THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS PAST

One Xmas Eve, a few years ago, the Planning Committee decided to approve the demolition of Barrett’s old school. He made one last journey, by car, over many miles, to see it. There it was, in its Edwardian elegance, framed by the silvery light from a full moon which threw into bas-relief the ornate pillars, portico and oriel window of the large and dignified Doric front entrance. Barrett’s footfalls rang heavily across the deserted playground. He walked over to a grassed area where his old temporary classroom, nothing better than a nissen hut, used to stand. It used to be heated by a coke-burning stove, he remembered, and he recalled how Tusker, the maths master, would lift up the tail of his gown and warm his behind at the metal stove. ‘Ah, there’s bliss,’ Tusker would say.

Barrett came across the place where the greenhouse had once stood, where ‘Weedy’ Wilkinson, the horticultural science master requested him to come in on lonely, eerie winter nights to check that the vents were properly closed, so that Weedy’s plethora of begonias and coleuses (colei?) didn’t develop Chinese stem rot or Brassica mildew or some other wretched horticultural blight. He could see an angry Weedy even now, with his caterpillar eyebrows waving like palm fronds as he furiously wagged a finger at a recalcitrant pupil. The greenhouse, and Weedy, had long gone to a vast allotment in the sky.

The gym was still there, where the sadist gym-master Birley had taught Barrett to climb a rope by repeatingly striking him with a gym shoe until he managed to struggle up, with burning hands, until he was out of range of the slipper. Here was the school playing-field, over which Barrett had lumbered in last in the 1965 school sports cross-town run. Barrett had only got back at all because he had caught a bus for the middle mile and a quarter. How the school had cheered him when he had finally hove into view, and how he had waved back! Happy, carefree days!

Finally, there was the chemistry lab, where Barrett had mixed magnesium sulphate with, he didn’t know, mushroomium hydroperoxide or something, and had damned near taken his eyelids off. As he walked past the old corrugated-iron shelter, in which MacTighe, the only pupil in the school to own motorised transport, habitually parked his noisome Zundapp scooter, Barrett got to thinking about the friendships he had made.

He’d moved a long way away, and he’d lost touch, but there was one person in particular that now flitted across his consciousness. This friend was Dan Boodle, and they had been very close chums for the last couple of years of their schooling. Boodle had arrived from a white farm in Zimbabwe, with a quiff and a funny accent, which gave him an air of mystique. He was believed to have Bohemian habits, because he wore John Lennon spectacles and high-collared shirts, listened to blues music instead of the Monkees, managed the chords E and B7 on the guitar and was able to wobble his adam’s apple up and down whenever he spoke.

Barrett shivered as the intense cold of the evening penetrated his thin raincoat, and he turned to leave, prior to making his long drive home. He cast one last look over his school, a sad, bittersweet, affectionate look at a building that had deserved to be preserved for ever, but which was to be turned into a new school that would resemble a silicon chip factory, a convex metal shed with the charm and architectural merit of an allotment water-butt. His old school would die, along with 100 years of history, laughter, tears, youthful optimism and blind curiosity.

A mist momentarily clouded his vision, and he collided with a burly, balding, middle-aged man, wearing spectacles and a clipped moustache. ‘I do apologise,’ Barrett said. ‘I didn’t see you there.’ ‘That’s quite all right,’ the other replied. I’ve just heard about the old school. I thought I’d have a last look at the place before they pull it down. It served me well.’ ‘Me, too. It’s funny how the memories come flooding back when you’re in loco parenthesis, as it were,’ mused Barrett. ‘You were a pupil here, then?’ asked the other. ‘Yes. Many years ago now,’ Barrett remarked. ‘So was I.’ They stood in silence for several seconds, before the moustachio’d man spoke again. He had a high, piping voice and he spread his flaccid hands expansively as he spoke. ‘They say that the ghost of old Judge Jaffers, the first Head, still walks abroad at night.’ Barrett looked as if he had seen a ghost himself, for despite the protection of several chins, the man’s adam’s apple wobbled up and down with great avidity. ‘What’s your name?’ Barrett eventually blurted out, in a hoarse whisper, although he knew it was an entirely irrelevant question and he wasn’t even waiting to hear the answer. ‘Boodle’ replied the other one. ‘What’s yours?’ Barrett paused only briefly before replying. ‘Carstairs,’ he said, ‘I was in 5x when you were in 5b. I’m sorry, I have to go, my taxi’s still on a meter.’ As he hurried away from the school, he reflected, not for the first time, how dangerous it was to be inflicted with the dreaded disease of excess sentimentality.