The Light of the Day - Eric Ambler [3]
Of course, an English public-school education is mainly designed to build character, to give a boy a sense of fair play and sound values, teach him to take the rough with the smooth, and make him look and sound like a gentleman.
Coram’s at least did those things for me; and, looking back, I suppose that I should be grateful. I can’t say that I enjoyed the process though. Fighting, for instance: that was supposed to be very manly, and if you did not enjoy it they called you “cowardy custard.” I don’t think it is cowardly not to want someone to hit you with his fist and make your nose bleed. The trouble was that when I used to hit back I always sprained my thumb or grazed my knuckles. In the end, I found the best way to hit back was with a satchel, especially if you had a pen or the sharp edge of a ruler sticking out through the flap; but I have always disliked violence of any kind.
Almost as much as I dislike injustice. My last term at Coram’s, which I should have been able to enjoy because it was the last, was completely spoiled.
Jones iv was responsible for that. He had left school by then, and was working for his father, who owned a garage, but I still went up to Hilly Fields with him sometimes. One evening he showed me a long poem typed out on four foolscap pages. A customer at the garage had given it to him. It was called The Enchantment and was supposed to have been written by Lord Byron. It began:
Upon one dark and sultry day,
As on my garret bed I lay,
My thoughts, for I was dreaming half,
Were broken by a silvery laugh,
Which fell upon my startled ear,
Full loud and clear and very near.
Well, it turned out that the laugh was coming through a hole in the wall behind his bed, so he looked through the hole.
A youth and maid were in the room,
And each in youth’s most beauteous bloom.
It then went on to describe what the youth and maid did together for the next half hour—very poetically, of course, but in detail. It was really hot stuff.
I made copies and let some of the chaps at school read it. Then I charged them fourpence a time to be allowed to copy it out for themselves. I was making quite a lot of money, when some fourth-form boy left a copy in the pocket of his cricket blazer and his mother found it. Her husband sent it with a letter of complaint to The Bristle. He began questioning the boys one by one to find out who had started it, and, of course, he eventually got back to me. I said I had been given it by a boy who had left the term before—The Bristle couldn’t touch him—but I don’t think he believed me. He sat tapping his desk with his pencil and saying “filthy smut” over and over again. He looked very red in the face, almost as if he were embarrassed. I remember wondering if he could be a bit “queer.” Finally, he said that as it was my last term he would not expel me, but that I was not to associate with any of the younger boys for the rest of my time there. He did not cane me or write to the Benevolent Association, which was a relief. But it was a bad experience all the same and I was quite upset. In fact, I think that was the reason I failed my matriculation.
At Coram’s they made a fetish out of passing your matric. Apparently, you couldn’t get a respectable job in a bank or an insurance company without it. I did not want a job in a bank or an insurance company—Mr. Hafiz had died and Mum wanted me to go back and learn the restaurant business—but it was a disappointment all the same. I think that if The Bristle had been more broad-minded and understanding, not made me feel as if I had committed some sort of crime, things would have been different. I was a sensitive boy and I felt that Coram’s had somehow let me down. That was the reason I never applied to join the Old Coramians Club.
Now, of course, I can look back on the whole thing and