5. FIRST DAY AT SCHOOL

Not all schools are kindly places, as Wallace is to discover.

By the time Wallace Pratchett was old enough to start school, his father was in no condition to do any more than beg that a protestant little boy and son of a church of England clergyman be accepted into a Catholic infant school. Due to the constraints of geography, the only school that little Wallace could be expected to walk to every day was Saint Movean’s Infant school.

Saint Movean’s school had a fearsome reputation due largely to the spirited belief by its Headmistress and a few of the staff that children are born evil and need purifying. The very act of conception, insisted Headmistress Sister Carthage, was the source of that evil. It was passed on from generation to generation as a gift from the corrupt and ungodly gonads of fathers who ought to know better.

So when little Wallace was taken there by Helen on his first school day in early September, (still aged four as his birthday was in December, and the beginning of the autumn term was deemed the proper time for him to start his education,) he was faced with the true monumental horror of his sin.

Sister Carthage was the horror that faced him that first day. With a face that had hardened to prune-like lines and a pallor that was the result of endless praying in darkened rooms, she stood before the reception class, and selected Wallace as her first victim, probably because he was of the wrong faith, though it wouldn’t have really mattered, they were all going to be victims sooner or later.

“What is your name?” the prune asked in a voice that sounded considerably less hydrated than the driest desert on Earth.

He looked at her through his eyes, a pleasing shade of blue that struck Sister Carthage as being particularly evil. “Wallace,” he replied.

“Wallace WHAT?” she creaked.

He thought his second name was Pratchett, though, truth to tell, it was little more than an informed guess, so “Pratchett, I think,” he added, his eyes beseeching that she offer him a little kindness.

“You think?” she squawked. “You only think that your name is Pratchett? How old are you, boy?”

He was on firmer, more assured ground when he replied. “I’m four,” he said firmly.

That was enough of an insult for Sister Carthage. How dared this miscreant of an urchin from the most wrong of all churches not call her sister? After all, she had been made a bride of Christ in a lustful orgy of self-love that had bordered on the hypnotic, and she deserved that recognition even from a horror like this child.

“You’re four?” she squeezed out, “you’re four, SISTER!”

This is where his pre-school education proved itself to have been most inadequate. As far as he was concerned he didn’t have a sister though he’d heard mummy say she’d love to have another baby so that little Wallace could have a sister or brother, she didn’t care which, but that had never happened, and probably wouldn’t, bearing in mind the circumstances. He had no idea what role daddy played in the production of sisters, but was sure it had something to do with that big book he treasured on his lectern in church.

So, in reply to Sister Carthage, “I don’t have a sister, though mummy says she wants one for me,” he said quietly. He’d been taught to be quiet and polite when he spoke to grown-ups, even wrinkled ones like this white-veiled apparition with her hooked nose and protruding chin.

To Sister Carthage, this was the last straw. With a vile acidic taste in her mouth, one that threatened to dribble down that chin of hers, she produced a cane like magic from somewhere behind her.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked, her voice so icy it could have frozen snow.

“A walking stick like daddy’s”, he replied in an instant, because, whenever he walked anywhere these days the Reverent Jack Pratchett used a walking stick and Wallace knew that was what it was called.

“It’s a cane,” she hissed, “a cane for beating the sin out of evil children, and if you’re not careful I’m going to use it to beat the sin out of you!”

That was gobbledegook, so far as Wallace was concerned. What was beating? He had a vague idea what sin was, it had something to do with what daddy thought cousin Maureen did with him when nobody was looking, and that was playing and pretending, she being a princess and he being a handsome prince, and he’d never seen anything peculiar or odd about that.

Sister Carthage hadn’t finished.

“And I’m going to beat some of that sin out of you now,” she pronounced. The air in the room became dry as the other children gasped. Some of them knew what was coming. Some of them had experienced a more informative pre-school education from parents who’d had evil amputated from their psyches in this school themselves when they’d been children.

When Sister Carthage had exercised her prerogative and removed some of Wallace’s sin he was howling his head off and had three red bruises on his small infant backside. He had been introduced to the realities of a harsh and cruel world by one of its harshest and most cruel ambassadors, and life for him would never be quite the same again.

It was when he arrived home that life (in the shape of cousin Maureen, who really and truly loved her little cousin) who taught him his second important lesson.

“Why did she do this?” she asked when she quite accidentally caught sight of the red weals on the boy’s backside when he was changing out of his school clothes.

“I said I didn’t have a sister,” he replied, and started weeping again in juddering gasps of anguish.

“Is that it? Is that all?” she asked, incredulously, and being twice his age she had a great deal more understanding of some the gutters that run through apparently Christian minds.

He nodded.

“There’s no need to trouble your daddy because he’s poorly,” Maureen told him, “we’ll deal with this ourselves. At least, I will. I know where the old witch lives and what’s more I know someone important in the church who wants to see her gone. She’s well known as a brute. Just you wait and see!”

“Is she a real witch?” he asked, all innocence coloured by the start of understanding.

“She’s more than a witch,” Maureen told him, “though you mustn’t tell her I told you that. But just you wait and see! Now pull your shorts up and we’ll say nothing to your mummy and daddy. They’ve got enough worrying them without having to deal with this.”

“That’s the good thing about having a cousin sharing the same house,” thought Wallace. “There’s always someone close at hand to put wrong things right.”

Which is what Maureen did. She never told anyone, not even Wallace, what she did and how she managed it, but she knew one thing too scary about the head of the school governors and his fondness for young men, and the very next week Sister Carthage was promoted out of the school where she loved to exorcise evil, and was made Head Warden of a small prison for misguided women, miles away in the big city, where mean spirits were endemic and some inmates even enjoyed the odd beating.

Someone brand new by the name of Sister Prudence succeeded her as the head of St Movean School, and under her bright and sparkling kindly tutelage physical punishment was banned and children learned to smile.

Why, Wallace Pratchett even got to like his time there.

© Peter Rogerson, 31.05.19