Arthur & George

his head and asks Harry Charlesworth, who is always in the front row and has his hand up all the time.
    ‘Eight,’ Harry says, or, ‘Thirteen and a quarter,’ and Mr Bostock moves his head in George’s direction, to show how stupid he has been.
    One afternoon, on his way back to the Vicarage, George soils himself. His mother takes off his clothes, stands him in the bath, scrubs him down, dresses him again and takes him to Father. But George is unable to explain to his father why, though he is nearly seven years old, he has behaved like a baby in napkins.
    This happens again, and then again. His parents do not punish him, but their evident disappointment in their first-born – stupid at school, a baby on the way home – is as bad as any punishment. They discuss him over the top of his head.
    ‘The child gets his nerves from you, Charlotte.’
    ‘In any event, it cannot be teething.’
    ‘We can rule out cold, since we are in September.’
    ‘And indigestible items of food, since Horace is not affected.’
    ‘What remains?’
    ‘The only other cause the book suggests is fright.’
    ‘George, are you frightened of something?’
    George looks at his father, at the shiny clerical collar, at the broad, unsmiling face above it, the mouth which speaks the frequently incomprehensible truth from the pulpit of St Mark’s, and the black eyes which now command the truth from him. What is he to say? He is frightened of Wallie Sharp and Sid Henshaw and some others, but that would be telling on them. In any case, it is not what he fears most. Eventually he says, ‘I’m frightened of being stupid.’
    ‘George,’ his father replies, ‘we know you are not stupid. Your mother and I have taught you your letters and your sums. You are a bright boy. You can do sums at home but not at school. Can you tell us why?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Does Mr Bostock teach them differently?’
    ‘No, Father.’
    ‘Do you stop trying?’
    ‘No, Father. I can do them in the book but I can’t do them on the board.’
    ‘Charlotte, I think we should take him into Birmingham.’

Arthur
    Arthur had uncles who watched their brother’s decline and pitied his family. Their solution was to send Arthur to be schooled by the Jesuits in England. Aged nine, he was put on the train at Edinburgh and wept all the way to Preston. He would spend the next seven years at Stonyhurst, except for six weeks each summer, when he returned to the Mam and to his occasional father.
    These Jesuits had come over from Holland, bringing their curriculum and methods of discipline with them. Education comprised seven classes of knowledge – elements, figures, rudiments, grammar, syntax, poetry and rhetoric – with one year allotted to each. There was the usual public-school routine of Euclid, algebra and the classics, whose truths were endorsed by emphatic beatings. The instrument deployed – a piece of India rubber the size and thickness of a boot sole – had also come over from Holland, and was known as the Tolley. One blow on the hand, delivered with full Jesuitical intent, was enough to cause the palm to swell and change colour. The normal punishment for larger boys consisted of nine blows on each hand. Afterwards, the sinner could barely turn the doorknob of the study in which he had been beaten.
    The Tolley, it was explained to Arthur, had received its name as a Latin pun.
Fero
, I bear.
Fero, ferre, tuli, latum. Tuli
, I have borne, the Tolley is what we have borne, yes?
    The humour was as rough as the punishments. Asked how he saw his future, Arthur admitted that he had thought of becoming a civil engineer.
    ‘Well, you may be an engineer,’ replied the priest, ‘but I don’t think you’ll ever be a civil one.’
    Arthur developed into a large, boisterous youth, who found consolation in the school library and happiness on the cricket field. Once a week the boys were set to write home, which most regarded as a further punishment, but Arthur viewed as a reward. For that hour he would pour out everything to his mother. There may have been God, and Jesus Christ, and the Bible, and the Jesuits, and the Tolley, but the authority he most believed in and submitted to was his small, commanding Mam. She was an expert in all matters, from underclothing to hellfire. ‘Wear flannel next to your skin,’ she advised him, ‘and never believe in eternal punishment.’
    She had also, less deliberately, taught him a way to popularity. Early on, he began telling his