Trubshaw's Secret
by John Everett
Free ebook download: Trubshaw's Secret by John Everett, legally licensed and available in PDF, and ePub formats.
The fifth instalment in the series, following Trubshaw's Ghost, Trubshaw's Folly, Trubshaw's Choice, and Trubshaw's Visitor. In this story, Trubshaw's headmaster gives him a secret task.
Good books for teens don't get any better! This is one of a series of tales about an English prep-school boy in the early 1950s. You may best read them in this order:
Book 1 Trubshaw's Ghost
Book 2 Trubshaw's Folly
Book 3 Trubshaw's Choice
Book 4 Trubshaw's Visitor
Book 5 Trubshaw's Secret
Trubshaw is a 12-year-old boy at a typical Boys' Prep School in the early 1950s. This is the fifth instalment of his story, and follows Trubshaw's Ghost, Trubshaw's Folly, Trubshaw's Choice, and Trubshaw's Visitor, ideally read in this order, and all available here. His headmaster gives him a secret task.
Excerpt:
Wetherill
I cannot make up my mind. Is life a tragedy or is it a comedy?
Here I am, half way through my fifth year here at Melton Hall Preparatory School for Boys, and you would think I would have got used to it by now. But each time a new term begins, and here we are in January of 1952, I have exactly the same reaction. Pure relief to be back here, and away from my parents, and yet I know that in a matter of just a few days I will be longing for the term to end to be released back to my home, if you can call it a home. I have the bad luck to be the son of parents who keep a hotel on the seafront of Eastbourne.
Keeping a hotel may be all right as a business, but it is dreadful as a home. My parents are never off duty, and this means no relief from the stress of impatient cooks, incompetent maids, and the constantly argumentative waiters, to say nothing of the guests. I am used as an unpaid servant to carry suitcases and to
run errands. As we are on the sea front, where there is nothing but hotels like ours, I have no friends. There is no one like me near at hand, and my only escape from the hotel that brings me into contact with people is to sing in the local church choir. This is quite a challenge, as I have no voice worth speaking of, but I need the escape.
So I am glad to be away from the hotel and back here at school. But here has its own problems. I am useless at games, which are all rather dangerous and full of opportunities to get hurt. Rugby involves people trying to hurt each other, and cricket is played with a ball so hard it hurts to catch it, or be hit by it. Being bad at games makes you very unpopular in a school like this. Where would I be without my one and only friend, Trubshaw?
He is not like the others at all. He was taught at home till he was eleven and came here. I say taught at home, but that is wrong. His father is a professor at Cambridge, and does not believe in teaching. So Trubs was just given books and allowed to discover everything for himself. He learnt Latin from being given a dictionary and a grammar book, and told to translate the Latin version of the Gospel of St John into English. The result of that is that he knows more Latin than any of us. Much the same with Maths, which he learnt from a chap called Euclid. So he is a total boffin, and you would think that would make him unpopular with his peers. But it does not, because he uses his mind to embarrass our teachers, and that gets us all on his side. He fights our battles against the teachers with his mind. He calls it philosophy. And he helps us with our homework too.
When he first arrived the Chaplain gave me the responsibility to show him round and sort of look after him. He never needed looking after. Just the reverse: he looks after me, and this makes the others avoid his displeasure, otherwise my unpopularity would be intolerable. Bullying does not have to be physical, and there was one time when Trubs managed to get one bully tried, like in a court, and this led to his being demoted from being a prefect. Trubs was a real hero for this achievement, and is now respected more than anyone else in the school.
The prefects in this school have two main privileges: they have a private room they can escape to, which even has some old and battered chairs in it, and they alone are permitted to wear long trousers. The rest of us have to wear grey worsted shorts, which leave your legs exposed to the elements. Someone like me will never get to be a prefect, but my friend Trubs, even though not yet in the sixth form, is a deputy prefect. He was raised to this unique position so that he could be in charge of a school club. He runs the Socrates Club, which meets in the school folly, a sort of Greek temple with no roof. Trubs takes his philosophy very seriously.
So here we are in a new term, and I am looking forward to catching up with what Trubs has got up to over the Christmas hols.
Headmaster
This is the worst term of the year. We are in winter, so the heating must be adequate, especially in the Masters' Common Room, which has a coal fire. My handyman, the cook's husband, has to keep the central heating boiler going, which is an art only he has mastered, so my fuel bills are huge. This is the key problem of owning and running a school like this. Every penny spent on something is a penny less for me and Mrs. Walker. Simple economics. If I reduce costs too steeply, then the parents will start to think of sending their boys somewhere else. The fees they pay are the only income. So it is a juggling act.
I have four key members of staff, all just too old to have been in the war, and another younger man who has been with us for seven years now, having joined as soon as he was demobbed. He had been a chaplain in the forces during hostilities, and came to me as Chaplain here, teaching Divinity and Latin. Finally I economise by appointing any young fellow I can get, to do the games and manage the youngest boys in the First Form. I am lucky with Easton, the current chap, who came straight here from school, because of a mix-up with his National Service. He has a two year wait for his place at university, so he is an ideal choice for me. Unqualified, so I can pay him next to nothing, while making it palatable by giving him free food and accommodation. But he will leave at the end of next term, so I must start looking to my usual agency for a similar sort of replacement.
The other forward planning I must do is with regard to prefects. This year's lot will all leave at the end of next term too. It is interesting that prefects, although entirely powerless, are an important part of the way the school hangs together. We need the boys to be a happy community. We do not have the capacity to control rebellion, especially since I am totally opposed to any form of corporal punishment. Some other headmasters I know swear by it, but I am sure it is not the best way. I do sometimes threaten to whack the boys, and this is what they expect. I rejoice that they have changed my surname from Walker to Whacker, as the nickname they use for me. My view is that if a boy cannot be controlled other than by the fear of pain, then I will ask his parents to find another school for him.
In senior schools the prefects are allowed, even encouraged, to cane the younger boys. My prefects are forbidden any such actions, and I was very relieved when my star pupil managed to deal with a prefect who had become a bully. He is already a deputy prefect, a post I invented specially for him so that he could take charge of a school club. Trubshaw wanted to run a sort of philosophical debating club, and I decided he should take charge of it himself, even though he was obviously too young to be a prefect. Without any doubt he will be my first choice for next year's set of prefects. But who else shall I choose? Perhaps I will do best if I ask him to choose them for me.
Ivy
It has been a wonderful Christmas break from the tedium of my work here. Florence, another girl from the village and about my age, and I are called by the fine sounding title of Assistant Matron. But we teenagers are simply underpaid skivvies, doing all the cleaning, washing, and cooking jobs given us by Matron or Cook. There is little else for girls like us who have just left school to do in a small rural village like ours. It is an easy bike ride to the school, and better some work than none, I suppose. But the problem for me is that I have seen a glimpse of a possible future. All this because I was invited by Trubshaw to join his family for Christmas. His father intends to marry his Polish housekeeper, and I have been invited to be bridesmaid. More than that: I am now looking at the prospect of being invited to become a trainee art restorer at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, where Trubshaw's father is a trustee. We Assistant Matrons are strongly forbidden from having any contact with the boys, and I nearly got into trouble about this once already. But I really do need to keep in touch with young Trubshaw, so that I can keep up to date with news from his father. Florence knows nothing of all this, but I must let her into the secret, so that I can devise a way to communicate with my friend, which she is bound to find out about sooner or later. Better to be open and tell her what I plan. So while we had a break from work on the very first day of the term I opened up to her.
“Flo, I need to let you into a secret.” “Gosh. What?”
“I spent part of the break in Cambridge.” “Where is Cambridge?”
“Quite a way away, but all right if you can get a lift in a car.”
“So who took you?”
“Trubshaw's father. He is a professor at the university there.”
“But how . . .?”
“It was all down to young Trubshaw, that brainy boy in the fifth year.” “But why?'
“His dad is going to marry the woman who has looked after Trubshaw since he was a two-year-old, because his real mother had died. She is a Polish refugee, so has virtually no friends in this country she could ask. So Trubshaw's dad asked him to find a bridesmaid, and he chose me. And I was collected by car to stay with them for a few days to meet the prospective bride.”
“Lucky you,” was all Florence could say.
“Now this is a secret, and Matron must never know.”
“Obviously.”
“But I need to keep in touch with Trubshaw, and the best way is by putting the occasional note under his pillow, and collecting any note he writes in return.”
“So you're telling me in case I find a note there?”
“Hope you don't mind.”
Of course not. I like secrets.”
Thus my plan was ready to put into action.
