Gunner Kelly

“We both won places at King Edward’s School.” The other boy filled the silence coolly. “Everyone who wins a place at King Edward’s—everyone from here—gets a bicycle from the Old General.” He put a capital letter on the title.

“Ah!” And with Duntisbury Royal’s inaccessibility to public transport, that was an act of practical generosity, thought Benedikt.

dummy1

“So you are able to cycle to school!”

“No.” Benje shook his head again. “There’s a taxi comes for us—

collects us in the morning, an‘ brings us back after first prep.”

The other boy nodded. “And the Old General pays for that as well.”

It was strange how they both held him in the living present, here of all places. But presumably the benefaction was endowed to outlast the benefactor.

“ ‘Sright,” agreed Benje. “An’ it’s Blackie Nabb’s old taxi, too—

my dad reckons it’s worth a fortune to him, picking us up. Says he wouldn’t be able to run it if it wasn’t for us, and Sandra Brown and Mary Hobbs—they go to the High.” He cocked his head at Benedikt. “They got bikes, too.”

So the Old General was both directly and indirectly the village’s benefactor—but not ‘was’, rather ‘had been’ ... he was falling into their confusion of tenses.

He looked at them sadly. “But now he is dead, the Old General . . .”

“Miss Becky is paying now,” said the other, boy, mistaking his sadness with the cold logic of youth.

“Well, she would, wouldn’t she! Becky’s all right—she used to go to the High in Blackie’s old rattle-trap too, didn’t she!” Benje’s view of the Old General’s successor was less deferential than his friend’s, and so was the face he now presented to Benedikt, even though he could not yet quite nerve himself to ask the questions his curiosity had printed clearly on it.

“Miss Becky is the Old General’s grand-daughter?” He prodded Benje towards those questions without scruple. It would not do to dummy1

underestimate either of these children—it never did to underestimate any children, but these two particularly. For a start, they were perhaps older than he had at first thought, and in spite of their peasant accents they were scholarship boys as well, so it seemed. Exactly what that meant, he wasn’t sure, in the present confused state of English education, which the English themselves had not standardised and didn’t seem to understand, let alone agree on. But it was still probably true that when English education was good it was very good, and these were fledgling products of it.

“Yes.” Suspicion, rather than curiosity, was dominant in the other boy.

Darren, he remembered suddenly. The outlandish name.

“You’re not English.” The first of Benje’s questions came in the guise of a statement.

“No, I am not.” It nettled him slightly that the boy’s first thrust had penetrated his almost faultless accent. “So what am I, then?”

“German,” said Benje unhesitatingly.

“Or Swedish,” said Darren. “Remember those two who came through last year, who stayed at the Eight Bells? The chap who played rugger—”

“German,” repeated Benje. “Betcha lop.”

So the Eight Bells did have rooms. “What makes you so sure, Benje?” It was time to counter-attack just a little, to assert equality rather than any adult superiority.

“How d’you know my name?”

Benedikt smiled. “Benje and Darren.”

dummy1

“On the road below Caesar’s Camp,” Darren jogged his friend’s memory. “When Old Cecil balled us out— remember?”

“Huh!” Benje didn’t like being jogged, especially in front of the stranger whose car he had touched, and most especially when that stranger was a foreigner too, that sound suggested.

“But you are quite right.” Benedikt invested the admission with a touch of admiration: more than equality, he wanted their friendship, because with these two little mobile spies on his side he could have a mine of information open to him about Duntisbury Royal, past and present. Precious little that happened in the Chase would escape them, and David Audley was a stranger there also.

Benje thawed slightly.

“You are quite right,” he repeated himself, grinning now.

“Wiesehofer—Thomas Wiesehofer, from West Germany.” And since he judged it time to be honestly foreign he extended his hand to each of them in turn.

For a moment the handshaking unsettled them. But they accepted the alien custom manfully, like the well- brought-up lads he had also judged them to be under their brashness, and his heart twisted between approval of them and disapproval for his own disingenuousness.

Benje rallied first, predictably on his mettle after the debacle of the names. “You’ve come to see . . . Miss Becky, have you?”

“Miss Becky?” That was a disconcertingly sharp little assumption, but having admitted it in the Eight Bells pubjic house ten minutes ago he could not deny it now. “Miss . . . Rebecca Maxwell-Smith dummy1

is that?”