1724
School
My next real memory is a year later. What happened between leaving my parents’ house and joining St Luce was too predictable to make firm memories. The sun rose and the sun set and an old woman who lived in the school’s gatehouse fed me twice a day in between, once in the early morning and once before dusk, and in return I fed her chickens and took care of myself during the day. The meals were poorly cooked and monotonous but filling and frequent enough to keep me fed and my body growing. Tossed corn brought the cockerel and chickens running. The cockerel was old and vicious and soon for the pot. The hens were safe so long as they kept laying and I lied occasionally, saying I’d tripped and dropped this one’s egg or forgotten to put out the previous night’s food, which was why that one had not laid. Maybe the old woman even believed me.
When eggs were plentiful I took the occasional one and let the richness of its yolk run down my chin before wiping the yellow away with my hand and licking my fingers. Winter yolks tasted sourer than summer ones. Autumn yolks were rich with burnt earth and sunshine. Spring yolks tasted different again. They tasted of spring. Everything caught and killed or plucked from the ground or picked in spring tastes of spring. You can’t say that for the other seasons.
She called me her strange one, barely slapped me when she found me stealing food. What tastes the old woman’s cooking didn’t provide I found for myself. The crab apples growing up the side of the gatehouse were sour, the grubs that bored through them sourer still. The beetles in her yard were less sweet, the cheese in her shabby kitchen hard and waxy, without the imperial blue veins of roffort or its rottenly glorious smell. In my days at the St Luce gatehouse I tasted whatever I had not tasted before: cobwebs and earwigs (dusty, and spit), spiders (unripe apple), dung, the chickens’ and my own (bitter, and surprisingly tasteless). I ate new laid sparrow’s eggs and tadpoles from the brook. Their taste was less interesting than their texture. Both were slimy in different ways. The old woman helped look after the boys at St Luce and had the task of fielding me until I was old enough to go myself, which moment soon arrived.
There were men who liked small boys more than they should, she warned me. And boys could be cruel to boys in that way and others. I would have to stand up for myself. She could look out for me but I would have to be brave. There had been discussion about making me wait until I was seven. But almost seven was fine the headmaster said. I should call him sir. I should call everyone bigger than me sir, except the servants; they should call me sir. ‘You understand?’
She had wiped my face and washed my clothes and forced me to eat a bowl of porridge. It was only when I saw the bundle with my other clothes, a slightly smarter jacket, a different pair of breeches, that I realised this was my last morning feeding chickens. Tonight they would have to wait until she could feed them herself.
‘Courage,’ she said. ‘You’ll be fine.’
Her face wobbled as she looked at me and she paused as if she might kiss or hug me goodbye. She spoke well and knew her letters, but was poor enough to need to work and the gatehouse was small for all it was clean. And the food . . . Perhaps she didn’t care for food; the same dishes again and again, the same tastes. She looked at me and I looked at her and eventually I understood I was to walk to the school on my own.
Picking up my bundle, I headed down the drive and found it was further to the school than I’d thought. After a few minutes I turned to discover she was still standing in the gates at the top of the road, so I waved and she waved back and then I turned my face to the school and kept walking, with my bundle swinging at my side.
The wind was warm for early autumn and the track dry and the grass slightly yellowing. The cow parsley was bare, waiting to be made into whistles or blowpipes, both of which I’d discovered for myself. The chestnuts on both sides of the drive were rich with conkers and I took the largest I could see and polished its gleaming swirls before dropping it in my pocket. Another and another fat conker lay on the road in front of me and I took those as well, stuffing my pockets until they were bulging.
The boy who came towards me had his hand out. ‘Give,’ he demanded sharply.
Such was my greeting to a school where I knew no one; after a year in a gatehouse with a woman who was neither family, friend, servant nor mistress. I was to learn later that the drive was out of bounds and a dozen pupils had watched me approach, dressed in clothes that I didn’t know represented their school uniform, and wondered where I’d come from and how severely I’d be punished for going beyond the courtyard. For now there was the outstretched hand.
‘I’ll hit you.’
Silence, while I looked at him.
He was my species but the only boys I’d seen were at a distance. I played by myself from necessity, and sat alone when I couldn’t be bothered to play. The woman in the gatehouse hadn’t suggested I find friends and I’d felt no need of them. The idea I might want to share my conkers with him was absurd.
‘I warned you.’ Watched by his friends, he made good his promise and I rocked back, hands to my already bleeding nose as someone started laughing.
‘You want the conkers?’
‘Uuu wan da conkers . . . ?’ His voice mocked the pain in my nose, my split lip, the trouble I had speaking.
‘Have the conkers.’
Closing my fingers round a handful, I threw them as hard as I could straight into his face and then punched him hard while his eyes were still shut. He rocked back as I’d done and I punched again, harder, splitting my knuckles. The boy was some inches bigger and obviously older but he sat down hard on his bottom and cowered back to stop me hitting him again.
St Luce had rusting wrought-iron gates to the forecourt, with an arch through the main building that led to a courtyard beyond. ‘You, boy, your name . . . ?’ I turned to see an old man shambling from a door that had been shut seconds earlier. ‘Well?’
‘Jean-Marie.’
A boy laughed, a different boy from before, falling into silence when the old man glared at him. ‘He’s young. He doesn’t know our ways. You will give him two weeks’ grace. You understand me?’
‘Yes, headmaster.’
‘Your family name?’ He said kindly.
‘D’Aumout, sir . . . Jean-Marie Charles d’Aumout.’
He was asking so the others would learn it, I realised many years later. Dr Morel was the old headmaster and the new headmaster’s father. In his seventies, and looking impossibly old to me then, he put an arm around my shoulders and steered me under the arch through the school and into a dark courtyard overlooked by rooms on all sides. A smaller arch led through to whatever was at the back of the building. ‘You’d better come too,’ he said over his shoulder to my attacker, who followed after us like an unwilling shadow. ‘Duras,’ said the boy, sticking out his hand.
I stared at it.
‘You have to shake.’
‘You hit me.’
‘You still have to. That’s the rules.’
I took his offered hand and he nodded. ‘Emile Duras,’ he said. ‘I’m in the second class.’ The old man chose that moment to turn and smiled to see us shaking.
‘Don’t be late,’ he told Emile. ‘But first show him to class.’
‘Which one, sir?’
‘You can read?’ the man asked me.
‘Yes, sir.’ The old woman had taught me the rest of my letters.
‘What’s fifty minus twenty?’
‘Thirty, sir.’
The old man looked thoughtful, then decided. ‘You can be in my class. I’m putting you in Emile’s care. His punishment for what happened.’
‘Sir . . .’