Though White had fled from the world of school, he never escaped the models it had given him on how to conduct his life. At school you had to pass tests and ordeals to prove you were brave. You tested your bravery in the playing fields, and through the beatings by masters and prefects. And there were the ceremonies of cruelty of the boys themselves: the initiations and ordeals that were the price of entrance into the school, and later into boys’ secret societies. White had put his hand between the cocked hammer of an unloaded revolver and its frame before the trigger was pulled. The pain was a triumph; in bearing the agony, he proved he could belong.
But White was not always the victim in these rituals. School taught him that as he suffered at the hands of older boys, so he should punish the younger. He joined gangs and terrorised those weaker than himself, testing them as he had been tested. One term the test was to jump from a window in Big School fourteen feet to the ground. Puppy Mason6 was too scared to do it, so White assisted in pushing him out. When the fall broke his leg in three places, they were impressed by his silence. He told the masters that he had tripped over a twig on the headmaster’s garden path. Puppy had been tested, had behaved heroically, and his membership of the fraternity was approved.
I knew nothing of such things. I knew about being hurt: the impossibly clumsy child that was me scraped her knees, tripped, grazed herself, hit her head on open windows and bled terribly. But I did not understand the logic behind ordeals of belonging. I did not see pain and bravery as steps toward gaining self-reliance, as necessary parts of growing up. But still I noticed, when I read The Sword in the Stone, that whenever the Wart became an animal, he seemed to be in danger. I puzzled over this. Merlyn is teaching him to be brave, I thought, eventually. Because he will need to be brave to be King.
I read Colonel Cully’s ordeal with the Wart over and over again. It mesmerised me because when you are small you don’t have to worry about the child heroes in books. They might suffer peril, but they are human: they never, ever die. But there was always a flicker of worry as I read The Sword in the Stone, for it was not quite clear if the Wart was human any more. He had been turned into a bird. Was he still the Wart? He was an animal now. Could he die? He might die. He might. And it was that possibility that held me spell-bound every time I read the scene; I felt an apprehensive terror that was just big enough to master. I’d read on, desperate to reach the end, for that moment when the Wart springs up from the perch, the goshawk’s great foot clutching at his wing, before he wrenches himself free and survives. I knew nothing of ordeals, but reading it felt like one. Every time I finished reading it, part of me was relieved that I’d survived to read it again.
White had escaped the school by running to the woods, but he’d rented a cottage on the old road to its door. He’d gained freedom by changing his life, but he’d not escaped the concept of freedom that school had given him. At school you move up from year to year, gaining more power and privilege until finally you leave. It was this notion of freedom – as the natural end to an ordeal-filled education – that never left White, and it was working within him when he lengthened Gos’s leash with breakable twine. As a schoolboy he knew that the boys over whom he’d had authority would one day have authority themselves. As a schoolmaster, too. And a falconer. Deep down he knew he was always training his charges for a time when they would be free.
25
Magical places
TEN DAYS HAVE passed. Last night the forecast was bad. A storm surge threatened to inundate East Anglia. All night I kept waking, listening to the rain, fearing for the caravans along the coast, their frail silver backs against the rain and rising seas. But the storm surge held back at the brink, and the morning dawned blue and shiny as a puddle.