Holy Terrors Read online

  He had been attracted to the post of chaplain by the number of famous names which he recognised amongst the parent body. He’d not enjoyed his curacy in a parish in Hounslow, though his vicar had assured him he had a talent for preaching. So he had applied to St Veep’s advertisement for a chaplain with a ‘sound academic background’. Since his was the only application and the bishop had been insistent to his fellow governors that an appointment be made, he had got the job in spite of the misgivings of the senior staff. It took him very little time to realise that, with adolescent girls of the calibre found at St Veep’s, he was not at ease. Indeed, if he were honest, he would have had to admit that he could scarcely cope. But he wouldn’t resign; instead, he developed a series of evasions which more or less saw him through. By surrounding his subject with a powerful aura of holiness, he could stave off inquiry or intellectual debate which might put his own knowledge to the test. He discovered too that if he could infuse enough emotional intensity into even his most ordinary remarks, he could circumvent questions for which a degree in geography at Reading and two years at an evangelical theological college in the Midlands had not equipped him. He used no textbooks except the Bible and kept the critical independence of mind of his pupils at bay through sarcasm and deflation. With his colleagues on the staff he was jocular, facetious and knowing. The cloth, the collar, just about protected him from the contempt of women whom he patronised, and to whom he could not hold a candle.

  Jessica fixed her eye with simulated interest on the Reverend Robert Mere and felt her way down the immense and comforting depth of her right-hand skirt pocket. Two toffees, her asthma inhaler, locker key and a dog lead gave place at the very bottom of her pocket to a solid metal object, round which her fingers curled. She jangled it between her thumb and two fingers, caressing the smooth cool metal and warming it into life. While her hand held it, she felt safe.

  CHAPTER TWO

  South-West London Comprehensive School

  At seven-thirty on Monday morning, Mr McGrath wiped both hands down the front of his pale grey sweatshirt, thereby freeing them from the remains of his breakfast. He strapped on a leather belt of enormous girth – not, however, quite so enormous as his own girth – clipped two different sets of keys on to a chain hanging from it, and thus accoutred started out for work.

  His caretaker’s residence was some distance from his place of work. He lodged in the basement of a large Edwardian villa which backed on to the enormous plain which constituted the playing fields and immediate environment of the South-West London Secondary Comprehensive School in the parish of St Sylvester’s Betterhouse.

  It was a long haul across the steppe-like field. The April wind would have cowed a lesser man. But Mr McGrath did not flinch, nor did his pace vary as he approached the school’s two tower blocks with their litter of hutted accommodation at their feet. They were like a couple of icebergs surrounded by seals, Mr McGrath thought, his years in the Royal Navy having given him an eye for such things. Up the north wall of the nearest block ran a web of scaffolding, now almost permanently in place to cope with the building’s cracking decay as it entered the twentieth year of its existence. The site board advertised the diverse nature of the building industry in this part of London: Makepeace and Singh, Vouniki and Smith advertised their share in the economy of the area. At this hour the workmen could be seen in the site hut making their first brew of the day.

  As McGrath neared the buildings, the steppe gave way to pure mud, lightly spiced with a litter of coke tins, broken glass and crisp packets. The composite stone paving of the path to the main entrance was fissured, and to left and right were signs of an intense and vigorously destructive life. Two raised beds of very tough hebes had alone survived from the ambitious planting scheme drawn up by the landscapers of the hopeful sixties. Mr McGrath’s job description obliged him to take notice only of what was actually dangerous. The ugly or merely delapidated was not his concern. A skip full of broken plaster, and an immense coil of electrical cable, presaged the rewiring which was causing chaos within. He unlocked his way through pairs of plate-glass doors, sniffed the smell of commercial cleaner and coke fumes and dived down to his beloved boilers.

  At eight-ten, three deputy heads – two male and one female though identically attired in denim – arrived clutching huge plastic holdalls. They slammed a variety of Japanese car doors and sprinted towards the main block entrance.

  At eight-thirty a trickle of younger boys, skimpily clad in padded nylon jackets, began to kick bits of litter about at the edge of the mud, adding to it judiciously with offerings of the wrappings of breakfast snacks of Mars bars and crisps. Ten minutes later, older boys drifted in like a hesitant tide, as though unsure whether they would be staying, and began to divert themselves by tripping the smaller boys into the mud. Here and there a curl of cigarette smoke flared briefly before being caught by the wind. Pupils did not come by car or bicycle. They walked or else fell off buses as though released from a spring trap, all tangled up together. It was a neighbourhood school.

  By eight-forty, two-thirds of the seventy-odd staff had begun to inhabit the factory-like structures. Striplights flickered on here and there in classrooms and laboratories. The smell of coke fumes increased. Girls of all ages but usually in gaggles of four or five took up their stances on the perimeter of the mud and began to jeer at the boys. By ten to nine most of those of the fifteen-hundred-strong pupil body who had decided to grace the establishment that Monday were milling around in the intense cold and beginning to move like marauding invaders towards the four pupil entrances of the two concrete blocks. At five to nine there was a rattle of keys and eight large P.E. staff members, two to each of the pupils’ entrances, flung the doors open. With something close to a cheer, the horde of pupils began to pour inside.

  Mr McGrath pulled off his boiler-house gloves, checked his keys and emerged from the infernal regions. He made his way up the main staircase of B-block, an uncarpeted concrete and steel structure, to the second floor. Unlike most of the junior staff, he did not need to fight his way through the unyielding scrum of pupils. His reputation was enough to secure him passage. Where a child was dilatory or unheeding, McGrath simply applied his ample hand to whatever part of the body was most accessible and swung him or her out of the way. He was much respected; he never used more force than was necessary. In this way he reached the staffroom.

  He could hear the voice of the second deputy head at the far end of the staffroom as she ran her eye down her clipboard, and the plaintive tones of her colleague as he pleaded with her.

  ‘I can’t put more than fifteen in that rat hole.’ ‘I know you’ll be a tiny bit squeezed, Ralph. But we’ve all got to make the best of it even if it does mean flying out the windows.’

  ‘Thirty-eight B4 hasn’t got any windows. That’s my point. Apart from some noisy heating mechanisms, it hasn’t got room for anything in it.’

  ‘Well, you’ll just have to think of it as a challenge. It’s a marvellous opportunity for co-operative learning. Social … interactive … basic body skills … integrated … participative … learning situation.’

  McGrath heard the incantation with interest.

  ‘Yeah. A complete pupil-centred, project-based, autonomous learning slice of chaos. I am not taking a collection of thirty band seven fourth years, sorry, year tens, for drama in a room designed for fifteen to practise sitting still and breathing in.’

  The deputy head never allowed herself to become ‘stressed’ as she would have put it. She had a degree in sociology from Ontario and was reading for a masters in the social psychology of micro institutions at London University Institute of Education, where she was highly regarded by her supervisors. The more agitated her colleagues got with her, the cooler, genuinely cooler, she found herself becoming. Tiny, with a cloud of dark hair, she inhabited her dungarees beautifully. It made her difficult to argue with and it was a measure of his desperation that Ralph even tried to.

  She turned to McGra
th as he hoved into view. ‘Mike, 39B4 is still out of commission? Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’ He was going to say, ‘Miss’, because he’d spent twenty-five years in the services and had an Irish father behind him. But he prided himself on having picked up the mores of the institution. ‘First names in a rational democracy of free equals. And that means all ancillary staff,’ the ridiculously young-looking headmaster had said. So he replied, ‘Yes, Cherry. It won’t be ready before tomorrow. Not the rate they’re doing it. It’s the electrics takes the time.’ He refrained from adding that none of the electricians seemed to speak English and that would slow things down, like as not.

  Ralph, the ageing young man in cords (cords, McGrath had learned, meant a member of the English department) looked desperate.

  ‘Cherry, love, you’ve got to find me something else. I simply can’t take ten seven in 38B4. It’s got one of the Kostases in it’. He clinched his argument with what he clearly regarded as his trump card.

  Miss Rumbold assumed a yet more reasonable air, if that were possible. She put her small pretty finger to her lower lip in a parody of thinking.

  ‘There is the Councillor Ferrin Memorial Hall.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the desperate young man without hesitation.

  ‘It’s a big space, Ralph,’ she said with concerned intimacy.

  ‘You’re sure your working parameters aren’t going to be unhandleable?’

  ‘I’ll keep the beggars in play. Thanks awfully, Cherry love—’

  His further remarks were drowned by a tannoy of incredible decibels cancelling all conversation. ‘Good morning, everyone. May I have your attention, please?’

  The headmaster, or headteacher as he preferred to be called, or better still, the senior management team leader, had swiftly acquired the nasal south London vowels which he felt appropriate to his situation and his carefully plotted advancement within the state education system. But just occasionally the imperfect reproduction of the sound system detected, like some prying archaeologist’s trowel, the received pronunciation to which he’d been brought up. Subliminally Ralph noticed the stab of contempt that he always felt at being patronised by such a voice using such a medium.

  ‘The staff absentee list for today is as follows. Miss Shepherd, Mr Singh, Mrs Godfrey, Ms Helliwell. So the room changes will be: Miss Shepherd’s classes to Mr Troutbeck in 38B4, Mr Singh’s classes …’

  Ralph gave a yelp of dismay. ‘I can’t, I just can’t cope with Muriel’s lot as well as mine. It means I’ll have the other Kostas boy.’

  An hour later the Reverend Geoffrey Brighouse on a second-hand Lambretta bumped cautiously over the once decorative paving of the school drive, circumvented the roll of cable, and fell off in the general direction of the door. He was so numbed with cold he could scarcely see out of his eyes, so he almost cannoned into McGrath as he lurched through the glass door. McGrath had a respect for the cloth, even when it wasn’t, by his Irish father’s standards, proper, and he liked the gangling and energetic Geoffrey. He caught him adroitly with his left hand, much as he’d manhandled pupils on the staircase an hour before.

  ‘A good way to get about in summer, sir. If you see what I mean.’ Geoffrey drew in deep breaths of the coke and cleaner mixture, which was at least warm, and turned his smile full on McGrath. ‘Thanks very much. I can never decide whether it’s better to go fast and get very cold but get it over with, or to go slowly and prolong the agony but not quite as much cold air rushing past.’

  ‘It’s a problem, sir. Myself I find it’s best to take your mind forward to what you’re going to do next so you don’t notice too much.’

  Geoffrey thought this sound pastoral advice, and said so. He unlaced his gauntlets and attempted to unbuckle his helmet, which made him look like an old-fashioned deep-sea diver, stamping his feet a couple of times to get them used to where they were in relation to the floor. He glanced in the direction of the empty guichet which said: ‘All Visitors Report Here. No Pupils Before 11.30.’ From behind the glass shutter came the clatter of typewriters. Deciding against announcing his presence, he mounted the stairs, now mercifully empty, to the staffroom.

  Geoffrey opened the door cautiously and edged inside. The staffroom resembled a wide corridor. Along one long side were windows, along the other noticeboards. There were double doors at either end on the short sides. The view was of the playing field wastes. The familiar décor met his eye. It was not unlike an airport lounge at the height of an aircontrollers’ strike. Unwashed mugs of half-drunk coffee and overflowing ashtrays crowded the low tables. Unseated armchairs were piled with battered-looking exercise books. Luggage in knapsacks or plastic holdalls was prudently stacked out of the main flight paths against the walls. The low chairs and low tables had the effect of bringing the scale down to the horizontal, an impression reinforced by the semi-recumbent posture of a number of staff, apparently in the last stages of fatigue, spreadeagled on, rather than in, the untrustworthy chairs.

  Geoffrey recalled the words of one probationary teacher, now long gone. ‘South-West London Secondary is like a waiting room’, she’d said. ‘Half of the staff have just come and the other half are poised to move on.’ It was true. Nobody loved it. It had been devised, in the teeth of opposition from parents and staff (briefly united) from two secondary moderns and a technical high school, in response to planners’ decisions in the late sixties. It had had the vicissitudes of such institutions. Funds from the Local Authority had flowed freely for a time and then dried up. Chairmen of Education Committees had come and gone, leaving their names but not their thrusting spirits on the building; the Councillor Ferrin Hall, the Isaacson science block. It had an air of waiting for the next reorganisation to hit it. The school secretary was the longest-serving member next to McGrath.

  The immense noticeboards, stretching from head’s notices, through those of the deputy head, heads of house and heads of year down to the Union’s, displayed the web of the institution. At the very end of the series there was a space left empty, perhaps to allow some small token of individual creativity to insert itself into the heavy concrete paving of the hierarchy. Here someone had scrawled in blue chalk, ‘Dreadlocks unlock dread.’

  Humbly, for it was not his terrain, Geoffrey fumbled inside his jacket pocket and produced a neatly typed notice:

  St Sylvester’s Betterhouse

  Wanted for boot sale

  last Friday of Easter term:

  helpers, programme-sellers.

  Staff and students, all welcome.

  If you can spare an hour,

  please give your name as soon as possible to: Rev. Geoffrey Brighouse, St Sylvester’s Vicarage, Old Road, Betterhouse.

  He was struck by the unobtrusiveness of the notice. Perhaps a logo or a bit of red biro would improve the impact? Geoffrey fumbled in his pocket again.

  ‘Reverend Brighouse to go to headteacher’s room immediately. Mr Springer is free now.’

  It was a woman’s voice crackling over the tannoy. It managed to convey, in the manner of secretaries the world over, that an honour was being conferred by her boss’s order. The tannoy crackled again and three pips sounded. Immediately there was an enormous roar. The third teaching period had ended and the school had been loosed for break.

  Geoffrey braced himself for the battle. He struggled through a mass of bodies, braving double doors swung in his face from expert, inimical hands. Boys cannoned off each other. Girls in all sizes but all redoubtable, many eating, their arms linked together, presented phalanxes more impenetrable than Alexander’s army. Geoffrey made no judgements. He simply remarked the differences in physical conduct from his own school days. He had to admit that Rugby and Magdalen College, Oxford had not really equipped him in some respects for life at SWL. The navy’s training in unarmed combat had been rather more useful.

  He had to concentrate to find his way. Every corridor of the four floors looked like every other corridor. All had windows on one side with the dire view of the playing fie
lds and identical classrooms opening off the other side. Here and there graffiti showed through the thin cover of white emulsion on the walls. Geoffrey always liked the Arabic ones with their vigorous, elegant script; such a testimony to the efficiency of the Islamic community’s Saturday schools, he felt.

  The going was made yet more treacherous for pedestrians by the piles of nylon bags left in heaps outside the doors of the classrooms. No one trusted the lockers in the basement cloakrooms, their locks long since vandalised, their doors unhinged. So pupils carried round with them everything they needed for the day: games kit, food, even the odd book.

  The bodies decreased in number. Geoffrey rounded a corner, and in triumph recognised the headteacher’s door at the end of the corridor. The only thing which stood between him and it was a pair of boys marching shoulder to shoulder. The fact that they marched in step made them almost as menacing as the fact that they had made no concession to the school’s uniform requirements. They were dressed in khaki trousers and green shirts, belted and booted like miniature infantrymen. For a moment Geoffrey wondered if the school had an army cadet corps. But Mr Springer was, he had been told, a pacifist. The pair came on without breaking step. He noticed that they carried between them a bulky black nylon bag. For a moment he thought they were going to barge him, but at the last moment they parted with military precision, the boy on the left taking the bag neatly from his companion. Without further incident Geoffrey reached his destination.