The transformed school no longer contained Ben Nevin, who had gone back to Canada. It was a sort of bereavement, but he gave me a wonderful present before he left. It was a Chinese box, beautifully enamelled, which he’d picked up on a visit to Hong Kong. Best of all, it had a secret compartment. Unless you pressed at exactly the right point, you’d never be able to open it. It wasn’t roomy, as secret compartments go, but big enough to hold a folded piece of paper on which I’d written in my best hand, which was still pretty bad, Given to John Cromer by Ben Nevin at Vulcan School. A GREAT MAN.
I would have mourned Mr Nevin more keenly if Judy Brisby hadn’t left at the same time. That was a present finer even than a Chinese box with a hidden compartment. Hearing the news gave a definite spring to the tyres of my wheelchair. It wasn’t that her leaving compensated for his, exactly, but it certainly made it harder to wish for the clock to be turned back.
Judy Brisby hadn’t been found out and dismissed in disgrace, rather the opposite. She left the school without a stain on her character, and she had the gall to get married too. She had found someone her own size to give nerve punches to, someone to make beg for cold toast at breakfast. At first it seemed surprising that her husband was a soldier, but I suppose it meant he was used to taking orders.
No one could have measured up to Ben Nevin, so it was splendid in a way that his replacement should be such an abject duffer as a teacher — the sort whose idea of teaching is to read long passages out from a book. Mr Gilchrist was Irish. We thought he was old, meaning I suppose that he was in his forties. Somebody must have tipped him off about my imperfect control of my wheelchair, because I never managed to run over his feet, though Heaven knows I tried. He was annoyingly nimble, and perhaps accustomed to unpopularity.
I was shocked when I learned Mr Gilchrist’s first name was Christopher. He had Christ in his name twice over and he was still horrible. I thought perhaps the Christs had cancelled each other out, like terms on opposite sides of the equals sign in algebra. In my book he had no redeeming features.
I remember that for Geography the book was green. Once he was dictating something about winter wheat under snow, and how the snow gave the seeds a chance to breed. Of course he meant ‘breathe’, but the Irish accent made it unclear, and breed was what I wrote down. I had my doubts, but didn’t dare ask. He wasn’t the sort of teacher you could ask about things — I suppose that means he wasn’t worth anything as a teacher, really. If I’d been an AB, he would have clipped me round the ear, but in common with the other more or less severely disabled boys I wasn’t supposed to have my ear clipped. So he crept up behind me with a pencil rubber in each hand and rubbed them both up and down my sideboards really hard, whispering, ‘Some say that having this slower pain is worse than having your ears tweaked,’ again in that thick Irish accent, so that ‘worse’ sounded like ‘worras’. I had no reason to doubt it.
It wasn’t just Ben Nevin and Judy Brisby. At the point when the school expanded its premises, there was a whole-sale change-over of staff, so that very few of the matrons who had been at the school when I arrived still worked there. I enjoyed these new faces rather than regretted the passing of the old. New people could be conned, by virtue of their unfamiliarity with the place, into letting me get away with little ruses that would formerly have been stopped dead in their tracks.
I did miss Sheila Ewart, Big Matron, the original Biggie, who left the school at this time. She was replaced by Mrs Wemyss (pronounced Weems), who was never known as anything but Mrs Wemyss. When you are spelled Wemyss and pronounced Weems, nick-names are unnecessary.
From a wheelchair, you tend to look up people’s noses. In Mrs Wemyss’s case, there was usually something to see. She had a resident bogey, more often than not, waggling as she spoke. It bobbed up and down as the breath went in and out.
I was learning that anyone in authority has at least one hobby-horse. Mrs Wemyss had two, hot breakfasts and tonsils. On the first subject she would say, ‘How these boys can be expected to learn anything at school without a hot breakfast inside them is simply beyond me. In summer it’s one thing, but in winter? Quite absurd.’ She instituted porridge and campaigned for bacon and eggs.
Her line on tonsils was less humane. She thought they were a mistake. Everyone would be much the better for having theirs out. She had strong ideas about the best post-operative diet: dry toast. ‘My goodness, don’t you cry when you eat your first piece! But you get better quickly. At my last place of work there was an Italian man who was crying his silly eyes out when I made him eat his toast. Next day what happens? He thanks me from the bottom of his heart, for helping him get better so much more quickly than the patients being pampered with jellies and ice cream. Such a soppy thing to give a tonsillectomy patient!’ Temperamentally she was well suited to the school’s philosophy of care that stopped well short of spoiling.
Ponky-doodle
I appreciated the porridge very much and enjoyed the occasional fried egg but hung stubbornly on to my tonsils. One of the minor matrons who joined the school at this time was Millicent Baxter, thin and pretty, very lively. She had a stylised way of sniffing when she was near some of the boys. Whatever else Vulcan was, it was a place where boys reached physical maturity far away from their mothers’ tender nagging. Some of us positively hummed. She would raise her chin and tilt her head to one side, to take two thoughtful sniffs. There was nothing censorious about it. She might have been trying to memorise the scent of a flower strange to her. Then she might casually say, to an Egyptian boy who was sometimes distinctly aromatic, ‘Nabil, have you had a bath today? We’re getting a little …’ She never said smelly. She never said whiffy, rank, stinky or high. She never even said pongy. What she said was ponky-doodle.
Her other mannerism was what she said instead of swearing. Just when it seemed that the temptation to say ‘Bloody’ was too much, and she’d gone beyond the point of no return with those satisfying opening consonants, that ‘Bl—’, she would make a great effort and say ‘—ue pencil!’ instead. Blue pencil. The censor’s blue pencil crossed out the expressions she didn’t allow herself to utter.
In theory the new buildings were perfectly tailored to our needs, but there were plenty of little flaws. Miss Willis often told us about the bell-push she had seen at a Local Authority building, for the disabled to ring for assistance, but placed far too high for anyone in a wheelchair to reach. This was one of her little sermons. Even so, on her home ground she hadn’t been able to anticipate every problem. There was a metal ridge, for instance, to the front entrance of the dormitory block, which no electric wheelchairs could cross, and only the most skilful manual wheelers could jerk themselves up and over. A temporary wooden ramp was commissioned so that the premises could be properly accessible while the repairs were pending.
Trussed, basted, oven ready
Judy Brisby had the nerve to visit the school to flaunt her happiness. She even came into the classroom and said she had an announcement to make. She was going to have a baby. Why, exactly, were we supposed to care?
There was dutiful applause from two or three pupils. I was one of them, toady to the last, but since all I can do in the way of clapping is to pat the back of the left hand with the front of my right I hardly swelled the accolade. Julian didn’t even go through the motions of clapping. As the applause was dying away he said, ‘Poor kid!’ not loudly — but loudly enough.