'Couple of broken legs once in a while but they'd get that anyway on the rugger field. In fact, I think it's fair to say that the boys taking this course are less likely to do themselves an injury than inflict some pretty nasty ones on other people.'
They went into the gym and watched a demonstration of unarmed combat. By the time it was over, Mr Clyde-Browne had made up his mind. Whatever else Groxbourne might fail to provide, it would guarantee Peregrine's entry into the Army. He returned to the Headmaster's study well content.
'Right, well I think we'll put him in Mr Glodstone's house,' said the Headmaster, as Mr Clyde-Browne took out his cheque-book 'Marvellous with boys, Glodstone. And as for fees...'
'I'll pay in advance for three years.'
The Headmaster looked at him quizzically. 'You wouldn't rather wait and see if he finds our atmosphere suits him?'
But Mr Clyde-Browne was adamant. Having got Peregrine into what approximated to a Public School, he had no intention of having him expelled. 'I've added a thousand pounds for the Chapel Restoration Fund,' he said, 'I noticed you're making an appeal.'
And having written out a cheque for ten thousand pounds, he left in an ebullient mood. He had been particularly heartened to learn that the Overactive Underachiever's Course extended into the summer holidays when Major Fetherington took the group to North Wales for 'a spot of mountaineering and cross-country compass marching'.
'It will give us a chance to get away on our own,' Mr Clyde-Browne thought happily as he drove South. But this was not the argument he used to persuade his wife, who had learned from a friend that Groxbourne was the last school she'd send her son to.
'Elspeth says it's a brutal place and the boys are nearly all farmers sons and the teaching is appalling.'
'It's either Groxbourne or the local Comprehensive.'
'But there must be other schools...'
'There are. A great many, but they won't take Peregrine. Now if you want your son to mix with a lot of teenage tarts at the Comprehensive, you've merely to say the word.'
Mrs Clyde-Browne didn't. It was one of her most ingrained beliefs that only the working class sent their children to Comprehensives and Peregrine must never be allowed to pick up their deplorable habits.
'It seems such a shame we can't afford a private tutor,' she whined, but Mr Clyde-Browne was not to be deflected.
'The boy has got to learn to stand on his own feet and face up to the realities of life. He won't do that by staying at home and being mollycoddled by you and some down-at-heel unemployable posing as a private tutor.' A remark which said as much for his own view of the world's awful reality as it did for his apparent conviction that Peregrine had spent the first fifteen years of his life standing on other people's two feet or perched on one of his own.
'Well, I like that,' said Mrs Clyde-Browne with some spirit.
'And I don't,' continued her husband, working himself up into a defensive fury. 'If it hadn't been for your insistence on bringing him up like a china doll, he wouldn't be the idiot he is now. But no, it had to be 'Peregrine do this and Peregrine do that' and 'Don't get your clothes dirty, Peregrine.' Come to think of it, it's a wonder the boy has half a mind to call his own.'
In this he was being unfair. Peregrine's peculiarities owed as much of their bias to his father as to his mother. Mr Clyde-Browne's career as a solicitor with court experience disposed him to divide the world up into the entirely innocent and the wholly guilty, with no states of uncertainty in between. Peregrine had imbibed his rigid ideas of good and bad from his father and had had them reinforced by his mother. Mrs Clyde-Browne's social pretensions and her refusal to think the worst of anyone in their circle of acquaintances, all of whom must be nice because the
