MANY OF THE SIXTY BOYS in Manor House were as welcoming as Willy. Their indifference, however, didn’t unsettle me as much as their ease. Even the
ones my age acted as if they’d been born on the school grounds. Ludgrove had its problems, but at least I knew my way around, knew how to fox Pat, knew when sweets got handed out, how to survive letter-writing days. Over time I’d scratched and clawed my way to the top of the Ludgrove pyramid. Now, at Eton, I was at the bottom again.
Starting over.
Worse, without my best friend, Henners. He was attending a different school.
I didn’t even know how to get dressed in the morning. Every Etonian was required to wear a black tailcoat, white collarless shirt, white stiff collar pinned to the shirt with a stud—plus pinstripe trousers, heavy black shoes, and a tie that wasn’t a tie, more like a cloth strip folded into the white detachable collar. Formal kit, they called it, but it wasn’t formal, it was funereal. And there was a reason. We were supposed to be in perpetual mourning for old Henry VI. (Or else for King George, an early supporter of the school, who used to have the boys over to the castle for tea—or something like that.) Though Henry was my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, and though I was sorry for his passing, and for whatever pain it had caused those who loved him, I wasn’t keen on mourning the man around the clock. Any boy might balk at taking part in a never-ending funeral, but for a boy who’d just lost his mum it was a daily kick in the balls.
First morning: It took forever to fasten my trousers, button my waistcoat, fold my stiff collar, before finally getting out the door. I was frantic, desperate not to be
late, which would mean being forced to write my name in a large ledger, the Tardy Book, one of many new traditions I’d need to learn, along with a long list of new words and phrases. Classes were no longer classes: they were divs. Teachers were no longer teachers: they were beaks. Cigarettes were tabbage. (Seemingly everyone had a raging tabbage habit.) Chambers was the mid-morning meeting of the beaks, when they discussed the students, especially the problem students. I often felt my ears burning during Chambers.
Sport, I decided, would be my thing at Eton. Sporty boys were separated into two groups: dry bobs and wet bobs. Dry bobs played cricket, football, rugby, or polo. Wet bobs rowed, sailed, or swam. I was a dry who occasionally got wet. I played every dry sport, though rugby captured my heart. Beautiful game, plus a good excuse to run into stuff very hard. Rugby let me indulge my rage, which some had now taken to calling a “red mist.” Plus, I simply didn’t feel pain the way other boys did, which made me scary on a pitch. No one had an answer for a boy actually seeking external pain to match his internal.
I made some mates. It wasn’t easy. I had special requirements. I needed someone who wouldn’t tease me about being royal, someone who wouldn’t so much as mention my being the Spare. I needed someone who’d treat me normal, which meant ignoring the armed bodyguard sleeping down the hall, whose job was to keep me from being kidnapped or assassinated. (To say nothing of the electronic tracker and panic alarm I carried with me at all times.) My mates all met these criteria.
Sometimes my new mates and I would escape, head for Windsor Bridge, which connected Eton to Windsor over the River Thames. Specifically we’d head to the underside of the bridge, where we could smoke tabbage in privacy. My mates seemed to enjoy the naughtiness of it, whereas I just did it because I was on autopilot. Sure, I fancied a cig after a McDonald’s, who didn’t? But if we were going to bunk off, I’d much prefer heading over to Windsor Castle golf course, knocking a ball around, while drinking a wee beer.
Still, like a robot, I took every cig offered me, and in the same automatic, unthinking way, I soon graduated to weed.
