Box 88 : A Novel (2020)

with chauffeurs to drive them around and butlers on call to ferry glasses of orange juice to their studies. That night Kite didn’t sleep a wink. All he could think about were the photographs of Alford he had seen in a book Roger Dunlop had given him as a present for passing Common Entrance. Boys in tailcoats and top hats, lining the funeral route outside Windsor Castle following the death of King George VI; great men of yesteryear who had attended Alford in the Victorian era and gone on to run every corner of the British Empire; oil paintings of Alford’s magnificent cathedral and cloisters, built by Henry VII to stand for a thousand years. To Kite’s young eyes, the school promised to be a black-and-white time warp of ritual and convention so far removed from the life he knew in Scotland as to be almost incomprehensible. Kite’s father had given him a small silver box as a Christening present, engraved inside the lid with the simple message: To Lachlan, from Da and the date of the service. Kite clutched it in his hand all night, whispering to his father as Cheryl snored in the next-door bed.

‘Just give it a couple of weeks,’ she said as she prepared to leave Alford the following afternoon, having spent most of the day walking around the school campus. ‘Once you get used to it, I’m sure it’ll be a great success.’

It took Kite a lot longer than a couple of weeks.

On his first morning, having woken at six o’clock in a tiny study on the top floor of a house on Common Lane, he had put on the tail suit his mother had ordered from Billings and Edmonds in Alford High Street and wrestled with a stiff collar for almost an hour until one of the boys with a room on his corridor offered to help. He showed Kite how to place the metal studs in the front and back collar of the starched white shirt, then to loop a narrow length of rectangular cotton over the top button so that it formed a tie.

‘I look like a vicar,’ said Kite when he glanced in the mirror.

‘Get used to it,’ the boy replied.

This was to be his uniform for the next five years. Kite became acutely conscious of the fact that he sounded Scottish; there seemed to be no other boy in his year, even the ones called ‘Angus’ and ‘Ewan’, who was like him. He was quickly nicknamed ‘Jock’ and set about flattening his accent, making the consonants more clipped, giving the vowels more air, so that he sounded less like a run-of-the-mill Scottish teenager and more like Little Lord Fauntleroy. A couple of years later, as his peers became increasingly self-conscious about their class and background, Kite adopted a faux-Cockney twang, an affectation which remained with him – as it did with dozens of old Alfordians – into his early twenties.

The thirteen-year-old Kite also had to adjust to the arcane language of his new school. Teachers were not ‘teachers’, as they had been in Portpatrick, but ‘beaks’ – and they were all men. A bad piece of homework wasn’t just a bad piece of homework; it was known as a ‘rip’ because it was literally torn in half by a beak, who would then instruct the boy to show it to his housemaster. Break in the morning was ‘chambers’, terms were called ‘halves’ and each year’s intake of boys was known as a ‘block’. Stranger still – though they were never given a name – were the busloads of Japanese tourists who would park outside School Hall on weekdays and take photographs of the boys through the windows. Every time Kite walked past them in his tailcoat and stiff white collar, he felt like an exhibit in a human zoo.

Then there was Lionel Jones-Lewis. Kite’s housemaster, a fifty-something old Alfordian, was the only grown man Kite had ever met who hadn’t remarked on his mother’s beauty. He had been a scholar at Alford just after the war, taken a First in Mathematics at Cambridge, completed his military service as a submariner and applied immediately for a job at his alma mater. ‘LJL’, as he was known, had been at Alford ever since. A formidable intellectual with a peculiar fondness for the traditions and idiosyncrasies of Alford life, ‘Jumpy’ Jones-Lewis was, on the surface, a camp figure of fun, shuffling back and forth from the playing fields of Alford in Wellington boots, custard-coloured cords and his favourite purple anorak. Yet those boys who were unfortunate enough to be in his house saw a different side of Jones-Lewis. Late in the evenings he would walk into a boy’s room without knocking, hoping to catch him topless in a towel or in the process of removing his boxer shorts. Each study at Alford had its own desk where boys would do their homework in the evenings. In Kite’s first term at the school, Jones-Lewis came into his study two or three times a week and crouched beside his desk, purportedly to help him with a maths problem or chunk of Ancient Greek. In reality, he was looking forward to feeling him up. As Kite talked, Jones-Lewis would run his hand up and down his spine, stroking his lower back in a way that made the young boy freeze with anxiety. At thirteen, Kite had been unsure if this was normal behaviour for a ‘beak’ or something that he should be concerned about. When he told his mother at Christmas, she laughed it off, saying: ‘Don’t worry, sweetheart. He’s only being affectionate.’ Eventually Kite asked Jones-Lewis to stop, forcibly removing his hand from his leg on a summer evening in 1985. From that day on, Kite was a marked man. Though Jones-Lewis never again laid a finger on him, he treated Kite with none of the charm and easy goodwill that he extended to other boys in the house. He made sure that Kite obeyed