The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More Read online

  "Go away and brush your hair properly. And don't let it happen again or you'll be sorry."

  "Let me see your hands. You have ink on them. Why didn't you wash it off last night?"

  "Your tie is crooked, boy. Fall out and tie it again. And do it properly this time."

  "I can see mud on that shoe. Didn't I have to talk to you about that last week? Come and see me in my study after breakfast."

  And so it went on, the ghastly early-morning inspection. And by the end of it all, when the headmaster had gone away and Mr Pople started marching us into the dining-room by forms, many of us had lost our appetites for the lumpy porridge that was to come.

  I have still got all my school reports from those days more than fifty years ago, and I've gone through them one by one, trying to discover a hint of promise for a future fiction writer. The subject to look at was obviously English Composition. But all my prep-school reports under this heading were flat and non-committal, excepting one. The one that took my eye was dated Christmas Term, 1928. I was then twelve, and my English teacher was Mr Victor Corrado. I remember him vividly, a tall, handsome athlete with black wavy hair and a Roman nose (who one night later on eloped with the matron, Miss Davis, and we never saw either of them again). Anyway, it so happened that Mr Corrado took us in boxing as well as in English Composition, and in this particular report it said under English, "See his report on boxing. Precisely the same remarks apply." So we look under Boxing, and there it says, "Too slow and ponderous. His punches are not well-timed and are easily seen coming."

  But just once a week at this school, every Saturday morning, every beautiful and blessed Saturday morning, all the shivering horrors would disappear and for two glorious hours I would experience something that came very close to ecstasy.

  Unfortunately, this did not happen until one was ten years old. But no matter. Let me try to tell you what it was.

  At exactly ten-thirty on Saturday mornings, Mr Pople's infernal bell would go clangetty-clang-clang. This was a signal for the following to take place:

  First, all boys of nine and under (about seventy all told) would proceed at once to the large outdoor asphalt playground behind the main building. Standing on the playground with legs apart and arms folded across her mountainous bosom was Miss Davis, the matron. If it was raining, the boys were expected to arrive in raincoats. If snowing or blowing a blizzard, then it was coats and scarves. And school caps, of course -- grey with a red badge on the front -- had always to be worn. But no Act of God, neither tornado nor hurricane nor volcanic eruption was ever allowed to stop those ghastly two-hour Saturday morning walks that the seven-, eight-and nine-year-old little boys had to take along the windy esplanades of Weston-super-Mare on Saturday mornings. They walked in crocodile formation, two by two, with Miss Davis striding alongside in tweed skirt and woollen stockings and a felt hat that must surely have been nibbled by rats.

  The other thing that happened when Mr Pople's bell rang out on Saturday mornings was that the rest of the boys, all those of ten and over (about one hundred all told) would go immediately to the main Assembly Hall and sit down. A junior master called S. K. Jopp would then poke his head around the door and shout at us with such ferocity that specks of spit would fly from his mouth like bullets and splash against the window panes across the room. "All right!" he shouted. "No talking! No moving! Eyes front and hands on desks!" Then out he would pop again.

  We sat still and waited. We were waiting for the lovely time we knew would be coming soon. Outside in the driveway we heard the motor-cars being started up. All were ancient. All had to be cranked by hand. (The year, don't forget, was around 1927/28.) This was a Saturday morning ritual. There were five cars in all, and into them would pile the entire staff of fourteen masters, including not only the headmaster himself but also the purple-faced Mr Pople. Then off they would roar in a cloud of blue smoke and come to rest outside a pub called, if I remember rightly, "The Bewhiskered Earl". There they would remain until just before lunch, drinking pint after pint of strong brown ale. And two and a half hours later, at one o'clock, we would watch them coming back, walking very carefully into the dining-room for lunch, holding on to things as they went.

  So much for the masters. But what of us, the great mass of ten-, eleven-and twelve-year-olds left sitting in the Assembly Hall in a school that was suddenly without a single adult in the entire place? We knew, of course, exactly what was going to happen next. Within a minute of the departure of the masters, we would hear the front door opening, and footsteps outside, and then, with a flurry of loose clothes and jangling bracelets and flying hair, a woman would burst into the room shouting, "Hello, everybody! Cheer up! This isn't a burial service!" or words to that effect. And this was Mrs O'Connor.

  Blessed beautiful Mrs O'Connor with her whacky clothes and her grey hair flying in all directions. She was about fifty years old, with a horsey face and long yellow teeth, but to us she was beautiful. She was not on the staff. She was hired from somewhere in the town to come up on Saturday mornings and be a sort of babysitter, to keep us quiet for two and a half hours while the masters went off boozing at the pub.

  But Mrs O'Connor was no babysitter. She was nothing less than a great and gifted teacher, a scholar and a lover of English Literature. Each of us was with her every Saturday morning for three years (from the age of ten until we left the school) and during that time we spanned the entire history of English Literature from A.D. 597 to the early nineteenth century.

  Newcomers to the class were given for keeps a slim blue book called simply The Chronological Table, and it contained only six pages. Those six pages were filled with a very long list in chronological order of all the great and not so great landmarks in English Literature, together with their dates. Exactly one hundred of these were chosen by Mrs O'Connor and we marked them in our books and learned them by heart. Here are a few that I still remember:

  A.D. 597 St Augustine lands in Thanet and brings Christianity to Britain

  731 Bede's Ecclesiastical History

  1215 Signing of the Magna Carta

  1399 Langland's Vision of Piers Plowman

  1476 Caxton sets up first printing press at Westminster

  1478 Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

  1485 Malory's Morte d'Arthur

  1590 Spenser's Faerie Queene

  1623 First Folio of Shakespeare

  1667 Milton's Paradise Lost

  1668 Dryden's Essays

  1678 Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress

  1711 Addison's Spectator

  1719 Defoe's Robinson Crusoe

  1726 Swift's Gulliver's Travels

  1733 Pope's Essay on Man

  1755 Johnson's Dictionary

  1791 Boswell 's Life of Johnson

  1833 Carlyle's Sartor Resartus

  1859 Darwin's Origin of Species

  Mrs O'Connor would then take each item in turn and spend one entire Saturday morning of two and a half hours talking to us about it. Thus, at the end of three years, with approximately thirty-six Saturdays in each school year, she would have covered the one hundred items.

  And what marvellous exciting fun it was! She had the great teacher's knack of making everything she spoke about come alive to us in that room. In two and a half hours, we grew to love Langland and his Piers Plowman. The next Saturday, it was Chaucer, and we loved him, too. Even rather difficult fellows like Milton and Dryden and Pope all became thrilling when Mrs O'Connor told us about their lives and read parts of their work to us aloud. And the result of all this, for me at any rate, was that by the age of thirteen I had become intensely aware of the vast heritage of literature that had been built up in England over the centuries. I also became an avid and insatiable reader of good writing.

  Dear lovely Mrs O'Connor! Perhaps it was worth going to that awful school simply to experience the joy of her Saturday mornings.

  At thirteen I left prep school and was sent, again as a boarder, to one of our famous British public schools. They are not, of co