The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [118]
“They knock it into you,” said Julian. “As it was knocked into them.”
Julian, at sixteen, shared a study with two other boys. Tom, as a new bug, had no private place. Not even the jakes, where the boys stood and sat at a long open stool with regular holes in, and considered each other’s privates, furtively or openly. Not in the dorm, where he lay two feet away from a boy called Hodges and a boy called Merkel, both of whom had that smell both cheesy and acrid which permeated the whole school. Hodges asked him if he liked touching or being touched best, and Tom went fiery-faced and said, neither. He was, of course, being touched, by Hunter, who had his own gang of bloods, solid members of the rugger scrimmage, who played a kind of game of forfeits with the newbutts, which consisted of tearing off their garments, one by one, as they tested them on arcane school lore. “What do we call a creep who smarms at the archets.” “A sucky-bum,” said poor Tom, who knew that one. But they went on and on until they found things he didn’t know—that you must never say bacon and eggs, but always pigs and shelly, you must not say prep, but bogroll. What must you do when we beat you? Say thank you, because it’s good for you, or we’ll beat you a lot more. His underpants were taken before his socks and shoes, and they all handled him, one after another. The whole code of such places insists that it is foul and dishonourable to tell anyone of such happenings. Tom didn’t.
He bumped into Julian on a cross-country run in the Dales, for a short distance, and thought of speaking to him. But he looked at Julian and saw both that Julian knew what was happening, and that Julian, like everyone else, expected him to grin and bear it.
His letters home said that he was settling in, and had various duties like making the archets’ beds, and bringing them things from the tuckshop. He imagined a stolid, unimaginative small boy writing, and wrote what he imagined such a boy would write. Humphry remarked to Olive that his letters were dull for a boy with two writers for parents, and Olive said that it was just protective camouflage, she was sure, boys at school were not encouraged to show their feelings. He always wrote at the end “Thank you, Mama, for sending the story. It makes all the difference.”
Considering that there were six other children in the house, and Humphry of course, Olive missed Tom appallingly. He had something to do with her power to write good stories—real stories as opposed to pot-boilers—and she needed him. He was neither audience nor muse, exactly, but he was the life of the story. She went on writing Tom Underground for him, compulsively. She hoped he didn’t mind her having changed her hero’s name from Lancelin to Tom. Names are things over which writers sometimes have little control. Tom underground would neither act nor think, without his true name. The plot sprouted all sorts of delectable, frightening complications as Tom underground made his way inwards and downwards, along rushing underground rivers, along ledges beside plunging black funnels whose end could not be seen—or heard; if you dislodged a pebble, no sound of landing came back. Sometimes there were caverns lit by encrusted glittering jewels, which someone unknown had cut free of the rock and polished. Sometimes at a distance there were sounds of activities—whisking things that might be rats, or larger animals, trundling wheels of trucks in adjacent galleries, passing trains and troupes of gnomes and salamanders, from whom Tom concealed himself in a crevice, fearing their alien dark faces and spiked, filthy fingernails.
Time went on, and Tom’s stolid little letters continued to come. Thanks, Mater, for the delish fruitcake, which was much appreciated by the archets. Can you send more treacle cake, the Head Archet likes it. (So do I, when I get any.) Yesterday we went on a cross-country run in the Dales, by a trout-stream.