It's Murder at St. Basket's Read online

  “Bloody rotten country, the States is.”

  “Have you ever been there?” I shot back.

  They all laughed. “Who’d want ter go there? You might get murdered.”

  “That’s baloney,” I said.

  They laughed again. “‘E’s a hoot,” one of them said.

  Just at that moment I noticed David Choudhry coming up the hill. He waved to me, and I kind of gestured him back, but it was too late, because the bovver boys had already seen him. “‘E yer friend, the Paki?”

  “He’s Pakistani.”

  “‘E’s Paki to me, myte.” “Myte” is how he said “mate.”

  Just then David got up to me; and suddenly he realized what was going on. David isn’t very big, and he isn’t very athletic, and I knew that the bovver boys were going to pick on him because of his size. The leader turned around to the rest. “‘Oo do you want, the Yank or the Paki, lads?”

  I was scared but I was mad. “Is that how brave you are?” I shouted. “You’re going to fight us, six guys to two?”

  “The Paki, ‘e hardly counts for one.”

  And then the amazing thing was, as little as David Choudhry was, he jumped on the guy. He just jumped up on him, got his arms around his neck, and down they went on the ground. David wouldn’t ever have had a chance, except that he took the bovver boy by surprise; and it didn’t last long anyhow, because in about a minute David was on the bottom and the other kid was on top, and David was shouting out that nobody was going to call him Paki, and the guy was hitting David in the face—not too hard, but hitting him. So I jumped on him, and knocked him off David, and somebody came down on top of me, and just at that moment there was a police whistle. The bovver boys just ran, and that was the end of it. The bobby sort of checked us over to see if we were all right, and find out where we belonged, and then he took us back to school to clean up. Luckily Miss Grime wasn’t around, and we managed to slip in and shower before anyone noticed that we’d been fighting. Fighting was against the rules, even though it wasn’t our fault.

  So that was another reason why David and I felt we had to help each other out. We were strangers; we were kind of outsiders, and if we didn’t look after each other, nobody would. And so you can see, in the end, why it didn’t matter much about discussing to see who would talk to Miss Grime about David being hurt: it was really up to me, anyway.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.”

  CHAPTER 2

  THE NAME OF the school was St. Basket’s. Actually it had a much longer name: The College of St. Basket Over-Woods, Beyond-the-Gates. I never did find out what all that meant. They had it written up in a pamphlet they had printed to impress the parents, but frankly it was too boring to read and I never finished it. All I know is that it had something to do with Henry the Eighth, who was the fat king who had all those wives, and that it wasn’t a college. In England they call some of the high schools colleges. What you go to after high school is university. Not the university or a university, but just university. The English have a short way of talking, with a lot of the words left out. You just have to get used to it.

  The reason why I happened to be getting used to it was, my father has a thing about England. He’s always going on about how some ancestor of his was the ninth cousin of an earl, and if forty or fifty dukes and earls and so forth happened to get killed in an airplane crash or something, he’d become the Prince of Wales or the President of Scotland or something. I forget what. Actually it’s a crock, and I could tell him so, only I hate to ruin his dreams. The way the English think Americans stink, they would no more let my father be Prince of Wales or whatever it is than a pig. In fact they’d rather have a pig than my father, if they were sure it was an English pig, without a trace of American blood.

  Anyway, because of this idea of being related to a duke who’s never even heard of him, my father always buys English clothes and stuff, and a special kind of English gin, and when he has a couple of these gins he’s likely to go striding around the apartment saying, “Cheers,” and “Jolly good,” and all that. So you can imagine how he felt when his company decided to send him to England to be head of their London office. If you want to know the truth, I think he told them he’d work for nothing or something. My mother was pretty excited by the idea, too, and for about three months it was all they’d talk about. They began getting English newspapers to read the ads for apartments, and maps for trips they planned to take and all that, and of course they wrote away to get me and my sister into St. Basket’s. You never saw such an uproar when we got the letter saying we’d got accepted. You’d have thought it was a letter from St. Peter saying we’d go into Heaven.

  I was suspicious about it right from the start, because while I’m not exactly stupid, I get a lot of B’s and C s. My sister isn’t much better, either, so I know there wasn’t any reason for St. Basket’s to be desperately begging us to rush over and join their school. But my father and mother were all excited, and they used it as an excuse to have a couple of English gins.

  All it did was make me and my sister nervous, though. We didn’t know anything about what the English were like, and we didn’t see how we could manage to be polite day after day. We didn’t want to go. We wanted to stay home with our friends and our usual school and our regular way of doing things. Of course, the idea that I was going to an English school made me a little proud, and I showed off a little in front of my friends; but actually I wished I weren’t going.

  And then somebody in my father’s company died and they decided they couldn’t send him after all. They said he was too valuable—at least that’s what he told me. It really upset him, and my mother too. My father got a promotion and a raise, but it didn’t help much—although he figured they would be able to go in two or three years anyway. It didn’t upset me, though, because I figured I was safe for now and who knows what could happen in two or three years?

  But I should have known my father better. He’d got his son into St. Basket’s College and he wasn’t going to waste the opportunity. One morning at breakfast he said, “We simply can’t pass up a chance like this, Chris—a classical English education. You’ll be miles ahead of everybody when you come back.”

  “I don’t want to be miles ahead of everybody,” I said.

  “Latin and Greek, and cricket and you’ll learn to ride. They must have extensive stables at St. Basket’s.”

  “How come Mary doesn’t have to go?”

  “She’s too young. Oh, it’ll be terrific, Chris, two thousand years of history underneath your feet.”

  “I don’t want to—”

  “Can’t you manage to be a little enthusiastic, Chris?”

  So in August the whole family came over for three weeks, and hung around London boring ourselves to death, and then they took me up to St. Basket’s and left me to my fate and all went back to New York. If my father had known about kids being belted by field hockey sticks he might have taken me home too, although I guess probably he’d never have believed it. Having one of the masters break a boy’s leg is pretty unbelievable.

  Actually, I didn’t really think that David was going to die, but it struck me in the back of my mind that he might; so after I realized it was up to me to tell Miss Grime, I left Margaret’s room and went across the hall to the dorm where David and Leslie and I lived.

  David was lying on his bed, propped up with a pillow. David still had his uniform on, but he’d pulled down the sock on his right leg. He looked pretty bad—all pale and sweaty.

  “Does it still hurt?” I asked.

  “It hurts awfully,” he said. “Sometimes it goes away for a few secs, but then it comes back again.”

  “It looks pretty swollen up,” I said.

  “Don’t touch it,” he said.

  I wished there was something I could do to make it stop hurting. “Do you think it’s broken?”

  “I never had a broken leg before. All I know is it bloody well hurts.”

  “Maybe I could
get you some aspirins or something,” I said.

  “Do you think they might help?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It says in the ads that they’re pain relievers. I don’t know if I believe that. We could try it, though.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “Maybe it’ll be better in the morning. Maybe it’s just a bad bruise.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “It hurts more than a bruise. He really bashed me.”

  “You could hear it crack,” I said. “Well, the thing is, Leslie and Margaret and I talked it over, and we decided somebody has to tell Miss Grime.”

  “She won’t care. She hates me because I’m a Pakistani. I’m only here because my father’s got the lolly.” David’s grandfather was some kind of rich Indian prince before they divided the country into India and Pakistan. David’s mother is actually English, which is why he’s got the name of David for a first name. His parents live in Paris.

  “She doesn’t like me, either,” I said. I got tired of standing up. I didn’t want to sit down on his bed because I might jiggle his leg, so I looked around to see whose chair had the least amount of junk on it. The dorm where Plainfield and David and I live is the old billiard room, from when the house was a mansion. It’s up on the fourth floor—just one room with a little old beat-up bed for each of us, and three bureaus and three kinds of wardrobes where we’re supposed to hang our clothes. Actually, we don’t hang them up too much. We keep the place pretty messy with clothes and books and papers and stuff junked around. Usually there’s a soccer football under the bed along with the dust, and a lot of toy soldiers set up someplace. Leslie’s got a hobby of toy soldiers, all painted with special colors of the various British regiments.

  The room isn’t too small, but it’s pretty crowded due to the way we’ve got it junked up. There’s a fireplace, with a gas heater in it, but of course you don’t get to turn it on except when it snows, which is mostly never. Actually, we’re supposed to keep the place spick and span.

  Old Shrimpton is supposed to come up and inspect every morning and chew us out if there’s the least piece of dust on the floor. At the beginning of the year he did it for about a week, but he’s pretty lazy, and now he doesn’t come up more than about once a month. He’ll say, “Come on, chaps, this is simply impossible. Get a move on. Let’s get on with it now, Quincy, this isn’t your American pigsty, you know, in England we don’t just toss our things about.” Of course, in England they did toss their things about—Leslie was worse than me about hanging up his clothes—but we’d slop around hanging things up until Shrimpton went away again, and that was about all the cleaning we did.

  Finally I decided that David’s chair had less junk on it than anybody’s, so I flung it all on Leslie’s bed and sat down. “Listen, David, what exactly did Jaggers tell you?”

  “You know he came up just before you did?”

  “He did?” I was surprised at that.

  “He pulled down my sock and looked at my leg. He said, ‘There was no need for all that bloody row, Choudhry, it’s just a bruise. Fell down on it the wrong way, I can tell. If you silly sods would pay attention to what I tell you, things like this wouldn’t happen.”

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “I told him I thought it was broken and I wanted to see the doctor. He began raging at that. He said we couldn’t bother the doctor over every little scratch, it was time I learned to bear up. I’d been living too soft and the rest of that rot he’s always flogging about us not being able to stand a little punishment.”

  Suddenly he stopped talking and sort of shuddered and sucked in a quick breath and closed his eyes. I knew it was hurting badly and he was trying not to moan or cry. It made me feel awful to see him like that. “Listen, David, we’re going to make Miss Grime get a doctor.”

  CHAPTER 3

  ST. BASKET’S IS in an old mansion that got turned into a school about a hundred years ago. It’s older than that because of being founded by Henry the Eighth or whoever it was, but they’ve only been in this building for around a hundred years. It’s a four-story brick building. Down in the basement there’s the kitchen and dining room, and a couple of classrooms, and more classrooms on the ground floor. On the next floor classrooms too, but mostly the apartment of Mr. and Miss Grime, who run the school. Then on the third floor there are rooms for a few of the masters, which is what they call the teachers. And on the top floor, some dorms for us boarders. There are only four of us. Most of the kids just come during the day.

  In front of the school there’s a little lawn and some bushes, but out back there’s a pretty big field where we can play athletics—games, the English call them. There’s a high, red brick wall surrounding everything, with two gates in it. The front gate opens onto Tanza Road, and the back one opens onto Hampstead Heath, which begins right behind the back wall.

  Those extensive stables that got my father all excited are part of the back wall. They probably were terrific once, but there aren’t any horses in them now. They’re just used for storage, so, as you can see, I’m not learning how to ride a horse.

  In general, I guess you could say everything about St. Basket’s is pretty old and beat up. The math book we have in the third form came out in 1927. Form is what the English have instead of grades. Third form is equal to the eighth grade. I guess it doesn’t matter too much about the math book, though arithmetic has changed, but the history book came out in 1936, so as far as St. Basket’s is concerned, the world came to an end in that year. Which suits them, I guess, because in 1936 England was still ruler of the seas.

  They don’t waste any money on heat, either. You see, they have the idea that it never gets cold in London except when it actually goes below freezing, so most of the time the radiators are stone cold, and the kids come to class all huddled up with sweaters on under their blazers, and mufflers—that’s scarves—around their necks. Sometimes you can actually see your breath—I’m not kidding, you can.

  Another thing they don’t waste any money on at St. Basket’s is food. For all I know, our fat cook, Mrs. Rabbit, may be terrific, but you can’t tell because we get mostly the same slop all the time. She says, “Before the war, we ‘ad lovely things to cook—roast venison and cakes with ever so many eggs, but it’s all too dear nowadays. Poor Mrs. Rabbit.” But I can understand why she’s so fat—mostly what we eat is starches and sweets. You don’t see too many vegetables around. We get a lot of things like shepherd’s pie. Another one they have is baked beans on toast. A big one is bangers and mash. Bangers are these fat sausages they have, and mash is mashed potatoes. Dessert is usually rice pudding or custard pudding, which is cake with custard sauce dumped over it. For breakfast, it’s cold cereal and cold toast with marmalade. The toast must have been hot once, otherwise it wouldn’t have got toasted, but to make sure that it’s cold and stiff when you eat it they let it stand around in a little rack for a while before they serve it. The only thing they have for it is orange marmalade. Being cold, the toast always smashes up when you spread anything on it, anyway.

  But the main thing wrong with St. Basket’s is that it’s a prison. You’re hardly allowed to do anything without asking, and usually they say no, anyway. They don’t bother to give you a reason, either. “We don’t do things that way at St. Basket’s,” is all the reason you ever get. You can’t use the telephone unless there’s an emergency; in fact, you’re not supposed to use a pay phone or anything when you’re away from the school, except, of course, on your vacation. But that doesn’t matter much, because you’re hardly ever away from school. Us boarders are not allowed to leave the grounds without permission. Of course, sometimes we go to another school to play them in football—that’s what we call soccer. Then on Sunday we go to church. But the only real time we’re allowed off is a couple of hours Sunday afternoon. I’m not kidding when I say it’s a prison.

  The floors all creak and the doors squeak and the desks have names carved in them with dates like 1872.
In the United States, the parents would come charging around and make them get new books and more vitamins, but English parents don’t mind. In fact, they like it that way. The idea of an English school is that if it doesn’t hurt you it isn’t good for you.

  What saved it was David Choudhry and Leslie Plainfield. The rest of the kids were day boys and girls, that is, they went home after school. But Choudhry and Plainfield and me and Margaret Fallows were boarders.

  After I left David I went down to the dining room for supper. Actually they call it tea—in England anything that comes between five and seven at night is tea, even if it’s a banquet—but actually it was plain old supper.

  The dining room being in the basement, the windows are up high. Over on one side there’s a little counter across the kitchen door where Mrs. Rabbit serves the meals. At lunchtime, when the day kids are there, the room is pretty full, and Mrs. Rabbit grunts and shouts, “Come along, boy,” and sweats into your food if you’re not lucky, but in the evening the four of us just sit at one table and relax.

  The masters ate at seven-thirty, and Mr. and Miss Grime ate at eight o’clock all by themselves in their suite on the second floor. Actually the masters were supposed to take turns eating with us and watch over our table manners, but they didn’t because they couldn’t stand the way we ate. Shrimpton always said, “One would go mad if one had to watch you wallow in the trough every evening. Table manners are not expected of Quincy, of course, one does not look for that kind of thing in Americans, but I am shocked at the rest of you.” Of course, he was wrong about that, too. English kids are great on heaving food around the place. You know, snapping peas on their spoons or scaling buttered bread at somebody. At lunchtime, when the day kids are there, there are always a few buns flying through the air. Leslie figures a meal doesn’t really count unless he’s flung a couple of buns or catapulted a few peas at somebody.

  Margaret and Plainfield were already there, jamming home the evening’s delicacy, which was the usual slop, bangers and mash and some peas that had been cooked for a few days and were practically white. Mrs. Rabbit was smart: she always quickly piled on the gravy before you got a look at the food, and if you washed it down with a lot of milk, you usually could ram home seconds.