Red Earth and Pouring Rain (65 page)

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‘You’re a nigger.’ ‘No I’m not.’ ‘You’re a nigger wog.’ ‘No I’m not.’ ‘Nigger’ ‘I’m not.’ ‘You’re blubbering, nigger bitch.
Look at this here. She’s blubbering.’ ‘I’m not. That either.’

The school was day and night, and Durrell had the night and Dr Lusk had the day. At the very beginning I was called into the
Doctor’s study for an interview, as he wanted to know how much I knew. He questioned me regarding the ancient poets, of which
I knew none, of history of which I knew nothing. Finally he said what an atrocious accent you have my boy you must work on
it. Your education has been patchy. I can do mathematics I said, and I can engineer anything, a model bridge a working windmill.
That’s very good, he said, but you are here to learn those things which make you an English gentleman. Character, he said,
character. He was massive in his proportions, and in his black robes and with his great head and his measured manner of speech,
deep basso voice he frightened me quite wonderfully. Yes sir I said, not knowing at all what he meant. Outside the low grey
clouds took me back to the docks on the Hooghly where I had learnt knots. That evening I was to see Durrell.

Am I to understand your people are in trade, said Durrell. I was quiet, for what could I say: my own mother passed to the
other side before I could remember, and my father was who he was. Then he married my mother. There was something in him that
was attractive to women. On his lecture tours they would flock around him, eager and moist-eyed. In his lectures he would
stop, his hands raised up, too stirred to go on as he talked about the great task. I think it was that they loved. My new
mother married him against her father’s wishes. They waited until he was dead. She was very large, and their money was from
candles, and cloth.

Your new name, said Durrell, your name now and forever, is Mary. I kept silent. After that they called me Mary. One takes
the names one is given.

Bowles was house captain, and Bailey and Hodges were prefects, and Hodges cricket captain besides, and Durrell was nothing.
Nothing official, that is, but he was unmistakably the leader. They all followed him, and undeniably, as soon as I met him,
I did too. He was small, or
smaller than the rest, with neat, dark hair (After two weeks I parted my hair in the middle, like him), and he looked at you
as if he were weighing you, all the time amused. He was completely sure of himself. In trying to think of why we all were
his disciples, all I can say even now is that he commanded us because he had a certain
moral
force, a strength of character that was like steel, which appeared only when he chose to reveal it. For all their pretensions
I think there is not one master at Norgate who knew what he really was, who understood his position in the world of the boys,
which they knew very imperfectly, if at all. I am sure they all thought of him as nothing more than a middling scholar and
a bit of a dandy. He was always impeccable. Even when I was that young, it was clear to me that the others were merely brutes,
that their cruelty, even when it was malicious, was only of the canine variety, all slobber and grunting and swagger. Durrell
was different. I did not understand him for a long time.

Dr Lusk took a great interest in me, for which I shall always be grateful. I suspect he saw in me a worthy project for his
reforming instincts, which I surely was: tempestuous; flighty; emotional rather than analytical, despite my scientific leanings;
and given to tears and rages. Whatever the cause or mode of his attention, my conversations with him softened my loneliness,
although he terrified me. It was like talking to God: the awe one felt was not sufficient to completely dissipate the enormous
reassurance of being noticed. He called me to him often as he walked through the paths of Norgate: Well, Sarthey, I hope you’re
getting along, eating well. Good morning, young fellow. Sarthey, now I hear you’re not applying yourself sufficiently to Horace,
and I’m not
happy
about it. His voice curled itself comfortably about the Norgate stones, so rich and round it was, and it seemed that he must
be eternal: I’m not
happy
about it. He appeared like a black vision in the walks, on the grounds, in the dormitories, and he always knew exactly what
was being whispered among the boys, what scandals were brewing, who the culprit was. He was uncanny and fearsome and everywhere.

The occasion of my first switching was an offence observed by Dr Lusk: I secreted a piece of bread from the mess and ate it
on the walks outside the classrooms. No bread at school, control your appetites,
young fellow, said Dr Lusk suddenly from behind me, assembly hall Saturday if you please. What’s that mean, I asked Byrd.
You’re in for a flog, old Mary, he said off-handedly, and I thought of nothing for the days after. I woke up thinking about
it and slept with it. I suppose I ate and read and did the usual, but not a thing I can remember, and then on Saturday morning
there was the Hall. The older fellows got it first. They leaned over a desk, trousers down and shirt pulled over their heads,
clutching at the side of the desk. Dr Lusk held out a hand for the switch, a bushy terrible pack of wattles, and I looked
away but the sound was like a bowl of water being dashed onto a rock. When it went on I could hardly bear it, and when he
finally got to us I could hardly stand, my legs were shaking and I was blubbering. Somebody took me to the desk and they did
the belt for me, hauled up my shirt. When it hit me there was a very small moment when it was only a shock against my thighs,
and I thought that’s all that’s all it is, but then it seared me like a fire and I howled. I must admit I couldn’t stop it.
There was a murmur when I roared —the flogging being the chief entertainment on Saturday mornings, there was a crowd of fellows
spectating from the pews and they thought my performance ripping. I got three strokes, and afterwards Byrd said you’ll have
a fair set o’ stripes, one of Lusk’s better efforts, close together and nicely grouped. After this I went with Byrd to the
Saturday shows. Some of the older chaps took it without a groan. Even watching, I jumped every time I heard it make its thin
whistle in the air.

During the holidays I was always alone. I stumbled about my mother’s house, clambered about the grounds. Once my parents had
Markline up for dinner, and I suppose he was some class of nobility but he seemed to me a pious bore. He asked me very carefully
about my classes, with particular attention to the practical sciences, and wrote down my answers in a little book. And is
there anything about Norgate you don’t like, he said, looking significant and my father goggling at me over his shoulder.
They were both so peculiar that it required me a moment to take their meaning, and when I did I almost laughed. But I said,
no, because I was supposed to be very nice to him. That’s what my mother said, be very nice to him. It was that he was rich,
and better, known to the grandees, so he helped them on their crusades, and he got
me into Norgate. For which I am grateful. But to tell him about Durrell, no. I told nobody about Durrell.

… that night Bowles had me to his room. I sat there for a while, on a hard wooden chair. He had hunting prints on the wall.
Then he came in, and he let on he was drunk, but I think he was putting it on. I mean he had to act drunk so he could do what
he did, which was put me on the bed. He was cursing and pushing me about, not that I was fighting him but rather that I was
completely passive, even when it hurt. The candle flickered and he whispered bitch but I didn’t shut my eyes, just bore his
weight as if it were far away, and it was. Afterwards I was very cool and methodical, putting on my pants and buckling up,
and it rather impressed him. The next night it was Hodges, and then Bailey. So when Durrell called me up, and I went to his
digs, and he walked in, I started to unbutton, and he said sharply, oh stop that, you silly child. I must have looked puzzled,
because he seated himself across from me, crossed his legs, put an elbow on a knee. You’re too sharp for those simple pleasures,
he said. Oh no you’re much too keen. I have a special plan for you. I’ve been watching you he said.

At first nobody understood what I said because I half-sung my words. I had a whole new language to learn. Bogs were the privies.
When you were flogged it was a good tunding you got. Not chapel but the gaol was where we went Sunday mornings for a wailing.
Nothing was good, but it was top
.

In mathematics, soon enough, I was at the head of the class. There is something restful about a theorem when you are far from
home and your heart is like a sore chancre. An angle against another angle is like all the universe. The question of it is
the relief.

Durrell said you have talent. I said what. Look here, he said. What I want from you is not what they. What I want is you to
find a dog for yourself. D’you see? Bring me somebody you can
fuck,
and show me you can, right here in front of me. Now for a moment I had the oddest feeling. I can’t catch it now as I write.
It was like an opening up. Like something had opened then like a seam, as if the evening had ruptured
along its centre and had pressed its warm secret heart to me, revealing itself completely. Like suddenly I understood, like
I knew. So I said, but how, but I was nodding yes. Durrell smiled and said, you’re a crafty little experimenter, ain’t you?
Use your imagination.

My father and mother were always talking. In rooms filled with the grey light of piety they talked. But when I walked away
from Durrell with my mission I never asked why.

In an attic, one summer, I found an enormous cross. It must have hung in a church, high and life-size. But there had been
some accident perhaps, because now there were only the crossed beams, lovely dark wood, and the nails, heavy black iron. The
image of Him was gone, perhaps broken and removed for repair and then forgotten, but the thing that was left frightened me
terribly. It affected me to a degree that I cannot explain still, because it was only after all a large but perfectly ordinary
cross with the nails intact, lying covered with dust. But it was the heaviness of the wood and the thickness of the nails.

I looked around, examined those around me and there were the usual lady lot you find in any school company. I mean there were
a few obvious choices, smooth pretty little boys who looked always a little scared because they knew what they were. However
none of these interested me, I daresay precisely because it would have been easy or at least plausible. I felt, you see, a
certain obligation to perform well, to do something that would gain my mentor’s admiration. There had been the note of challenge
in what he had said, and the gauntlet being flung I did not think it sporting or manly to take an easy slide. No, he expected
great things of me and I wanted to do him proud. So I looked around, and waited, and meanwhile the whisper of the house was
that I was Durrell’s friend, so naturally I put on side and acted older than my years and took no guff from anyone. He saw
all this and I thought I saw a clue of a smile on his face, approving or so I imagined.

Every morning I looked in the mirror hoping the dew, the freshness and the wet would take some of the colour from my skin.
I did not
like the cold but I became accustomed to it, and after a while I remembered the glare of India and the endless heat plains
with horror. But even relief from that terrible sun and the good chill winds of Norgate were never to remove the swarthiness
from my skin, and to the last of my stay there were sniggers and cutting remarks, although by the end they learned to be careful.
By the end of it nobody called me Mary.

My mother I never knew. I have a very small likeness in a clasped locket, of a thin dark-eyed woman with dark hair. My father’s
second wife treated me well, and as we came to England and I to Norgate through her money, I am grateful. She was a thick,
suety woman, very serious, who had displeased and scandalized her family by following my father out to India and marrying
him. A candle and tallow fortune, it was, and then later cloth, but they had hoped higher for her than an indigent missionary.
I always thought her charmless and stupid, and as I grew older it was her endless and sentimental kindness that was most annoying
to me. When I was rude to her she grew sweaty and fatter with hurt, and even more defenceless, which threw me always into
a rage.

It’s the Boss, said Durrell, and the lot straightened up, Hodges cupping a cigarette behind his back. Well good morning quoth
Dr Lusk, and we chorused back. Except that Durrell drawled Maw’nin, and a look Dr Lusk gave him, but Durrell was ever the
cool cove, and gave him back stare for stare. Mr Sarthey you know only the uppers may wear cravats. Take it off and assembly
Saturday. You must pay attention to rules, Mr Sarthey, and with that he was off. Six I think for you, laddie, said Hodges.
It don’t signify, I said and took a wheeze at the smoke. You’re growing up, pal, said Durrell. He had somehow realized a perfect
treasury of cheap American novels and had taken to a lazy drawling affectation of what he called Yankee speech. He may be
the Boss, said I, but he can’t do a thing to me. Oh he can’t, can he, said Durrell. And I said, just you wait, just you wait.
And the others, who knew nothing of our contest, or wager, or call it what you will, looked baffled at us and our friendly
chaffing. They had stopped, by now, calling me to their rooms, they had. Couldn’t grasp what I was at, and didn’t
understand their god Durrell’s interest in me. He’s the Boss, I said, but I’ll settle his hash.

We had a fair for Merrie England. The Third Form were peasants. The Fourth tradesmen. Some of the Fifth got to be minstrels,
and other diplomats. The Sixth were knights and barons. There were tents on the green, strolling players, theatricals and
tableaus. All this was for parents’ weekend so Dr Lusk gave a speech on chivalry. What we try to do here is to produce Englishmen
he said, and what is it we expect of an English gentlemen? We expect application, but I do not expect my boys to be clever,
there is nothing worse than a clever boy who hangs back from his fellows out of pride, who shirks his responsibilities and
splits fine hairs over the truth. Were one of my charges to become a cabinet minister but a sophist and an atheist, I should
think worse, much worse of him than one who never achieved fame, or wealth, or land, but who told the truth always in a forward
manly way, who kept his body unsullied and strong, and who performed his duties as a Christian and a loyal subject of his
monarch. We live in a curious wintery age, and although we feel the promise of spring we feel the darkness close around us,
for the old times were best, when spears clashed on shields, and hardy knights rode out to give battle to the foe. Here there
was honour, and trust, and fellowship, and true faith, a Christianity not weakened and effeminised, but strong and potent,
that one might fight the good fight, and bring light to the world. Around you today, as you look at your sons, see not the
tender faces of your offspring, but the frank, fearless and forthright visages, loving and stern under plumed helmets, of
those who ride by St. George for the cross and the crown.