Six columns formed up to be marched in by the prefects. The asphalt yard sloped down to lavatories, and along the wall of the infants’ and junior girls’ departments was written in large white letters: CLEANLINESS IS NEXT TO GODLINESS — by order of Mr. Jones, who called in a man to repaint the letters so that on the first few days of each term they shone and glittered with reproach at the yardful of ragged-arsed, down-at-heel, and often unwashed kids.
Black clouds gathered across shining roof slates, and cold rain blew as they marched inside. Any inside was good in weather like this, and Brian felt happy that an English lesson was on the timetable. His belly was full from a meal at the dinner-centre, and he anticipated a ha’penny from his father when he got home, it being Thursday, dole-day.
Mixed telegraph messages of clacking desk-lids and stamping feet filled the teacherless room. Rain streamed down the window-panes and, as no one had been told to switch on the lights, the gloom that lay about needed much noise to dispel it. Brian made for the steampipes with Ted and Jim Skelton, and they watched two bodies rolling and pitching in a gangway fight. A smell of damp coats and trousers mingled with breath and polish smells, and a further violent surcharge of rain against the outside glass increased the recklessness within.
A sly face rose slowly above the door panel, stayed still for a few moments. “Get back to your desks,” Brian hissed. A phenomenon detached from the turmoil, the livid vivid face of Mr. Jones turned this way and that to take in everything before entering the room. Seconds went by like minutes, and Brian looked away from the face at the window to meet the equally distrusted visage of the Laughing Cavalier on the opposite wall, then turned with a half laugh to the front and stared at nothing.
After the crash of the door and the sight of eyes hollow with rage, the only sound left came from tangible rain outside. Mr. Jones grabbed four boys who had been fighting and hauled them one by one to the front, a few well-placed punches getting them into line.
“What were you fighting about?” he roared, shaking the nearest boy. The noise of rain flowered like a burst dam, for everyone in the room except the frantic expostulating Jones seemed to have stopped breathing. The life had gone out of them, but for hatred and fear. The boy could not answer, and the sound of flesh meeting flesh at great speed jerked silence out of the room. “What were you fighting for, you lout?” Mr. Jones shouted again, into the ear he had just hit.
“Nothing,” the boy blubbered.
“Nothing?” he bawled. “Nothing what, you jackanapes?”
“Nothing, sir,” came between the sobs. With a faintly sarcastic smile he lifted the desk-lid and took out a stick. His body doubled with spite as he leapt at the culprits: “You don’t fight for nothing, you idiot,” he yelled, hitting the nearest boy furiously across the back and shoulders. “You don’t fight for nothing, do you? Do you? Eh? If you want to fight,” whack, whack, whack, “then fight me. Come on, fight me,” whack, whack, “fight me, you nincompoop.”
He’s barmy, Brian thought. He’ll go into a fit one of these days and wain’t be able to come out of it. I’m sure he will, as sure as I sit here. Either that, or somebody’s dad’ll come up and knock him for six.
“Get back to your seats,” he gasped, straightening his royal-blue tie. “And come out the monitors.” Four boys, a piece of yellow ribbon pinned to each lapel, walked to the front. “In that cupboard you’ll find two stacks of books called Treasure Island. Give one to each boy.”
They went to their tasks with avidity. “I’m taking you for English literature during the next few weeks,” Jones went on, “and I’m going to start reading Treasure Island to you, by Robert Louis Stevenson.” A hum of excitement was permitted. Treasure Island. Brian had heard of it: pirates and ships and other-world adventure, a cinematic hit-and-run battle among blue waves and palm-trees taking place a million miles away yet just above his head, as if he could reach up and touch cutlass and cannon and tree branch to heave himself into hiding.
“And”—the plangent voice of Mr. Jones made an unwelcome return — “every other Thursday I’m going to ask you questions on what I’ve been reading”—his grey eyes glared, eyes empty if you dared but look at them, which wasn’t so dangerous as it seemed because they stared back at nothing when he wasn’t inclined to bully — “and woe betide anyone who hasn’t been paying attention,” he concluded ominously, opening the teacher’s clean copy the monitor laid before him.
He had a good voice for reading, rolled off the first paragraph in a booming tone that lit each boy’s imagination like a powder trail. They saw the captain as Jim Hawkins first saw him: a proud suspicious renegade stomping along the clifftop followed by a wheelbarrow bearing his far-travelled sea-chest, heard him demand a noggin o’ rum, and tell Jim to keep a sharp weather-eye out for a one-legged villain called Pew. He ran fluently on through several chapters, before the class was sent flying home through a real world in which the rain had stopped and a mellow sun shone on rainbows of petrol and water in the middle of clean streets. Brian was glad to be free, and could not think of the good story he had heard without imagining a wholesale tab-batting when Mr. Jones questioned them on what he had so far read.
It rained the next day and was cold, so that no one knew whether the year was coming or going. A mere drizzle fell by playtime, and Brian pledged his last four marbles against a boy from top class. He knelt, and aimed one at the blue-and-white of the bigger boy some yards away. It seemed a great distance, since he was not sure of his aim and his fingers were cold. He shivered in his jersey: I might hit it — hoping he’d hit something soon, with only four left, because there’d been nineteen in his pockets that morning. The bigger boy was impatient, so that Brian needed an even longer time setting his sights. “Look sharp,” his adversary said. “I want to play Smithy next, after I’ve skint yo’!”
The playground noise swayed about him: two hundred surging boys watched by a teacher walking up and down under the shed. He’d got his aim, couldn’t miss, drew back an arm to release the marble from between his fingers. A boy from his class walked over the target marble, and when he lifted his foot it was no longer there.
Brian looked around him up in the air, even felt in his pockets and opened his other hand. Where the marble had rested, the asphalt paving was blank. He could only stare at the boy who had walked over the marble, now at the other end of the playground, and saw that he was limping. He’d walked evenly before, but Brian guessed that the boy’s boots were so full of holes that it had caught in one of them. He watched him lift his foot to see what caused the limp, extract the marble, and glance back to where Brian was standing.
The bigger boy swung round, demanding: “Ain’t yo’ shot yet?”
“No,” Brian answered.
“Well, gerron wi’ it then.” He was tall and truculent, a dash of hair falling into his eyes, and even more holes around his clothes than Brian had in his.