Five Roundabouts to Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page A

early age.
    I first met him when we were ten years old and day boys at a little school in York. Then, as later, he was no beauty. He was a little frog-faced chap, with gold-rimmed spectacles, and then, as later, he was of only medium height, and weedily built. During his first two terms he was badly bullied, and I took part in the bullying, and thought it rather fun.
    We used to roll him up in the matting in the gymnasium and bounce on him. There was a piano in the gymnasium, too, and singing lessons took place there, and sometimes, for a change, we would poke him under the vaulting horse and keep him there the entire lesson.
    Some psychologists say that if you know the cause of irrational fears you are as good as cured. Bartels suffered in afterlife from claustrophobia, which he ascribed to the vaulting horse incidents: but the knowledge didn’t cure him.
    When school was over, we would lie in wait for him outside the premises, but after a while he grew to expect this, and would lurk about in the comparative safety of a classroom until time compelled us to go home. I remember to this day the sight of his pale little face pressed against the classroom window as he waited hopefully for us to leave. Poor little Bartels!
    After a couple of terms we gave up bullying him, principally because he was a good-humoured fellow, and he and I became firm friends.
    At that time my parents had rented a house at Dringhouses, on the outskirts of York. There was a field next door in which black pigs were kept and a stagnant pond. After I had stopped bullying Bartels, we united to bully the pigs by throwing mud balls at them, and occasionally, since this was soon after the First World War, we would play at naval battles with bits of wood on the pond.
    During our last term at the school a play was produced in which I had the role of Julius Caesar and Bartels played Cassius. It used to amuse us greatly when I had to speak the famous words:
    Let me have men about me that are fat;
    Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights.
    Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
    He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
     
    It never occurred to me then that Bartels could ever be a dangerous man. Even in those days he was such a kind-hearted and gentle chap.
    For instance, we used to play a ludicrous card game called “Lams and Biffs,” in which we gambled, not for money but for our personal comfort or discomfort. At the end of the game, various winners inflicted upon various losers a number of whacks with a ruler to equal the points they had gained. Nobody much minded losing to Bartels, because you always got off with a few soft, perfunctory pats.
    When we left the little school in York, we went to different preparatory schools, and later, to different public schools, but I still saw a tremendous lot of him in London during the school holidays.
    My parents had a modernized flat in Kensington, and because they were gay and interested in everybody, and content with their lot, there was always a joke or two in the evenings, and a friend popping in for a talk and a cup of coffee.
    But for Bartels it was different.
    He was just thirteen when both his parents were killed in a train crash in France, and he was compelled to go and live with his aunt Emily, her sister, aunt Rose, and his uncle James, a retired colonel of the Somerset regiment, who, in addition to other acts of bravery, had married Bartels’ aunt Rose.
    I have come across some quaint households in my time, but nothing that could beat the extraordinary set-up into which Philip Bartels, a lonely and sensitive child, was pitchforked at the impressionable age of thirteen.
    There was laughter enough in my home, but the only jokes which amused me when I visited Bartels were quite unintentional and entirely due to the farcical goings-on in that incredible place.
    As for friends popping in for a chat, any acquaintances who called, for one reason or another, took their departure as soon as decency