It helped my cause that Dad was back in employment. Through old RAF contacts he had landed a job in the Personnel Department of BOAC, our national airline. Broadly speaking he was in a good mood. It suited him down to the ground. It was as close to a Services job as could be had on Civvy Street, stiff with officiousness and protocol.
I knew that Miss Willis wouldn’t be happy to see me go, but I hadn’t prepared my arguments. The summons to the sole principal’s study was peremptory. She was hoping to catch me off guard, and to nip my independence in the bud.
I found it odd to be there without Raeburn. His presence was still strong. If anything she seemed to be trespassing on his sanctum. This after all was where Raeburn had given me some of our walking lessons, told me about the Aztecs and their enlightened ways, and asked me whether I had sensation below the waist. This was also where he had given two sexually experimental boys their small glasses of sherry, and told them that they must be discreet and not worry Miss Willis, who was old-fashioned about such things. Behind her I could still see the spine of Civilisation and the Cripple.
‘I think you have been happy here, John, so I don’t know what to make of this misguided idea of changing schools. What is it that you want, John? Really?’
‘I want to go to a proper school.’
‘This is a proper school.’
‘I want to go to a grammar school.’
‘This is a grammar school in all but name. Our educational programme is ambitious. It’s odd that I should have to make mention of the fact to someone who has benefited from it for some years now. Vulcan has a precise name, corresponding to a precise function. This is a special boarding school for the education and rehabilitation of severely disabled but intelligent boys. And you are severely disabled, John. You need a high level of care. You are also intelligent, but not more intelligent than a number of boys who have gone on to success in their exams, and who have started to find their place in the world. Are there subjects you would wish to study that are not provided for here?’
‘Chemistry, Miss Willis. Chemistry is an important subject. And I want to play the piano.’
‘If you are serious about chemistry I will see what can be done. As for the piano, it is not Vulcan School that disqualifies you from it. You can’t simply ignore your limitations if you are to make the most of the opportunities you have.’
‘Miss Willis, I want to go to a normal school.’
Marion smiled. ‘No school that is able to meet your needs could be described as normal, John. I am an educationalist, and you must trust my expertise. If there was the remotest possibility of disabled boys thriving in any old school, do you think that Mr Raeburn and I would have gone through our various ordeals to set up this one?
‘You are already a pupil at an exceptional school. Why throw away what we have achieved together? Is it perhaps that you want the academic company of girls? Because I can tell you that girls may be a disappointment, if you are hoping for special friendships and tender sympathy.’ She was barking up the wrong tree there, of course. Perhaps she was referring indirectly to her own school-days. In her bleak smile could be read a certain amount of suffering.
‘I want to go to Burnham Grammar School. Not because there are girls there.’
‘And who will devote themselves to your care at this school? To put it at its most basic, who will take you to the lavatory there?’
‘I’ll manage.’
Marion said, ‘John, I’ve come to know you better than anybody over the years, to understand your qualities — which are considerable — and also your limitations.’ She settled back in her chair. ‘John, you know your little adventure in the woods? The time when no one could find you, after your “accident”? It was as plain as plain that you were just begging for attention. I said nothing about it. Perhaps you don’t realise that I have to divide myself into many little pieces to look after you all. And perhaps this application to another school is an exercise in the same vein, a way of making yourself important.’
In a sense I’d never before had a conflict with authority. I’d been indoctrinated by Mum and sensitised by Dad to his withholding of feeling. I’d been tortured by two generations of carers, by Miss Krüger at CRX and Judy at Vulcan: strong hands had held me under the surface of the hospital pool, strong hands had dangled me over the school stair-well. In my time I’d been scolded, roughly hugged and taken under a few wings. I’d had passing battles of will with Granny, which had been invaluable training, but this was actually the first time a whole personality had been nakedly opposed to mine, on something like equal terms.
Miss Willis expected the force of what she said, or simply the authority she embodied, to carry the day. To prevail because either she was right or because she was Miss Willis. It was almost intoxicating, to have her voice address me at its deepest, with the Kathleen Ferrier throb giving her an extra authority, and her clean-and-not-really-like-a-fat-person’s smell taking me back to the time she broke my fall on the steps.
Of course she was right that I craved attention. She wasn’t stupid. Even in my days of bed rest, with my day-dreams of having a steel ball in the room, which I could move around with the force of my mind — the whole point of the fantasy was that everyone would be impressed. Not that I had powers, but that everyone knew about it. In the absence of acclaim a steel ball was a duller toy than most.
The Little Mermaid had always been one of my favourite stories, but I always bridled at the bargain she made, to walk in agony and have no one know her suffering. I had no objection to suffering in silence, as long as everyone knew about it.
The weather-vane of Marion’s rhetoric changed quarter. I had stood up to the breezes of reproach and wheedling, now she would try some colder blasts. Her voice took on a hard edge. ‘In a school other than this, you would not be treated with understanding. You would be humiliated and mocked. Never accepted. I have watched you spread your wings here, with our help, but that doesn’t mean I must watch as you throw yourself off a cliff and try to join a flock which will peck you to death. You can’t judge the world outside by our splendid ABs. It can be a cruel place, and weakness is no protection. Weakness can even be an incitement to cruelty.’
Of course, it spoiled her case that the world over which she ruled was crueller than she knew. Judy Brisby hadn’t been detected in her various assaults. She had left the school as an unspotted professional, as a loving wife and mother-to-be.
In fact there was only one person reprimanded for bullying in my years at Vulcan, as far as I know, and that was me. We were used to our own little tortures. Chinese Burns were common currency, given and received without much comment. I was almost proud of the first one I got. It was painful but also a mark of belonging, like a phantom bracelet. Eventually I found someone even weaker than me, a worthy person to receive an amateurish sort of Chinese Burn in his turn (my hands not really being up to the task of twisting the skin of the wrists in two directions at once) — and I got a proper scolding for it. It even turned up on my report: ‘John really must stop bullying boys weaker than himself.’ Unfair, unfair! The action was technically difficult and it was quite a feat to manage it at all. But oh no, suddenly grassing people up is perfectly all right and I’m a menace to society. Never mind that no one ever got a word in their reports about the Chinese Burns they’d given me.
And after all, as the whole Skull of Doom episode showed, there was a little nerve of cruelty unknown to Marion herself which pulsed in her from time to time. If she was in loco parentis for all the children, then by letting little Stevie Templeton be frightened until his athetoid twitching became frantic and he cut his head against the metal of his wheelchair, she was responsible for the hurt he suffered. She was hurting him as directly as if she had knocked his head against the metal herself.