Fools of Fortune by William Trevor Page A

and Preparation. Cloister cricket is a tradition too, but that’s only played in the summer term. In class and Chapel and Dining Hall we have to wear gowns. On Sundays we wear surplices in Chapel, and the masters have academic hoods, all different colours.
    The chaplain was a good-hearted man with a stutter, keen on rugby. Old Dove-White, who was my housemaster, sought a quiet life, never minding when we read books during his Latin lessons, or played cards or dice. Mad Mack, the mathematics master, had a ginger moustache and ginger hair and twisted the lobes of your ears. There was a man in a white coat who dealt in scientific subjects, and bald Monsieur Bertain who liked to talk about the part he’d played in the German war. Hopeless Gibbon, younger than one of the prefects, couldn’t keep order. Dove-White’s pipe tobacco had burnt holes all over his clothes.
    Exposed to the winds that swept across the gorse-laden hillsides, the school that contained these people was a cloistered world of its own, different in every way from Mercier Street Model. None of my new mentors resembled the two teachers I had previously experienced, and the sexual obsessions of Elmer Dunne paled to ordinariness when related to the exploration of that same subject by my classroom companions. The headmaster was known as the Scrotum and his wife as Mrs Scrotum.
    In my letters to my mother I did not repeat that nickname, nor say that Mr Mack was violent or that Hopeless Gibbon had difficulties in the classroom. The Chaplain has a tin of biscuits, I wrote, like the tins there used to be along the counter of Driscoll’s in Lough, with glass over them .A boy whose name I don’t know has got into trouble because of the mice he keeps, and his jackdaw pecked poor Fukes and had to be given its freedom, even though the boy had taught it to say ‘Amen’. In reply there was a letter that was difficult to read. Some of the ink had been smudged, and the sentences rambled on, often remaining unconcluded. My mother’s handwriting was jagged and unfemi-nine, sprawling as if a spider had trailed its way from the inkwell across the page. She described a walk she had taken, and how she’d sat on a low wall and a cat had crept into her lap. Vaguely she said she missed me.
    Ring and de Courcy and I used to smuggle bread out of Dining Hall beneath our gowns and toast it in the furnace-room on the end of a length of wire. On Sundays we had tea with Dove-White, who invited a few other boys as well. He always had Fuller’s cakes, which he had sent up specially from Dublin, and he let us make toast at his fire, a less difficult operation than poking slices of bread into the coke furnace. We sat for hours in his cluttered room, full of the belongings of boys who had long since left the school. Stacked away in corners, filthy with dust by now, were cricket bats and tennis racquets, books, overnight cases, deflated rugby balls, rugs, canes, caps, scarves, hats, hockey sticks, and a useful supply of gowns, surplices, blazers and House ties. ‘Oh, now, now,’ Dove-White would protest with a half-hearted sigh when the conversation touched upon Big Lily the nightwatchman’s wife, who was the source of the graffiti in the school’s whitewashed lavatory cubicles. Big Lily worked in the kitchens, returning in the late evening to a cottage halfway down the back drive. Her husband, O’Toole, would then get up and prepare himself for his night’s duty in the furnace-room. It wasn’t until he was safely ensconced in a chair among the piles of coke that surreptitious journeys were made to the windows of his cottage, where the culminating excitement was the sight of Big Lily washing herself at the kitchen sink. I made the journey myself, since to do so had long since become a ritual experience for all new boys.
    ‘Blood Major knocked on the door,’ de Courcy said in Dove-White’s room, and Dove-White gave his sigh. Blood Major was no longer at the school, but the night he