The Perils and Dangers of this Night (2 page)

It was Wednesday, 21 December 1966, the last day of
the Christmas term. The whole school, boys and
teachers and parents, had assembled in the little chapel.
The last light of the shortest day of the year fell feebly
through the stained-glass windows, so that the reds and
greens of the school crest and motto were a splash of
colour on the cold stone floor.

'Sing up, Scott,' the headmaster whispered, leaning so
close that I could smell the mixture of sherry and mint on
his breath, the bitter odour of his body and the pomade
on his thinning, slicked-back hair. 'This is an honour for
you.'

And then, signalling with a twitch of his ivory baton
that everyone should stand up for the beginning of the
carol service, Dr Kemp waited for a moment and swept
the room with a smile of welcome. Forty-nine boys
between the age of seven and twelve, in short trousers
and grey jackets, their hair neatly cut for the special
occasion; seven assorted teachers and a matron, dutifully
attentive; at the back of the chapel, the parents, shivering
in stiff dark overcoats, who'd driven to the school for the
service and to take their sons home for the Christmas
holiday; they all stood up at the flicker of the headmaster's
baton and flinched from his smile.

Cold, as cold as a tomb.

In the middle of the aisle, Mrs Kemp sat in her
wheel-chair, the fur collar of her coat turned up to her
throat, a rug wrapped tightly around her legs. A gleam of
scarlet from the stained glass coloured her fine blonde
hair and the pale skin of her face. She seemed as fragile
and as beautiful as the glass through which the wintry
sunlight fell.

At her feet there lay a very old black dog. He groaned
so loudly that everyone in the chapel could hear it, and
some of the boys giggled. At a glance from Mrs Kemp,
the slightest lift of an eyebrow from Dr Kemp, the room
was silent again.

'So,' the headmaster whispered, turning back to me.
He adjusted the baton into the crook of his fingers and
he caressed my knuckles with it. He pinged a tuning fork
so softly that only I could hear it. I took a deep breath
and started to sing.

Unaccompanied, I sang the opening verse of 'Once in
Royal David's City', pure and clear in the icy air of the
chapel: Alan Scott, twelve years old, head chorister at
Foxwood Manor School, scrubbed and polished in a
clean cassock and surplice, my ruff starched and stiff
around my throat. With an anxious white face, a sprinkle
of freckles and a bristle of red hair, I stood on the front
row of the choir with the other choristers beside and
behind me.

And a curious thing happened just then. The tiniest
prickling on my palms began. Not enough to make me
itch them, but enough to bring to my mind the face of the
boy I'd seen in that dream: the boy I'd thought at first
was me, who became a boy I didn't know.

He was there with me. He was inside my head, as
though a droplet of icy water had splashed onto my scalp
and trickled down my neck. It was he who was singing,
not me. In the purity of his voice all the lives of every
living thing in the chapel stopped still – his was all the
breath in the room and there was none left for anything
else. Even the dust, which had swirled through the shafts
of sunlight with the movement of people standing and
shuffling, hung still, motionless sparks of red and green,
and the breath that had trickled from the mouths of all
the people present stopped for those few moments, while
he sang.

Dr Kemp stroked my knuckles with the baton, keeping
time. For everything and everyone else, time stood still.

I came to the end of the verse. Dr Kemp waited for the
final breath of the last note, and, in the hush which filled
the chapel, his eyes held mine. He frowned, as if he'd
noticed something different in my voice, and he pressed
the baton on my knuckles as if to prolong the moment by
pinning me to the choir-stall. Then, turning to the body
of the chapel, with a wide sweep of both arms he brought
the congregation and the rest of the choir into the second
verse.

I sang too, relieved that my big moment was over. I
turned over my hands, half-expecting to see the faintest
of stripes on my palms. But there was nothing, and the
prickling had stopped. The boy had gone.

I touched the purpling scratch on the side of my neck,
where the bramble had snagged me, and, still singing, I
moved my hand from the scratch and felt for a tiny
ear-piece I'd tucked into my ruff. I angled my head so
that the headmaster couldn't possibly see it or the wire
that ran into my ruff, and I adjusted the ear-piece into my
ear. Then I dropped my hand to my pocket and pressed
the switch of a little transistor radio.

The music erupted in my ear, so loud that it felt as
though my head would explode.

Still I mouthed the words of the Christmas carol,
especially angelic whenever Dr Kemp turned and caught
my eye. But inside my head it was the Kinks, '
you really
got me, you really got me –
' raw and ragged and blasting
hard, '–
you got me so I don't know what I'm doin' . . .
'

Through the rest of that Christmas carol, I tapped my
foot and swayed to the driving beat, and just as the
chapel echoed with the last note of the last verse of 'Once
in Royal . . .' I felt in my pocket and switched the radio
off.

The congregation sat down, coughing and shuffling. Dr Kemp
turned to the choir and gestured at us to sit down too. 'Good,' he mouthed
at me. For a horrible split-second, he narrowed his eyes and stared at my
neck. I touched it with my hand and felt a trickle of blood runing from the
scratch to the perfect whiteness of my collar. At the same time, I took out
the ear-piece and snuggled it into my ruff.

Upstairs in the main house, along the corridors of the first floor and the
second floor, it was the noisiest afternoon of the term.
In every dormitory the boys were crushing the final items of clothing or boots
or shoes into their trunks and struggling to close them. Some were helping
one another, one standing or sitting on the lid to force it shut while the
other squeezed the clasp shut or tugged at belts and buckles to get it closed.
The matron was on the first floor, Miss Hayes, a dumpy middle-aged spinster,
usually a stickler for quiet and orderliness in the dorms but this time relaxing
and allowing herself a little smile as she reminded this boy or that boy to
strip his bed properly and fold the sheets and blankets neatly, to remove
the pillow slip and fold it carefully on top of the pillow, to check the cupboards
and drawers and the wardrobe to make sure nothing was left behind. Upstairs,
at the top of the house, Mr Buxton was on duty, balding, effete, so genuinely
nice that the boys took advantage of him in equally nice ways which had, over
the seven years he'd been at Foxwood, made him an almost completely ineffectual
teacher. He wandered from dorm to dorm and smiled gamely at the boys as they
shoved and hustled around him, no doubt wishing with all his heart that they'd
soon be gone and he could go too. It was chaotic, but the end was in sight
as, one after the other, the trunks were shifted out of the dorms and manhandled
along the corridors, then bumped down the stairs to the ground floor.

Some of the dorms were already empty. It was nearly
dark, only three o'clock on a midwinter's afternoon.

There was a jam in the second-floor corridor. At the
top of the narrow stairs a couple of trunks were stuck, as
a number of boys jostled with Mr Buxton to turn the
corner. Someone shouted, 'Come on, what's the holdup?'
and another voice, shrill with excitement and
emboldened by the thrill of this longed-for moment,
called out, 'Hey, let's get out of this dump!'

A sudden silence followed. Mrs Kemp had emerged
unnoticed from her door at the further end of the
corridor and wheeled herself towards the confusion.

The boys who'd cried out were embarrassed, and one
of them, a fat boy with a silly fat face, said lamely, 'Sorry,
Mrs Kemp,' as she spun her wheelchair up to the lift
door. 'Sorry, Mrs Kemp,' he said again in the hush which
had fallen, and, contrite, he came forwards and helped
her open the door of the lift and eased her chair inside.
She smiled up at him – the shy, foolish, harmless boy
who'd blurted so loudly and was sorry to have upset her,
just as he was going home for the holiday – and she said,
'Thank you, Jonathan.' The boy glowed with relief. He
stepped out of the lift, closed the door, and everyone, Mr
Buxton too, watched and waited as the lift went down.
Then the shoving and the bustling resumed, the jam
unjammed. The school was emptying fast.

Mrs Kemp went down in the lift. She emerged at the
ground floor, tugged the door open and wheeled herself
out, spinning the chair with great expertise. She accelerated
sharply along the corridor, the tyres hissing on
polished brown linoleum, and she pressed harder with her
arms to negotiate the ramps which her husband had had
fitted, where previously there'd been a step or two. The
lifts had been installed especially for her, two of them, one
at each end of the house, so that she had access to every
part of the building, even the attic space in the roof. She
sped along the corridor, past the library and the staffroom,
towards the crowd of parents and boys in the old hall.

The hall was the heart of the school, and now it was
full of people. There was a fire burning in the great stone
fireplace, and a Christmas tree in the far corner, behind
the grand piano. A wide, elegant staircase, usually out of
bounds to the boys, curved into the room, but today, for
the special occasion of the carol service and the presence
of all the parents, some of the boys were using this route
to get their trunks downstairs. Dr Kemp was standing in
the doorway of his study, a short powerful figure,
middle-aged but somehow ageless, the headmaster, the
figurehead of Foxwood Manor School. He was talking to
some of the parents, taking the opportunity, on this
special day at the end of another year, to remind them of
the school's motto – 'to strive is to shine' – and encourage
them to apply it to the progress of their sons. He turned
with a smile as his wife rolled towards him.

I watched from the landing of the staircase, from high
up on the top floor of the house.

I was alone in the darkness, still wearing the suit I'd
worn under my cassock and surplice for the carol service.
I could smell the smoke from the fire; and the resinous
pungency of the tree reminded me of my family and home
and the Christmases I would never enjoy again. The
murmur of many voices rose up the staircase, strangely
muted and distorted, but I could still make out the sharp
little barks of the headmaster among so many strangers –
the parents of all the other boys in the school, who sipped
a sherry and warmed the backs of their legs at the fire,
who moved awkwardly around the hall and looked at the
faces in the faded school photographs, who stared
upwards to the honours boards and the names of
long-ago pupils of Foxwood Manor who'd progressed to
higher and better things.

I leaned on the banister at the top of the stairs and I
watched. I saw the knot of people far below, at the foot
of the stairs, next to the headmaster's study, move away
and out of sight, and I knew that gradually everyone
would make for the front door of the hall and go outside.

I moved slowly along the corridor. All the dormitories
were empty now, all the lights switched off. I went into
my own dorm, and crossed to the window.

Outside it was quite dark. There were still a few cars
on the gravelled driveway: a Rover and a couple of
Vauxhalls, an Armstrong Siddeley, the bulbous mass of a
Mark 10 Jaguar looming in the shadows of the copper
beech which overhung the lawn. I watched as boys and
parents manhandled their trunks into the boots of the
cars and said their final goodbyes to Dr Kemp. Headlamps
flicked on, slicing into the darkness of the surrounding
woodland. Cars moved off and around the
school, their tyres crunching on the gravel, until only
three or four were left. Dr Kemp moved among them, in
and out of the light, waving away each departing car,
then running his hand over and over his grey, oily hair.
From my vantage point at the window, I could just see
Mrs Kemp's feet in the front door, and I knew she was
sitting there in her wheelchair, so charming and somehow
so lovely, and so much younger than her pawky, curiously
graceless husband.

I eased the window open. Dr Kemp had stopped a boy
who'd pushed past him on the driveway, and he was
leaning down to talk to him. The man's voice, and the
threat in it, cut through the cold, clear air. 'Listen, boy,
and remember,' he said. 'On the first day of next term, I
want to hear you play for me. I'll know if you haven't
been practising. I don't like to be disappointed. Go.'

The boy spun away, and for a second the light from a
car's headlamps fell on his cowed and anxious face.

The last car left. It rolled across the gravel, turned the
corner of the school house and disappeared. Dr Kemp
stood there, alone, his hands hanging loosely by his sides,
and he waited and listened, as I did upstairs. The noise of
the engine faded, the headlights cut this way and that
among the dark trees, and all of a sudden there was silence.

The only light was the light that fell from the front
door of the school. The only sound was the ticking of a
wren somewhere in the woodland. The air seemed to
prickle with cold.

I withdrew my head from the window. As I did so, I
banged it on the frame, just hard enough that Dr Kemp
glanced up at the sound. For a second, he looked up at me,
and he frowned as though he couldn't remember why one
of the boys was still in the school. Then he marched to the
door and inside. As the door shut, the slab of light which
had fallen onto the gravel and across the lawn to the trees
beyond was gone. There was nothing but blackness.