The Norfolk Mystery (The County Guides) Read Free Page B

college?’
    â€˜Yes. Christ’s College. I am intrigued.’
    â€˜Well, it was very … nice.’
    â€˜Nice?’
    He paused in his typing and peered dimly at me in a manner I later came to recognise as a characteristic sign of his disbelief and despair at another’s complete ignorance and lack of effort. ‘Come on, man. Buck up. You can do better than that, can’t you?’
    I was uncertain as to how to respond.
    â€˜I certainly enjoyed my time there, sir.’
    â€˜I believe you did enjoy your time at college, Sefton. Indeed, I see by your abysmal degree classification that you may have enjoyed your time there rather more than was advisable.’
    â€˜Perhaps, sir, yes.’
    â€˜Too rich to work, are we?’
    â€˜No, sir,’ I replied. I was not, in fact, rich at all. My parents were dead. The family fortune, such as it was, had been squandered. I had inherited only cutlery, crockery, debts, regrets and memories.
    He looked at me sceptically. And then tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, and then a final and resounding tap as the sands of the timer ran out. A knock came at the door.
    â€˜Eleven o’clock post,’ said my interviewer. ‘Enter!’
    A porter entered the dark room as my interviewer peeled the page he had been typing from the Underwood, shook it decisively, folded it twice, placed it in an envelope, sealed it and handed it over. The porter left the room in silence.
    My interviewer then checked his watch, promptly upended his egg-timer – ‘Fifteen minutes,’ he said – sat back in his chair, stroked his moustache, and returned to the subject we had been discussing as if nothing had occurred.
    â€˜I was asking about the history of the college, Sefton.’
    â€˜I’m afraid I don’t know much about the history, sir.’
    â€˜It was founded by?’
    â€˜I don’t know, sir.’
    â€˜I see. You are interested in history, though?’
    â€˜I have taught history, sir, as a schoolmaster.’
    â€˜That’s not the question I asked, though, Sefton, is it?’
    â€˜No, sir.’
    â€˜Schooled at Merchant Taylors’, I see.’ He brandished my curriculum vitae before him, as though it were a piece of dubious evidence and I were a felon on trial.
    â€˜Yes, sir.’
    â€˜Never mind. Keen on sports?’
    â€˜Yes, sir.’
    â€˜No time for them myself. Except perhaps croquet. And boxing. Greyhound racing. Motor racing. Speedway. Athletics … They’ve ruined cricket. And you fancy yourself as a writer, I see?’
    â€˜I wouldn’t say that, sir.’
    â€˜It says here, publications in the
Public Schools’ Book of Verse
, 1930, 1931 and 1932.’
    â€˜Yes, sir.’
    â€˜So, you’re a poet?’
    â€˜I write poetry, sir.’
    â€˜I see. The modern stuff, is it?’
    â€˜I suppose it is, sir. Yes.’
    â€˜Hm. You know Wordsworth, though?’
    â€˜Yes, sir, I do.’
    â€˜Go ahead, then.’
    â€˜Sorry, sir, I don’t understand. Go ahead with what?’
    â€˜A recitation, please, Sefton. Wordsworth. Whatever you choose.’
    And he leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and waited.
    It was fortunate – both fortunate, in fact, and unfortunate – that while at Merchant Taylors’ I had been tutored by the late Dr C.T. Davis, a Welshman and famously strict disciplinarian, who beat us boys regularly and relentlessly, but who also drummed into us passages of poetry, his appalling cruelty matched only by his undeniable intellectual ferocity. If a boy failed to recite a line correctly, Davis – who, it seemed, knew the whole of the corpus of English poetry by heart – would literally throw the book at him. There were rumours that more than one boy had been blinded by Quiller-Couch’s
Oxford Book of English Verse
. I myself was several times beaten about the ears with Tennyson and struck hard with
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