Brief Tales From The Bench Read Online Free PDF Page B

knew it was a pretty odd school?’
    ‘I knew it was different.’
    ‘If the boys were allowed with impunity to throw stones at the parents of prospective pupils, did it not occur to you that there might be other things that they would do which might be even worse?’
    ‘I admit I thought it was roughing it up a bit to put a stone in a snowball, and not altogether sporting. But there was nothing dishonest about it.’
    ‘Wasn’t there?’ I asked. ‘You said yourself that it was a stone in the guise of a snowball. You mightn’t particularly mind being hit by a snowball, but if you knew there was a stone in it, you would certainly duck.’
    ‘I did,’ said the Major-General.
    ‘But it hit you just the same?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘But wouldn’t you describe it as dirty play?’ asked counsel.
    ‘Yes,’ said the Major-General, ‘that’s exactly how I would describe it. Where games are played, there is always a certain amount of dirty play, and one’s got to accept it. But that’s very different from plain theft.’
    ‘General,’ went on counsel, ‘you’ve heard Mr Chilton say what the theory is behind his method of carrying on the school.’
    ‘Method of carrying on the school!’ repeated the Major-General, with scorn. ‘It’s all a lot of bunkum, sir. If you ask me, the whole thing’s a fraud. They get a lot of money from a lot of unsuspecting parents. They do no work at all, and allow the boys to become little hooligans and then that unctuous peacock goes into the witness box and lays down the law as though he were the second Messiah.’
    ‘But, Major-General,’ went on counsel, ‘you heard Mr Chilton explain that, if the parents of a boy know his criminal tendencies early enough, they may be able to set him on the right road. Whereas if they don’t know of them, he may become a criminal when it’s too late to do anything for him.’
    ‘I heard your client talk a lot of poppycock,’ said the Major-General. ‘I didn’t ask Mr Chilton to teach my boy Latin or Greek or nuclear physics or mathematics or any of the rest of them. I liked the idea of this lack of restraint. I thought it might be good for a boy in the first instance. I thought it might be character-building. But I expected the end product to be a decent boy who could live in a decent family where you didn’t have to lock up the spoons before going to bed.’
    ‘How do you know,’ asked counsel, ‘that you wouldn’t have had to lock up the spoons if he hadn’t gone to this school?’
    ‘Well, I’ve never had to lock them up before.’
    ‘Did you count them all?’
    ‘Of course not.’
    ‘Then how do you know you didn’t lose any?’
    ‘Well, I know, that’s all. You can tell when things start to become missing. I saw the cup wasn’t there on the day when he took it.’
    ‘Well, of course you noticed that,’ said counsel, ‘as you enjoyed looking at it. Every morning you probably revived old memories.’
    ‘That’s perfectly true. Anything wrong in that?’ asked the Major-General.
    ‘Of course not,’ said counsel, ‘but that’s why you’d noticed its absence. But the spoons–’
    The Major-General interrupted: ‘I won some spoons too,’ he said.
    ‘Well, you didn’t win any forks, did you?’ said counsel.
    ‘I can’t say that I did.’
    ‘Then,’ said counsel, ‘unless you counted the forks each day, you couldn’t tell if any were missing.’
    ‘My wife would have known,’ said the Major-General.
    ‘Well,’ said counsel, ‘let’s assume that he never stole anything from you until he’d been at the plaintiff’s school for the six terms you allowed him to be there. When did he first start to steal anything?’
    ‘As far as I know, only during last holidays.’
    ‘So apparently,’ I said, ‘it took him two years to learn to steal.’
    ‘I suppose so,’ said the Major-General.
    ‘Are you complaining that he didn’t learn any quicker?’ asked counsel.
    ‘I’m complaining that he learned at