The Discovery Of Slowness Read Online Free PDF Page B

also lacked the walled-in courtyard and lawn. The school had three high, sharp-cornered chimneys, as if it contained a forge. There was a lot of hammering.
    Â Â Â Â 
    â€˜Correction Day’. There were two of them: rod day and cane day. Could a plant grow in freedom and become a cane? Strange, too, how many names there were when it came to punishment. The head was called a ‘turnip’ or ‘poet’s box’; the backside was called ‘register’; ears were ‘spoons’; hands ‘paws’ – those to be punished were malefactors. John had enough on his hands with current words. This additional vocabulary seemed to him a waste.
    Punishment itself he ignored. Mouth closed, his eyes turned to a faraway world – that was how one got over correction days. It was humiliating that the moderators held the delinquent as if he wanted to run away. John ignored them as well. There were also punishments outside the regular order. Being late for prayers, not having signed out before going to the tree, being caught at a game of dice: then one got it ad hoc. On the school’s seal was written ‘ Qui parcit virgam, odit filium ’ – ‘He who spares the rod hates the child’. Dr Orme remarked that this was pig Latin: parcere takes the dative.
    Dr Orme wore silk knee-breeches, lived in a house on Breakneck Lane, and, it was said, conducted experiments with clocks and plants – both of which he collected assiduously. An ancestor, they said, had been one of the ‘eight captains of Portsmouth’. Although John never found out what the captains were supposed to have done, the gentle schoolmaster assumed something navigational for him: often John even saw in him a secret ally.
    Dr Orme never shouted or thrashed anyone. Perhaps he wasless interested in the children than in his clocks. He left it to his assistant master to enforce the necessary discipline and came over to the school only for lessons.
    John wanted to learn better how to behave with people like Stopford; they were not undangerous. On one of his first days at school he said in response to a question by Stopford: ‘Sir, I need a little time to find the answer.’ The assistant was irritated. There were crimes by pupils that didn’t give even him any satisfaction. Asking for more time, that was no discipline to speak of.
    Â Â Â Â 
    Thomas Webb and Bob Cracroft kept thick notebooks in which they entered something every day in fine script. On one of the covers was written ‘Sayings and Thoughts’ or ‘Common Latin Phrases’. That made a good impression. So John started a voluminous copybook with the heading ‘Noteworthy Phrases and Constructions to Be Remembered’, which included quotations from Virgil and Cicero. When he wasn’t writing in it, the notebook was buried in his chest under his linen.
    Â Â Â Â 
    Dinner. After long prayers, only bread, small beer, and cheese. Meat broth twice a week; vegetables never. Anyone who broke into the orchard and stole fruit got the cane. At Rugby, Atkinson told them, the pupils had locked up their rector in the school’s cellar two years ago. Since then they were given real meat three times a week and were thrashed only once a week. ‘Is he still in the cellar?’ asked John.
    In the navy, too, they had mutinied against admirals!
    Â Â Â Â 
    The dormitory was large and cold. All around them they saw displays of names of former pupils who had accomplished something because they had studied diligently. The windows were barred. The beds jutted out into the room. Every sleeper was accessible on both sides. No one could turn to a protective wall to stare at it or cry. You made believe that you slept until you did sleep. The light burned incessantly. Stopford wandered up and down to see where the pupils had their hands. John Franklin’s travels under his covers were not noticeable;he withdrew them