Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [32]
So when, on the first morning of the new term, Clem waited for Goz to come down the street, he wept.
“You look a right twot,” Goz said, stationary and upright on his bike.
“So do you,” Clem said, wiping his face with the overhang of his sleeve, pretending his tears were snot or sweat.
“I know. These caps’re a form of cruelty.”
“I’m not gorna wear it. Round the corner, I’m gorna stick it in me saddlebag.”
Goz nodded like a judge. “My spies tell me,” he said, “that if we’re caught not wearing them, we get our arse thrashed. And that it hurt.”
“Bollocks.”
“Yeah. Them an all. Ready, then?”
As soon as they turned onto the Aylsham road, they were ambushed by their former comrades, dressed in hand-me-down Secondary Modern uniforms. Clem and Goz crashed through with their legs kicking right and left, their brown leather satchels bouncing against their backs. A hail of stones and unripe conkers fell just short of their bikes, but the taunt reached them, echoing in the tunnel of the railway bridge:
“Grammargogs! Grammargogs! GRAMMARGOG BASTARDS!”
Later that same week, Edmund Mortimer suffered his first heart attack. Luckily, he was holding the telephone at the time — he was trying to get through to his son, Gerard, in Canada — and when he fell, he dragged the instrument off the desk. The crash brought his housekeeper hurrying to the morning room.
And in November of that momentous year, a boat called Granma departed the coast of Mexico and headed for the island of Cuba. It contained eighty-two hairy revolutionaries — among them Che Guevara — led by a man called Fidel Castro. Their lunatic ambition was to liberate Cuba from the American-sponsored dictatorship of a man called Batista. Improbably, they would succeed, and Fidel Castro would make a significant contribution to twentieth-century history and to Clem Ackroyd’s yet-undreamed-of loss of virginity. Clem would, no doubt, have been interested to learn this, but at the time his mind was on more urgent matters. When the Granma slipped into the Gulf of Mexico, he was in a tearful agony of dread. He and Goz had been bushwhacked by the Sec Mods again, and Brian Woods had thrown Clem’s cap into the back of a passing lorry loaded with beets. His dad was going to go mental.
I’M NOT GOING to bang on about my suffering, my brutalization, and my salvation at Newgate. Those long seven years. (Well, eight, if you count the missing year.) Lord knows, bookshop shelves already creak under the weight of Misery Memoirs and Teen Novels that might as well all be called My School Hell. I have no desire to add my small pebble to that avalanche of unhappiness. In any case, looking back at it from this distance, it seems mostly funny. Tragedy does sometimes look like comedy to the survivors. And I survived. There’s scar tissue, but after a while you stop seeing it in the mirror. Believe me. I know a thing or two about scar tissue.
So, briefly:
You walk through the school’s wrought-iron gates. (Which are massive. And there’s a carved griffin or some such thing perched on the stone posts at either side.) The original School House, three hundred and fifty years old, autumn-yellow creeper clambering up its russet face, is, actually and truly, beautiful. Between you and it there is a huge and immaculate lawn circled by a gravel path.
Rule 7: No one, other than the headmaster and his immediate family or guests, may set foot upon the school lawn.
Rule 8: Pupils walk clockwise around the school lawn, on pain of death. Only staff and prefects are permitted to walk anticlockwise.
(It occurs to me that I could convey the nature of my school experience simply by reproducing The Newgate Rules. I kept a copy for years, but I lost it somewhere between my divorce and my emigration to America. It was a little hardbacked book with a blue cover, the first book we were issued with. We were told to learn it by heart, and we did.)
For most of its history, Newgate had been a boarding school dedicated to turning the superfluous sons of moneyed families into military officers or, failing that, into