Authors: Charles Palliser
I might mention that while the beatings by the Headmaster were bad enough, most of all we dreaded being invited to tea by the Chancellor to cheer us up afterwards.
Our life was altogether fairly miserable. We were lodged in a dark old building – a former gatehouse – in the shadow of the Cathedral in the Upper Close. We slept in narrow truckle beds almost at the top of the ancient edifice. We were locked in at nine o’clock and were usually left all night to our own devices – which were unpleasant enough, for the bigger boys tormented and humiliated the smaller ones – and though I was among the oldest, I counted as one of the bullied.
Although this happened less than forty years ago, it seems to me that that was another age. No school would be allowed these days to treat children in the way we were treated. The dormitory was completely unheated in the winter and, winter and summer, infested by rats. There were eighteen of us in this one big room whose windows we sealed as tight, during the bitter winter nights, as their rattling frames permitted. At half-past six we had to rise and dress in order to attend Early Practice, after which we had our meagre breakfast and then assembled in a big schoolroom on the ground floor – a room which was poorly heated by a single coal-fire and was always filled with the stench of the cheapest tallow-candles.
Saturdays were my favourite time – at least, until it was dark for then my favourite day turned into the night I most feared; Saturday was the only night of the week when I was alone in the Old Gatehouse. Although my family had at one time had a connection with the town, I had no living relatives there. And so on Saturdays, after Practice and breakfast, when the other boys went to visit their families until the morning service the following day, I would find myself alone and completely without any adult taking an interest in what I was doing since the cook and housemaid had the day off. Or, I should say, taking an interest that I welcomed. I would spend a solitary day mooching about the town, returning for the bread and cheese left out for me by the servants. And on Saturday nights, rather than sleep by myself in the big room, I would carry my bedding up to the little top room under the roof – though that did not save me.
It was because of this solitariness that I made the friendship as a result of which I became involved in the case.
Of course I don’t mean to say that I was unhappy all the time. There were some moments when I enjoyed myself – lying with a book on the grass of the Lower Close in the summer or roasting chestnuts on the schoolroom fire in the autumn. Once or twice one of the younger canons, Dr Sisterson, invited us to his house where we were well treated by his friendly wife and his own children, and there were occasions when I joined in the games and it was forgotten that I was different and queer. Later – after the time I am now speaking of – I even made a friend, a quiet, timid boy of whom I had taken very little notice at first, except occasionally to wonder enviously how he managed to avoid being singled out and ridiculed for not enjoying rough games, loud noises, and so on. (He had a brother – much older than he – who worked in the Library.) Another consolation was that I found I enjoyed Latin and Greek which were taught by an old man who passionately loved the ancient literature and took a kindly and unselfish interest in us.
But when I started again in the Michaelmas term after my arrival – after a dreadfully dull and lonely summer with an elderly uncle and aunt in a remote village in Cumberland – I became more and more unhappy. I passed whole hours in imagining how I might be set free. My parents might both die and since the fees would not be paid, I would be sent out into the world to earn my living. Or somebody might adopt me. And if neither of these things happened, then one day I would just run away. I had good reasons for wanting to.
Not only was I bullied by my fellows, but all of us choristers suffered from the fact that there was another school in the Close. We choirboys were scholars, recipients of charity, and the fact that the school occupied the Old Gatehouse was used to insult us. The Courtenay boys were rich – at least, richer than most of us – and self-assured. They swaggered about the town in their distinctive garb – dark blue gown, blue knee-breeches and buckled shoes – secure in the possession of their own territory, the Lower Close, so that if one of us ventured into it they would beat us. On the other hand, they strutted freely around our territory – the Upper Close – and we were required to get smartly out of their way or take our punishment in kicks and blows.
One Saturday, towards the end of September, I was crossing the Upper Close when I saw an old gentleman whom I knew by sight walking ahead of me, carrying a couple of things – a large object that looked like a book and a package – under his left arm, his right being occupied by the leather case which he always bore. He let the package fall and walked on without noticing. I picked it up, ran after him and handed it back. He was grateful and appeared to be very struck by the fact that I stammered so badly and by my sallow complexion and slightly exotic manners. He was intrigued to learn that I had been born in India and told me he had a passion for faraway places and showed me the book under his arm. It was a beautifully illustrated collection of maps, printed in Leiden, he told me, two hundred years ago. He explained that he collected maps and atlases and said that one day he hoped he would have the opportunity to show me his collection. I knew him only as the old man who lived in the big ancient house at one end of the Upper Close.
I met him again now and then, and during October and November I talked to him perhaps five or six times – always outside his back-door. I happened to meet him on a Saturday when the Close was deserted and mentioned my solitariness on that day and it was then that he invited me to tea the following Saturday, telling me to mention it to nobody for it was to be our secret and he would not even inform his housekeeper but would buy the bread and cakes himself. I believed I knew what to expect for I had twice been invited to have tea with Dr Sheldrick who occasionally invited boys to his house in the afternoon. (The Headmaster either did not know or did not care about these visits – probably the latter for he and the Chancellor, both staunch members of the Low Church tendency, were allies in the convoluted politics of the Chapter.)
I was by nature suspicious and already good at keeping secrets for, because of the difficulties in my family which I have mentioned and which very soon after this led my parents to live apart, I had been introduced at an early age to habits of secrecy and instinctive suspicion of the motives of others. My involvement in the so-called Stonex Case had a fearful effect upon me – all the greater because nobody ever knew of it. At the time I vowed to myself never to reveal what I had learnt in such an accidental manner. (In truth, there was nobody I trusted to whom I dared reveal it.) I had to nurse my secret and the burden of guilt that accompanied it without the relief of confiding it to another. I said nothing at all of what I knew and avoided all discussion of the matter until a few years ago when I was moved to write to a newspaper to correct errors of fact which had appeared in a grotesque article on the case. It was that letter which, in a way I had not foreseen or intended, drew me into the case again and which indirectly explains why I am writing this ‘Afterword’ now. Apart from poor Perkins’s wretched children, I suppose I am the last surviving victim.
So one Saturday at the beginning of December I went into the house for the first time – the first of only two occasions, for I have entered it only once since then. (After the old gentleman’s death it was sold by his sister who turned all the assets she inherited – principally, of course, the Bank but also various properties in and around the town – into cash within a few months of probate and went to live abroad. The house later became the office of the solicitors, Gollop and Knaggs – as it has remained to this day.)
Tea with the old gentleman went off very well. He seated me at the table opposite him and talked to me as if I were an adult. He did not use the babyish language that the Chancellor employed and, above all, he did not bring up the question of beatings.
He asked me about my studies. I told him I enjoyed Greek and Latin because I liked the master who taught Classics, and he confessed that he had hated those languages when he was a boy and had been a complete dunce at them. (I might remark here that it was because I enjoyed my studies under that kind old gentleman that I continued with them when I passed on to my public school and later went up to Cambridge to read for the Classical Tripos.) He told me that he, too, had attended the Choir School. We found that – despite the difference of some sixty years – the existence he had led was not very different from mine. There was another link between us for he told me that he himself had stammered when he was my age. We talked about the teachers. Mr Stonex asked me about the assistant-organist and seemed intrigued by the little I was able to tell him.
It was almost time for me to go when he remembered that he had not shown me his atlases as he had promised to do. He wasted more time – as it seemed to me – in telling me how he had wanted to be a sailor or an explorer when he was a boy and that was how he had acquired his love of maps. He told me he had had to sacrifice his dreams of travel because he had had to take on onerous family responsibilities at an early age because of the premature death of his father. Then he talked, somewhat obscurely in my view, of how ironic it was that he had wanted to be a hero and had dreamed of returning to his native town fêted and lionized as a great warrior or bold navigator, and had, in fact, become a kind of hero but a secret one. He became quite upset as he described how, far from being thanked and adored, the reward for his heroism was to be despised and shunned. None of that meant anything to me then, of course, and it was only three years ago that I came to understand what he meant. (Little as I understood then, I remembered his words because only a short time later I found myself similarly nursing a terrible secret.) The old gentleman became so absorbed in his story that he forgot the time. The chiming of the grandfather clock – fortunately rather ahead of itself – reminded us of the lateness of the hour and when I had to take my leave without having been shown the famous atlases, my host promised me that I should come again soon and look at them properly.
And yet, kind though he was to me, I don’t believe he was a very nice man. Certainly not a very good one. For he treated his sister badly when she was very young and in difficult circumstances. I remember that when I learnt that the entire fortune had gone to Mr Stonex’s sister who had turned out to be living in Harrogate in sadly reduced circumstances, I felt – as did many in the town – that some kind of justice had at least emerged from the horror of the old gentleman’s brutal murder. It was learnt that the sister had lived in a tiny cottage for some years and had recently had a stroke and become bedbound. There was something profoundly romantic in the idea of the forgotten relative being raised suddenly from illness and poverty to vast wealth.
Some years after the murder an article appeared about it in the
Daily Mail
in February 1903. The journalist revealed that Mr Stonex’s sister had always believed that her brother had cheated her of her share of their father’s estate. The article recounted this story: her father had always preferred her above her elder brother and the animosity this created between the siblings had been enhanced by the fact that they were temperamentally opposite: he was cautious, unsociable and shy. She was flamboyant, extravagant and easily bored. Their father died when the girl was fourteen and her brother, some seven years older than she, had treated her badly to get revenge.
At sixteen she had been one of the greatest heiresses in the district, but her brother had refused her a dowry, and by doing so had discouraged the interest of young men from distinguished families in the county. As a result of his ill-treatment of her, she had been seduced by a much older man – an actor visiting the town with a theatrical company – who had taken her away. She tried to earn her living on the stage herself but, apart from a few early triumphs, failed in this career. She was a brilliant, passionate, compelling and daring actress but she would wilfully depart from the text and improvise her lines in the heat of the moment, with the consequence that other performers refused to go on stage with her and managers declined to employ her. During the years that followed, her brother succeeded, she maintained, in stealing her share of their inheritance. When she reached twenty-one and tried to claim it and failed, her lover abandoned her and their young child. The writer of the article claimed that the seducer was himself closely related to an aristocratic Irish family and had some expectation, therefore, of making a good marriage despite his somewhat dubious manner of earning his living.
All of that, of course, happened some thirty or forty years before the time I am speaking of – the afternoon when I sat opposite Mr Stonex at that big table in the houseplace and he talked to me about the sacrifice of the hopes that he had had as a boy. It occurred to me some years later that he felt guilt at what he had done to his sibling and even that he had seen me as the child of his sister whom he had more recently turned away penniless from his door. I sympathized with him for I know how oppressive and corroding a sense of guilt can be, since if any living person is responsible for the unjust and cruel death featured in the foregoing account, it is I. Much later again, however, I realized how wrong I was about the old man’s feelings.
After our tea-party I spoke to him only twice more – and since the first of these occasions was about a week after I had been to tea, it must have been only a week or ten days before he died. I met him in the Close and he asked me where I would be during the Christmas holiday and I told him I would have to stay at the school for my aunt and uncle had decided they were too old and frail to take responsibility for me again. He said nothing but looked thoughtful. I did not speak to him again until the day of his death.