Innocence Read online

  ‘I hope they all go rotten,’ my mother said. ‘Now back that cart out of our way this instant!’ And to the children standing on the road she cried out, ‘Jump back into the car! We’re going to the doctor!’

  ‘There’s glass all over the seats!’ they shouted.

  ‘Never mind the glass!’ my mother said. ‘We’ve got to get this boy to the doctor fast!’

  The passengers crawled back into the car. The man with the horse and cart backed off to a safe distance. The ancient sister managed to straighten the vehicle and get it pointed in the right direction, and then at last the once magnificent automobile tottered down the highway and headed for Dr Dunbar’s surgery in Cathedral Road, Cardiff.

  ‘I’ve never driven in a city,’ the ancient and trembling sister announced.

  ‘You are about to do so,’ my mother said. ‘Keep going.’

  Proceeding at no more than four miles an hour all the way, we finally made it to Dr Dunbar’s house. I was hustled out of the car and in through the front door with my mother still holding the bloodstained handerchief firmly over my wobbling nose.

  ‘Good heavens!’ cried Dr Dunbar. ‘It’s been cut clean off!’

  ‘It hurts,’ I moaned.

  ‘He can’t go round without a nose for the rest of his life!’ the doctor said to my mother.

  ‘It looks as though he may have to,’ my mother said.

  ‘Nonsense!’ the doctor told her. ‘I shall sew it on again.’

  ‘Can you do that?’ My mother asked him.

  ‘I can try,’ he answered. ‘I shall tape it on tight for now and I’ll be up at your house with my assistant within the hour.’

  Huge strips of sticking-plaster were strapped across my face to hold the nose in position. Then I was led back into the car and we crawled the two miles home to Llandaff.

  About an hour later I found myself lying upon that same nursery table my ancient sister had occupied some months before for her appendix operation. Strong hands held me down while a mask stuffed with cotton-wool was clamped over my face. I saw a hand above me holding a bottle with white liquid in it and the liquid was being poured on to the cotton-wool inside the mask. Once again I smelled the sickly stench of chloroform and ether, and a voice was saying, ‘Breathe deeply. Take some nice deep breaths.’

  I fought fiercely to get off that table but my shoulders were pinned down by the full weight of a large man. The hand that was holding the bottle above my face kept tilting it farther and farther forward and the white liquid dripped and dripped on to the cotton-wool. Blood-red circles began to appear before my eyes and the circles started to spin round and round until they made a scarlet whirlpool with a deep black hole in the centre, and miles away in the distance a voice was saying, ‘That’s a good boy. We’re nearly there now … we’re nearly there … just close your eyes and go to sleep …’

  I woke up in my own bed with my anxious mother sitting beside me, holding my hand. ‘I didn’t think you were ever going to come round,’ she said. ‘You’ve been asleep for more than eight hours.’

  ‘Did Dr Dunbar sew my nose on again?’ I asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Will it stay on?’

  ‘He says it will. How do you feel, my darling?’

  ‘Sick,’ I said.

  After I had vomited into a small basin, I felt a little better.

  ‘Look under your pillow,’ my mother said, smiling.

  I turned and lifted a corner of my pillow, and underneath it, on the snow-white sheet, there lay a beautiful golden sovereign with the head of King George V on its uppermost side.

  ‘That’s for being brave,’ my mother said. ‘You did very well. I’m proud of you.’

  Captain Hardcastle

  We called them masters in those days, not teachers, and at St Peter’s the one I feared most of all, apart from the Headmaster, was Captain Hardcastle.

  This man was slim and wiry and he played football. On the football field he wore white running shorts and white gymshoes and short white socks. His legs were as hard and thin as ram’s legs and the skin around his calves was almost exactly the colour of mutton fat. The hair on his head was not ginger. It was a brilliant dark vermilion, like a ripe orange, and it was plastered back with immense quantities of brilliantine in the same fashion as the Headmaster’s. The parting in his hair was a white line straight down the middle of the scalp, so straight it could only have been made with a ruler. On either side of the parting you could see the comb tracks running back through the greasy orange hair like little tramlines.

  Captain Hardcastle sported a moustache that was the same colour as his hair, and oh what a moustache it was! A truly terrifying sight, a thick orange hedge that sprouted and flourished between his nose and his upper lip and ran clear across his face from the middle of one cheek to the middle of the other. But this was not one of those nail-brush moustaches, all short and clipped and bristly. Nor was it long and droopy in the walrus style. Instead, it was curled most splendidly upwards all the way along as though it had had a permanent wave put into it or possibly curling tongs heated in the mornings over a tiny flame of methylated spirits. The only other way he could have achieved this curling effect, we boys decided, was by prolonged upward brushing with a hard toothbrush in front of the looking-glass every morning.

  Behind the moustache there lived an inflamed and savage face with a deeply corrugated brow that indicated a very limited intelligence. ‘Life is a puzzlement,’ the corrugated brow seemed to be saying, ‘and the world is a dangerous place. All men are enemies and small boys are insects that will turn and bite you if you don’t get them first and squash them hard.’

  Captain Hardcastle was never still. His orange head twitched and jerked perpetually from side to side in the most alarming fashion, and each twitch was accompanied by a little grunt that came out of the nostrils. He had been a soldier in the army in the Great War and that, of course, was how he had received his title. But even small insects like us knew that ‘Captain’ was not a very exalted rank and only a man with little else to boast about would hang on to it in civilian life. It was bad enough to keep calling yourself ‘Major’ after it was all over, but ‘Captain’ was the bottoms.

  Rumour had it that the constant twitching and jerking and snorting was caused by something called shell-shock, but we were not quite sure what that was. We took it to mean that an explosive object had gone off very close to him with such an enormous bang that it had made him jump high in the air and he hadn’t stopped jumping since.

  For a reason that I could never properly understand, Captain Hardcastle had it in for me from my very first day at St Peter’s. Perhaps it was because he taught Latin and I was no good at it. Perhaps it was because already, at the age of nine, I was very nearly as tall as he was. Or even more likely, it was because I took an instant dislike to his giant orange moustache and he often caught me staring at it with what was probably a little sneer under the nose. I had only to pass within ten feet of him in the corridor and he would glare at me and shout, ‘Hold yourself straight, boy! Pull your shoulders back!’ or ‘Take those hands out of your pockets!’ or ‘What’s so funny, may I ask? What are you smirking at?’ or most insulting of all, ‘You, what’s-your-name, get on with your work!’ I knew, therefore, that it was only a matter of time before the gallant Captain nailed me good and proper.

  The crunch came during my second term when I was exactly nine and a half, and it happened during evening Prep. Every weekday evening, the whole school would sit for one hour in the Main Hall, between six and seven o’clock, to do Prep. The master on duty for the week would be in charge of Prep, which meant that he sat high up on a dais at the top end of the Hall and kept order. Some masters read a book while taking Prep and some corrected exercises, but not Captain Hardcastle. He would sit up there on the dais twitching and grunting and never once would he look down at his desk. His small milky-blue eyes would rove the Hall for the full sixty minutes, searching for trouble, and h