Tales of the Unexpected(31)

Then the door would open and Foxley would be there, and everyone would scatter and pretend to be doing his teeth or saying his prayers while I was left standing in the centre of the room with my pants down.

‘What’s going on here?’ Foxley would say, taking a quick look at his own handiwork. ‘You – Perkins! Put your pyjamas on properly and get into bed.’

And that was the end of a day.

Through the week, I never had a moment of time to myself. If Foxley saw me in the study taking up a novel or perhaps opening my stamp album, he would immediately find something for me to do. One of his favourites, especially when it was raining outside, was, ‘Oh, Perkins, I think a bunch of wild irises would look rather nice on my desk, don’t you?’

Wild irises grew only around Orange Ponds. Orange Ponds was two miles down the road and half a mile across the fields. I would get up from my chair, put on my raincoat and my straw hat, take my umbrella – my brolly – and set off on this long and lonely trek. The straw hat had to be worn at all times outdoors, but it was easily destroyed by rain; therefore the brolly was necessary to protect the hat. On the other hand, you can’t keep a brolly over your head while scrambling about on a woody bank looking for irises, so to save my hat from ruin I would put it on the ground under my brolly while I searched for flowers. In this way, I caught many colds.

But the most dreaded day was Sunday. Sunday was for cleaning the study, and how well I can remember the terror of those mornings, the frantic dusting and scrubbing, and then the waiting for Foxley to come in to inspect.

‘Finished?’ he would ask.

‘I… I think so.’

Then he would stroll over to the drawer of his desk and take out a single white glove, fitting it slowly on to his right hand, pushing each finger well home, and I would stand there watching and trembling as he moved around the room running his white-gloved forefinger along the picture tops, the skirting, the shelves, the window sills, the lamp shades, I never took my eyes off that finger. For me it was an instrument of doom. Nearly always, it managed to discover some tiny crack that I had overlooked or perhaps hadn’t even thought about; and when this happened Foxley would turn slowly around, smiling that dangerous little smile that wasn’t a smile, holding up the white finger so that I should see for myself the thin smudge of dust that lay along the side of it.

‘Well,’ he would say. ‘So you’re a lazy little boy. Aren’t you?’

No answer.

‘Aren’t you?’

‘I thought I dusted it all.’

‘Are you or are you not a nasty, lazy little boy?’

‘Y-yes.’

‘But your father wouldn’t want you to grow up like that, would he? Your father is very particular about manners, is he not?’

No answer.

‘I asked you, is your father particular about manners?’

‘Perhaps–yes.’

‘Therefore I will be doing him a favour if I punish you, won’t I?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Won’t I?’

‘Y-yes?’

‘We will meet later then, after prayers, in the changing-room.’

The rest of the day would be spent in an agony of waiting for the evening to come.

Oh my goodness, how it was all coming back to me now. Sunday was also letter-writing time. ‘Dear Mummy and Daddy – thank you very much for your letter. I hope you are both well. I am, except I have a cold because I got caught in the rain but it will soon be over. Yesterday we played Shrewsbury and beat them 4–2. I watched and Foxley who you know is the head of our house scored one of our goals. Thank you very much for the cake. With love from William.’

I usually went to the lavatory to write my letter, or to the boot-hole, or the bathroom – any place out of Foxley’s way. But I had to watch the time. Tea was at four-thirty and Foxley’s toast had to be ready. Every day I had to make toast for Foxley, and on weekdays there were no fires allowed in the studies, so all the fags, each making toast for his own studyholder, would have to crowd around the one small fire in the library, jockeying for position with his toasting-fork. Under these conditions, I still had to see that Foxley’s toast was (1) very crisp, (2) not burned at all, (3) hot and ready exactly on time. To fail in any one of these requirements was a ‘beatable offence’.

‘Hey, you! What’s this?’

‘It’s toast.’

‘Is this really your idea of toast?’

‘Well…’

‘You’re too idle to make it right, aren’t you?’

‘I try to make it.’

‘You know what they do to an idle horse, Perkins?’