Serfs

Four years of wandering fields and making cycle rides gradually getting further from home but never making an expedition. Camping in back gardens or at a campsite but never going hiking, backpacking, carrying all your gear and heading out into the wilderness. Now I was in the scouts the twelve mile hike was a requirement and for me one of the best things about being a scout. Trinder and Dorn were to be my companions. Trinder was the only boy in our troop who went to private school- he was a ‘Royce’s boy’ as the local Independent school was known- and though he had a slight superiority of manner he was liked and accepted by everyone. He told me his ambition was to become a skin doctor so that he could cure his father of the skin disease he had. He said this with a certain fervour which impressed me and yet at the same time I knew there something hopeless about such dreams. Life did not work out like that. Dorn was from the opposite end of the social scale. He was an oik alright, a real local, a boy who could catch snakes and tickle trout; he spoke in short inarticulate observations but he was sharp. His kind of lad I knew from my own comp and it was very unusual for them to become something as lower middleclass and naff seeming as a boyscout but I suspect that Dorn’s dad had been a scout and like mine had passed on a love for that organisation. Dorn showed me a gruff tolerance; that I went to a similar kind of school to him meant I could not be a snob. With Trinder it might be different. Behind his back references to Royce’s poofs were made constantly. Despite the large size and manly bearing of the Independent school’s Rugby team, all privately educated boys were considered effete and quite probably homosexual. The generalisation always stands despite individual cases that proved the opposite.

So Trinder led the way and me and Dorn followed though it was Dorn who got us water from one farmer and even some milk for our porridge from another. We walked four miles one evening along the Ridgeway and eight miles the next morning to Goring Gap where Trinder’s dad picked us up.

And so it seemed most extraordinary that Trinder should eventually be beaten up by Dorn among others for putting a safety pin in his ear and telling everyone he had taken acid when we had it on good authority that he had been palmed off with an aspirin and his trip has been nothing more than stumbling around in the rain for four hours in soaking jeans and a tee shirt. Trinder turned up seemingly stoned to a scout meeting when he was fifteen though we all suspected he was putting it on. Then the older scouts and patrol leaders of which I was one by then lured him to a hut while on a winter camp and beat the shit out of him. I would have been there but for some reason I missed that camp and often think what I would have done if the group had decided to pick on Trinder who I still quite liked and even if I didn’t the obvious cowardly nature of the attack appalled me. What had Trinder done to deserve such rejection? I think it was simply some kind of cumulative resentment against his privileged background, which was made much worse, brought into focus by his embracing of punk culture. Punk music at my very ordinary comp was for middle class kids, arty types. Hard kids, people who came from council estates and caravan parks, liked northern soul or nothing at all. Was it the fact of Trinder pretending to be ‘out of it’ and therefore trying too hard to be cool? Was it Trinder’s attempt to gain acceptance in a duplicitous manner and double the perceived already injustice of him having higher social status owing to being a Royce’s boy? I think that was it. The messing with the natural system, the age old feudal hierarchy of serfs and gentlemen and I think it was Dorn who got him to come to the hut where they were all waiting for ‘the meeting’ that resulted in his beating. Dorn- the only genuine serf among us if by that I mean someone with the same knowledge of the land as someone from a thousand or more years before. Trinder never returned to the scout group after that.