The Horatio Stubbs Trilogy

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Part of the Brian Aldiss Collection

The Hand-Reared Boy

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The sister arrived at school at the beginning of what proved to be my last year at Branwells, just when I had secured the position of hooker in the first fifteen. She attracted me from the start, perhaps because it so happened that she was returning to school from a shopping expedition by the same train on which I was reluctantly arriving, and she invited me to ride the two miles from the station to school with her in the school car (I had carried her bag to the car). If I was struck dumb on that ride, it was chiefly because she was registering on me.

I wanted to register on her. Playing in the first fifteen was the ideal way to do it – until I found that she never bothered to watch the game. This made her very unpopular with most of the school. We had a vote on it in the sixth, to which I had now ascended, and it was carried by a narrow margin that, since her gesture was more insulting to the headmaster than to the boys, she was okay. Nobody was rat enough to suggest that she might not be interested in rugger.

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