‘Ah, here’s Percy again,’ she said to the class every day when those with no sums right lined up for the strap. ‘He tries very hard. He’s very trying, is our Percy. It’s a fine old English name, Percy. So is Vere.’
She raised his hand a little higher, straightened his palm, and addressed him as she strapped him.
‘Well, Percy, you must Percy Vere. That’s all.’
And every day the boys and girls preparing for the eleven-plus examination laughed at the same joke and laughed at him. It was the girls’ laughter hurt him most. It fell from Heaven like the merriment of angels looking down on the antics of a clod-hopper who couldn’t get his big feet out of the mud. He grew sullen at Miss Elginbrod’s daily joke and one bright morning in May he challenged her. The room was stuffy in the early sun. Miss Elginbrod always kept the windows closed because she disliked draughts. His head was hot and he didn’t know what the sums were about. It was trains one minute and marbles the next, then it was rolls of cloth, then it was tons and quarts. One minute she was saying you add the speeds, then she was saying you subtract them. She kept on hopping about. You were just beginning to think you were bringing pounds to pennies when she made you bring pounds to ounces. She never gave you peace. So for the thousandth time he had only two sums finished out of the five, both wrong, and for the thousandth time she shrugged over him.
‘Well, Percy, you’ve just got to persevere, that’s all.’
He faced her, rather round-shouldered because of his height. Even then he was much taller than other boys of his age, and it made him look gawky.
‘Please, miss,’ he said, and then his nerve failed.
‘Yes?’ said Miss Elginbrod, looking at him with patronizing patience, swinging the strap in a practice smack. ‘Is there something you don’t understand?’
Her question gave him back his determination to oppose her.
‘I don’t understand why you call me Percy Vere. My name isn’t Percy Vere, it’s Percy Phinn.’
An earthquake unpredicted by the eight o’clock weather forecast shook the class. A cyclone of laughter lifted the roof and a tornado of girlish screams whipped the walls apart. He felt himself naked to the wind and weather when he had expected to stand there proud and respected in an awed silence. He was frightened. There was never a mockery like this, clawing at him on all sides and tearing him apart to eat him up.
For causing a disturbance in the class Miss Elginbrod gave him three hard ones with her strap, not the thin one she always had in her hand but the thick one she kept away at the back of her desk out of sight until she was really angry. And when she had done that she said he had been insolent, and gave him another three.
When he was reborn at sixteen he looked back on his past life and blamed Miss Elginbrod for his failure in the examination. She had discouraged him. She ought to have seen he was a case of late development like Sir Winston Churchill. She ought to have seen his true merit and given him love and understanding. She wasn’t fit to be a teacher. People like her would have failed to see Shelley’s gifts when he was a boy at school. She had never even told him he had the same name as Shelley. She just made a joke of it. That proved she was so ignorant she didn’t know Shelley’s first name. He had to find it out for himself after he had left school. The discovery excited him. He stopped hating his name. He became proud of it. It made him something of a poet too. He read up on Shelley. In a biographical dictionary in the public library he found a sentence that he copied out and learned off by heart. ‘Percy was a boy of much sensibility, quick imagination, generous heart, and a refined type of beauty, blue-eyed and golden-haired.’ He hadn’t only the same name as Shelley, he had the same colour of eyes and the same colour of hair – though his mother said his hair was ‘like straw hinging oot a midden’. But his mother had no sensibility, no quick imagination. It was a mystery where his had come from. And he was a rebel too, just like Shelley. It was for being a rebel that Miss Elginbrod had given him six with her Lochgelly strap. Well, he would remember her, and when he was famous as a poet or a producer or an authority on modern art she would be ashamed of herself. But to get fame he would have to get leisure, and to get leisure he would have to get money. It always came back to money.
‘If only!’ he dreamed while the choir exulted in the Gloria. ‘If only I had enough money to live without having to go out to work every day. If only I had a private income like Shelley and Wordsworth. I could get peace then I’d show them. If only I’d got a fair deal out of life I could play my cards better.’
CHAPTER THREE
While Percy Phinn was attending Bach’s Mass a search- party was out from the gang that bowed to him as patron, chairman, and final arbiter. They were frightened, and they wanted advice. Some of them laughed at Percy behind his back, some of them argued he was ‘dead clever’, but they all agreed he would never do them a dirty trick and they were all scared of him a little, especially when he fixed them with his big, sad eyes and lectured them on the good life. And now they needed help from somebody clever, somebody older, somebody they could trust. It could only be Percy. That was the unanimous decision, taken in full assembly in the cellar. But they couldn’t find him. He wasn’t in Johnny Hay’s billiards-room (billiards was the one game where he showed any talent), he wasn’t in the public library, he wasn’t in the house, he wasn’t at the corner watching the big girls go by, he wasn’t in the playground refereeing five-a-side football, he wasn’t at the swings pushing the kids higher and higher, he wasn’t anywhere. He had simply vanished. It showed how clever he was. They were baffled. They had never heard of the Bute Hall or Bach either. They were only ten or eleven years of age. Hughie Savage, the oldest of them, was not quite twelve. He couldn’t read very well, but he was shrewd and he could write out a three-cross double with no difficulty. He was far cleverer than his teachers ever suspected, and his line of humour was to put on a la-dee- da voice and speak in what he thought was an English accent. He had a big head on a bull neck and his ears stuck out like a couple of cabbages.
The scattered groups of the search-party returned by arrangement to the cellar at half past nine. When they were all present for the second time that evening Savage took the chair and reported Percy’s disappearance. The chair he sat on was a high-legged one with a broken back and a foot-rail. It was the chair Miss Elginbrod had sat on when Percy was in her class, but the back spars and the shoulder-rest came off one afternoon when she threw a cheeky boy across the room. He fell against it and knocked it over. When he got to his feet he kicked it apart in a fury while Miss Elginbrod whipped him round the legs with her strap. She sent it to the janitor for repair, and the janitor put it away in the cellar till he could find time to look at it. Death found him first, and the chair had lain there ever since, in the cellar below the school, the secret headquarters of the gang that Percy sponsored.
This was no picayune cellar. It was a sprawling low- roofed vault stretching below the main building and out under the playground, where it ended in an unexplored boundary of evil darkness. Not even Frank Garson had ever touched that far-off invisible wall, and when the Three High Clavigers of the Bethel Brotherhood ordered him to make a map of the cellar because Miss Elginbrod had praised his drawing and handwriting he left his sketch open at that side and along it he wrote in a scroll Here Be Rats. A door in the basement, at the end of an L-shaped line of wash-hand basins, opened to a dim and dangerous staircase that went steeply down to the bowels of the building, and that was commonly supposed to be the only door to the cellar. But because of the gradient on which the school was built there was another door to the cellar in Tulip Place, a blind alley round the corner from Bethel Street. It was a small, inconspicuous, dark-green door, hacked by many initials, and behind it was a chute. That was where the coal for the boilers had been delivered before the school changed over to electrical heating, and then the door was locked for good and forgotten.
Percy had a key to it from his father’s days as janitor. Three other keys were cut from his and given to the three oldest members of the Brotherhood. The cellar became their church, the scene of enrolment, expulsion, and initiation rites.