Sons of Fortune by Malcolm Macdonald Page B

by sliding down the steepest bits on one boot.
    “You’ll wear out your boots that way,” Boy told him. “Mother will know it couldn’t be normal wear and she’ll be mad!”
    Caspar pulled a face but did not repeat the trick.
    Chief was first into the trough, after a furious sprint against several pharaohs for the privilege of breaking the ice. For a while they larked about in the water, catching up the ice fragments and dashing them against the walls, where they shattered in tinkling sherds, leaving scintillating white blisters adhering to the stone. They ducked each other, too, with great bull roars while the younger lads laughed and cheered in piping treble around them.
    Chief pulled his trousers on before he left the yard. Once he and Cusack had gone the atmosphere changed. The ostentatious manliness vanished and four hundred naked boys piled through the stone troughs as quickly as muscle could carry them. Boys who had pubic hair and lived in the Houses (where there were female domestics) were obliged to pull on cotton drawers; but everyone else, including boys of all ages in Old School (where one ill-paid old man was supposed to do all the domestic work), simply picked up his own clothes and ran hell for leather back to the dorms.
    As de Lacy had said, if you went in hot, you came out at least warm; and if the run to the dorm didn’t dry you off, there was something odd about you. In that brief, naked run back to the dorm, Boy and Caspar saw hardly one backside that did not bear the mark of the cane or the slipper.
    Despite the horror of the icy water, Boy had to admit that he felt splendid by the time he slipped on his clothes; they had a strange new silken texture. But there was no time to luxuriate in the sensation. It was fifteen minutes to first trough and in that time they had to clean a pharaoh’s boots, lay out his clothes, and tidy his study. Caspar was boot roe to Deakin; Boy was clean-collar roe to Malaby. They would remain so until released by a fresh crop of newcomers. The pharaohs all went back to bed until five minutes before trough. Then, in one frantic rush, each aided by his two roes, they got up, washed, shaved, and dressed, ready to file into the Barn looking as if they had been up for hours. God help the roe who crumpled or dirtied anything or presented it the wrong way around or fumbled too long with a button.
    First trough was at half-past seven. At twenty-five-past the grunts began ladling out glasses of thin beer and setting them on the four tables. At twenty-seven minutes past they started to dole out a glutinous mess of shredded flannel and bobbin grease called “porridge and treacle.” The roes took turns to run a shuttle service of intelligence between the Barn and the pharaohs’ corridor; so Boy and Caspar found themselves running and shouting things like “twenty-six and a half minutes past, beer on three tables…twenty-seven past, porridge on one…twenty-eight and a quarter past, porridge on half the top table…twenty-nine past, the master’s egg’s in…bell in twenty seconds…” and so on, right up to the bell.
    On a good day the shirts went on, the collars and cuffs were studded, the ties knotted, and the boots laced, each exactly as the beer or porridge reached its appointed tide mark in that inexorable filling of tables. On a bad day, each piece of intelligence brought fresh oaths from the pharaohs and the blows would rain down on the heads of the luckless roes.
    Today, it seemed, was a good day. They filed into the Barn in perfect order—roes, bucks, Trench (the new King o’ the Barn), and the four pharaohs. Then the master, bursting with hair at every orifice.
    “ Benedictus benedicat ,”Whymper almost sang.
    Everyone could smell the master’s egg, a strong, rich note over the insipid steam that rose from the “porridge.” In three minutes the porridge was gone. In four minutes the egg, too, was gone, its delicious aroma already a fading memory. All stood.