‘What on earth is going on in School House?’

‘Going on? What do you mean, "going on"?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I’m not sure that I do.’

‘I’m sure that you do. The whole bloody place is going to the demnition bow-wows.’

‘Very funny. Come on. We’re late for Physics. Don’t want old Haystacks getting in a sweat about it.’

‘Dead right. He’s sweaty enough already.’

It hurt me of course, and if I had been more alert I’d have coughed loudly or dropped a book to let those two boys know I was nearby. As it was I had eavesdropped on them quite by accident. I had been sitting at my desk in the Sixth Form Arts School, idly working up a new sub-plot for one of my novels, when they passed by the open window, chatting as boys do. One of them was Watson from Roberts’ House and the other was one of my own School House boys, George Whybrow.

The mid-morning break was coming to an end. I would have to put my notes aside in a moment or two and get ready to resume revising the social history of the Industrial Revolution with one of my Middle Sixth classes. They would be taking their A Level examinations in only another few weeks, so the die was cast for most of them – they would pass or fail on the basis of their inborn talent combined with their application to their work. Or otherwise, naturally. All the same, a good course of revision can turn a fail into a pass, or lift a grade C result to a B or even an A. It can make the difference between entering Oxford or Cambridge, or having to settle for a lesser university. It’s no exaggeration to say that whole careers have been made or thrown away in the A Level examination room.

I looked again at my notepad. My jottings were making little sense, and I found myself wondering why I had ever tried to create this set of stories featuring the adventures of an alchemical detective in sixteenth century London. It had sounded such a good idea. Kit Huntingdon, natural philosopher and occasional alchemist, solving crimes in the intrigue-ridden courts of Henry Tudor and his daughters Mary and Elizabeth and his son Edward. There was so much story potential there – Kit would be walking a tightrope, in perpetual danger of being denounced as a witch and trying to avoid being sucked into the fierce religious disputes of the time, while putting his quasi-heretical skills to good use in the untangling of the devious political schemes and stratagems for which the Tudor courts were renowned. The story I was working up – The King of Spain’s Weird – concerned the Spanish Armada, the Inquisition and a false soothsayer. It was full of interesting ideas and it should have practically written itself, but it wouldn’t. The plot wouldn’t gel, the characters refused to act in a consistent way and – worst of all – I kept getting my historical facts wrong. Which for someone who calls himself a historian is a very serious matter indeed.

Nicolas Nickleby was an A Level English set book that year. That explained the silly Dickens quote which that wretched Watson had misused. I should have laughed at the boy’s foolishness and left it at that. But I couldn’t; and I’m sorry to say that I was not a great deal of help to my History class that morning.

For there was definitely something wrong with School House. My House. I had been in charge of the everyday pastoral care of the sixty boys who lived in the oldest and most traditional of the Houses of The Vale School for six years now. Generally speaking, they had been good years and I could look back on my time there as having been a success. It wasn’t all down to me; my wife Muriel had taken on the job of House Matron and I had been fortunate in my prefects and Head Boys. Some years were better than others, of course, and it was certainly true that one boy could exert a disproportionately bad influence on his fellows and drag the whole tenor of the place down. That was why we had a punishment system.

If, as a prospective parent perhaps, you read the Prospectus of The Vale School you will see that there is a clear statement that we have a policy of no compulsory fagging. The great Public Schools still keep it, I know. In the halls and corridors of Eton or Harrow, Winchester, Rugby or Marlborough a prefect’s cry of ‘fag!’ will summon a stream of small boys eager to pass the Senior Study door ahead of the rest and escape having to perform some menial task for their superiors; such as making toast or cleaning shoes or washing sports kit. It is said to encourage the development of appropriate hierarchies and to ensure that even boys from the wealthiest homes have at least some experience, just once in their lives, of the simpler housekeeping jobs. It also causes much innocent amusement among our transatlantic cousins when they hear a distinguished member of the House of Lords declare that ‘Lord So-and-so was my fag at Fettes.’ It confirms their belief that the British Public School system is a hotbed of all kinds of deviant behaviour.

That is as may be. And while it is true that there is no compulsory fagging at The Vale; nevertheless there are ways and means around this. In School House for example, a minor infraction of the rules is punished by the awarding of one or more so-called Odd Jobs, which are recorded on a chart which is affixed to the Senior Study door. Any boy who has undischarged Odd Jobs can be made to do such lowly tasks for the prefects as making toast or cleaning shoes or washing sports kit – in other words fagging is used as a means of maintaining discipline, rather than as a reminder that there are dirty jobs to do in this world, and that people have to do them. I am not sure that this is a good thing; this making a penance out of necessary labour and offenders out of those who do it, but it is the way things are done here. The system is run by the prefects and I make sure that they do not abuse it.

There are further sanctions available to deal with more serious offences, but I will come on to them presently.

The trouble came down to this: Discipline had almost completely collapsed in School House. Only last week someone had torn down the Odd Job chart from the Senior Study door. Boys ran around the place just as they pleased, shouting and swearing at the top of their voices. School House boys were late for their lessons, were missing their books when they did get to them and usually hadn’t done their homework. I was taking considerable flak in the Staff Room – so much so that I’m sorry to say that I was beginning to avoid going there at break times, preferring to return to my study in School House. Not that that was very much better. The sound of highly-amplified popular music echoed up and down the stairs and out of the windows, disturbing my studies. ‘What is that noise?’ I asked Morrison, my Head of House, one day.

‘The Grateful Dead, sir. They're a new group from America.’

‘The Grateful Dead? Why are they grateful? Who is dead? What does it mean? I hope it’s nothing to do with drugs.’

‘It's only a name, sir. It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Neither does that awful racket they’re making. Get it turned down. It’s deafening!’

‘I'll see what I can do, sir.’

The prefects – and they weren’t a bad lot, just out of their depth – seemed unable to control the juniors. I later found out that they were tending to avoid School House themselves, just as I avoided the Staff Room, going back with their friends from the other Houses and eating muffins and drinking instant coffee in their studies instead.

It all seemed to come down to one group of Fifth Formers, led by an objectionable lout by the name of Simon Harrop. It would sound like one of the stories I used to read in the Gem or the Magnet when I was a boy if I were to say that he was spoiled and rich, but in fact he was neither of these things. His father was a department store manager in Derby, I believe. He was very intelligent, I am sure, but he had no idea of how to apply his intelligence and so he easily became bored. With boredom came what Edgar Allen Poe once called the Imp of the Perverse. He always had an objection, which he would express as if it were a perfectly valid reason, to doing as he was told. You could argue with him for ever, and get nowhere. Or you could simply tell him and, if you were a master or a prefect he would do it, with a sullen or cocky air. This was bad enough when he was a new boy, or in the Fourth Form, but by the time he had been at The Vale for two years and entered the Fifth, he thought he had no need to obey anybody. To add to the problem, the malaise was beginning to spread. It only took one abstracted or tired prefect to overlook one of his transgressions, and that would be taken as justification for him to do it again, and for his friends – for he had friends, surprisingly – to do it as well. ‘You didn’t punish Harrop for running on the Chapel Flags,’ some oik in the Fourth would say, ‘so why are you picking on me?’

It came to a head at the start of the Lent Term. The boy had been beaten before, but only by the prefects. They are carefully supervised when they administer corporal punishment, so they are more likely to wield the cane too gently than with an excess of force. These punishments had had as little effect on the reprobate as you might have expected, culminating in a disgraceful episode which had left Clayton, who was a soft-hearted chap, much more upset than the offender he was supposed to have disciplined. I called Harrop into my study.

It must have been clear to him the moment that he entered the room that he was in serious trouble. I had turned the picture of the Queen which hangs over the fireplace around, so that it faced the wall. It emphasises the grave nature of what is about to happen that the Queen of England’s image should not be exposed to the sight of a boy’s beating. It also gives the boy advance notice, so that he can prepare himself mentally for the ordeal to come.

Actually, the Queen’s picture – the Annigoni portrait – was the only part of the room which was as it had been last year. Muriel, who spent a good deal of her time trying to make me a little less schoolmasterly, had had my study redecorated and rearranged the previous summer. I had to say that she had made some remarkable improvements. My desk was now much better lit by the leaded windows which looked over the tennis lawns beyond, my bookcases were neatly organised and completely re-indexed and my two Parker-Knoll armchairs had been reupholstered and moved from their original positions by the door to new locations on either side of the bay window in the opposite wall. She had, with that infallible woman’s touch of hers, transformed a stuffy room full of stuffy thoughts into a light and airy place.

Harrop slouched though the door, slamming it shut behind him, and stood in the middle of the floor with his hands in his pockets and his head tilted to one side. His mouth was moving – he was chewing gum or something like that. I decided to waste no time with him.

‘Harrop, we both know why you are here today. Would you kindly spit out whatever you are eating into the waste-paper basket.’ The youth spat.

‘Now remove your jacket. You may hang it on the back of the door.’ Moving with an insolent slowness, Harrop took off his coat and hung it up.

‘Thank you. Now bend over the right arm of that chair and wait.’ I pointed to the left-hand armchair. I myself am right-handed.

Again with that infuriating lassitude, Harrop did as he was told. I got up from behind the desk and went to the cupboard where I keep the instruments of correction. I unlocked it, and took out a medium-weight kooboo with a straight handle. As you might expect I use a number of different canes, some suitable for the delicate boy, others of a substantial nature, more appropriate for the older offender. This was the stick which I usually employed with boys from the Fifth Form. I removed my own jacket and my schoolmaster’s gown, putting them on the back of my chair and took my usual place to the front of the armchair where Harrop was kneeling.

I looked carefully at him. He might have entertained the idea that he could use that oldest of schoolboy devices, the exercise book slipped into the seat of the trousers, but if so he had thought better of it. One of his friends had probably warned him that I was not so stupid as not to know about such tricks, and that the beating which I would administer following its discovery would be far worse than it would have been otherwise.

I was not disposed to be gentle with Master Harrop, so it was indeed fortunate for him that he had not tried to mitigate the effects of the punishment which I was about to give him. Or so I thought.

I gave the boy six strokes, fully swung. In other words, I pulled the cane all the way behind my shoulder before sweeping it down and striking him with it. It is the length of the swing which mainly determines the force of the blow. Ask any golfer. The results, however, were not quite what I had expected.

Usually after such a beating the boy is a little short of breath and gets up from the kneeling position with a certain amount of care. Then he and I shake hands, and he thanks me before taking his jacket and walking – slowly, as a rule – from my study and closing the door silently behind him. This time it was different. Harrop practically jumped to his feet.

‘Is that it? Thanks sir.’ He sauntered over to the door, across the room, grabbing his jacket and slinging it casually over his shoulder. He yanked on the doorknob, strode out into the passageway beyond and pulled the door shut behind him with a loud bang. I believe he was whistling as he returned to his study.

Whistling! I couldn’t believe it. I had just given Harrop six of the very best and he had leapt up and strolled out as if we had just been taking afternoon tea and having a fireside chat. I looked at the cane where it lay on the desk. I picked it up and flexed it. There was nothing wrong with it that I could see. I gave it a trial swing through the air. It made the customary sound. Was there something wrong with my arm? No – apparently not. There was no pain or discomfort there. I had not strained it recently. I locked the kooboo back in its cupboard and shook my head. I was absolutely sure that Harrop had not put anything down his trousers. As I said, I am not a fool and I had been a housemaster for over six years.

By the end of the day the whole of School House knew that old Jacko had lost his form and that a caning from him was nothing to fear any more. By the end of the following week it felt as if I had caned half the House, with the same dismal results as with Harrop. By the end of the first Half of that Lent Term I was beginning to feel a little desperate. Things were, I was sure, beginning to be said in the Staff Room, the Bursar’s Office and the Headmaster’s Study.

I saw the school doctor; an old quack to be sure, but he gave me a clean bill of health. I spent some time in the gym during the evenings when it was quiet, doing a little weight-lifting. I ordered a complete new set of canes from the Midland Educational Company, but they were no better or more effective than the ones I had already. In the end, I did what I should have done to begin with. I talked to Geoffrey Thurslow about it.

‘What do Rogers and Jenkins say?’ asked Geoffrey.

‘I… I don’t want to talk to the other housemasters just yet. They might see it as a sign of weakness, you know.’

‘Quite so, quite so. And you say the beatings have no effect at all?’

‘Apart from making me look like an idiot, no.’

‘Well, hmmm. Can’t say I’m in favour of this corporal punishment anyway. Boys don’t learn though their bottoms, do they?’ He chortled at his own joke.

‘Or any other way, so I hear.’ I was feeling testy.

‘Now, now. All right, here’s an idea. Why not try it out on me?’

‘What?’

‘Try it out on me. Where do you put the horrible miscreants when you’re going to give them a whacking?’

‘Over the arm of the chair you’re sitting on.’

‘All right.’ Geoffrey stood up. ‘So they take their jackets off?’

‘Yes.’

‘And they kneel down so?’ He crouched down by the side of the chair.

‘Pretty much. Forward a bit. Yes, that’s it.’

‘All right, Jack. Take a swish or two.’

‘What?’

‘Give me a couple. Swish me.’

I studied Geoffrey’s skinny buttocks, outlined in beige cavalry twill. He turned his head to the left and grinned at me. ‘Go on. I won’t tell anyone.’

‘Do you really mean this?’

‘Of course.’

‘You’ve been caned before?’

‘Of course. I went to school, didn’t I?’

‘Very well.’ I fetched a 36-inch dragon cane from the cupboard. ‘I warn you Geoffrey, this is meant to hurt.’

‘Stop messing about and get on with it!’

I took careful aim and placed a couple of blows on Geoffrey’s rear. ‘Go on! Give me a few more.’ I obliged him, con brio.

Geoffrey stood up with no obvious signs of discomfort. ‘Well! Either my backside is tougher than it used to be, or schoolmasters have forgotten how to use the cane!’

This was getting ridiculous. ‘All right, Geoffrey! If you’re so tough, try it out on me.’ I kneeled down over the arm of the chair, gripping the opposite arm with my hands as I had seen the boys do. Geoffrey lifted my jacket up over my back, exposing the seat of my trousers. ‘Aren’t you supposed to take this off?’

‘Yes I am. I’d have given one of my boys an extra two for forgetting it.’

‘Then so will I.’

As I had supposed to be the case with Geoffrey, I hadn’t been caned since my schooldays. Unlike Geoffrey I was – or so I had thought – a skilled practitioner of the supple art. I hoped that my friend would remember that when it comes to administering a caning consistency is all; consistency of force and consistency of positioning. I had no wish to be struck on the back or on the legs. I need not have worried.

The dragon cane swooshed through the air and landed fair and square on me. I was expecting to suffer a red-hot burning sensation from the cut, but apart from a mild impact I felt very little at all. Nor did the next blow have any more effect. Geoffrey may not have been experienced in the use of the cane, but he was no beginner either, the cuts being spread evenly across my anatomy. After the sixth, seventh and eighth he stopped. I stood up.

‘Where did you learn to use a cane like that?’

Geoffrey’s face was flushed – from exertion, perhaps. ‘Oh, nowhere. It’s a knack, you know.’

‘It’s not much of a knack, then. I hardly felt a thing.’ I took the instrument from Geoffrey. ‘There’s nothing wrong with this.’ Indeed there was not. It had cost me thirty-one shillings and sixpence.

‘No – it’s a very good one.’ How did Geoffrey know that? Subject masters like him did not use the cane at The Vale. Such matters were always referred to housemasters such as myself. I decided that I would rather not find out where Geoffrey got his knowledge from and let the matter drop.

It was nearly the end of the Lent Term. It had been the worst time of my life, and that includes my first term at Ercall College when I was bullied incessantly and remorselessly. My own morale and that of the boys in my charge had fallen to an all-time low. It seemed as if Harrop and his cronies thought that they were running the House, not me, and could do as they pleased. Why not expel them, you say? It was coming to that; but how could I admit my failure to the Headmaster or to my fellow housemasters? Had I been younger and less experienced I would not have minded calling for help. As it was I kept up a stony front which repelled all thoughts of assistance. I was seriously considering resignation. I could see no way out of the situation.

In the end it was Geoffrey who saved the day. He knocked on my study door one Saturday afternoon and bounded in cheerfully. I was sitting behind my desk, morosely leafing through Crime and Punishment.

‘Jack, I’ve got it!’

‘Well don’t give it to me.’

‘Ha-ha. No, listen. I know why the cane isn’t working. It’s the chi!’

‘The what?’

‘The chi! C-H-I. Chi! It’s energy!’

‘What are you talking about? I’ve plenty of energy.’

‘It doesn’t look like it. Anyway, listen. I told Brian…’

‘Brian who?’

‘Brian Thurslow. My brother.’

‘You’ve got a brother?’

‘Yes. His name’s Brian.’

‘You never told me.’

‘You never asked.’

‘And you told him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why. What business was it of his?’

‘He’s filth!’

This was past bearing. I stood up. ‘Geoffrey, have you been drinking? What do you mean, he’s filth? Do you hate him? Why did you write to him about me, then?’

‘Sit down, Jack. He’s filth. F-I-L-T-H. Failed In London, Try Hongkong. He set up in stockbroking in the Square Mile, but it didn’t work out. The family sent him out to the Far East for a second chance.’

‘So you have a wastrel brother in China. How does that help me?’

‘There are more things in heaven and earth, you know. Listen and learn, Jack. You’ve been having problems with discipline ever since the start of the school year, haven’t you?’

‘You know that.’

‘What happened, in here, in the last summer holidays?’

‘I read War and Peace for the tenth time. Is that relevant?’

‘Not so far as I know. What else happened? Look around you!’

I looked around me. ‘Muriel had the place done up. I like it.’

‘Yes! The room was rearranged!’

‘So what?’ I was getting annoyed.

‘So everything! You’ve been losing chi! Wasting energy!’

‘What the hell are you on about?’

‘I wrote to Brian, as I say. I told him, in passing, of what was happening here. He sent an airmail back, asking me how the room was laid out. I sent him a plan.

‘Then he went to this business acquaintance of his, who helped him arrange the furniture in his office. Brian’s been doing ever so well, you know, since he met this chap. Making money hand over fist – says he’s going to retire soon. It seems that the way you set out the tables and chairs and windows in a room has a critical effect on your fortunes. Brian’s was all wrong before this chap helped him because the chi – the energy – was leaking out through the window. As soon as he moved his desk to the right place all the energy and all the money landed on the top of it, instead of in the street outside, and stayed there.

‘It’s the same with you. All the discipline, all the order, is being dissipated because the armchairs are by the window. Move one of them over here by the door and use that one for your canings, and everything’ll be fine. Look!’ Geoffrey showed me a piece of rice-paper, with a plan of my study carefully drawn on it in black ink. ‘Come on! I’ll help you move your things.’

Geoffrey and I heaved and pushed the heavy old armchair back into its old place by the door. ‘Are you sure about this?’ I asked him. ‘By the window was much better. I could see what I was doing with the cane, and get a good swing.’

‘Believe me. Now then!’ The chair was by the door, looking rather out of place and in the way. ‘We’ll move the other stuff later. Let’s try it out!’

‘On you?’

‘No fear! Isn’t there an offender somewhere who’s due a jolly good whacking?’

I was about to answer when there came a loud crash from outside the door, followed by a stream of imprecations which I will not repeat here. Geoffrey shot out, returning a few moments later holding Harrop by the left ear. ‘Here’s your man. He’s just smashed the Quiet Room table.’

‘All right. Get over that chair, Harrop. Mr Thurslow will stay and observe.’ I went to the cupboard and fetched the dragon cane, although I had little hope that it would do any good. When I returned, Harrop was in position over the chair arm. I could see him smirking and pulling faces. He knew he was in no danger. Geoffrey was standing on the other side of the chair. I took up my usual stance, pulled back the cane to its fullest extent and swung it as hard as I could at his posterior.

‘Yarooh! Christ! Fucking hell!’ Harrop yelled and stood up. He rubbed his backside with one hand.

‘Get back down, Harrop. Mr Thurslow, if you please.’ Geoffrey took hold of the boy’s hands and forced him back over the arm of the chair.

‘Thank you.’ I swung the cane again.

I gave Harrop thirteen strokes in total – a full baker’s dozen – that afternoon, and sent him directly to his dormitory. The boy’s shrieks and howls of pain had echoed up and down the stairwells and passageways of School House, bringing an eerie silence which persisted long after he had climbed slowly up to his bed, to clutch at himself and drench the pillow with his tears. Muriel saw to him later, and the bruises had pretty much subsided by the time he went home at the end of term a week later.

Geoffrey and I finished moving all the study furniture in accordance with the plan his brother had sent him. ‘It’s called Feng Shui,’ Geoffrey said. ‘It’s an ancient Chinese art, making sure that your living and working spaces are harmoniously disposed.’ I looked at the room. ‘Ancient Chinese fiddlesticks,’ I said. ‘All we’ve done is put everything back exactly the way it was before Muriel redecorated it!’

‘So we have. Tell me something, Jack. When you moved in here, after old Crockers left, did you change anything?’

‘No. It seemed… right as it was.’

‘And do you think he changed anything when he moved in here, fifty years ago?’

‘I can’t say.’

‘I bet he didn’t. Those old scholars knew things we don’t know any more, whether they were Chinese, Celtic, Anglo-Saxon or whatever. Call it Feng Shui, call it instinct, call it what you like, you’d be a fool not to pay attention to what they said and did.’

And that is more or less the end of the story. Muriel never believed my explanation of why I had undone all her good work in my study, but as the atmosphere of the House that Summer Term was the best I had ever known it – especially as Harrop had not returned after the Easter holidays – she forgave Geoffrey and me, especially as The King of Spain’s Weird came out to excellent reviews later that year. I wanted to write to Brian to thank him personally, but Geoffrey dissuaded me. It appeared that he was a very private person who, like Mister Badger in The Wind in the Willows, hated Society. I have my own theory which you are free to speculate about, but which I would rather keep to myself.