Читать книгу Never Surrender - Michael Dobbs - Страница 5

Ascot, 1883.

The boy was small, only eight, the youngest in the school. Red-haired, blue-eyed, round in face, and nervous. He had been at the school only a term and was not popular. One of the older pupils had written home that this new boy was ‘irksome’; the headmaster already found him intolerable. ‘A constant trouble to everybody and is always in some scrape or other,’ the headmaster wrote to his parents. ‘He cannot be trusted to behave himself anywhere.’

The boy didn’t fit in. And he was about to discover that failing to conform carried with it a heavy price, even for an eight-year-old.

St George’s School was a private educational establishment of four teachers and forty pupils, set in woodlands that had once been the ancient hunting forests of Windsor. It couldn’t claim much of a tradition since it was only six years old, so it sought to make up for that by charging outrageously high fees. It made the place instantly exclusive. Perhaps that was why the boy’s father, a man habitually committed to over-extending himself, had found the place so attractive. Anyway, it was time for his son to move on; up to that point he’d been educated by private tutors and seemed ill at ease amongst other boys – he’d developed both a nervous stammer and foul temper. But that, as his father had written to the headmaster, was what he had been sent to St George’s to cure.

He was almost a year younger than any of the others, but within days of his arrival, perhaps seeking the approval of the older boys, he had leapt onto a desk and begun to recite a bawdy song he’d learnt from some of his grandfather’s stable lads. Only his recent arrival saved him from a punishment harsher than being sent to bed without his supper.

Yet the boy carried with him his own sense of justice, and the following day he felt not only hungry but also poorly treated. After all, St George’s was one of the most expensive schools in the country: he felt sure his father hadn’t sent him here to starve. So, in order to balance the scales of elementary justice, he had sneaked into the basement kitchens and stolen a pocketful of sugar. Inevitably he’d left considerable evidence of his crime spilled upon the counter, so the kitchen staff had reported the loss to the headmaster, the Reverend Herbert William Sneyd-Kynnersley.

‘Mr K’, as he was known to the pupils, was tall, almost gangling, mutton-chopped and sandy-haired, a graduate of Cambridge with very distinctive ideas about education. To some he was a man of impeccable standards and something of a reformer, a schoolmaster who liked nothing more than to join in with his pupils while they swam naked in the pond or pursued him on a paper chase through woodlands they called the Wilderness. For others, however, he was nothing less than a ruthless brute, who punished pupils so savagely that he would not stop beating them until they bled. It was also remarked upon that, for some reason no one either could or wished to explain, Mr K seemed to pay particular attention to those with hair of a colour even more red than his own. His childless and overwrought wife had red hair, and pupils with similar colouring seemed to be summoned frequently to the headmaster’s study. The young boy had been dubbed ‘the red dwarf’ the day he arrived, and he seemed to spend more time in the study than most.

For Kynnersley, chivalry, posture and truthfulness were the highest virtues attributable to an English gentleman. The boy’s relationship to these virtues was, in Mr K’s opinion, ‘like a rainbow in the night’. His habits and language belonged more to the stable yard than the schoolyard, he disliked sports, was constantly late, had few friends and was rebellious with the teachers. There seemed no one in any part of the school who seemed capable of exerting a positive influence on him, with the possible exception, it was noticed, of the gardener. He was a child doomed to failure.

There was also the matter of the stolen sugar. When, at morning assembly, the miscreant was instructed to do his duty and to own up, the entire school had remained silent. But Kynnersley knew there would be tell-tale traces, and there were. In the boy’s pockets. Both of them. In such circumstances, the Reverend Kynnersley found his duty clear.

The boy stood in the entrance hall outside the headmaster’s study and considered what lay ahead. He knew of the punishments, had heard the cries of others even as he sat at his desk, had seen the welts at bedtime and knew of the desperate sobbing beneath the covers from boys much older than he. Now it was his turn.

He gazed at the clock, ticking so slowly, then up at the leering faces of the stuffed fox heads on the wall. He paced quietly in an attempt to compose himself, then fiddled with the ornate carvings of the mock Tudor fireplace, trying to find something for his fingers to do other than to tremble. On one side of the mantel stood the figure of a husband, on the other side stood his wife, separated by the fire. Just like home.

Suddenly the door to the study opened. Towering in it stood the headmaster. The boy wanted to run, every ounce of common sense screamed at him to flee. He strode forward.

The study was not large. It was dominated by two French windows that looked out onto the lawn and to the woodlands of the Wilderness beyond. Near the fireplace was a wooden block. It was upon this block that the Reverend Kynnersley had sat and toasted teacakes for Churchill’s mother when she had first brought him to this place. Neither of his parents had been back since.

On the back of the door hung a straw boater. It was a favourite item of the headmaster, one he wore throughout the summer and would raise in greeting to all visitors. Beneath the boater, hanging from the same hook, was a length of hazel cane. That, too, judging by the splayed end, had been raised with equal frequency.

The boy was ordered to take down his trousers and underwear, and to raise his shirt. He did as he was told. The Reverend Kynnersley, cane in hand, adjusted his gold-framed spectacles.

‘You’re a thief, and you will have your nasty little habits beaten out of you. Do you have anything to say?’

What was there to say? Sorry wouldn’t save him, and anyway he didn’t feel in the least sorry. Only scared. And thankful that they hadn’t noticed the apple he had stolen at the same time.

Kynnersley nodded towards the wooden block. The beating block. It was whispered about between the boys, and no one ever came back bragging. The boy shuffled forward, his trousers around his ankles, like a prisoner in chains.

Eight is such a tender age to deal with adversity, but perhaps lessons learned so young are those that endure. Certainly the Reverend Kynnersley thought so, which is why he persisted in trying to flog the qualities of an English gentleman into his pupils. Break them while they are young, the younger the better, and rebuild them in a better mould. It’s what had made an empire.

The boy’s thoughts didn’t reach so elevated a plane. He was putting all his concentration into controlling his bladder and denying the flood of tears that demanded to burst forth. He knew he would cry, and scream, as they all did, but not yet. Sunlight flooded in through the French windows and he struggled to look out at the woods beyond, trying to imagine himself romping through the Wilderness, a million miles from this block.

Suddenly, he thought he saw a shadow at the window, a silhouette that looked remarkably like his father. But it couldn’t be, his father had never come to the school, not once. He was always at a distance, somehow untouchable, elevated. The boy adored his father – no, worshipped him rather than adored, as one might worship a god. And feared him, too. Yet the greater the distance that stood between him and his father, the more eager he grew to bridge it. The less he knew about his father, the more the son invested him with almost heroic powers; the less he heard from his father, the more ferociously the young boy clung to his every word.

Never cry, never complain, his father had instructed, for they will only take advantage of your weakness.

So throughout that thrashing, he refused either to cry or to complain. The only sound to be heard was the swishing of the hazel branch, which fell with ever greater force as Kynnersley insisted that the boy submit. Again, and again. But the boy’s fear of Kynnersley was as nothing compared to the fear and adulation he felt for his own father, standing there in the doorway. And when the pain became extreme, unbearable, he cried out for his father, but only inside.

They had to get two of the older boys to help him back to his room.

‘You are a thief,’ Kynnersley shouted after him from the doorway of his study, struggling to smooth the creases in his self-control. ‘You’ll never come to any good. You hear me? Never!’

Once alone, Winston Churchill sobbed into his pillow until there were no more tears left to shed. In later years he would cry many times, but never in fear.

Some days later, Churchill slipped away from the swimming pond where Kynnersley and the other boys were cavorting. He ran quickly back to the school buildings, being careful not to leave any trace of wet footprints on the polished floor. He tried the door to the headmaster’s study, but it was locked, so he slipped out to the garden and rattled the French windows. They were also locked, but loose. A twig thrust between the doors enabled him to slip the catch.

It was the work of only moments to snatch the beloved straw boater from its place upon the door, and it became the pleasure of an endless afternoon, alone in the Wilderness, to kick it to a thousand pieces.