in the lower
sixth. I
was on course for a good university: Mr Watkyns said my work had
improved immeasurably since I got free of Sebastian’s
influence.
In fact I got good A-levels and a place
at
Manchester, from where I moved to a goodish job in London, not one of
those banker’s jobs with colossal bonuses, but still, far
better
than anything in Swardale. Now that I was back I could afford
the
best house in Halden.
As for the others: Bulman went to work
on his
father’s farm, Muncaster went into his father’s
shop, Lulu
Greatbatch just got odder and odder and when I last saw him he was
wondering round in women’s clothes with all the neighbourhood
toughs mocking him. As for Sebastian, he became a barman at a
rather sleazy pub in a suburban side street.
All in all, I had good reason to feel
that I had
come out on top. Sebastian’s surname may have
suggested
that he would soar effortlessly above us all, but, like Icarus, he flew
too near the sun, the wax melted, his wings disintegrated, he lost
touch with reality, and he fell. It was plebeian, pedestrian
George Walker who kept on going and got to the top. I was the
one
who returned to my native town with money to burn, ready to buy
Sebastian’s house, where once I had looked out of the window
at
Halden and the world beyond and defied it. I had won!
All this I told to Amanda as we drove up
to Halden,
and there was plenty of other excitement for her too. The
shits
and the turds were out in force. I could hear her little
squeaks
of admiration as I overtook turds on the left, obstructed shits who
tried to overtake me, and generally had fun with the world.
Amanda’s squeaks of excited fear would soften her up
nicely. When we got to our destination I would screw her till
she
begged for mercy.
Halden, of course, had changed a lot
since I lived
there. No longer could you drive in at the southern end of
the
town and through the centre. Nowadays you have to follow the
motorway right round to the far side then get off onto a sort of major
through road that takes you round past the city centre, cutting, I may
say, my old school off from the rest of the city, but I suppose
they’ve got underpasses so that the kids of today
don’t get
squashed by the traffic thundering past. You carry on round
the
north end of the town then down via an insignificant little feed-off
and approach from the north.
Our destination was the Swardale Arms,
the best
hotel in Halden, situated midway between the Cathedral and the Town
Hall. Nothing but the best for George Walker these
days. A
night of passion with Amanda in one of the best suites, then off in the
morning to buy my new residence, ready to take my place among the poor
benighted provincials as one of the leading citizens of my home town.
Please
remember that this story is copyright. See Copyright
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1:
Sebastian's house
-- 2:
Sebastian's gang --
3:
Sebastian's project --
4:
Sebastian's revenge
Les Épatants:
index
Les Épatants, Part II: Péripéties:
Johnny and Norah
Les
Épatants,
Part III: Dénouement: Felicity
Robin
Gordon's works: Index
Auksford
index -- Send
an
e-mail to Robin Gordon
