Coram Boy. Jamila Gavin

home was when he became a chorister and came to live in the cathedral. With the cathedral being barely a stone’s throw away from the docks, it hardly felt like leaving home, for Thomas was often able to escape to see his mother and father and all his brothers and sisters. So he was full of apprehension at the prospect of leaving the city for the very first time. But more than that, he was nervous about going to the home of a boy the others called a ‘gentleman’. He wasn’t sure that he had ever met a gentleman, although he could recognise a gentleman if he saw him on the street by the cut of his clothes and the deference with which he was treated. They were people far removed from him, who rode round in carriages and lived in remote big houses which he had only heard about, but never seen. He knew that the clergy at the cathedral were gentlemen but, somehow, enveloped in their clerical robes that was different. What would it be like to go to the home of a gentleman, be under the same roof as a gentleman – especially someone like Alexander?

      It was five years now since he joined as a new chorister aged eight. Alexander had already been a scholar for a year. Only slightly older, it was Alexander who had been put in charge of him and ordered to show him the ropes. A dour and unsmiling boy, he had dutifully led Thomas round the cathedral precincts, showing him the schoolroom and the song room where they learnt their music, and Miller’s Green, the schoolmaster’s house. He told him where he could and could not go, where they practised, where they worked, ate, slept and studied, the times of the services and practices. But once the tour was over and they were back in the schoolroom with the other boys, Alexander seemed to relinquish his responsibility for him.

      It was in the schoolroom that they slept, on thin mattresses on the floor and lining the walls, and Thomas would never forget that first night. The boys had jumped on him. Not Alexander – he had disappeared – but the others. Then had followed a few hours when he was sure he was going to die. They had held his legs and tipped him head first out of the window; they had dunked his head in the piss pot; they bundled him out of the room and into areas of the cathedral he had never been; they had pushed him up steep spiral steps till they reached the tower, and there they made him stand, blindfolded on the parapet, knowing that one false step could cause him to plunge to his death. The next night and the next, there were more trials and tribulations. Where was Alexander, his supposed protector? he wondered bitterly. He was never around during this torture, either to take part or intercede for him.

      Thomas was so miserable that it was almost in his mind to run away back home. After all, it hadn’t been his idea to be a chorister. He would have been quite content to follow his father’s trade as a ship’s carpenter. He was only there because someone heard him singing in a tavern and urged his father to let the boy try for a scholarship as a chorister at the cathedral. But then he thought of all the high hopes his mother had placed on him, and how humiliated his father would be if he got to hear that his own son couldn’t put up with the tauntings of a bunch of choir boys. So somehow he got through each day and each night, having no notion of when it would end and who, in the end, would be his friend or his enemy.

      It all changed suddenly. One night, Thomas was hanging by a rope, upside down from the beam, when he became aware of Alexander watching from a corner. He lounged against one of the wooden posts as if he were carved out of it, half in shadow, his face chiselled into a mask. Only his eyes glimmered darkly. He did nothing while two, three times, the boys twisted the rope then let it go, so that he spun fiercely like a top, helpless, dizzy, sick, while the boys laughed uproariously. Alexander’s movement was unexpected. Even his torturers paused and turned. As if to show he was one of the lads, Alexander came forward. He grabbed Thomas’s wrist and roughly tied one of the knots but, while doing so, he whispered in his ear, ‘Make them laugh. If you can make them laugh, they’ll never trouble you again.’

      Thomas spiralled slowly from the beam as Alexander retreated to the shadows once more. ‘Make them laugh!’ They were the first words that had been spoken in kindness to him since he arrived. Another boy stepped forward. He was about to start the twisting of the rope all over again, when Thomas mimicked:

      ‘Err . . . rrum . . . now then . . . errum . . . boys . . . errum . . . let usum turn . . . errum to psalmumm 48 . . . errum . . . ’ he said from upside down in a voice exactly like Dr Smith, the choirmaster.

      The boy stopped short. The others looked at each other in amazement, and even checked to be sure it wasn’t in fact Dr Smith, and then they burst out laughing. ‘More, more!’ they demanded. Despite being swung and prodded and spun round and round, still dangling from the beam, Thomas managed to scramble through his repertoire of jokes and rhymes and imitations.

      As Alexander predicted, they cut him down, still laughing. But his ordeal wasn’t quite over – perhaps they were having too much fun. They stood him on top of the bookcase and told him to sing. So Thomas sang; he sang all the songs he had ever sung in taverns and inns to make extra pennies for the family; the sea shanties, the mummers’ and morris songs, and foreign songs he’d picked up from sailors and travellers in the inns round the docks, imitating the characters and their accents, which had the boys splitting their sides. Finally, when he felt he had got them sufficiently on his side, he leapt down from the bookcase and went into a dance, accompanying himself with foot-tapping and thigh-slapping. And he even found a pair of spoons which he then played with incredible skill, to everyone’s amazement. Soon all the boys were also foot-tapping and thigh-slapping and making such a rumpus that Mrs Renshaw, the matron, came hurrying in to put a stop to it.

      Later, lying on their mattresses side by side in the darkness, instead of dropping wet toads on his face or inserting wriggling spiders into his bed, the boys begged him for more imitations of Dr Smith and the Bishop. He duly obliged, and added Mrs Renshaw to the list, which had everybody giggling and sniggering in the darkness until, gradually, all but Thomas himself subsided into sleep. He lay long into the night, staring into the darkness, wondering if at last his troubles were at an end. They were as far as teasing was concerned; from then on, Thomas was not only accepted but he became the most popular of boys, at least with all except Alexander.

      Alexander was a loner and didn’t seem to want any close friends. He often disappeared for hours at a time, and if discovered it was usually at the schoolroom virginals with his nose in a musical score or scribbling on a page of manuscript, much to the scorn of the other boys. In the school it wasn’t always good to be different. Most boys, wearing as they did their uniform jacket and tails and mortar board in school, or the black cassock and white ruffs for cathedral services, managed to seem like a single organism. They conformed to a group mind and a group purpose – except Alexander. He didn’t care. He didn’t try to conform or attempt to be one of them. Where they spoke with the same soft, broad, Gloucestershire dialect, he spoke like a gentleman; where the other boys got up to larks and laughed at the same jokes, he would be standing apart, watching but not joining in; and though they slept side by side, ate together, practised together and studied together, he was never quite one of them, and they referred to him as ‘Gentleman Alex’.

      It was not just because he seemed a gentleman that made Alexander different. Although the boys joked about him, they never laid a finger on him and Thomas soon realised they respected him after all, for no one doubted that Alexander had the finest voice of them all and, more than that, was the most musically gifted. Even the bishop treated him with awe and called him ‘our little genius’. Not only did Alexander have the voice of an angel, but he played the harpsichord and virginals precociously well and had composed obsessively from the age of six. His anthems and choral pieces were often sung at services and concerts.

      At first, Thomas was disappointed to find himself ordered to sit next to this surly, uncommunicative boy in the schoolroom. Strange that Alexander, who had advised Thomas to make the boys laugh, seemed impervious to jokes and wise-cracking. When Thomas tried to get even a smile out of his companion, his attempt was received with a blank uncomprehending stare. But Thomas was gifted at algebra, and when he saw Alexander drifting helplessly over a calculation, he offered to help him. Alexander grudgingly accepted his assistance and, in due course, reciprocated by helping Thomas with Latin, Greek and French. Then, when Thomas took up the violin, he soon showed himself to be such a skilful performer, Alexander began writing pieces for him. Without realising it, they had become friends.

      It was a strange friendship. No two boys