Colonel Bogey

| ongoing |

“And now, children, a follow-up question: where is the other one?”

“In the Albert Hall!” screamed class 6B.

“Yes!” said Mr Hewitt, beaming. “What stars you are!” 

<Ding Ding>

The children began gathering their books, pens and pencils.

“And tomorrow, we’ll turn to how the damn thing ended up there in the first place: die materfamilien, young Klara herself!”

The class nodded in agreement and started to file slowly out of the room.

“Don’t forget to fill in pages four and five of your workbooks this evening,” said Hewitt, returning to his marking. “And yes: this will be on the test!” 

The noise of the class receded into the D-block corridor. After a few moments, Hewitt looked up to see young Nancy Trentwhistle standing in front of his desk. 

“Hm? Don’t you have mathe—?”

“Sir,” interrupted Nancy. “Why are we spending so much time learning about Hitler’s testicles? My friends at Woodside are studying Tenochtitlan and the complex sociopolitical systems of the Aztecs.”

“Pah! Those chancers!”

“And yet we’ve been reciting this song for weeks now.”

Hewitt let out a deep, professorial sigh.

“Ms Trentwhistle, do you have any idea how many times Catholics recite the Hail Mary? Or the frequency with which Muslims utter As-Salam-u-Alaikum?”

“Er—”

“Innumerable times, young lady — oodles.”

“Oodles?”

“Oodles. A Catholic’s appeal for the Virgin’s intercession is foundational; it forms the substratum of the faith itself; it is dug into the very loam of spiritual awakening. How old are you again?”  

“Twelve.”

“Sā́ncta Marī́a, Mā́ter Déī! High time to sharpen up, I’d say, missy. At your age, I was writing my first treatise on ‘Monorchism and Modernity’ — not fannying about playing hopscotch and crying over a shared sherbet dib-dab.” 

“But—”

“Not one more word, Trentwhistle. Three illuminations of O’Brien’s lyrics this afternoon — as penance. Here’s a key to the Scriptorium. And remember to complete pages four and five of your workbook — the chapter on Göring’s damaged oglet following the Beer Hall Putsch.” 

~  

This wasn’t the first time that Nancy had been sent to Hewitt’s Scriptorium as punishment for asking questions. In fact, this was the third time in as many weeks, and she had already come to dread that musty, suffocating air and bludgeoning silence. The room was a dark and cramped oblong at the very end of D-block. It contained only a sixty-watt bulb, a standard-issue school desk and chair, and stacks of unused cartridge paper. In the past, this room had served as the History Department store cupboard, but since Hewitt’s ascension to the role of HoD, the textbooks and stationery were no longer welcome. Even the label on the door was gone: in its place, a highly polished brushed-brass legend, laser-cut in elaborate medieval text: “Scriptorium: Salva Veritate”.

Nancy stood before the sign and shook her head in disbelief. 

She was new to the school, having left neighbouring Woodside Grammar the previous semester, and truth be told, she’d not yet settled. Her classmates refused to talk to her, and she was often singled out by the teachers, who regarded her as too precocious, too much of a “Woodside know-it-all”. Hewitt was the worst of them — and Mr Franks, the design teacher, who had, during Nancy’s first week, set fire to her “below par” scale-model ductus deferens in front of the whole class. The school seemed senseless to her, a farce; nothing added up, nothing was logical. 

Nancy unlocked the door to Hewitt’s Scriptorium and stepped inside. 

“Trentwhistle!” It was Hewitt, blustering down the corridor towards her. 

“Yes, sir?”

“Indigo, Orcein, Verdigris and Orpiment. Clean ink-wells. HB pencils. Fine brushes,” Hewitt said, passing Nancy a boxful of items. “Codex Cenannensis!”

Hewitt closed the door behind Nancy and left her alone in monastic quietude. Sighing deeply, she unpacked the items onto the table one by one, selected a clean sheet of paper from the stack, and twisted open the lurid verdigris inkpot.

“Hit-ler … has only … got … one ball,” Nancy mouthed slowly to herself as she started sketching out the illumination in crisp HB. “The … other … is in … the … Al-bert Hall …. His mo-ther … the dirty … bug-ger …. Cut … off the … other ... when he was … small.” 

This could be a long afternoon, Nancy thought to herself. 

<Knock Knock>

“Trentwhistle?”

~  

Hewitt’s full name was Lance Henry Hewitt, but his colleagues at Queen Anne High referred to him mainly as “Col”. Publicly, this moniker was down to Hewitt’s unwavering devotion to the March of Colonel Bogey — the school’s anthem and credo. Privately, though, it was due to his striking resemblance to a kohlrabi, a squat turnip-like vegetable with sparse, protruding green leaves and peeling skin. 

To say that Hewitt was an ugly man would be to simplify matters: he looked, somehow, accidental, like an unset plum pudding, or a badly spoiled ham. He wasn’t pleasant to look at, certainly, but neither was he boring or commonplace. His ugliness had texture and tone; it was a feature made up of features: his sprouting, wiry hair, his bulbous strawberry-pocked nose, his wonky eye, his purplish lips and his pronounced, triangular dimples. He was ugly in something of an artistic or archetypal way — his was an ur-form of ugly which was ... somehow beautiful. 

His mother and father had loved him in their own cold way, but, in truth, neither had really wanted a child, and certainly not a child like Lance — which is to say, a child described by the hospital midwife as a “berserk looking thing”. Over the years, they’d come to grow affectionate, sometimes even proud — when, say, baby Lance had burbled his first word or filled his first nappy — but their principle relationship with their son was one of timidity and distance, as if they were living with an unexploded sea-mine or a live-in puma. 

Lance’s father Philip, for example, was rarely seen within twenty feet of him; he’d nod at breakfast, or pass him dutifully on the stairs, but he’d never been one to bounce Lance on his knee or spin him round making aeroplane noises. It just wasn’t his nature. Philip’s one true love was God Almighty, and Lance (an enfeebled freakshow baby) simply paled in comparison. He worked as churchwarden for a local fire and brimstone Baptist ministry, and spent much of his time polishing the pews and patrolling the graveyard for vagrants and junkies. The very idea that his family would come in the way of his religious duty was anathema to him. 

Iris tried much harder with Lance than her husband did: she was friendly and warm and caring, albeit not especially motherly. She could never quite shake the feeling that Lance was somehow unknowable: a boy-formed enigma with shitty nappies and a powerful thirst for breastmilk. She took to calling Lance her “little mystery”, and would offer him side-eye glances as he played with his building blocks or scrawled on paper. Lance represented an agent of chaos in her otherwise ordered and mundane world, and although the couple had had all the scans, made all the doctor’s appointments and performed all the check-ups necessary for a Modern British Birth, Iris was completely astonished when Lance finally slithered out of her vagina at a quarter to eight one Saturday evening. 

Before her son was born, Iris worked as a receptionist at a local printworks, and found some satisfaction in putting through calls and sending off faxes. She’d never been too ambitious as a young woman, and was quite content taking a paycheck and living cheaply and easily with her ma and pa in Colchester. There was church every Sunday — religiously — and the big shop most Saturday mornings down at the Gateway; there were organ recitals and choir practices, and the yearly trip to Cornwall to see the extended family. But generally speaking, life was a pretty humdrum affair for young Iris, and that suited her down to a tee. 

It would be overly dramatic to say that this all changed when she first met Philip, but it is certainly true to say that something changed: she became more stern, more serious, and undeniably more pious. Her life took on a tone of reverence, of practised devotion — and she found it intoxicating.   

Philip had come into the printworks one Thursday morning to discuss the production of a church pamphlet on justificatio sola fide with the publications editor. It was to be his legacy contribution to the work of the parish, and he’d arrived with his sales pitch fully polished.

“The congregation will multiply,” she remembers him saying to her across the counter, flashing a broad smile. “This treatise here is just the tonic we need to bolster our flock, to eliminate doubt, to dutifully serve our God. Faith—sorry, what was your name again?”

“Iris.”

“—Faith, Iris: that’s all any of us needs. Do you have faith, Iris? Are you able to believe what you do not see, Iris, in order to see, finally, what you believe?”

“Saint Augustine,” mouthed Iris, breathlessly.

“Saint Augustine, Iris. The Bishop of Hippo Regius, right here in AnyPrintUK. In amongst the reams, duplicating, evangelising.” 

Their eyes locked. 

“Take this,” said Philip, passing Iris a small business card with the words “Live With Our Lord” emblazoned on it in raised letters. “Will I see you on Thursday evening for vespers?”

Still Iris said nothing; she looked deeply into his large dark eyes.

“Our evensong is heavenly, Iris. You simply must come.”

They were married a little over six months later, and although Iris’s father had only approved of the marriage begrudgingly, everyone agreed that the pair were well suited, and that their future looked bright enough. With a little help from the families, they secured a mortgage on a simple two-up-two-down on the outskirts of Ipswich, and thus began their modest, devout and dependable life together. 

The arrival of baby Lance some eighteen months later upset the pair’s cloistered asceticism, however, and suddenly the house was awash with muslin and screams. Philip quickly retreated into his doublelocked study to begin work on his Handbook to Soteriology — a work which, he assured his wife, would take several years of quiet research to complete — and Iris was left to administer and expunge the many liquids and solids of burgeoning life. It was a voluminous task, and one which slowly but surely wore Iris down into a deep and lasting malaise; and it was this malaise which formed the proscenium arch to the formative years of Lance’s life.

Lance never went hungry or cold or unshod exactly, but neither was he spoiled — nor even really noticed. His childhood passed in mere subsistence, both financially and emotionally, and as a result young Lance spent large swathes of his early life sequestered away within the four white walls of his upstairs bedroom. It was there that he took his first step, scrawled his first doodle and grew his first tooth; there, that he learned to write his own name and tie his own shoes; there, that he slowly tracked his own height against the frame of the door; and there, finally, that he fell clumsily into his own adolescence.