8

For our first English homework at the Grammar, Mr Hawk-Genn told us to write a composition.

“On any subject. I want to gauge the kind of work you’re capable of. The range of your interests, the depths of your imaginations.”

“Oh, sir! Do we have to?”

“Mine isn’t very deep, sir. I can tell you that right now.”

“I don’t have any interests, sir.”

“Couldn’t we learn a sonnet, sir? Hickory, dickory, dock…”

Poor Mr Hawk-Genn. I now understood he was a poet with a growing reputation—although this was something I’d discovered only many years later, after he’d committed suicide and I happened to see his obituary in the Telegraph. He was about thirty when I first knew him, quite nice-looking in a mildly effeminate way, a slight man of only medium height, with slicked-down flaxen hair, and a yellow cord jacket which stank of cigarettes. He left the Grammar before I did, having banged down a desk lid on top of a boy’s head and given him concussion. The boy, a new boy, had been winding him up by opening his desk every few minutes to conduct a lengthy rummage and treating the class to a running commentary on everything he found.

We ourselves, as new boys, also thought we had the measure of him, even before he was five minutes into our first lesson. Whereas with Mr Horwood and Dr Derry and Mr Tank you realized you had to behave—to some degree it was a matter of reputation but to a greater one it was a matter of presence—with Mr Hawk-Genn it was believed that you could get away with anything.

And the pity of it was, he would have made an excellent teacher. He longed to enthuse us with his own love of language and of literature.

“He said on any subject,” Gordon Leonard told the class at the end of the period, when the master had departed. “Let’s write on rubbing up. Let’s all write on rubbing up.”

The first time I’d heard this, fifty-five years earlier, I must have been uncommonly naïve. I hadn’t understood what the expression meant; hadn’t been aware of the activity it specified.

“I know! We’ll claim we’ve done it so much we’ve all gone blind but haven’t yet learnt brail!” Gordon put out his hands and stumbled down the central aisle, zigzagging drunkenly and being helped along his way by sturdy pushes. “Alms for the blind! Alms for the blind! Hendrix, you’ve let off, you filthy beast. Don’t try to deny it. You’re disgusting!”

And I had used to think he was so wonderful: this nonchalantly dashing Gordon Leonard.

“Tell you what, though. Being serious now. We can time ourselves, see who can write the thing in under ten minutes. Say twelve at the most.”

Then small, grey-haired, dynamic Dr Derry swept in, wearing his black gown, and the uproar was immediately quelled. He didn’t say anything but merely turned his back on us, selected an unbroken stick of chalk, and stood thoughtful for a moment in front of the board. At length he began to write. The chalk squeaked unmercifully for over a minute—for over a minute and a half—for over two minutes. Some of us looked at one another and wondered if it was ever likely to stop. Even I wondered that, because when it came to the minutiae of my existence I had naturally forgotten more than I remembered. But finally the small man stepped aside and we saw what he had written. “‘Manners maketh man’ is the motto of Winchester College and I should like to say how thoroughly I agree with that, and how I shall now do everything within my power to adopt such a laudable maxim, and to endeavour to live up to it!” We were then informed we should have to write this out a hundred times before tomorrow, obviously rendering every word in every line so legible that there could be no fear of our needing to rewrite it two hundred times for the day following. After that, there ensued a further silence which lasted, except for authorized interruption, throughout the whole of that miserable Latin period, our first, and possibly least enjoyable, of all that Dr Derry ever took us for.

I didn’t know what to do about Mr Hawk-Genn. During those chaotic few minutes between classes I could perhaps have remonstrated, said, “Hey, he’s all right, let’s give him a chance!” But probably a better way was to try to win over Gordon in private, since Gordon was patently a born leader—or else hope to influence some of the others at a more conducive moment.

Meanwhile, there remained the question of the essay.

“Any ideas?” asked Johnny Aarons, as we sauntered home that evening.

“A visit to the seaside,” I offered. “The life of a threepenny bit.”

“Gosh, yes. Thanks, Ethan. Original thinker—ahead of your time.”

I smiled. “Talking of which, you know what I reckon I might do? The shape of things to come! But not according to H.G. Wells. According to E.B. Hart.” It was a subject I’d often been drawn towards at prep school but which I now felt glad I’d saved. “I’d like—if I can—to produce something quite impressive.”

“For Hawk-Genn? You’ll be in a minority.”

“Sounds like it.”

“Minority of one.”

“What about minority of two?”

“Hah! You know what old Dallas used to say about my English.”

“But if I try to help with it?” In any case we’d frequently done our homework together—and Johnny’s mathematics had always been far in advance of mine. “And why should we just sit back and let Flash Gordon run this show?”

It hadn’t been a ploy but it was providential. A spot of rivalry existed. In times past they’d seldom vied for the greater share of my affection, yet to be better-looking and taller and stronger had certainly made something of a difference. For one thing, of course, it must have provided me with more confidence.

It was strange I’d again picked Gordon for a friend but perhaps in some ways we were closer than before—in part, I think, simply because I didn’t fawn on him as I had used to. And, invariably more thoughtful when away from the crowd, he was by far the best person to go bird-watching with, or bicycling or camping with, a trait in him I had never before recognized, let alone appreciated. Also, as it happened, we were currently talking about buying a set of weights together, from the proceeds both of our paper rounds and of a visit from one of Gordon’s great-aunts (he was a generous friend), then exercising in his father’s garage. And since Johnny was less interested in physical and outdoor pursuits and more into music and the sciences—together, twice now, we had made an effective crystal set which passed between us on alternating weeks—they complemented each other these days much better than when I myself had not been so attracted to such things as hiking and football and fishing. (Though I always threw the fish back and still objected unreservedly to shooting.) Gordon’s father was a keen huntsman who enjoyed baiting me on the subject of blood sports but nowadays I could answer in kind, whereas previously I’d avoided him or, if unable to do so, had addressed him assiduously as ‘sir’. Previously, however, I had missed out on the tree house he had helped us build in their cherry orchard, the really splendid tree house which Gordon had also missed out on, since the idea for it and even the first rough sketch had emanated from me.

So despite the changes that had taken place in myself (I often remembered telling Zack I was afraid a higher IQ might alter my personality but I’d made no allowances for other, gentler things), Johnny and Gordon were still my best friends, and it had felt weird on my eleventh birthday to have my mother snap the three of us in front of our prep school and remember the second occasion on which it had happened, with Zack and me standing on the opposite pavement and watching her flirt with Mr Dallas. When the camera had been put away I wouldn’t even have been flabbergasted to hear a familiar stranger asking for directions to the station: a sly joke, maybe—a wink across the calendar—engineered by Zack. Gordon had asked, “Ethan, what do you keep looking for over there?” “What? Oh, nothing, really. Ghosts!” And he had laughed.

“Or perhaps I’ll write about the building of the tree house,” I remarked now. Johnny had been invited up to it a lot and though so far he had refused to come the subject was no longer awkward. “And how I told Mr Leonard I’d decided to become a vegetarian and that it was him who’d mainly been responsible!”

He laughed. “Interesting. But, no, I’d still rather hear about The Future According to Hart.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m happy.”

“What aspects will you choose?”

“Thought I might have the Festival of Britain as my framework. Not really sure yet.” Instead of getting it done in ten minutes—or even twelve—I could envisage it taking something more like ten hours. Or even twelve.

But I was wrong. It took me fifty minutes. It flowed. It flowed as fast as the ink from my Platignum—faster, in fact, since the nib kept scratching up the paper. It could have been a lesson in dictation, without all the pauses or the needless repetitions.

Yet it wasn’t about the future. Mr Hawk-Genn had asked us to plan what we wrote so that it might build towards a satisfying climax or at least to a logical conclusion. Naturally I could see the sense in this but I had started writing with a mind that was practically a blank—save for the projected Skylon, save for the exciting Dome of Discovery.

And I found the result to be horrifying.