Facing the Tank Read Online Free PDF

little eighteenth-century waistcoat too, but that’s only for the winter months. I’ll be back before six to make sure you don’t get lost. Bye.’
    ‘Goodbye.’
    His magister left in a wild flap of braille organ scores and Crispin noticed that his strong box had materialized by some unseen agency. It felt odd having grown men doing things for one. As the munificence of his scholarship had been explained to him in strictly historical terms using phrases like ‘sons of the indigent worthy’ and ‘episcopal patronage’ he had visualized his new life at Tatham’s as that of some put-upon waif or poor relation. Perhaps Tatham’s would prove to be like Drummond Lodge where hordes of servants appeared only hours before any massed parental occasion and vanished, pay packets in hand, in the wake of the last departing Volvo.
    Crispin sat at his desk and opened the little pink book. ‘LINGUA’ it said over the school crest and a Latin motto which seemed to mean power through stealth, which couldn’t be right, ‘Being the Language and Principle Customs of Tatham’s School, Barrowcester (Revised 1946).’ He turned a page and read,
    ‘Never run when you could walk.
    Never hum when you could talk.
    Never talk when you could read.’
    Someone had scribbled below this, ‘Never read when you could run’ and someone else below that,
    ‘Any man who runs when he could be eating is an idiot and a fresh-air prude.’
    Crispin turned another page and found list upon list of seemingly pointless alternative vocabulary. A few words with bracketed references to dots on a small map of the school and surrounding streets were clearly proper nouns and excusable, but the bulk seemed to be childish, snide or nonsensical replacements of everyday words such as water, chair or blotting paper. Blotting paper was parch and water was hoo . For chair there were specifics:
    ‘Straight-backed dining chair – sedan
    Upholstered armchair – bulldog ’
    The generic term seemed to be bench . He turned more pages. There was a great deal to memorize in three weeks. He had been well trained in blind obedience. It was the one subject Drummond Lodge could be said to have taught thoroughly, being a preparatory school that compensated for the brevity of its history with disciplinary and power structures that provided a striking object lesson in the feudal system.
    ‘You can stick pictures up if you like,’ said Jermyn, who had finished her book. ‘I always do.’ She tossed her book on to her desk and left the room.
    Crispin was alone. In the days that followed he was to discover what a rare luxury solitude could be. Although the general underpopulation of the school was a kind of privilege, it only served to accentuate the fact that one was hardly ever alone. After three or four minutes of peace, someone always walked in. They might ignore one and sit silently on the other side of the room but they were there. Only the girls, who lived with teacher’s families and in lodgings around town, had their own bedrooms. Boys slept twelve to a room and even had to use a vast Seventeenth-Century communal bath house called jugs . Crispin came to see the faintly Roman enjoyment that could be had from chatting and washing at the same time but he often longed for a small bathroom all to himself instead of jugs ’s great arched chambers with their sluices and steam.
    ‘If you want to be alone,’ David would advise him the next morning, ‘you have to take a good book and lock yourself in the loo. It’s either that or take up the organ. Have you thought of the alto viol?’
    Alone briefly on this first evening as a boarder, Crispin started to unpack his strong box. He put paper and pencil case in the desk and ranged his new dictionaries and battered Bible on his shelf. The only novels he had brought with him were Call of the Wild , a favourite he was rereading with deliberate nostalgia, and Barchester Towers . This looked dull but it was a present from his