THE BRONZE COW

Mrs Faber wasn’t a cruel teacher, she just had a bad memory. Punishment in those days was considered an important duty. It was what gave children character. The Romans understood these things and we all loved the Romans. The principal would have worn a toga but it was too draughty and cold in our stone boarding school. Mrs Faber was his daughter and she’d been brought up to understand the need for an occasional decimation.

That wasn’t what happened with Calder, though it was well known he was about the worst boy around. There was a special punishment in the basement no-one had used since before Emperor Hadrian. Mostly it had been forgotten down there. It was a bronze cow. It was double life-sized, with a hatch on the side. Calder was asked to get in and Mrs Faber locked it.

She wasn’t planning on leaving him in there as long as she did but it was the basement, after all, and we needed to learn about mathematics and missile manufacture. Calder sat in the bronze cow for weeks, and then months. The poor boy couldn’t die because the cow wouldn’t stop eating the mould that grew profusely down in that sultry basement.

When she finally remembered him, Mrs Faber rushed down and let him out immediately. She apologised and kissed his sweaty head. She told him he wasn’t a bad boy anymore and she brought him up to class despite the fact that his teeth had gone green and he smelt like he’d been dragged from the river Styx.

For a few days we were happy to see Calder again and we treated him well. Some of us felt guilty because we hadn’t forgotten him at all. We just did not want to remind Mrs Faber. Calder seemed alright for a while. The smell went away, though his teeth remained mouldy and moss green.

It seemed miraculous. But then we noticed that he needed us to continually stroke his head and kiss his cheeks, otherwise he would start screaming. The sound his voice could make must have been something he learned in the belly of the bronze cow because we couldn’t stand it. It made all of us jump out of our seats like spiders dropped into hot sulphur.

We caressed his head and kissed him and were forced to tell him we loved him and valued him, when it was obvious to everyone that this really wasn’t true. It could’ve gone on like that until it was the end of the year and we could all be sent back to our real homes, but it got worse.

In the end Calder wouldn’t stop crying no matter what we did, so we had to walk him down to the basement again. We put him in the bronze cow and the sound it made on quiet evenings that autumn was quite pleasant. Mrs Faber explained that this was because the massive head of the cow had a system of pipes and stops that resembled a compressed French horn and would convert even the most grievous noises of agony into lovely lullabies.