First Term Only

Peter Kendell

For Uncle Fred

‘What’s it about this time, this new book of yours? The usual murder and mayhem?’

‘Pretty much, yes. It’s another police procedural, actually.’

‘What; the prickly Inspector Gorse and his faithful sidekick Mull? Solving yet another donnish malefaction in Cambridge?’

‘That’s it. The readers like reading them; I like writing them. My publisher absolutely loves selling them!’

‘Quite so, Jack. It keeps you off the streets, at least.’

My friend Geoffrey Thurslow and I were enjoying our pipes and a companionable afternoon talk sitting on the bench under the big oak tree outside the Old Buildings. It was wonderfully peaceful that day, as all the boys had been packed onto buses first thing after Chapel to go and play soldiers up and down the Vale. Waving rifles (unloaded) at each other, building camp fires, that sort of thing. Some boys love the CCF – the Combined Cadet Force – some loathe it. Field Day really brings it out in them. I said as much to Geoffrey.

‘Yes, I’ve noticed that. What about that boy that you were so worried about – young Twiss?’

‘Oh, he’ll be fine.’

‘That’s a relief. We talked about him more than once last year, if I recall. I suppose that some of them just take longer to settle in than others. As a housemaster, you’d see more of that than me, of course.’

Yes, indeed. As a housemaster, my duties include the pastoral care of the boys. School House – my own responsibility – has fifty of them, ranging from great hulking young men of eighteen years to little boys, some scarcely weaned, of just thirteen.

It’s always a difficult time, introducing the new boys to School life at the start of the autumn term. They turn up at the gates two hours before the older pupils; anxious boys and even more anxious parents. Some hide their anxiety better than others, naturally. If the father is an Old Boy this can help, although some fathers so put the wind up their sons with their own reminiscences of school that the poor little chaps are half expecting to be caned for some minor offence before they even cross the threshold. I always choose the kindest and most sensible of my prefects to keep an eye on the new boys. A housemaster may well have eyes in the back of his head – he wouldn’t last five minutes if he didn’t – but boys pick things up that adults miss, like the onset of bullying, for example.

This term started off much like any other. Once I had got rid of the stiff-upper-lipped fathers and their tearful or frightfully-brave wives, I took all the new boys into my study and offered them tea and cakes. Muriel was there, too. Her presence helps reassure the more worried kind of boy.

I cast my eyes over the ten of them. They were a fairly typical bunch. Boys of thirteen vary widely in their maturity, both physical and mental. Wheeler, for example, five foot eight inches tall and bulky with it, came with a tremendous sports report from his prep school and would be playing in the under-fourteens very soon, I could see. He would settle in very easily. Parsons, lanky, bespectacled and abstracted, had won a scholarship and would doubtless be going up to Oxford in five years’ time. Hodgson, short, round and cheerful, would be the class clown. And so on. But Twiss…

‘Didn’t he have a teddy bear with him when he came?’

‘Yes. It’s unusual, but well within the rules.’

I should explain: When a boy is accepted for The Vale School, his parents are sent a long and expensive list of all the clothes and other things he is expected to bring with him on his first day. Shirts, shoes, collars, trousers, coats, suits, sports kit. And other things, like pens, pencils, geometry kit, prayer-book, trunk and tuck box. Most parents – the better-off ones, anyway – simply go to one of the big department stores and make a bulk order of everything. The others get what they can at Marks and Spencer.

At the very end of the list is this item:

One Teddy Bear (First Term Only)

Some of our new boys are very young for their age.

Twiss, I could see, was going to be a problem. Uniquely in my experience he had not only brought a teddy bear with him, he was carrying it, holding it by one paw. In front of all the other boys, too. I could imagine the things that would be said and done to him in the dormitory that night, and the way that spiteful rumours – for thirteen year old boys can be incredibly spiteful – would spread around the school. I resolved to have a special word with Hume, my new Head of House, about him. The prefects could at least do something to help him through what promised to be a difficult few weeks.

I gave the new boys the usual pep talk. ‘I’m Mr Jackson, and I’m the housemaster of School House; everyone calls me “Jack”, but not to my face. Play fair by me and I’ll play fair by you. My study door is always open; come to me, or Mrs Jackson, at any time if you have a problem or just need to talk about something that’s troubling you.’ As I say, the usual stuff. Then I handed them over to Muriel, and she took over all the unpacking and organising.

I briefed Hume and the other prefects over a glass of sherry that evening. They promised to do their best, but I wondered if that was going to be enough. And, as the first weeks of that autumn term passed, I could see that it was not going to be enough. My colleagues would have a quiet word with me in the staff-room; Twiss was not doing very well. Muriel would mention that his clothes and other things kept going missing. Whenever I saw him, he seemed to be on the verge of bursting into tears. We had persuaded him to leave his teddy bear – whose name was Mr Gruff, by the way – in the dormitory; although I half expected that he too would mysteriously disappear, the way Twiss’s collars, socks and sports kit did. But no. The bear, it appeared, was considered sacrosanct. Sometimes I entirely fail to understand boys, even though I was one myself, once upon a time.

One afternoon, two or three weeks into that autumn term, I was passing the first year dormitory when I heard voices. Now, there’s a strict rule that no boys are allowed in the dormitories, without special permission that is, between nine o’clock in the morning and nine in the evening, for all kinds of very sensible reasons. So I was just about to storm in and deal with the offenders when I stopped. I recognised one of the voices. It was Twiss’s. I resolved to deal kindly with him as he had probably been ragged by his fellows and had gone up to the dorm, despite the prohibition, for some respite.

Then I realised that something was a bit strange. One of the voices, as I said, belonged to Twiss, but I didn’t recognise the other. I was half-relieved that he had found a friend at last and half-annoyed that they had both broken a clear school rule. The peculiar thing was that I didn’t know the second voice. It didn’t sound like a boy’s voice at all – not a first-year’s at any rate. I listened for a moment.

‘It’s Stapledon, now.’ That was Twiss.

‘What’s he done?’ That was the other voice, deep and hoarse.

‘He took all my books and threw them round the Arts Quad. I lost my History essay and got given a detention.’

‘Do you want me to do something about it?’

‘I wish you would.’

That was enough. I flung open the dormitory door. There was Twiss – small and weedy, frightened as a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car on a country road – sitting on his bed, but where was the other boy? I looked around; the dormitory was empty. I was not going to look under the beds, naturally. I have my housemasterly dignity to maintain and sometimes it’s better not to let on about everything you suspect.

I sent him downstairs with no more than a reminder that rules were rules and were to be obeyed and then I looked around the dormitory again. Nobody else was there, I’m sure. Just ten iron-framed beds, five chests of drawers, a hanging cupboard. And Mr Gruff, of course, in his usual place on the pillow of Twiss’s bed.

It was a day or two later when I heard about what had happened to Stapledon, a rough but basically good-hearted chap in Rogers’s house. It seemed that he had been heard screaming in the night – a nightmare they supposed. But when the lights were turned on they revealed a trembling Stapledon shivering by the dormitory window. Down his left side were three long scratches. Whatever had made them had torn right through his pyjamas.

‘Sounds like a case for your Miss Dorpleston,’ Geoffrey said to me the following day. I had a look in Stapledon’s dormitory and found a nail sticking out of one of the cupboards – a nasty thing. The school carpenter fixed the cupboard, Sister patched up Stapledon and that was that.

But after that, more odd and unsettling things happened. Hume told me that he’d had a word with Hamley about teasing Twiss. Hamley was a fifth-former who was blessed with an infinite supply of sarcastic wit. Despite Hume’s warning he hadn’t stopped tormenting the boy and shortly afterwards had been found with deep cuts and abrasions, caused by a rake we supposed, in the gardener’s shed where he had gone for an illicit cigarette.

Then there was Mr Trevor, the third-form Classics master. I had never liked the man, and couldn’t understand why he had chosen teaching as a profession. He clearly hated children, particularly adolescent boys. I often wondered if he had had a terrible time at school himself and had taken up teaching so he could wreak his revenge on the boys – or substitutes for them – who had tortured him in his own schooldays.

I was not surprised to hear that he had reduced poor Twiss to tears several times in his Latin classes. No doubt the nervous boy had forgotten everything he had ever known about fourth declension nouns under Trevor’s remorseless stare.

And there seemed to be a kind of inevitability about it when I heard that Mr Trevor had lost control of his car while driving down the hill into Marlborough and had been taken into hospital with serious injuries.

The atmosphere in the school was starting to become strained. After what happened to Williams, who had been heard shouting at Twiss to ‘Come on, damn you’ during a cross-country run and shortly afterwards had been very badly scratched about the face – on barbed wire, we presumed, as the farmers had been wiring their hedges to keep out the dogs – and Lessiter’s horrible accident in the kitchens after he told Twiss to ‘eat up or he’d never grow into a man,’ I decided that I must take action.

I called Twiss into my study one evening during Prep, and asked him to bring Mr Gruff with him.

‘Now look here, Twiss,’ I said. ‘I know it’s not been easy for you these past few weeks. Lots of boys have a difficult first term, but everybody finds their niche in the end.’

‘Yes, sir,’ he replied.

‘This teddy bear of yours, Mr Gruff. Have you known each other long?’

‘All our lives, sir.’

‘You stick by each other, don’t you? You’re best friends.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘You’d do anything for each other, wouldn’t you?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘And yet it’s possible to go too far, you know. It’s completely the right thing to stand by your friends, but not if people get hurt. I’m sure you take my meaning.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Good. Then there’s someone I’d like you both to talk to, if you wouldn’t mind. You and Mr Gruff.’

‘Sir?’

‘I’m going to leave you all together now for half an hour or so. Just come and find me when you’re ready.’

‘As it turned out,’ I said to Geoffrey, ‘I could see that neither Hume nor I would be able to solve young Twiss’s problem for him.’

‘Who did you get to talk to him, then? A psychiatrist? Like your psychological detective, what’s-his-name?’

‘Sigmund Spofford, you mean?’

‘Yes, the chap in Dagger of the Mind.’

‘No – this was someone much more appropriate. I had Twiss and Mr Gruff talk to Lionel.’

‘Lionel? Lionel who?’

‘Lionel Bear. I’ve kept him in my study all these years. He was given to me when I was a baby and we’ve always gone everywhere together ever since.’

‘Let me get this straight. You left Twiss and Mr Gruff alone in your study to talk to your forty-five year old teddy bear?’

‘Yes. I don’t know what Lionel said to them, but he can be pretty stern at times. Much fiercer than me, Muriel always says.’

‘And that’s all you did?’

‘That’s all I had to do. And it worked; you’ve seen the results for yourself. No more nasty accidents around the school. Young Twiss is out there now, somewhere in the Vale, terrorising the locals with a Lee-Enfield rifle and having a whale of a time with his friends. Admit it; you never liked Trevor, either.’

‘Well, I’ll be…’ Geoffrey knocked his pipe out on the side of the bench. The summer sun, shining through the leaves of the oak tree, dappled the ground around our feet. It really was a most beautiful afternoon.