‘It’s important we toughen our feet,’ Michel said, stuffing his lurid blue rugby socks into his boots. ‘Footwear doesn’t last forever.’ Michel was using the school’s weekly cross-country run to prepare me for a world without consumer goods. We tied the laces of our rugby boots together and slung them around our necks.
Rhododendrons, stabbing and spiteful, massed along the edge of the millrace. Michel shuffled along the top of the wall, holding on to their branches. I followed him. White water rushed beneath us.
‘We’ll wait here.’
The bushes screened us from the path our games teacher, Mr Hill, would take as he caught up with his runners. Of course anyone inside the mill house would have had a clear view of us hiding there – but there was never anyone in.
I heard Hill running past. I rose and palmed the foliage aside and watched him go. I didn’t like cheating him, but I liked Michel more.
Michel was quiet, lugubrious, self-contained. For me, at any rate, he had extraordinary presence. A glamour. If he understood my feelings for him, he never let on. He showed very little tenderness for me. He wasn’t interested in my weaknesses. He wanted me to be strong. He cared for me as you would care for your side-kick, your familiar, for the man you had chosen to watch your back. He said we had to toughen up.
There was a narrow path of flattened grass beyond the bushes. After about fifty metres, even this petered out among bogs and fallen birches. Nothing here grew above a sapling’s height before it keeled over in the soft earth. The ground was so soft you could sink to your waist in it.
‘My feet hurt.’
‘Put your boots back on, then. We have to do this gradually. No point in getting cut.’
I found myself a seat – a damp cradle of tree roots – and wrestled damp socks over my wet feet. Balanced, comfortably barefoot, on a fallen log, Michel looked more strange than beautiful. I dithered, hoping he’d help me up. But as soon as he saw I was ready he moved off through the undergrowth, and suddenly a ridiculous fear took hold of me: that here, minutes away from school and everything familiar, Michel would abandon me and I would never find my way home.
We teetered on logs. We picked our way. Just under the surface of the mud were roots tough enough to sprain an ankle. Ferns towered over our heads. Even in this tiny corridor of untended green, even with the river to guide us, we sometimes lost our way. Nothing grew straight. Nothing held. Trees clung to life amid stands of nettle, oily-looking brambles and, at last, Michel’s centre of operations: a circle of abandoned refrigerators.
Michel drew a stick through the earth, sketching his ideas for me. Earthworks. Palisades. Curving paths that drew assaults ineluctably to one easily defended chokepoint. Here, where the fridges made a sarsen ring, he planned to dig down, roofing his redoubt with turf and leaf litter. The earthworks too he would camouflage, hiding them behind stands of blackthorn, its barbs as vicious as razor wire.
The river, swollen by recent rains, babbled against the trunks and roots of trees. ‘One stiff rain and you’ll be living in a mud-pool.’
Michel surveyed the ground – a golfer lining up for a putt. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Besides, all these defences – how are you going to come and go?’
He rehearsed for me the construction of his artful runs: traps he would safely crawl over, but which would stick an unwary intruder stone dead.
‘Just don’t mistake your entrance and your exit.’ What I meant was, ‘Don’t talk shit.’
Michel, deep in his dream of Millennium, missed the joke. ‘Now there’s the truth.’
‘I promise I’ll come visit you during the End Times.’
Michel laughed. ‘Come the End Times, it’ll be every man for himself.’
Cadet training at our school started when we were fifteen. The terms of the school’s foundation had gifted it military pretentions which it didn’t particularly deserve. Some came from service families and took being a cadet very seriously. Most of us regarded the whole carry-on as a tiresome cousin of our regular Wednesday afternoon games. There were trips here and there. Now and again you got to fire a gun. Most of the time you spent square-bashing or listening to well-meaning guest lectures. These revealed rather less of military life than the news bulletins and debate programmes to which we were already addicted.
There was a lot of fuss made over various military traditions, and slightly desperate attempts were made to foster a friendly rivalry between the services. There were rivalries, but they were local, accidental, and very short lived. They absolutely refused to take on an ideological aspect. Particular groups of friends joined particular services. Their preferences and animosities became the preferences and animosities of their service. Dress us as they would in scratchy serge and ill-fitting plastic boots, we were still schoolchildren, and our ordinary loyalties and friendships survived their every experiment.
It didn’t help, of course, that ‘they’ were our teachers. Uniform did not transform them, though some took it as a licence to behave less well towards us. In crabfat blue or khaki, they were no less themselves than we were. They looked ridiculous. The captain of the navy cadets was our school chaplain, a five-foot tall martinet whose crisp whites had to be ordered specially because the real service had no uniforms that small.
The cadet experience was entirely without glamour. There was an almost wilful shoddiness to it all. The air cadets played tug-o-war, heaving on their elastic rope. Once the rope was extended, a lever was let go, sending the school’s glider rolling across the sports fields. Sometimes it ended up in the long-jump pit. It never flew. Navy cadets kicked their heels indoors, staring at charts. Once a year they visited the coast and wetted and stained their heavy blue serge trousers in the sumps of a smelly, decommissioned frigate. I had imagined Michel, my closest friend, would join me in the army; they at least took us on night exercises every half-term.
I knew that Michel came from an Army family. He showed no interest in discussing the connection. He certainly wasn’t bound, through family loyalty, for a service career, as some were. All the same, it came as a surprise and a disappointment when he told me he wasn’t joining me in the Army cadets.
‘Well, what are you going to do?’
‘Community service.’
I burst out laughing.
‘What?’
There were a handful of peaceniks and loners among us, and the school catered for these aberrant consciences by sending them off on shopping errands for the local elderly and infirm.
Michel was too much of a loner to suffer a parade ground – this I understood. But try as I might I couldn’t picture Michel helping the weak and needy. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘It’s a way of getting to know people,’ Michel said – a prospector describing a geological expedition; there was no warmth in his vision. ‘It’s good to see how people manage.’
I imagined him casing every joint.
Our school cross-country route began with a circuit of the sports fields, then led us along a street lined with ostentatious wooden houses as far as the Margrave, its lead-roofed porch smothered in lilac. Here we turned down a bridleway – tarmac at the beginning, cinders at the end – that took us past an old mill. Though it had been converted long before to an ordinary dwelling, the millhouse was genuine. There was a pond and a race, and a pale scar of stonework in the brick wall marked where the axle of the wheel had spun. For me, the house marked the psychological boundary between town and country. Whenever I passed over the stile and crossed the plank bridge over water canalised between walls of aging, moss-felted brick, a weight lifted inside me. I felt free.
Michel was a runner. He represented the school in regional competitions. He won cups and shields. The rest of the time he wasted strength and athletic talent on muddy scrambles through farmers’ fields and break-neck, shit-strewn verges. The rumour was our games instructor was making our cross-country courses as unpleasant as possible so as to persuade Michel onto the playing field, where his speed was desperately needed. If this was true, he may as well not have bothered – Michel never had and never would see the point in team games.