Read Online Swan River by David Reynolds - Free Book Online Page B

them had, in their own opinions and for different reasons, not had enough of – had an allure that transcended personal pleasure and conviction.
    When boarding school had been a distant prospect, I had actually looked forward to it. When I was nine or ten, I had read Billy Bunter and Jennings and Darbishire books, and it all seemed like lots of fun away from the restraints of home. It was still nearly a year away. If I was to go, I was to go the following May. We had visited the school and met the man who would be my housemaster; he had been friendly but had seemed old and austere. I was due to take an entrance exam in the autumn.
    I stubbed my cigarette carefully on the branch beside me and dropped the butt to the ground. ‘I don’t know.’
    â€˜Don’t! You’ll hate it… No freedom… No girls.’ Richard stretched, and then wobbled on the branch. He quickly dropped his hands to his sides to steady himself. He was right; what I had thought of as the restraints of home, when I was nine or ten, seemed to have fallen away. Save that I had to go to school and perform a few perfunctory household chores, there were no irksome rules.
    â€˜I wouldn’t go to a place like that, I’ll tell you… Don’t they beat the boys whenever they get the chance? They do in Ireland. I know.’ Dennis squinted against the sun as he peered at me. ‘Stay here with us. Marlow’s OK, and your school’s OK.’ He was right as well. I liked the town – the river, the lock, the park, the cinema, the High Street, our house, my friends – and my school was fine, given that I had to go to a school; I was around the top of the class, played football, liked two of the teachers a lot, hated one of them – but everybody hated him.
    I knew that, if I said I didn’t want to go, I wouldn’t have to. My father would take very little persuading, although I would have to give an intelligent reason. That would be easy – I would simply point out that I would be helping to perpetuate the evil class divide by joining what he called ‘the upper classes’, ‘the idle rich’, ‘the snobs’, ‘the Tories’, ‘the toffs’.
    With my mother, too, it would be easy to get out of it. But I felt that to do so would be letting her down: in her opinion this type of education was a gift that one should accept gratefully; it would lead to Oxford, as it had for her father and uncles – the school was a few miles from that hallowed city and sending boys there was its speciality. I felt a duty to my mother.
    A few weeks before, when I had voiced my worries about the school – the beatings, fagging, bullying and silly rules – she had hugged me and told me I didn’t have to go. But that had made me angry because it had been her idea, not mine; it was because of her, and her father and uncles, whose photograph – three proud men in World War I officers’ uniforms – hung in her bedroom, and her aunt – the men’s sister, who had left the money – that I was going to this school forty miles away. I hadn’t been going to let her down, so why had she suggested I might?
    We came down from the tree and tramped on through the woods. Richard knew about birds, which together with the excitement of trespassing was what had first brought us here two years before. He liked woodpeckers in particular. We could hear one and stopped frequently, gazing in silence trying to see it. Eventually, we reached the northern edge of the sanctuary away from the river. Here, beyond the barbed wire, there was an empty field between the woods and the railway line that joined Marlow to Bourne End, Maidenhead and London. Although the sun had almost gone, the air was warm, and the dry, golden grass gave off a sweet smell. Dennis ran ahead of us to the centre of the field and flung himself down on his back with arms outspread; four or five birds