He was older than I was, and in a different House, but I had often seen him at the Art School on Saturday evenings.
He had a large rent in his shirt and I could see his bare shoulder through it. He stopped when he saw me and said, “Is anything sticking in my shoulder, Welch? It hurts like hell.”
I jumped off the stile and went up to him. He was as big as a man and I suddenly felt very puny. He turned his back to me and pulled the shirt off his shoulder. There was a long, red scratch on the white flesh. Beads of blood were dropping from it, so I wiped it with my handkerchief and then tried to look into it.
I found two broken-off thorn heads and gradually worked them out. I held on to his other shoulder and he bent down so that I could reach. He was still trembling from running and his breath came in gasps.
“There, I’ve got them out!” I said at last.
He swung round quickly and pressed hard against me, rubbing his cheek against mine. I could feel how warm and moist his body was, and the touch of his eyelashes was like feathers. He spoke harshly and yearningly and shut his eyes.
I was suddenly alarmed and made a movement away from him, but he grasped me tightly and dug his fingers into my flesh until I gave a short gasp of pain. When he heard it he dropped his hands to his sides and laughed softly.
“Was I suffocating you?” he asked. Then he hitched up his shorts and ran on.
The glory of our beagling was that we never caught a hare. We just ran on and on. No sport could be more harmless.
In the steaming changing-room afterwards I felt happy about life. The room was full of the nice smell of bodies, and gay shouts rang out. I sank down into the hot bath which twenty other people had already used. The thick, muddy water stroked my flesh.
When we were told that a band of negroes was coming to sing to us, we all laughed and wondered if the music would be hot swing. Piers Hall seemed such a strange place for negroes. It had a pine hammer-beam roof and enormous windows filled with stained-glass pictures of school worthies and their coats of arms. The only lovely thing was a seventeenth-century Flemish tapestry hung high up in the organ loft, well out of sight.
Geoffrey and I, like all the rest, waited impatiently for the singers to file on to the stage.
Then the lovely music began. The light was concentrated on the black faces so that the songs seemed to come from a lighted cave. The words floated over the lumpy field of heads.
“Little David, play your harp. Hallelujah, Hallelujah.”
“I went to the rocks to hide my face, but the rocks they said, ‘No hiding place, no hiding place down here’.”
“Who’s that a-calling. Who’s that calling so sweet?” I knew that in future I would not have only Schubert from Geoffrey. He was listening with a furious look of concentration on his face, and as we walked back to the House afterwards he kept prodding me with his umbrella, telling me to listen to him.
One cold morning, the whole School stood on the field where the monks had once had their tile kiln. We were waiting to be marched off in companies to Willington. We were going to have a Field Day. I looked to see what my rations were. I found an apple, a pork pie and a bar of chocolate.
The shouted commands rang out excitingly in the clear, biting air and I felt suddenly thrilled, as if our pretence at soldiering were serious and heroic.
There was nothing serious about our railway journey. Some people expressed themselves by ordering coffee, with two lumps of sugar wrapped in paper, just as if they were independent citizens and not schoolboys; but others seemed to want more scope.
One unfortunate in my carriage had his trousers taken off and chewing-gum rubbed in his pubic hair. He screamed a lot but I think he really enjoyed the publicity.
I sat very still in my corner, drinking my coffee and hoping that nothing like this would happen to me.
I was supposed to be a Lewis gun.
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