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By Root 1042 0

with enormous relish on the first verse: “Come all ye jolly sailors bold, Whose hearts are cast in honour’s mould, While English glory I unfold”—head shaking with the jolliness and boldness, chin tucked in for the gravelly descent on “English glory,” the risk of comedy brazened out: “Hurrah for the Arethusa!” He felt he could sing to them all day. A hand was up: the feeble Peebles, as Colonel Sprague called him, had no book. “Well, share with Ackerley, use your nous,” and then they were off. There was something Peter was expecting to happen, and he thought he would listen out for it and wait. For the moment he corrected nothing, the thing was to get them moving: “Not a sheet or a tack or a brace did she slack …” They had sung the song every week this term and could belt it out with their strange uncaring glee; it was he himself, frowning over the piano, who sometimes forgot where they were and joined in furiously with the wrong words. “And now we’ve driven the foe ashore, / Never to fight with Britons more”—a reckless boast, overtaken in a moment by an immense bass crack in the air above the roof of the house, far away and right on top of them, so that the room shook and the piano itself gave out a faint jangling thrum. They broke off raggedly, then rushed to the window, but the plane was so far beyond them and moving so fast that they saw nothing. The great scientific fact seemed all the more eloquent and exemplary for that. On the back-drive below, the Headmaster too was standing and gazing at the sky over the tree-tops, his upper lip raised rodent-like as he squinted into the blue. “Come on, back to your places,” said Peter carryingly, before the HM himself could do so; but in fact in the presence, or rather the immediate absence, of this sublime phenomenon, a minute’s mutual wonder seemed to be allowed.

“Did you see it, sir?” Brookings called down. But the Headmaster shook his head, with a shifty smile, almost as if he’d missed it with his gun. Peter leant out above the three boys who were jammed in the open casement. Though he thought the HM was a fool, he didn’t want to be shown up by him, and the HM found fault in the most unaccountable things. He picked up fag-ends, he brooded ingeniously on things he had misheard. Peter was a young master, far closer in age to the boys than the HM was to him. There was sometimes an imputation in the older man’s tone that Peter himself must be kept in check. Now he said,

“They’d let me know this might happen,” something slightly absurd in half-shouting this at a first-floor window.

“Had they, sir?”

“Oh, yes: I’m in touch with the Commander at the Base. He keeps me in the picture.”

“What was it, sir?” said Brookings.

The Headmaster peered again at the sky, with a genially proprietary air. “Well, back to your lessons, come on!” and nodding uncertainly at Peter he trudged on down the drive towards the garages.

“Anyone know what it was?” said Peter, as they took their places again; with their Airfix and their Biggles and their War Picture Libraries they lived a constant battle in the air.

“Was it a Hustler, sir?” said Sloane.

“Why would a Hustler make that noise?” said Peter, pretty sure he knew, but taking a donnish tone.

“Sonic boom, sir!” said several of the boys.

“So when we speak of a Hustler, what do we mean?” said Peter.

“It’s a B-58 bomber, sir,” said Sloane, and someone else made a stupid booming noise. “They can do Mach 2, and of course they carry a nuclear weapon, sir.”

“I hope they don’t bomb us, sir,” said Peebles, with that utter feebleness that only provoked the others.

“I don’t think we’d know much about it, if they did,” said Peter.

“The Americans don’t just go round bombing people, you idiot,” said Milsom 1, to Peebles, not to Peter, though there was a slight sense of things getting out of hand.

“Right, where were we?” said Peter, and with a sudden intense boredom, which seemed the natural counterpart of his desire to be thorough and exciting: “OK, I’ve had enough of the ruddy Arethusa, let’s do something else. ‘Cherry Ripe,’ perhaps?”

“Oh, no, sir