The World as I Found It (32 page)

In every school there were dozens of written and unwritten shibboleths governing dress and deportment: the proper vocabulary to use, where and precisely how one was to walk in the hall and how one was to defer to prefects and the various “bloods,” those school heroes and Adonises who were adored by boys and masters alike. In this two-tiered jail system of master and boy justice, at least the masters were bound by civil code. The boy justice was worse, far worse, and soon Wittgenstein saw why, beneath it all, his bantam friend was so tough and unyielding.

Pinsent was funny and bitter describing these experiences, of which he was perversely proud, like one who has survived a war. He could tell about Cramburne, a school heavy on Latin, where he was caught writing satires and was compelled to conjugate in the pluperfect subjunctive while Mr. Caedmon spiritedly flogged him. Or about a master there who supervised rugger and combed his curly side whiskers like laurels over his temples.
Lupus Dementia
, the boys called him for the way he would foam at the mouth at football matches, shouting,
Piger stulte! Dele plumbum, Higgins! Jugula! Jugula!
rallying his toughs like Caesar to his cohorts, as in the mud they battled the pugnacious Gauls of Chigwell, Brighton and Leatherhead.

Once Pinsent got over his initial reluctance to speak of his life, he could laugh himself sick over these stories, telling them half to see Wittgenstein's horrified expression. Less funny was the part about how Pinsent had been born with a twin a month premature; and how his brother Alfred died of the croup at three, while he himself nearly died of the fever that took his hearing in one ear. With Alfred's death, his mother, always flighty and depressed, went to pieces. This was her first stint in the “loony bin,” as Pinsent called it. His father, who sold machine tools and traveled, wasn't much for caring for children, and anyway, Pinsent said, he wasn't much around. The boy was sickly pale and a picky eater. So while his mother was wheeled about in a bath chair, heavily sedated, he was left in the care of an old nurse who craw fed him like a goose, screamed in his deaf ear for being ill attentive and bound his left hand when he favored it, calling it “the devil's hand.”

Still a lefty, Pinsent said, gamely holding up his hand.

Things didn't get much better. When his mother returned from the sanitarium, she found the boy partially deaf and stuttering, though somehow along the way he had taught himself to read and do long sums in his head. Sent to a day school that next autumn, the boy was teased for his speech, which worsened, and also for his peculiar way of running. This proved another affliction: as a very young child, imitating a rider on a horse, Pinsent had learned to run by rhythmically patting himself on the rump,
ti-tump, ti-tump
, a habit for which he was called “Bumbeater,” “Switch,” and “Nickers.”

Still, the school was not bad. Things really might have been all right had not his father died of a brain hemorrhage a few years later. This loss paralyzed his mother, who suffered her third, and worst, breakdown. So, after dumping her in the asylum, the relatives collected some money and finally packed the little rotter off to Bondock, a third-rate public school rabid on football.

It was my uncle's idea, said Pinsent. Guess he thought Bondock would toughen the little sissy up. Teach him to run proper, you know.

And your mother? Wittgenstein asked. For you, she could do nothing?

Her?
Pinsent jerked his thumb. She couldn't even dress herself.

The boy had always hated athletics. Worse, he arrived in the middle of term, a hopeless time for the newcomer, when all alliances have been forged and an inviolable pecking order established. Pinsent clutched his stomach even as he described it: the sickening smell of the greasy food, and for pudding always that boarding school standby, the cursed
Spotted Dick
. Worse were the dripping, gutterlike stalls of the lavatory, where pecker holes had been gouged by countless pent-up penknives.

Pinsent best remembered the first day, when, dressed in his enormous blue blazer emblazoned with Bondock's golden crest, he was introduced to the schemers, dolts and bullies who were to be his new mates. They showed him good cheer, all right. No sooner did the master leave than a sneering inquisition began. Trapped under a circle of faces, the boy was asked a riddle that he naturally muffed — his first offense.

Oh-oh, said the smirking faces as a plate was passed forward. Hungry, was he?
Ooops!
Chucky pudding dribbled down his front. Then came a helpful hand, smearing it the length of his blazer.

Filthy scob!
shrieked a towering senior boy with cracked teeth, the leader. Soiling the school colors! You'll be firked for this!

So saying, he jacked the boy's tie past his throat, watching his bulging eyes glaze over before he cut it off — a Bondock tradition that ended with whistling jeers, fists on the back and the unanimous decision that he should fag for four and pass along all desserts and home parcels or else be beaten senseless.

The boy couldn't run or talk properly, knew nothing of fisticuffs; but they wouldn't beat him, he promised himself that. Brought down to the playing field in his new cleats and jersey later that afternoon, he could see the lads waiting for him, furiously rubbing dirt and spit into their palms. He remembered standing there, feeling incredibly stupid and inert as a ball struck him hard in the ribs, a glancing blow that spun him sideways. The boy clutched his ribs but did not cry. Regaining his balance, he stood for a moment, watching the grinning, sniggering boys. And then at that moment, at age eleven, he made a decision that would dictate his entire life. He lay down in the cold mud and stared at the sky.

'Ey, scob! they screamed at the boy who would not play. Ge' up before yer get a foot in the face. 'Ey, scobber!

It was amazing. For a moment, they didn't know what to do. There was name calling and threats, then a kick in the back that finally flushed tears. Still he didn't move. They stood him up, but when they took their hands away he fell in a heap. They threw him in the mud, dragged him by the hair; and then, with retching coughs of disgust, the spitting started, warm gobbers drooling down his face and muddy glasses. The boy felt the worst was behind him by then. Beyond terror, he realized that he had wet himself and wondered if his aunt had packed extra drawers. Also, there was God — he still believed in God — and as the jeering circle closed, he started to pray, thinking that soon it would all be over.

Had not the coach seen the pack closing and heard their blood chant, the Bondockers might have done the lad serious harm. But all this stopped with a groan like bagpipes as the football master punched his blood-red upside-down head through that bower of teeth and taunts.

Up! he barked. Up right now!

To the recumbent boy it seemed most strange that this enraged and powerful man did not simply haul him up by the arm. But no: the coach believed in rules; he wanted the boy to rise by his own volition. In a curious way the boy wanted to comply, but in him there was a stronger side, which clamped its jaws on his mind like a bulldog on a windpipe, choking off this impulse to survive at sufferance of another's will.
They'll not make me
. That was more or less what he remembered hearing, this accompanied by a distinct sensation of choking, as if by smothering himself he might destroy them as well.

And they were losing. As the football master began his second ten-count, the boy triumphantly saw it was not he but
they
who were powerless. It was an eleven-year-old's revelation.
They did not know what to do
.

That afternoon, after being hauled by his muddy hair before the headmaster; after being ordered, then compelled, to grasp his ankles while the sap-laden whip softened his will; after being told that no boy had ever,
ever
done what he had, which was comparable to a king's soldier deserting the field under fire; and after being assured by the headmaster that he would not disgrace his family or Bondock, and that he would, make no mistake about it,
play
— after all this, the boy was shut in the headmaster's library for his own safety, with a vow that early the next morning he would have one last chance to redeem his sullied honor.

This threat the headmaster did carry out. The next morning, after further warnings and before what seemed the entire school, the boy lay down again. This time there was not a sound, just the keening November wind and the feeling that he was present at his own funeral. Of that day, Pinsent especially remembered the silent, shamed expressions of the boys and how the headmaster then turned to the football master and muttered, This will not do.

The boy got his way. Two days later, he was packed back to his uncle, who sent him to another school, where he didn't fare much better. And so came the pattern: the obstinate nose-thumbing at authority, and later the contempt even for God, finding himself in and out of the soup the way his mother was the loony bin. They were poor. Worse, they were beholden to relatives, to the church and the various charities. Since the boy had no pater and no reverence, it was his job to be brilliant. Thus he learned mathematics, taking prizes and scholarships in that and classics, and always making a point of being more brilliant than he was difficult. This pattern lasted until age fourteen, when he landed at Glengalerry, the first school loose enough to suit him and wise enough to basically leave him go his own way.

Wittgenstein lacked such wisdom. Overtly or covertly, Pinsent felt the same doughty need to fight Wittgenstein. For the boy who would not play, the circumstances had changed, but not the fundamental conditions of his life. For Pinsent, the question was how long he could hold his breath — suspend his life — while remaining submerged beneath another's will.

No, Pinsent was no pushover. He fought Wittgenstein, but even here he felt himself fall short. Still, as Pinsent noted, he wasn't the only one:

Between Pinsent and Wittgenstein, more personal conflicts were also beginning to emerge, and Pinsent kept a steady record of these, too.