called them the Clavigers. To be a Claviger in Percy’s gang was the highest rank you could reach. He gave himself the title of Regent Supreme because the boys knew those two words, but he went to great trouble to explain to them what they meant apart from their occurrence in a television advert.
Over the undated years the cellar had become a junk- house, a dark neglected dump where people threw things they didn’t know what to do with. Scores of old registers, tied in tape and going back for decades, were stacked against a wall and crowned by bundles of ancient group mental tests and verbal ability tests, pupils’ record cards, report cards and medical histories. Nobody had ever dared destroy them. Such documents are intimidating. They have their own over-weening life. To burn them would be as brutal and immoral as committing murder. And you could never be sure they wouldn’t be wanted one day. Somebody might ask for the date of birth or the father’s name or the IQ of a pupil who had left years ago and was now in Barlinnie Prison for house-breaking. It would never do to reply, ‘The records have been destroyed.’ The whole point of keeping records is that they are kept after they are kept. Otherwise why keep them?
Scattered alongside these sacred but forgotten documents there were blackboard compasses, blackboard rulers, pointers, pyramids, cones, cylinders and spheres, a carton of inkwells with the bakelite rims chipped off by vandals so that they fell through the hole cut for them in the pupils’ desks, the broken pole of a dead traffic warden, a punctured hose, brooms, spades, shovels and rakes, brown paper piled four feet high with the salvaged string wound round the sheets, a pail of stucco, a barrel half-full of washing-soda, empty bleach bottles put aside to be filled with ink made from a powder, political maps of Europe, Asia and Africa dating from before the First World War, a coal-scuttle and a stirrup pump. On one side of the outmoded boiler was a woodwork bench with a vice that wouldn’t screw up tight, and on the other a ziggurat of broken dual desks. In front of the desks was an old piano with occasional dumb keys. It had been put there twenty-two years ago, when an insistent music- teacher asked for and got a new piano. The janitor filled in the correct form to have the old one uplifted, but somehow nothing was ever done about it. On top of the piano was the large hand-bell that had been rung to assemble and dismiss the school before the electric bells were put in. It was a heavy bell, solid brass, and Savage said it was worth at least a fiver as scrap metal, but Percy wouldn’t let him hawk it.
Across the cellar from the broken desks, under a tangle of legless chairs, educational publishers’ catalogues, pre- war copies of the Scottish Educational Journal, and five dozen derelict reading books called The Sunshine Way, were six tea-chests, three along and two deep, containing the costumes and small props used in the annual school concert. But there had been no annual concert for five years, and in that time there had been two new headmasters and Percy’s father had died of a thrombosis, so that nobody in the school knew exactly what was in them.
There were two weak ceiling lights in the cellar, but the Brotherhood preferred not to switch them on during council meetings. They lit six candles, using the bleach bottles as candlesticks, and the dim unsteady light, with flickering shadows on the walls receding into the damp darkness where the rats were, gave a proper obscurity to the arguments of the assembly.
‘I vote we carry on without the Regent,’ said Hugh Savage, Chief Claviger, whose Christian name was locally pronounced ‘Sheuch’.
‘No, I object,’ said Specky, Second Claviger, sitting on the inverted coal-scuttle to the right of Savage’s chair. He was a brassy, blethering confident boy, wearing thick convex glasses with thin wire frames, a Schools Health Service issue, and he talked like a book.
‘Well, we’ll vote for it,’ said Skinner, Third Claviger, sitting on a drawing-board placed across the pail of stucco. He was always called Skinny in affectionate abbreviation of his surname. It was only a fortuitous anomaly that he happened to be a chubby child.
The Three High Clavigers faced the ruck of the Brotherhood, obedient troopers who sat, knelt or squatted on the grimy stone floor. Savage was the strong arm, Specky was the brains and Skinny was the kind heart. In that cavernous gloom they looked like three subterranean judges addressing a jury of sooterkins.
‘I’m in this,’ Frank Garson shouted from the front row. ‘It was me that found it. You can’t decide, Sheuch. You’ve got to wait for Percy. That’s the rule for urgent business.’
‘Don’t you call me Sheuch when I’m in the chair,’ Savage checked him crossly. Then he leered forward. ‘Anyway, how can it be urgent if we’ve got to wait for Percy? And you should be in the dock, so you should, but I move that Probationer Garson’s expelled. Come on, get him in the dock!’
Garson was pushed and pulled by four of Savage’s faction and forced to stand behind a dual desk on the left of the chair.
‘What’s the charge?’ he screamed.
‘You broke the first commandment,’ said Judge Savage. ‘All for one and one for all, united we stand but divided we fall. That’s Percy. Percy’s a poet, ye know.’
‘That’s our motto,’ Garson objected hotly. ‘It’s not a commandment.’
‘Doesn’t matter, you still broke it,’ the judge answered swiftly. ‘You wanted to keep it all for yersel’. If Specky hadn’t have been with you we wouldn’t have knew a thing about it.’
‘That’s not true,’ Garson shouted, wriggling in the dock between his jailers. ‘Specky wouldn’t have knew a thing about it if I hadn’t told him.’
‘That’s right,’ Specky admitted, standing up to address the judge. ‘I said it was a matter for the Brotherhood and he said we ought to tell the cops but he never said he wanted it all for himself.’
‘No, of course, he wouldn’t say it,’ Savage complained. ‘But that’s what he meant to do all right. Get the bell and expel him!’
‘You can’t do it like that,’ Specky whispered, horrified.
‘That’s wrong,’ Skinny called out, indignant.
The campanologist, so named and appointed by Percy to perform the rituals of admission, expulsion, summoning and dispersal, grabbed the bell from the piano and Garson darted at once from the clutch of his warders and struggled with him. The bell rang irregularly as they wrestled for it.
‘A barley, a barley!’ Skinny yelled in distress, and the contestants stood frozen. The assembly murmured against the brawl, condemning the decision that had provoked it. Savage saw he hadn’t the support for an expulsion and tried again quickly.
‘I propose an equal division then. Right here and now. Elect two tellers and share it out without Percy.’
‘Twenty tellers couldn’t count it,’ Garson protested vehemently. ‘And if they could you couldn’t spend it. I said the cops because I saw it was too much for us but when Specky said report it I agreed because he’s a Claviger and I’m not, but I meant report it to Percy, I never meant you, you big ape!’
‘Who’s an ape? You’re an ape,’ said Savage. He had a talent for repartee.
‘I still say you can’t decide without Percy,’ Garson argued. ‘Not on an urgent matter, not without Percy.’
‘Yes, we can,’ Savage overruled him. ‘It’s an urgent matter. You’re just after admitting it. Percy said we had to decide urgent matters for ourselves, it’s important matters we’re supposed to tell him.’
‘But this is important,’ Garson said. ‘That’s what I’m saying.’
‘You’re just after saying it was urgent. Is it urgent or is it important? Make up your mind, you can’t have it both ways.’
Savage grinned in the anticipation of victory and called out to the assembly, confusing them by the phrasing of his command.
‘Hands up those who agree it’s urgent.’
But before he could seize the victory he felt was within his grasp the troops were suddenly paralysed with fear. Someone was coming