The Price of Enlightenment

© 2013 John Trethewey. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 12/11/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-8622-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-8623-6 (e)

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Contents

EUTERPE       1961

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

CALIFORNIA       1974

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

CORAL STAR

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

THE BAINES SAGA

THE PRICE OF

ENLIGHTENMENT

EUTERPE

CALIFORNIA

CORAL STAR

EUTERPE

1961

"Set in 23 acres of the finest woodland close by Cloudesbury in rural Gloucestershire, The Euterpe School has a reputation second to none for academic solidity allied with social stability, the product, we believe, of healthy minds working assiduously under expert tuition.

Founded in 1876 for the sons of gentry and boys from the commercial sector, The Euterpe School offers first class educational and recreational facilities. Small friendly classes study here in a family atmosphere.

Chapter 1

From outside this academic Utopia it would be difficult to ascertain how far the sales pitch of ‘The Euterpean’—it was a prospectus that aspired to cultural heights the school had never reached—was justified. For five miles around the school perimeter ran a wall. It lined the road, it cut through a dense forest, and it paralleled the Swindon-Stroud railway line. In its entire length this eight foot structure supported only one pair of gates. These, doubtless the product of the much vaunted local woodland, were rimmed with vicious looking iron spikes. And they were almost never opened.

On six days a year, however, the school gates stood wide, allowing a procession of cars and taxis carrying pupils to enter and depart. The start of term in September 1962 was one of those days, and Charles Baines the newest pupil.

After morning rain the sun now shone in a cloudless blue sky. In the yard the cobbles steamed in the afternoon warmth. The air glowed with butterflies, dragonflies and clouds of midges. A gentle breeze carried the distant clack of hedging shears. From its rooftop perch the copper-green Victorian weather cock seemed to peer down intently.

His hands bunched in his trouser pockets, Charlie Baines stared disconsolately out of the school building across at the Dutch barn that now housed dormitories. It seemed both an age and yet only seconds since they had locked the front door and driven the few miles from Minchinhampton. An age, yet only moments ago that his mother had leaned forward in the torrential rain, kissed him briefly on the forehead and climbed quickly into the Jaguar. His father had not even waved as the car squelched away down the long drive and out of sight.

In those same hours the large detached house, the ill-kept garden, the black and white cat, everything, was abruptly consigned to memory. The memories were not all good. They included of late the acrimony and the arguments that had become daily occurrences in a household of marital discord.

Marital discord was not the reason for Charlie’s sudden entry to Euterpe, but Charlie himself was the principal cause of the discord. For ten long years Doctor Baines had suffered the constant presence of a child he had not fathered. As, with time, his practice flourished, so the family enjoyed greater wealth and material comfort, assets he found himself ever less willing to share. In the conservatism of the fifties it was not seemly for a doctor’s family to separate, so he had borne his burden uncomfortably for as long as it was impossible to send Charlie away from home. In a marriage that was long since moribund, it had been taken for granted by everyone, including Charlie’s half-sister Jane, that the day would come when Charlie would have to go. Taken for granted by everybody, that is, except Charlie himself.

He, of course, knew nothing of the problem he presented. Not yet. When the time was long overdue someone would have to tell him. With any luck it could be done by a solicitor, or a schoolmaster, and in the last resort there was always Jane, who had left home the previous year. The difference in their ages had always made their relationship odd, and significant though that relationship was one day to be, it interested nobody on the day of Charlie’s arrival at Euterpe.

He set off across the yard. At one point his new best shoes plunged deep in a muddy puddle. Water squelched in his socks, softening the shoe leather, but Charlie, unaware of the school’s severe punishments, continued innocently into the field and onwards. The grass was long and dense here, it reached to chest height, grazing his bare legs. When he paused to look back, the farm house was already a mere outline in the distance. Ahead of him the copse lay quite close, he could hear running water and the croak of frogs. Beyond the greenery was the lighter expanse of a small clearing, and in the distance stood the forest like a dark wall, mysterious and impenetrable.

The cold air of the woodland surrounded him abruptly, raising goose pimples on his arms and legs. From just inside the trees he turned to look back at the golden sunlight, the steaming earth. The dark green moistness of the forest, the constant drip of water and the incessant hum of insects were everywhere. For some time he wandered through a maze of tree trunks, clambering over fallen branches covered in moss, and through hollows of brown damp leaves. He gave no thought to where he was or where he was going, for his mind was two miles away, in a cheerful living room. The French windows were open to the garden, the scones on the tea table were already buttered and his favourite cake was already sliced. A jug of milk stood there, uselessly waiting. The picture remained incomplete, however. His chair was empty.

He stopped.

‘I wonder,’ he said in a tight little voice, ‘what they’re doing now.’ The sight of a tear falling on the earth at his feet hurt him strangely.

Turning, he stumbled blindly back the way he had come, catching his legs against fallen branches and tree stumps. Confused, he brushed his eyes with his sleeve, squinting in the harsh blaze that beat down on him on leaving the wood. He turned and peered into the twilight of the forest. ‘I’ll come back here soon.’ he murmured. The forest seemed to nod in agreement, and with a little imagination he half thought he heard it say so.

Chapter 2

Forty pairs of feet thudded along the worn linoleum like lemmings hearing the call. A tinny gong pealed out its call to dinner. At the end of the narrow corridor there was the clunk of battered swing doors and a noisy jostling for places. Old friends nimbly occupied adjacent seats without in any way being seen to do so. The table of Fatso-Firkin, who smelled, was overtly avoided, his company reserved for the new boys. The new boys. Unaccustomed to the timing, to the gong, to everything in boarding school life, they were still scanning torn and yellowed Rules and Regulations in the Dormitory building, and blithely unaware that a meal was being served at all.

The Seniors were serving up the black sausage slices that passed for a main course when the last of the newcomers excused himself at the Head’s Table, its surface so concave as to collect spilt drinking water in puddles. A bored thin man with opaque eyes waved the latecomer to an empty seat.

For all the notice the five boys already at table took of Charlie, he could as well have been on Mars. He sat and stared miserably at the table cloth, his gaze fixed on a gravy spot that seemed to have faded with the years, his mind once again on home.

Five minutes away they would be sitting at supper. Real supper, with food that looked like food, and drinks that didn’t come served in stainless steel four pint jugs. He sighed, brushed a wisp of hair away from his eyes and looked up.

‘Could I have some tea, please?’ There was a hush at the table. Five faces examined the newcomer frigidly.

‘Did it speak?’ Juniors were invariably treated to a process known as normalisation, as unkind a tradition as it was unnecessary. Fifth-former Billy Knowles took pleasure in being an expert.

‘Something came out.’ A fair-haired youth twisted in his seat to see Baines more clearly. ‘Name? Age? Dormitory number?’ He rattled off the questions in so peremptory a fashion that Baines shot back the responses like a soldier on parade.

‘Charles Xavier Baines. Eleven. Four.’ The five grey blazers seemed to surround him menacingly. ‘Can I please have some bread? And butter? And jam?’

‘Xavier?’ Knowles drawled the name with exaggerated incredulity. ‘Xavier? Good Christ, Xavier Baines?’

‘Shut up, Billy.’ Taff Owen, a pale fifteen-year old from Cardiff nudged him warningly. ‘The Wing-Co’s watching.’ Billy Knowles tried to catch a reflection of the duty teacher in the polished side of the water jug, and shrugged.

The duty teacher, disrespectfully known as The Wing-Co as a result of his interminable and hugely exaggerated wartime tales, sat in solitary state at the Headmaster’s table. He was neither watching the boys nor consciously listening to them. He was moodily eyeing the two slices of cold black sausage that purported to be his dinner. If the Wing-Co in any way enjoyed his work, he managed to hide the fact with accomplishment.

There was a growing uproar in the room, seventy knives and forks hammering at seventy plates, seventy boys’ voices like a rising tide of sound. Timothy Phillips, a jaded teacher of General Science, respected by nobody and least of all by his colleagues, reached for the block of wood on the table end. With a resounding smack be brought it smartly down beside his plate. The hubbub died on the instant. One small high-pitched voice lagging behind could be heard clearly intoning the words: ‘Would someone please pass me the bull?’

Phillips glared into the dimly lit yellow room; lighting cost money, a commodity in short supply at Euterpe. ‘Too much noise.’ he snarled. His gaze ranged unseeingly across the tousled heads. When he looked down he found that his two sausage slices had divorced themselves like giant tiddlywinks from his plate, and were lying neatly on the adjacent slice of buttered bread. His eyes flickered redly around the room, in case some quick-eyed juvenile found undue mirth in this act of levitation. Charlie Baines twisted in his seat to a small boy seated behind him.

‘What’s the bull?’ he asked.

‘New-twit.’ snapped the second-former. ‘Ask for milk, you’ll get nothing. Gotter ask for the right things, see? Milk’s BULL, and bread’s PILE. Sugar’s SAND and tea’s GROG, got that? Salt’s POWDER and pepper GUN. Go on, give it a try.’ He turned away as if embarrassed by his own forthcoming nature, which he probably was.

Charlie Baines sat motionless for a few seconds, listening to the older boys. They seemed so big, somehow self-assured, and indescribably violent. This was not the image that the school prospectus had given.

‘Bull please.’ As if by magic the jug sailed through the air, his cup was filled to the brim. Encouraged, he tried again. ‘Can I have some… err… PILE, please. Two slices?’

‘Not slices, sheets.’ The Welsh boy relented a fraction. He stared. ‘Baines.’ He relished the word like a mouthful of toffee. He said again ‘Where you from then, Bainesy?’

‘Minchinhampton.’ Charlie was buttering the bread for all he was worth. The Wing-Co had one eye on the clock, and the wooden block was already in his skinny hand again.

‘Minchinhampton?’ Billy Knowles stared, wide-eyed and willing to be nasty. ‘That’s only five minutes away. No one comes here as a boarder from Minchinhampton.’

‘Give over, Billy.’ Taffy Owen was contrite. It required little effort to see two large tears welling in Charlie’s eyes. Their very presence incited two more to appear. The din of raised voices all around only accentuated the sudden hush at their table. The Wing-Co smashed the wooden block down with long years of practice. Seventy chairs scraped back.

‘For what we have received…’ Phillips stared stupidly at his uneaten sausage, reflecting momentarily on his total hypocrisy. ‘May the Lord make us truly thankful.’

‘A~M~E~N’ roared the hordes, and were on their way to the door even before Charlie Baines had folded his napkin. Phillips eagle-eyed the emptying room, spied a dozen chairs out of place and called back the last boy. It was inevitable that the Wing-Co should now remark on the caked mud on Charlie’s best shoes.

‘New boy?’ snapped the teacher bad-temperedly.

‘Yes, sir.’ Charlie turned from where he was straightening the chairs.

‘Name?’ The Wing-Co enjoyed his reputation for brusqueness.

‘Baines, sir.’

‘We’ll start as we mean to go on then, Baines.’ Phillips eyed the diminutive fair-haired child strangely. If Charlie had intuitively sensed the lack of harmony at home, there are nevertheless some things of which, at that tender age, intuition is happily ignorant. ‘Report to my study in five minutes. With clean shoes.’ he roared.

‘Yes sir. Err… where is your study, sir?’ Charlie was trembling. In that moment he recognised that he had forgotten all about home and family, and far from being comforted by this, he felt ashamed, and not a little frightened.

Phillips flexed the fingers of his right hand in anticipation. A severe smile appeared on his face; his hand came to rest on Charlie’s shoulder.

‘Leave the chairs, Baines, and come with me.’ Charlie, mistaking the hand for a friendly gesture, smiled back at the teacher, reassured.

Five minutes later he threw himself face down on his bed. The belt had left weals on his legs where the short trousers failed to cover the flesh, and he could feel a warm moistness where a lash of the buckle had wrapped itself around his thigh. Indistinct noises issued from his throat. Unconsciously, in a haze of tears, he found himself kneeling in front of his bedside locker, groping for shoe polish and brushes.

Chapter 3

It was cold in the dormitory, and the street lights out on the main road shone like distant candles through the cheap curtains. There were five boys in the six-bedded room, five newcomers to an institution that employed only a certain kind of teacher and in which only a certain kind chose to work. The eleven full-time staff led to all intents and purposes the life of secular monks, with probably little difference during the holidays. If Wing-Co Phillips was the most brutal, it would be wrong to judge the others by his standards.

Phillips’ colleagues were not only not tyrants, they were for the most part highly competent teachers. Something else that they had in common, however, presented a greater danger than either tyranny or incompetence; they were educational eccentrics, academic cranks, universally too long in a boys’ small boarding school, and ready to follow blindly their Headmaster’s every whim. And it was to whim that James Foggett, the Principal, was cruelly prone. For him, ends would always justify almost any means. Given the universal air of eccentricity, his aims were frequently nothing short of bizarre and the means entirely alien to common sense. Many were the boys who had suffered his short-lived but entirely ridiculous command that cricket be played with a rounders truncheon for a bat. Others had patiently suffered a compulsory and painfully pointless cold shower immediately before lunch for no other reason than that Foggett had heard that it was customary in some obscure Oriental country. One January day, in a fit of bravado perhaps, he too stripped off and jumped in alongside the reluctant boys. There were no more cold showers.

Such oddities were not confined to sport and hygiene. For several years Foggett, a middle-aged Oxford graduate in PPE, had experimented with what he called MK, short for the German Menschenkontrolle. Foggett was not a German specialist any more than he had been an expert on oriental washing habits, but this did not deter him from reading vast volumes of German philosophy in translation, and introducing half-understood psychological practices. His Kontrolle experiments involved principally the youngest and the eldest scholars, for he was uncertain whether such at that time radical techniques as Transactional Analysis would mix successfully with the rigorous ‘O’ level régime that was imposed on boys in their middle teens. If the school achieved satisfactory results, however, the price in human discomfort was high, and the risk of lasting damage to adolescent minds by the lunatic practice of Kontrolle was considerable.

One of Foggett’s more questionable innovations was the enormous power given to the very few boys who remained in the school into the Sixth Form. It is fair to say that if certain scholars had achieved fame, more than a few rued the day that they had first entered Euterpean Gates. And this included nearly all the younger boys.

It may seem improbable that Foggett had any pupils left, but neither boys nor parents could know of these things before entering the school, and by the time they found out, it was too late to do much about it. The clinching factor, though, was the simple fact that boys were, for the most part, not sent to Euterpe for the quality of its education. Charlie’s home predicament was not singular. Of seventy boys placed in the school, more than half were there for their parents’ sake, rather than their own.

The door to Dorm 4 was ajar so that the matron could check from her end of corridor watch-tower that her troops, as she was fond of calling the boys, were not getting ‘restless’.

At that moment there was a lot of ‘restlessness’. Boys were talking in low tones in five of the six bedrooms. She could perceive also the measured tread of master-on-duty Phillips. She opened the door of her office and greeted him in an unduly loud voice that carried, as it was intended to, all the way down the dormitory corridor. The boys fell silent.

‘All quiet?’ Phillips tucked his thumbs into his belt self-importantly, not bothering with her answer. He wandered into the nearest bedroom, ready to be deceived by the vastly exaggerated deep breathing of boys who were anything but asleep.

‘If you say so, Mr. Phillips.’ Mrs. Mannion was keen to see the back of him. An unhealthy specimen, she used to say to her daughter-in-law, at their weekly coffee-house rendezvous in Stroud. If he looked at girls the way he eyed up the little boys, they’d put him away, agreed her daughter-in-law, (who had never met him), with monotonous regularity.

The Wing Co’s creaky shoes tramped away down the staircase. A smile crossed Mrs. Mannion’s lips as the low-voiced conversations one by one started up again. She resumed her efforts to memorise the new boys’ names from a list on her desk.

After her husband’s premature death she had fallen into the job of Matron by accident. It had been Sarah, her daughter-in-law, to whom the post had been offered. Just before she started work, however, Sarah had discovered that she was pregnant. The school still needed a Matron, the transfer of responsibility was a mere formality, and in the September of 1958 Helen Mannion started work as Matron at Euterpe School, in charge of sixty-six boys aged between ten and eighteen.

For the next four years, she had spent nearly every waking hour undoing the damage inflicted by Foggett’s Menschenkontrolle. She would regularly call herself to account for not giving in her notice, and every time she would sit down and make a list of reasons for staying and a list of reasons for leaving. Until she could convince herself that the leaving reasons outweighed the staying reasons, she argued, then she would stay. There was a certain illogicality in this approach: nearly all the reasons that made her want to leave made it essential that she stay.

The clock on her office wall showed half past nine. She slipped along the corridor and gently opened the door to Dormitory 4. It would have helped if she could switch on the light,