the laundry and the town, but how could I have imaginedMiranda? Perhaps he was out for his own personal pleasure on a sunny June day. I enjoyed the feeling of being safely hidden among the bushes while he went by, even if I were not yet hunted. The long secret trek through the heather by Alan Breck and David Balfour always for me took place on Berkhamsted Common; it almost seemed a personal adventure, perhaps because my mother was kin to the Balfours of Pilrig, and indeed first cousin to Stevenson himself.
I don’t know how long these sporadic escapes went on. They turned at some point (I would guess when I was eleven) into a better organized and a more prolonged truancy. By this time I was having breakfast in the dining-room with my elders, and not in the nursery with five-year-old Hugh and the baby Elisabeth. At the end of breakfast I would gather up my school-books as though going across to prayers.
I should explain that the school day began with prayers of a rather lay variety – masters on a platform, boys below – in what was called Deans’ Hall which was named after Dean Incent, the sixteenth-century founder of Berkhamsted School, but also – the position of the apostrophe was important – after Doctor Fry, my father’s sinister sadistic predecessor and kinsman by marriage, who had become the Dean of Lincoln.
This Manichaean figure in black gaiters with a long white St Peter’s beard sometimes came to stay. After breakfast on these occasions it was my mother’s duty to clear the hall outside the dining-room of maids and children, so that the Dean could go to the lavatory unobserved and emerge again unseen by anyone. As a headmaster he had been known as a flogger, and he thus made a life-long enemy of one old Berkhamstedian, later my Oxford tutor, Kenneth Bell, who one day had his cap snatched off by a school bully and was then beaten by Fry who saw him in the street without it. Fry as Dean of Lincoln became a popular lecturer in the United States where he went at regular intervals to procure money for restoring Lincoln Cathedral. On his last voyage, as he returned first-class in a Cunarder, fate overtook him and showed him up as the absurd figure he had always been. He had suffered a stroke before embarking which damaged hispowers of speech and his neighbours at table overheard him asking his son Charley, the Vicar of Maidenhead, for certain shocking objects when all he had in mind was a soft-boiled egg. Charley, who for years vainly paid court to my beautiful aunt Nono, was a far more likeable figure. He was so fat that he looked like a black tennis-ball, and to amuse us he would put two chairs together and bounce over them – not jump. ‘Bounce for us, Cousin Charley, bounce for us,’ we would cry, while my aunt watched with cynical disdain. She couldn’t respect a man who bounced.
Instead of going to Deans’ Hall I would wait in the garden until I knew the school was safely assembled, for fear that I might meet other boys or masters, and then I would walk up the High Street. My purpose was to steal something to read from the local W. H. Smith’s store. I can only remember two occasions, but I think there must have been others: once I stole a copy of The Railway Magazine and once, as I have mentioned, The Abbess of Vlaye by Stanley Weyman, a sixpenny paperback with double columns. My reading matter thus obtained, I would return home. This must have been an even trickier matter than the theft as I had to go by the windows of the dining-room where the maid would be clearing breakfast, but I suppose at the height I had reached then it was quite easy to stoop below their level. That danger safely past I would go cautiously out to the croquet lawn, past the buddleia and the butterflies, and swing the summerhouse round so that it faced a flower-bed and the sanatorium wall; there I sat comfortably in a deck-chair and read my stolen book until the school broke up for lunch. I followed the same routine,
I don’t know how long these sporadic escapes went on. They turned at some point (I would guess when I was eleven) into a better organized and a more prolonged truancy. By this time I was having breakfast in the dining-room with my elders, and not in the nursery with five-year-old Hugh and the baby Elisabeth. At the end of breakfast I would gather up my school-books as though going across to prayers.
I should explain that the school day began with prayers of a rather lay variety – masters on a platform, boys below – in what was called Deans’ Hall which was named after Dean Incent, the sixteenth-century founder of Berkhamsted School, but also – the position of the apostrophe was important – after Doctor Fry, my father’s sinister sadistic predecessor and kinsman by marriage, who had become the Dean of Lincoln.
This Manichaean figure in black gaiters with a long white St Peter’s beard sometimes came to stay. After breakfast on these occasions it was my mother’s duty to clear the hall outside the dining-room of maids and children, so that the Dean could go to the lavatory unobserved and emerge again unseen by anyone. As a headmaster he had been known as a flogger, and he thus made a life-long enemy of one old Berkhamstedian, later my Oxford tutor, Kenneth Bell, who one day had his cap snatched off by a school bully and was then beaten by Fry who saw him in the street without it. Fry as Dean of Lincoln became a popular lecturer in the United States where he went at regular intervals to procure money for restoring Lincoln Cathedral. On his last voyage, as he returned first-class in a Cunarder, fate overtook him and showed him up as the absurd figure he had always been. He had suffered a stroke before embarking which damaged hispowers of speech and his neighbours at table overheard him asking his son Charley, the Vicar of Maidenhead, for certain shocking objects when all he had in mind was a soft-boiled egg. Charley, who for years vainly paid court to my beautiful aunt Nono, was a far more likeable figure. He was so fat that he looked like a black tennis-ball, and to amuse us he would put two chairs together and bounce over them – not jump. ‘Bounce for us, Cousin Charley, bounce for us,’ we would cry, while my aunt watched with cynical disdain. She couldn’t respect a man who bounced.
Instead of going to Deans’ Hall I would wait in the garden until I knew the school was safely assembled, for fear that I might meet other boys or masters, and then I would walk up the High Street. My purpose was to steal something to read from the local W. H. Smith’s store. I can only remember two occasions, but I think there must have been others: once I stole a copy of The Railway Magazine and once, as I have mentioned, The Abbess of Vlaye by Stanley Weyman, a sixpenny paperback with double columns. My reading matter thus obtained, I would return home. This must have been an even trickier matter than the theft as I had to go by the windows of the dining-room where the maid would be clearing breakfast, but I suppose at the height I had reached then it was quite easy to stoop below their level. That danger safely past I would go cautiously out to the croquet lawn, past the buddleia and the butterflies, and swing the summerhouse round so that it faced a flower-bed and the sanatorium wall; there I sat comfortably in a deck-chair and read my stolen book until the school broke up for lunch. I followed the same routine,
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