Killing Rommel Read Online Free PDF Page A

stretching for the boat to pull it back. A great weight of iron—a garment of some kind—dragged me down. My mother’s sleeping form slipped from my grasp. I woke in a state of dread and consternation.
    The culmination of the initiation ordeals at Winchester is a rite called the freeze-out. This was a tradition at the school. Upon a bitterly frigid night, we new boys were stripped of mufflers and overcoats and locked out in the storm. We had been told by one of the more kindly sixth-formers that the torture would not last all night. The seniors would observe us in secret; when we had turned blue enough to satisfy the demands of the trial, they would fetch us back indoors. My fellow sufferers clung together, overacting their misery. I despised them. I would not give our tormentors the satisfaction.
    I began walking. I was going home.
    I made my way to the railway station. The place was deserted. I set off down the tracks. How far I marched, I don’t know. At some point I lay down in the snow.
    Stein, the prefect, saved me. He told me later he had sensed the freeze-out coming, but had been fooled by the older boys, who had made pillow-dummies of me and the other two and had put them in our beds. Stein didn’t realise what had happened till the frozen pair were brought back indoors. How did he find me? From my tracks in the snow and his own imagination. The train station. Home. He was a poet; he could figure it out.
    I was lying on my side on the tracks when I heard the tinny bell of Stein’s American Schwinn. “Chapman! Where in damnation are you?” I had never heard an upperclassman employ such language. Stein pedalled up. He was frightened; he thought I was dead. He wrapped me in a woollen blanket. Close behind him came the master’s assistant in an ancient Peugeot. The assistant pulled up on the road that paralleled the tracks. Stein carried me through the woods to the car.
    â€œYou better not pop off, you little sod,” the master’s assistant said as he bundled me through the passenger door and up against the machine’s feeble heater. Stein wrapped me in the blanket and his own greatcoat, cursing when the assistant botched the clutch and stalled. “Is this little twit going to croak?” the fellow demanded.
    Stein produced a silver flask. “He’ll be fine,” he said, lifting the whisky to my lips. “He just wants a stiff belt.”

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    AT OXFORD, Stein was my tutor. For those unfamiliar with the tutorial system, it works like this. A student at university acquires his education by attending lectures and seminars given by dons. Attendance is voluntary. Theoretically you could duck every lecture—as some did, myself amongst them, passing the hours playing croquet on the lawns behind Magdalen, my college—and still graduate with a First. But you must be examined and demonstrate mastery of the material.
    To assist the student in this, the university assigns him a tutor. Tutors are usually shaggy, ill-groomed junior dons who smoke and drink to excess and never leave their rooms except for illicit sexual liaisons or to replenish their stocks of tobacco and spirits. A good tutor can make one’s college experience a revolutionary passage, to life as well as to literature; a bad one can make it misery. The college provides accommodations for each tutor, usually in double suites with another tutor (Stein’s rooms were actually at Trinity College, where he was pursuing his own doctorate) with a kitchen and bath/WC, two sleeping rooms, and a sitting room between. The latter was invariably a hellhole, overheated in winter to a point barely shy of combustion, and knee-deep in texts, papers and the usual detritus of the academic life. I loved Stein’s sitting room. It was the first home I’d had since my mother died.
    I went up to Oxford because of Stein. His letters and testimonials got me in. Stein had eight or nine other pupils, among whom