going on here?’ a mournful voice asked, a voice that had only recently been broken and sounded as if it was still being mended. ‘I just thought yous was in here when I couldn’t see a soul anywhere outside.’
Frank Garson rushed at him and clung to him.
‘Help me, Percy! Save me! They’re going to put me out of the Brotherhood. We were all out looking for you. We need you, Percy! We need you! Sheuch’s trying to confuse me because I said it was urgent so he said we could decide it for ourselves but I said it was too important to decide without you, and he said I couldn’t have it both ways, but if it’s urgent it’s important too, isn’t it?’
Percy rocked on his toes and heels at the question and decided not to answer it.
‘What were you putting him out for?’ he asked, scowling round the meeting to remind them he had the seeing eye and they had better tell him the truth.
‘Where’d ye get to?’ Savage asked, boldly facing the seeing eye. ‘We’ve been looking for you all night, so we have.’
‘I was at a concert listening to a choir singing,’ Percy answered in his faraway voice, his sad eyes dreamily focused on the furthest wall where the rats lived. ‘It was rare, so it was. If we could get that piano there tuned I could start a choir with you lads if we could get somebody to play it.’
‘That’s just what I’ve been saying for years,’ Savage agreed insolently.
‘Scottish education, ach!’ Percy snorted in bitterness.
‘Percy, please!’ Frank appealed to him, shaking his arm. But Percy was beyond his reach, mounted on his high horse again.
‘They’re supposed to learn you culture and how to live and they don’t give you anything about philosophy or music. They never learn you how to write music for example. All they hammer into you is sums and spelling. If I could just read music I could form yous into a world- famous choir so I could. See the Vienna Boys’ Choir?’
‘No, where are they?’ Savage asked eagerly, looking round the cellar with dramatic jerks of his head. ‘Are they here the night?’
‘They’re only boys like you except that they speak German,’ Percy explained, snubbing the Chief Claviger. For some time he had regretted ever appointing him. Savage seemed too coarse a type to do his job properly. ‘But they’ve had a chance yous have never had because the Germans have always had a great love for music. The world’s greatest composers are Germans like Batch and Baith-hoven.’
He rocked, toe to heel, heel to toe, dreaming how he would love to be the salvation of these poor neglected urchins by introducing them to the good things of life.
‘Oh, Percy, listen!’ Frank pleaded, clutching him, shaking him.
They were all clamouring at him, everybody shouting at once, demanding attention, trying to explain. He came sadly out of his dream. He gathered there was something worrying them. He submitted wearily to the duty of helping them and dismissed Savage from Miss Elginbrod’s chair with a peremptory gesture and sat there himself. Nobody would ever say he shirked his duty. And he liked to sit where Miss Elginbrod used to sit. It was a kind of mild revenge. He put himself in the pose of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’ as he had seen it on the cover of a book he got for sixpence on the barrows in Ren field Street, and waited patiently till his supreme position got silence. He liked silence even better than he liked music. That was why he didn’t like his mother. She was always nattering.
‘Gi’ me a report,’ he growled.
‘Frank, Frank, Frank!’ the Brotherhood chanted. ‘He’s the one that knows! Let him report!’
Savage huffed away from them, kicked a stack of old examination papers containing, though he didn’t know it, his father’s score of five out of forty in mental arithmetic thirty years ago.
‘A frank report, eh?’ Percy smiled down at them from his throne. ‘Frank is always frank. That’s what you call a pun, lads. I had nobody to tell me these things, that’s why I like to tell you. Shakespeare was very fond of puns, and I like a good pun myself, so I do.’
‘I like a pun too,’ Savage muttered to the dusty sheets. ‘A pun o’ chocolates.’
Frank Garson went back to his place behind the lid of a dual desk, but this time without two warders holding him. He was the only child of a motor-mechanic who worked in the garage at the far end of Bethel Street, an intruder in a gang that respected his intelligence but distrusted his cleanliness. He seemed a cut above them because his father had a good job, and they couldn’t understand why he was so keen to be a member, even ambitious to be a Claviger. It made them suspicious. But they all liked him in the end because he was always straight. His mother had deserted his father for a West Indian bus-driver four years ago, and he could remember her only dimly as a bright-eyed woman with comforting arms and a good kissing mouth. He remembered also a cosy smell, quite different from the smell of chalk that accompanied Miss Elginbrod. But he could never talk of his mother. A boy whose mother had run off with a coloured man inherited a shame, and the fact that he was clever, clean and loyal, and that his father was a non-smoker, non-drinker and churchgoer, merely made him more of an oddity to his mates. Their fathers were drunken, idle and cruel, but they knew their mothers just had to put up with it. What kind of a mother then had Frank Garson that ran away from a good husband? Frank knew she was condemned, and he carried her guilt always with him. Dark-haired, rosy-cheeked, innocent-faced, and well-spoken except when excitement made him stutter a little, he would have suited a choirboy’s collar.
‘The new janny,’ he began, conquering his stutter in the hush that respected his report, ‘he doesn’t know where anything is, so he asked me to help him because the janny in Comely grove asked him for the lend of the gipsy costumes we had in our school concert when your father was the janny because the Comely grove are going to do a gipsy cantata at Christmas in the Bell field Halls and he didn’t know where they were but the janny in Comelygrove knew we had them all right, so the new janny asked me to look for them in the cellar because anything you can’t find must be in the cellar he said. So I asked Jasper, that’s the teacher that came when Miss Elginbrod retired, you’ve seen him, he comes here on a mo’bike and he’s got big bushy eyebrows and a blue chin, that’s what we call him, that or Bluebeard, but his right name’s Whiffen, and he let me come down here at two o’clock to look for them and I came down through the basement, the janny opened the door for me and then left me, and I found them in the tea-chests over there.’
He stopped, his mouth working. He felt his stammer coming on, and he fought against it.
‘End of Part One,’ Savage called out from the rear. He put on a television advert voice and chanted as he performed a Red Indian war dance round the back and flanks of the assembly. ‘Use the new super duper scientific formula automatic aw-tae-buggery Freezing Point. Never go without a Freezing Point. In a man’s world a girl needs a Freezing Point. Washes whiter than black and prevents flavour blur. Get one now, get one tomorrow, get one last week. The time is out of joint till you get a Freezing Point. And now back to Maverick.’
‘I think you’ve got far too much to say,’ Percy reprimanded him severely. ‘And stand still when the court’s in session.’
‘Well, tell him to get to the point then,’ Savage answered shrilly.
‘That’s the point,’ Frank hammered the desk, hating Savage. ‘I found the c-costumes, Percy, and I found something else too, a lot more, in the tea-chests. I gave the c-costumes to the new janny but I didn’t tell him what else I’d seen. I wasn’t sure if I’d seen right so I told Specky. You see there was a big spider came scuttling down the side of the tea-chest when I took the costumes out and I got a fright.’
‘Feart for a spider!’ Savage commented in disgust. ‘Feart for a spider and he wants to get a key one day! That’s the kind of probationer you get nowadays. Before I could get into the gang at all I had to get the Chinese Rub and I had to break seven windows in the scheme and steal a hundred fags and—’
‘I