12 Thursday and school

This is a story about the narrator's walk to school with his father. They talk about various topics, including nature and animals. The narrator's father is knowledgeable about the natural world and teaches the narrator about different plants and animals they encounter on their walks. The narrator also shares that their school has different teachers for different age groups and describes some of the teachers' personalities. The narrator mentions a secret poaching expedition and reveals that they know something about their headmaster, Mr. Snoddy, and his supposed glass of water. Chapter twelve, Thursday in school. The next day was Thursday, and before we set out for the walk to my school that morning, I went around behind the caravan and picked two apples from our tree, one for my father and one for me. It is the most marvellous thing to be able to go out and help yourself to your own apples in the autumn, of course, when the fruit is ripe, but all the same, how many families are so lucky? Not one in a thousand, I would guess. Our apples were called Cox's Orange Pippins, and I liked the sound of the name almost as much as I liked the apples. At eight o'clock we started walking down the road towards the school in the pale autumn sunshine, munching on our apples as we strayed along. Clink went my father's iron foot each time he put it down on the hard road. Clink, clink, clink. Have you brought money to buy the ravens, I asked. He put his hand into his chowder pocket and made the coins jingle. Will keepers be open so early? Yes, Danny, he said, they're open at eight-thirty. I really loved those morning walks to school with my father. We practically talked the whole time. Mostly it was he who talked and I who listened, but just about everything he said was fascinating. He was a true countryman. The fields, the streams, the woods, and all the creatures who lived in these places were a part of his life. Although he was a mechanic by trade, and a very fine one, I believe he could have become a great naturalist if only he had been good at schooling. Long ago he had taught me the names of all the trees and the wildflowers and the different grasses that grew in the fields. All the birds too I could name, not only by sighting them, but by hearing their calls and their songs. In springtime we would hunt for birds' nests along the way, and when we found one he would lift me up onto his shoulders so I could peer into it and see the eggs, but I was never allowed to touch them. My father told me a nest with eggs in it was one of the most beautiful things in the world, and I thought so too. The nest of a song thrush, for instance, lined inside with dry mud as smooth as polished wood, and with five eggs of the purest blue speckles, with black dots, and a skylark whose nest we once found right in the middle of the field, in a grassy clump on the ground. It was hardly a nest at all, just a little hollow place in the grass, and in it were six small eggs, deep brown and white. So why does the skylark make its nest on the ground where the cows can trample it? I asked. Nobody knows why, my father said, but they always do it. Nightingales nest on the ground too, so do pheasants and partridges and geese. One of our walks a weasel flashed out of the hedge in front of us, and in the next few minutes I heard a lot of things about that marvellous little creature. The bit I liked best was when my father said, that weasel is the bravest of all animals. The mother will fight to the death to defend her own children. She will never run away, not even from a fox, which is one hundred times bigger than her. She will stay beside her nest, and fight the fox until she is killed. Another time when I said, just listen to that grasshopper dad. No, that's not a grasshopper, my love, it's a cricket, and do you know that crickets have their ears and their legs? It's not true. It's absolutely true, and grasshoppers have ears in the sides of their tummies. They are lucky to be able to hear at all, because nearly all the vast hordes of insects on this earth are deaf as well as dumb, and live in a silent world. On this Thursday, on this particular walk to school, there was an old frog croaking in the stream behind the hedges we went by. Can you hear him, Danny? Yes, I said. That's a bullfrog calling to his wife. He does it by blowing out his julep, and letting it go with a burp. What's a julep? I asked. It's the loose skin on his throat. He can blow it up just like a little balloon. So what happens when his wife hears him? She goes hopping over to him. She is very happy to have been invited, but I'll tell you something very funny about the old bullfrog. He often becomes so pleased with the sound of his own voice, that his wife has to nudge him several times before he'll stop his burping and turn around to hug her. That made me laugh. Don't laugh too loud, he said, twinkling at me with his eyes. We men are not so very different from the bullfrog. We parted at the school gates, and my father went off to buy the raisins. Other children were streaming in through the gates, and heading up the path to the front door of the school. I joined them, but I kept silent. I was the keeper of a deep secret, and a careless word from me could blow the lid off on the greatest poaching expedition the world will ever see. Ours was just a small village school, a squat ugly red brick building with no upstairs rooms at all, and above the front door was a big grey block of stone cemented into the brickwork. And on the stone it said, this school was erected in 1902 to commemorate the coronation of His Royal Highness King Edward VII. I must have read that thing a thousand times, and every time I went in the door it hit me in the eye. I suppose that's what it's there for, but it's pretty boring to read the same old words over and over again, and I often thought how nice it would be if they put something up there different every day. Something really interesting. My father would have done it for them beautifully. He could have written it with a bit of chalk on a smooth grey stone, and each morning it would be something new along the lines of, did you know that the little yellow clover butterfly often carries his wife around on his back? Another time he might have written, the guppy has funny habits when he falls in love with another guppy, he bites her on the bottom. And another time, did you know that the death's head moth can squeak? And then again, birds have almost no sense of smell, but they have good eyesight and they love red colours. The flowers they like are red and yellow, but never blue. And perhaps some other time he would get out his chalk and write, some bees have tongues which they can unroll until they are nearly twice as long as the bee itself. This is to allow them to gather nectar from flowers that have very long, narrow openings. Or he might have written, I'll bet you didn't know that in some big English country houses the butler still has to iron the morning newspaper before putting it on his master's breakfast table. There were about 60 boys and girls in our school, and their ages went from 5 to 11. We had four classrooms and four teachers. Mrs Birdseye caught the kindergarten at the five-year-olds and six-year-olds, and she was really nice. She used to keep a bag of aniseed balls in the drawer of her desk, and anyone who did good work would be given one aniseed ball to suck right there and then during the lesson. The trick with aniseed balls is never to bite them. If you keep rolling them around your mouth, you will slowly dissolve on their own accord, and then right in the very centre you will find a tiny little brown seed. This is the seed itself, and when you crush it between your teeth, it has a fabulous taste. My father told me that dogs go crazy about it. When there aren't any foxes around, the huntsman will drag a bag of aniseed for miles and miles over the countryside, and the foxhounds will follow the scent because they love it so. This is known as a drag hunt. The seven and eight-year-olds were taught by Mr Colorado, and he was also a decent person. He was a very old teacher, probably sixty or more, but that didn't seem to stop him being in love with Mrs Birdseye. We knew he was in love with her because he always gave her the best bits of meat at lunch when it was his turn to do the serving, and when she smiled at him, he would smile back at her in the soppiest way he could imagine, showing all his front teeth, top and bottom, and most of the others as well. A teacher called Captain Lancaster took the nine and ten-year-olds, and this year, that included me. Captain Lancaster, sometimes known as Lancers, was a horrid man. He had a fiery carrot-coloured hair, and a little clipped carrot-y moustache, and a fiery temper. Carrot-y coloured hairs were also sprouting out of his nostrils, and both his ears. He had been a captain in the army during the war against Hitler, and that was why he still called himself Captain Lancaster, instead of just plain Mr. My father said it was idiotic to do that. There were millions of people still alive, he said, who had fought in that war, but most of them wanted to forget the whole beastly thing, because those company military titles were especially something people wanted to forget. Captain Lancaster was a violent man, and we were all terrified of him. He used to sit at his desk, stroking his carrot-y moustache, and watching us with pale watery blue eyes, searching for trouble. And as he sat there, he would make queer sniffling grunts through his nose, like some dog sniffling around a rabbit hole. Mr. Snoddy, our headmaster, took the top form. The eleven-year-olds and everybody liked him. He was a small round man with a huge scarlet nose. I felt sorry for him, having a nose like that. It was so big and inflamed, it looked as though it might explode at any moment, and blow him up. A funny thing about Mr. Snoddy, though, was that he always brought a glass of water with him to class, and this he kept separating right through the lesson. At least everyone thought it was a glass of water. Everyone that is, except me and my best friend Sidney Morgan. We knew differently, and this is how we found out. My father looked after Mr. Snoddy's car, and I always took his repair bills with me to school to save postage. One day during break, I went to Mr. Snoddy's study to give him a bill, and Sidney Morgan came along with me. He didn't come for just any special reason, we just happened to be together at the time. And as we went in, we saw Mr. Snoddy standing by his desk, refilling his famous glass of water from a bottle labelled Gordon's Gin. He jumped a mile when he saw us. You should have knocked, he said, sliding the bottle behind a pile of books. I'm sorry sir, I said, I brought my father's bill. Ah, he said, yes, very well. What do you want, Sidney? Nothing sir, Sidney Morgan said. Nothing at all. Off you go then, both of you, Mr. Snoddy said, keeping his hand on the bottle of the books, right along. Outside in the corridor, we made a pact that we wouldn't tell any of the other children about what we had seen. Mr. Snoddy had always been kind to us, and we wanted to repay him by keeping his deep dark secret to ourselves. The only person I told was my father, and when he heard it, he said, I don't blame him one bit. If I was unlucky enough to be married to Mrs. Snoddy, I would drink something a bit stronger than gin. Oh, you drink that? Poison, he said, she's a frightful woman. Why is she frightful, I asked. She's sort of a witch, he said, and to prove it, she has seven toes on each foot. How do you know that, I asked. Dr. Spencer told me, my father answered, and then to change the subject, he said, why don't you ever ask Sidney Morgan over here to play? Ever since I started going to school, my father had tried to encourage me to bring my friends back to the filling station for tea or supper, and every year about a week before my birthday, he would say, let's have a party this time, Danny. We can write out invitations and go into the village and buy chocolate eclairs and donuts and a huge birthday cake with candles on it. But I always said no to these suggestions, and I never invited any other children to come to my home after school or at the weekends. That wasn't because I didn't have good friends. I had lots of them, some of them were super friends, especially Sidney Morgan. Perhaps if I had lived in the same street as some of them, instead of way out in the country, things would have been different, but then again, perhaps they wouldn't. You see, the real reason I didn't want anyone to come back and play with me was because I had such a good time being alone with my father. By the way, something horrible happened on that Thursday morning after my father had left me at the school gate and gone off to buy the raisins. We were having our first lesson of the day with Captain Lancaster, and he had sent us a whole bunch of multiplication sums to work out in our exercise books. I was sitting next to Sidney Morgan in the back row, and we were both slogging away. Captain Lancaster sat up at his front desk, gazing suspiciously around the class with his watery blue eyes, and even from the back row, I could hear him snortling and snuffling through his nose like a dog outside a rabbit hole. Sidney Morgan covered his mouth with his hand and whispered very softly to me, What are eight nines? Seventy-two, I whispered back. Captain Lancaster's finger shot out like a bullet and pointed straight at my face. You, he shouted, stand up! Me, sir? Yes, you, you blithering little idiot! I stood up. You were talking, he barked. What were you saying? He was shouting at me as though I was a platoon of soldiers on the parade ground. Come on, boy, out with it! I stood still and said nothing. Are you refusing to answer me? he shouted. Please, sir, Sidney said, it was my fault. I asked him a question. Oh, you didn't, did you? Stand up! Sidney shot up beside me. What exactly did you ask him? Captain Lancaster said, speaking more quietly now and far more dangerously. I asked him, what are eight nines? Sidney said. And I suppose you answered him. Captain Lancaster said, pointing at me again. He never called any of us by our names. It was always you or boy or girl or something like that. Did you answer him or Daniel? Speak up, boy! Yes, sir, I did. So you were cheating, he said. Both of you were cheating. We kept silent. Cheating is a repulsive habit practiced by gaffer snipes and dandy preps, he said. From where I was standing, I could see the whole class sitting absolutely rigid, watching Captain Lancaster with nobody daring to move. You may be permitted to cheat and lie and swindle in your own homes, he went on, but I will not put up with it. At this point, a sort of blind fury took hold of me and I shouted back at him. I am not a cheat! There was a fearful silence in the room. Captain Lancaster raised his chin and fixed me with his watery eyes. You are not only a cheat, you are insolent, he said. You are very insolent, boys. Come up here, both of you. Come up here right now. As I stepped out from my desk and began walking up towards the front of the class, I knew exactly what was going to happen. I had seen it happen to others many times, to both boys and girls, but up until now, it had never happened to me. Each time I had seen it, it had made me feel quite sick. Captain Lancaster was standing up and crossing over to the tall bookcase that stood against the left-hand wall of the classroom, and he reached up to the topmost shelf of the bookcase and brought down the dreaded cane. It was white, this cane, as white as bone, and very long, very thin, with one end bent over into a hand-like walking stick. You first, he said, pointing at me with the cane. Hold out your hand! It was almost impossible to believe that this man was about to injure me physically and in cold blood. As I lifted my left-hand palm upwards and held it there, I looked at the palm itself and the pink skin and the fortune-teller's lines running over it, and I still could not bring myself to imagine that anything was going to happen next. The long white cane went high up in the air and came down on my hand with a crack, like a rifle going off. I heard the crack first, and almost two seconds later, felt the pain. Never had I felt a pain such as that in my whole life. It was as though someone were pressing a red-hot poker against my palm and holding it there. I remember grabbing my injured left hand with my right hand and ramming it between my legs and squeezing my legs together against it. I squeezed and I squeezed as hard as I could, as if I were trying to stop the hand from falling to pieces. I managed not to cry out loud, but I couldn't keep the tears from pouring down my cheeks. From somewhere nearby, I heard another fearful CRASH, and I knew that poor Sidney had just got it as well. But oh, that fearful, searing, burning pain across my hand. Why didn't it go away? I glanced at Sidney. He was doing just the same as me, squeezing his hand between his legs and making the most awful face. Go and sit down, the both of you, Captain Lancaster ordered, and we stumbled back to our desks and sat down. Now, get on with the work, the jittered voice said, and let us have no more cheating, no more incidents either. The class bent their heads over their books like people in church saying prayers, and I looked at my hand. There was a long, ugly mark about half an inch wide running right across the palm, just where the fingers joined the hand. It was raised up in the middle, and the raised part was pure white with red on both sides, and I moved my fingers. They moved alright, but it hurt. I looked at Sidney. He gave me a quick apologetic glance under his eyelids, and then went back to his sums. When I got home from school that afternoon, my father was in the workshop. I brought the raisins, he said. We will now put them in to soak. Fetch me a bottle of water, Danny. I went over to the caravan and got a bowl, and I half filled it with water. I carried it to the workshop and put it on a bench. Open up the packets and tip them all in, my father said. This was one of the really nice things about my father. He didn't take over and wanted to do everything himself. Whether it was a difficult job like adjusting a carburetor in a big engine, whether it was simply tipping some raisins into a basin, he always let me go ahead and do it myself while he watched and stood ready to help. He was watching me now as I opened the first packet of raisins. Hey, he cried, grabbing my left wrist. What's happened to your hand? It's nothing, I said, clenching the fist. He made me open it up. The long scarlet mark lay across my palm like a burn. Who did it? He shouted. Was it Captain Lancaster? Yes, Dad, but it's nothing. What happened? He was gripping my wrist so hard it almost hurt. Tell me exactly what happened. I told him everything. He stood there holding my wrist, his face going whiter and whiter, and I could see the fury beginning to boil up dangerously inside him. I'll kill him, he softly whispered when I had finished. I swear I'll kill him. His eyes were blazing and all the colour had gone from his face. I had never seen my father look like that before. Forget it, Dad. I will not forget this, he said. You did nothing wrong and he had absolutely no right to do this to you. So he called you a cheat, did he? I nodded. He'd taken his jacket from the peg on the wall and he was putting it on. Where are you going? I asked. I'm going straight to Captain Lancaster's house and I'm going to beat the daylights out of him. No, I cried, holding his arm and begging him to stay. Don't do it, Dad, please. It won't do any good. Please don't do it. I've got to, he said. No, I cried, tugging at his arm. They're ruining everything. They'll only make it worse. Please forget it. He hesitated. I held onto his arm and he was silent. I could see the rush of anger slowly draining out of his face. It's revolting, he said. I'll bet they did it to you when you were at school, they said. Of course they did. And I'll bet your dad didn't go rushing off to beat out the daylights of the teacher who did it. He looked at me and kept quiet. He didn't, did he, Dad? No, Danny, he didn't, he answered softly. I let go of his arm and helped him off to get his jacket and hung it back on the peg. I'm going to put the raisins in now, I said. And don't forget that tomorrow I have a nasty cold and won't be going to school. Yes, he said. That's right. We've got 200 raisins to fill, I said. Ah, he said, so we have. I hope we'll get them done in time, I said. Does it still hurt, Danny? He asked. That hand. Ah, I said. Oh, I'm bet. I think that satisfied him. And although I saw him glancing occasionally at my palm during the rest of the afternoon and evening, he never mentioned the subject again. That night, he didn't tell me a story. He sat on the edge of my bunk and we talked about what was going to happen the next day up in Hazel's Wood. He got me so steamed up and excited about it, I couldn't even get to sleep. I think he must have got himself steamed up almost as much because after he had undressed and climbed into his own bunk, I heard him twisting and turning all over the place. He couldn't get to sleep either. At about 10.30, he climbed out of his bunk and put the kettle on. What's the matter, Jack? Nothing, he said. Shall we have a midnight feast? Yeah, let's do that. He lit the lamp in the ceiling and opened a tin of tuna and made a delicious sandwich for each of us. Also, hot chocolate for me and tea for him. Then we started talking about the pheasants and about Hazel's Wood all over again. It was pretty late before we got to sleep.