A Fool's Alphabet by Sebastian Faulks Page B

Beginner’s Alphabet, or One Man’s Alphabet. Anyone can have his own version.’
    â€˜I see,’ said Pietro, and resumed his long stare from the window.
    â€˜When we were in North Africa during the war, a chap in my platoon called Padgett, who’d never been out of Yorkshire before, he noticed what funny names the places had. He said he wanted to spend a night in a place beginning with every letter of the alphabet before he died.’
    â€˜And did he?’
    â€˜I shouldn’t think so. There weren’t many XYZs in Yorkshire.’
    Before the move to London there had been a period in which Raymond Russell wanted Pietro to go to boarding school. With the money from an uncle’s legacy he thought he could afford the fees and he had investigated some possible places. He drove Pietro to Dorking, near which was a place whose soft, bucolic name – Brockwood, as it turned out, though it might have been Greenglades, Mossbank or something equally misleading – gave no hint of the crazed routine and discipline behind its ivied walls. Pietro watched his father depart, then sat in his cubicle until it was time for bed.
    In the morning an adolescent boy with a quavering voice called out the passing of each minute to wake the others. Twelve past, thirteen past, fourteen past. Breakfast was at seven-thirty, served from a battered trough by a paroled lunatic with shaking hands. New boys scrubbed the tables, the cookers, the floors, and anything else that was greasy. There was PT in white vests with a retired but still vigorous sergeant major. The showers that followed were cold through some official negligence. The books were old and scribbled over. Latin primers had failed to inspire pupils to anything more than drawing phallic diagrams in the margin. The brittle measure of the first declension, the moody grandeur of the subjunctive slumbered on for ever undiscovered by generations of Brockwood boys. Small pieces of chalk, flicked by muscular men with hairy ears, came through the air like tracer fire. By the end of trigonometry, the rows of desks were dug in like a front-line trench at Ypres. The boys, with bulging thighs pressed into grey shorts, took interest only inbodily functions, their dug-out world deep beneath a cloud of fart and morning breath, their talk of dicks and spots and spunk. Plastic dustbins with sliced loaves of white bread and margarine were manhandled up to the dormitories at mid-morning by the new boys. Six or eight slices went down each adolescent throat. Then came the scrubbing of the tables, removal of margarine from walls and floors by cold water and an unaired cloth that left more stench than it removed. Back in class was the tedium of physics which spawned competitions to see who could hold his breath longest. Light-headed and purple in the face, the boys staggered on to chemistry and the slim chance of making someone suck sulphuric acid through a pipette. There was a constant anguish at having failed to do the prep properly and of dreading the tests, which were incomprehensible. No boy dared ask the chemistry master, a Scottish cruiserweight with homoerotic leanings, to explain his indecipherable marks on the blackboard for fear of exciting his wrath, or worse. Lunch and the waiting at table, carrying the food from the metal troughs up to the senior boys, serving the whole table in turn, left no time for a new boy to eat, even if he could have stomached it. Then there was rugby and the twitch of the knotted string of the referee’s whistle about the back of mottled thighs. The showers this time were optional, though still cold, and the afternoon dispatch of bread and margarine could be improved by chocolate or ice cream from the food shop. The shop, like everything else, had a name, coined with affection by some Victorian patriarch but used now in unthinking tradition. No boy would have found the name outdated. No boy had a view on anything.
    Every morning was the