Stantour's Stand

by Mike Ward

There is a corner of England where tradition is still held dear. This is not to say that the residents of that area live in a time-warp or are locked in the past, it is simply to state the fact that these are people who value the best from the past and are inclined to be sceptical about change for change's sake. They have happily embraced the machinery that takes so much of the toil out of domestic life, their businesses (invariably successful) make use of the latest technology or are even to be found pushing the boundaries of research and design to come up with new gadgets. A glance at the driveways of their houses will show that those who live here are fond of good cars, generally from the top-end of the market, but always with an eye to build and quality. On the whole, these are well-off people who try to live conventional lives because they happen to believe that convention has the merit of having been tested and proved.

Tradition is possibly most keenly evident in the lives of the younger people of this community. A certain solidity in the middle-class vote has kept the local council firmly grounded in the values of the its electorate. The voters might not think of themselves as being of any particular political persuasion but given excellent local services they see no good reason for electing the sort of politician who likes to tinker and impose unnecessary reforms. This corner of England has therefore maintained a strong front against the forces of change that have swept through the nation's system of education. Over the years a few changes have been accepted as both desirable and appropriate. There can be few readers who will be displeased to learn that the local education authority in this area led the way in bringing an end to the use of corporal punishment in its schools, thus anticipating the national reform by nearly a whole decade.

The schools in this area are incredibly good. They have excellent facilities, enjoy the support of middle class parents who are themselves educated to a high standard. A recent census report indicates that in this town and its surrounding area some thirty-eight per cent of the resident adult population had a university degree or an equivalent professional qualification. With education so highly valued in the home it is not surprising that the schools are places where academic achievement is of such exceptional quality. The school system is slightly complicated as the local county authority has retained the middle-schools and there are two single sex grammar schools as well as a relatively small comprehensive school. So whereas in most of the country pupils would move into the secondary system at the age of eleven, here that move is delayed a bit by the middle school tier which caters for children between the ages of nine and thirteen. It's a well-tried system which has served thousands of young people over the generations although one has to recognise that selection kicks in at a young age here and those who don't make the cut at the age of eleven will often feel that they have been discarded by the system as they make the journey to the comprehensive school rather than to one of the favoured grammars. As an aside may I make the point that relations between the headteachers of all of the local schools, first, middle, and secondary, are excellent, and pupils from the comprehensive who do well in the public examinations at the age of sixteen and who want to go on to A levels have always been welcomed at the appropriate grammar school.

Now, why have I set all this out before you? It is, dear reader, because I want you to understand that the background to the events that I am about to recount, while bizarre and strange if looked at through the eyes of an outsider, is entirely ordinary and reasonable in this little part of England where tradition is adhered to with such faithfulness. But do beware, for while the background to this tale may have been so unremarkable to local residents, even the most traditionalist of them would be shocked by the outcome. It is just as well then that most of the locals have only heard rumours that something very strange happened at the Duke of Dorminster's Grammar School for boys on the last day of October last year. Only seven adults know something of the full truth: the headmaster, a medical doctor, a very perplexed Mathematics teacher, the local Anglican Rector, the Catholic Parish Priest, and the parents of the boy who was most directly affected. Others have heard various bits of the story but most of these people, being rational and intelligent, have dismissed the tale as a Halloween fantasy, and in a way they are right for it is most peculiar that these strange and frightening events came about on that day of mayhem when so many of us indulge in a little ghoulish entertainment. Which all just goes to show that there are mysterious aspects to human experience that we cannot fully comprehend.

So where should I start? I guess that it would be best if I started at what I think must have been the beginning of this story, way back in 1955 on that day at the end of October when the leaves were falling from the trees, the rain had been sweeping relentlessly across the country for over a week, and a sudden blast of colder temperatures had moved in from the North East over the course of the weekend. I'm sure that it could only be an awful coincidence that Halloween fell on a Monday that year. I suspect that it could have been any Monday as the year drew to an end and colder temperatures began to herald the onset of winter. As it happened, that Monday was Halloween but surely it was no more than the cold snap that precipitated these terrible events.

On the morning of Monday the 31st October 1955, fifteen year-old Richard Samuel Stantour climbed out of bed and got dressed for school. As he pulled on his clothes he must have known that he was taking a risk and that there would surely be consequences. I imagine that he pulled on a pair of regulation school kneesocks as usual, appreciating the warmth of the wool as it covered his calves. But then, for the first time in his school-going, he reached for a pair of long trousers and drew them up over his legs. Richard Stantour had decided that it was high time that someone challenged the tyranny that dictated, without ever having put the requirement in writing nor formalised in the rules, that all boys under the age of sixteen had to wear grey short trousers all year round to school. It was, Richard had concluded, no more than an optional tradition that was clearly impractical in this day and age and especially with the weather turning so cold. Tomorrow would see the start of November, today he was going to wear long trousers to school.

Hi father raised an eyebrow at breakfast and a gentle smile transformed his usual morning-face as he glanced through the letters page in the Manchester Guardian. He had always encouraged his children to stand up for their beliefs and to criticise those in authority when they made decisions that were unjust. He had been intrigued by his son's request for a pair of long trousers in advance of his sixteenth birthday but convinced by his son's strength of feeling and knew that this was a cause that Richard wanted to embrace. He too imagined that there would be some sort of consequences but he trusted his son to do whatever was right. Mister Stantour would pass more than just a few moments in his day wondering about how Richard's little crusade was going, and a few more moments of gentle recollection and regret as he reflected on the amazing speed of the years that had seen his baby son suddenly move towards manhood. It would not be until later that evening that he would get news that Richard's little crusade had taken such a tragic turn.

Richard's walk across town to school that morning must have been fairly unremarkable. No one would have looked twice at this boy in the ordinary uniform of a local school. If they thought he looked young to be out of shorts then they would have just as instantly concluded that he was a lad who looked young for his years. Even other boys from the same school would not have noticed that revolution was underway as he entered the school gates. Those who knew him well enough to remember that he had been wearing shorts in the previous week would simply have assumed that the great birthday had taken place and that he had claimed the prize of long trousers.

Only his classmates, with the infallible sense of hierarchy that leads to every boy knowing his place in the rankings of age and seniority in a class, would have known that anything untoward was happening. Some had already acquired those long-for longers, but most were still waiting for the calendar to work its way through to their sixteenth birthdays. A handful of boys, one of whom had already seen his birthday pass, knew that long trousers would not come their way automatically on that happy day. They, alas, would have to wait for a parental decision, no doubt hoping against all hope that they wouldn't end up like Wilson in the Upper Sixth whose parents had not yet relented and allowed him out of shorts even though his eighteenth birthday had occurred during the summer holidays. All boys at Duke's wore shorts at least until they were sixteen, but some would wear this mark of juvenile status for much longer and in an age of discipline when boys obeyed those in authority or suffered the consequences across their backsides, many a lad lived in fear of being kept in short trousers beyond the usual age.

Richard Stantour's classmates stared in envy at his covered legs, but every last one of them was wondering about consequences. Some feared that there would be terrible retribution for this deliberate act of defiance. Some, more uncharitably, hoped that the retribution would be both terrible and painful. None of them came close to imagining just how that day's events would unfold in such tragedy.

The morning's classes passed off uneventfully, or at least without anything unusual occurring. Mister Crepton, the Latinist, was as flustered and angst-driven as normal, while the second period turned the anxiety on the boys as Mister Savage the geography master vented his spleen and post-weekend hangover. Chavers and Wilkins each suffered the geographer's wrath in the form of two lines of parallel across the seats of their respective shorts when their homework was found to be lamentably wanting. It was a typical Monday morning; until the last quarter hour before lunch.

At a quarter to one, with a full fifteen minutes of tedious algebra left, the classroom door was opened and every boy stood smartly to attention as Doctor Simpson strode in. No-one missed the fact that the headmaster was carrying both a cane and the register book, bound with a cracked brown leather spine and ancient dark green cloth covers, known to every boy in the school as the punishment log. Only three of the boys could tell, having suffered its effects, that this was the dreaded senior cane, an instrument of discipline that left its physical marks for at least a week, and made an even more lasting impression on the mind of the suffering victim. The Doctor apologised to the class teacher for the interruption and then turned and called upon Richard Stantour to stand out.

The exchange was tense and highly charged. The headmaster enquired as to Richard's age and on having confirmed his status as a boy who had yet to reach the age of sixteen, went on to ask for an explanation as to why Richard had dared to come to school in long trousers. The headmaster's simmering rage was obvious but Richard, nervous as any boy would be, managed to maintain his composure. His response, that the weather was cold and so he had felt it more appropriate to dress for warmth, was clearly heard by the Doctor as a threat to all things proper and decent, a piece of blatant cheek on the part of a cocksure little boy.

From what I have been told the exchange that followed was quite involved. The Doctor pointed out that it was the longstanding tradition of the school that all boys wore short trousers until they were at least sixteen years old. Richard replied that while it might be traditional it was not actually required by the school rules. Some of Richard's classmates, now all in their mid-sixties, recall the tension in the room and even remember feeling that Richard had made his point and should have bowed to the authority of tradition. This was clearly going to get physical in a very short time and they worried their classmate was going to suffer a very severe thrashing given the mood that the old Doctor was in.

The climax to this exchange was certainly approaching. The headmaster opened the punishment book and began to write. For fifty years afterwards those words would be scrutinised by mystified readers. The headmaster had written, 'Stantour, R., disrespect, insubordination and defiance, 6 strokes, and'.

At some point while writing this notorious line Doctor Simpson looked up and pronounced sentence. He announced that Stantour was to be caned for wearing long trousers to school in advance of his sixteenth birthday. Stantour had replied in words impressed forever upon the memories of his classmates, "No Sir, you will not cane me for I have broken no rule".

Doctor Simpson looked up in complete fury and seemed to almost leap over the table in his rage as he tried to grab the defiant youth and manhandle him into position for what was manifestly going to be the most severe thrashing ever administered at the Duke's. Only it never happened.

At some point between the moment when he picked up his cane and that fraction of a second later when he reached out to grab Stantour, Doctor Simpson collapsed.

Within minutes the front of the classroom was crowded with masters and any other adult who might have been able to assist. The lithe young PT master had been called to administer whatever first aid could be offered. The senior history master, who had taken orders and then fled parochial ministry to the relative tranquillity of teaching in a boys' school had been asked to pray by the side of the dying man. For most of the fifteen year olds of Second Rhetoric this was their first encounter with the end of a human life and the scene would be seared into their memories like nothing else they had ever seen. The local weekly newspaper was not overly gentle in its headline that week; Well-known Headmaster Dies in Fit of Apoplexy.

At some point one of the senior masters looked at the shaken young Stantour who was looking on aghast and snapped, 'I hope you're bloody well satisfied now you little commie brat'. Richard, seeing the death of the old headmaster in front of him, feeling an increasing sense of personal guilt for bringing about the tragedy, and sensing the growing antagonism towards him, slipped away from the school and walked a very lonely mile to his home. He never returned to Duke's and no one from the school suggested that he should. He was the boy who had killed the headmaster and somehow that 'commie' jibe was linked to the tragedy at the school and soon enough the Stantour family felt compelled to sell their home and move away. No more was heard of Richard and his family until a few months ago when I went out of my way to look them up.

Well, when I say 'them', of course his parents were long dead but I met Richard at his home near Edinburgh. His family had moved all the way up to Scotland, putting as much distance between them and Dorminster as possible. Richard had gone on to train in medicine and then on to become an eminent psychiatrist. He readily confessed that he had been drawn towards the healing of minds out of his own struggles with the internal demons that took up residence on that fateful day when, as he said, 'I, an idealistic youth with the world before him, brought about the premature death of my headmaster'.

We spoke into the night and finished off an incredibly fine bottle of very rare Islay, and he looked genuinely appreciative of the tentative apology that I was able to make in my role as a governor of his old school for the unfortunate way in which he had been left alone to deal with the shock of that dreadful day. One little irony at which I found myself laughing before I could help it, and was pleased to see Richard smiling as he told me, was that he had been unable to bring himself to try on those long trousers again, and when the family moved to Scotland he ended up going to a school renowned for insisting that all boys, including the most senior prefects, should wear short trousers all year round. I believe that my visit did some real good in healing his memory but even so, I avoided any reference to the events of this past year. I've never been one to pile guilt on other people, and I certainly don't think that Richard Stantour should have to bear any responsibility for what happened on the fiftieth anniversary of his little revolution.

You see, my little visit to Edinburgh was all part of my own little attempt to make some sense of what happened on the 31st October 2005. Among one of the many strange coincidences in this story, Halloween fell on a Monday, just as it had in 1955. Now you need to know why I placed so much stress on tradition in our town in my long introduction. For after the death of Doctor Simpson a strange little tradition developed within the Duke of Dorminster's Grammar School. A few years would pass before any other boy felt it necessary to question the obligation on all those who had not yet attained their sixteenth birthday to wear the traditional junior schoolboy garb of shorts and kneesocks. But fashions changed, short trousers were increasingly associated with a younger age-group, and by the middle of the 1960s, so quite late in comparison to other schools in the county, the boys of Duke's slowly made the switch to longs.

The change was very slow when one considers just how quickly society was changing. You can track the change in the great panoramic school photographs that adorn the long hall. By 1973 the second formers were all in long-trousers but a narrow majority of the first-formers was clearly wearing shorts all year round (you can see from the trees that the photographs were taken before Spring had really set in).

But no matter how fashion conscious a boy might have been, no matter how dreadfully uncool it was for a teenager to bare his knees, a new and rather sweet little tradition set in and took root. For the story of the death of the old Headmaster was passed on through the generations, and for some reason, probably down to the peculiarities of the schoolboy code, every boy under the age of sixteen would wear short trousers to school on the last day of October. Short trousers disappeared entirely from the school photographs by 1976 but I have been told by many old-boys that knees were definitely bared for Halloween at the Duke's throughout the seventies and on through the eighties and nineties until today.

It's a little tradition that seems to please the lads at the school and is well-known around the town. And it's a tradition that is helped by the fact that the local educational authority has stuck to that system of having first and middle schools, for this means that any boy who has grown up in the town will have been wearing grey school shorts up to the age of thirteen even if only for the summer term, although at one of our middle schools many boys will have worn them all year-round. And you will know that between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, most boys grow upwards faster than they grow outwards. So with a little swapping, and a box of spare shorts in the school store-room, any boy in our town who is under sixteen finds it easy enough to get a pair of shorts to fit at Halloween. A sweet and harmless little tradition that somehow seems to serve as a suitable mark of respect to the memory of Doctor Simpson as well as recalling the stand taken by young Richard Stantour.

So it was, until last year.

If you think it an amazing coincidence that the fiftieth anniversary of that day, when a boy dared to defy convention and provoked a headmaster to such a rage that the poor man had a fatal heart-attack and died wielding his most fearsome cane, should fall on a Monday just as it had in 1955, then consider this even more bizarre little coincidence. There was, in attendance at the Duke of Dorminster's Grammar school in 2005, a boy named Stantour; Robert Charles Stantour.

These Stantours were, so far as I can tell, no relations of the Stantours that had shired Richard some sixty-five years ago. But there you have it; on the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Stantour's rebellion, the school boasted among its membership, a fifteen year-old boy who bore the name of Stantour. Now Robert and his family had only moved into the area just before Easter. It was pretty clear that neither Robert nor his two sisters were hugely delighted to have moved from their life in one of the London suburbs to this quiet market town with its more gentle pace of life and few amenities.

As the autumn term progressed Robert was becoming increasingly troublesome and difficult. He had taken to pushing the boundaries with each and every teacher, reducing one newly qualified English teacher to a quivering wreck as he used his own more metropolitan upbringing to reveal gaps in her cultural experience. During the last week of October he had simply skipped a detention with the result that the headmaster had arranged an appointment with his parents, set for the 3rd November, with a view to suggesting that they might consider finding another school more suitable for their son.

Robert was clearly a skilful player of the art of baiting teachers and was careful to keep in with his classmates who seemed to regard his behaviour with awe and admiration. So he was not without friends and during October they had been gently teasing him about the Halloween tradition. I say teasing because of course the events of 1955 had been recalled as soon as Robert's parents had visited the Duke of Dorminster's with a view to enrolling their son.

On that occasion the current headmaster had jokingly expressed the hope that their son wouldn't be the death of him. Naturally the joke had to be explained, the story told, and even the old punishment book was pulled out from its dusty hiding place and the page turned to reveal the line, 'Stantour, R., disrespect, insubordination and defiance, 6 strokes, and'. Robert's father made some sort of remark, clearly not appreciated by his wife, that "those six strokes for disrespect might do our own R Stantour some good". Those words were to come back to him only a few months later.

Naturally enough the tale of the tragic death of Doctor Simpson was passed on to Robert and he was ready for, and indeed expecting, the comments of his new schoolmates and various teachers. Little phrases seemed to come up time and time again like: 'the boy who killed the headmaster', 'the dreaded curse of the Stantours', and more obliquely, 'let's see a flash of your legs then Stantour'.

Robert in fact hadn't worn shorts to school since he was ten, and had never worn the traditional grey school shorts at all as his primary school had been a non-uniform school. As he and his classmates toiled their way through October he found himself distracted at times as he looked around and tried to imagine his new friends wearing those clothes of yesteryear. Now and then he found himself lingering in the long corridor and staring in fascination at the old school photographs. He'd worked his way through the school annuals in the library and found a class photo with his namesake, Richard Stantour, staring out at him, stood to attention at the end of the third row. As he looked through the ancient volumes he tried to imagine what it would have been like to have been a Duke's boy back in the days when bared knees and thrashings were such an ordinary part of daily school life.

So much he was willing to tell us afterwards. That he had been intrigued by the story of Richard Stantour, had looked up his photograph, and had wondered about how different life for teenage boys was back in the nineteen-fifties. I suspect that like many others, he may have been somewhat aroused as he day-dreamed of boys bending over to present a short-trousered backside for the cane. There's nothing unusual about that, I remember it well from my own schooldays, but I imagine that thoughts like these would seem very strange, and even slightly perverted, to any lad who had come to puberty in the twenty-first century.

It wasn't until the week before Halloween that Robert began to think ahead to what he should do on that day. One of his friends, a boy with two older brothers, offered to lend him a pair of school shorts from his household's plentiful collection. Robert took two pairs home with him to try them on for size over the weekend. So right up until only two days or so before Halloween he was clearly considering the idea of joining in the strange little tradition and going to school in shorts on Monday. But doubt crept in on Sunday, and he told us that he didn't sleep that night as he worried that this was an elaborate hoax and that he had been set up for what would, he conceded, be a pretty funny joke. Being such a genius at mischief he could see mischief at play and he wasn't going to fall for it. And then, as the new day dawned, he was struck by what seemed to be a neat little solution.

If, he reasoned, he turned up at school wearing shorts and then found that he was the only boy wearing them then the joke would be on him. If he wore long-trousers and no-one was wearing shorts then he would be able to laugh at those who had plotted to make a fool of him. If he wore long-trousers and the others were indeed wearing shorts then he could proudly proclaim that he was a Stantour, and that he was celebrating the Golden Jubilee of the Stantour rebellion. It was simple enough, he would win either way if he chose his usual trousers, he could be doomed to a lifetime of ridicule if he wore the shorts.

Robert Stantour's walk across town to school that Halloween morning started off as on any other school day, with him striding down the street clutching a little rucksack with his books for the day. By the time he turned the first corner on his route he could see that there had been no conspiracy against him; the sixth formers he saw were all dressed as normal, but every other Duke's boy was indeed wearing shorts. Actually, he was the one who was being stared at as guys noted his defiance of the tradition. One kind-hearted lad asked him if he didn't know about the school's Halloween tradition, and suggested that it wasn't too late to find a pair of suitable shorts. But when Robert offered the explanation, and then repeated it several times over, that he was standing in the great tradition of Stantour rebels and wearing longs just as his namesake had done on that day exactly fifty years earlier, the others fell in behind him and adopted him as their leader for the day. The joke was certainly not on Robert Stantour.

At the ancient gateway into the schoolyard the headmaster, standing with the three prefects who were on duty that morning, saw the approaching little army of schoolboys and chuckled when he recognised Robert. 'I might have known', he thought as the crowd followed their leader through to the assembly hall.

The morning's classes passed off uneventfully, or at least without anything unusual occurring. Mister Chapin, the French teacher, was as flustered and angst-driven as normal, while the second period broke down in chaos as Mister Edwards betrayed signs of a lingering hangover. It was a typical Monday morning and during the break at half past ten, Robert Stantour was the centre of attention as he made a playful little speech about the country's need for young men who were prepared to take a stand against the tyranny of tradition and embrace the power of the new. There was widespread agreement that he had, despite his covered knees, somehow captured the spirit of Halloween at Duke's, and of course it was obvious that no Stantour could be expected to bare his legs like other mortals.

The spirit of Halloween. Other mortals. It's strange how even everyday language can foreshadow the unexpected.

Accounts of what happened just before lunch are incredibly confused but there is widespread agreement that whatever it was that took place began at about a quarter to one. The classroom door opened of its own accord, which in itself was not all that unusual in what is an old and very draughty building. Some of the boys have reported that it suddenly became very cold in the room but again, that's to be expected if the wind is blowing through ancient corridors on the last day of October, and on a day when the boys were wearing shorts. Their teacher for that period, Paul Hudson, the head of the mathematics department, later said that at first it looked to him as if Robert Stantour had suddenly decided to take advantage of the distraction caused by the opening of the door and had flung himself across the big old schoolmaster's desk at the front of the room. Given Stantour's known proclivity for engaging in various acts of classroom disruption, Mister Hudson had barked an order for the class to settle back down and for Stantour to return immediately to his place.

But Robert didn't get up. Instead he shrieked as if in pain and shouted out, 'let me go, let me go'. There being no one anywhere near the boy Mister Hudson took the shouting and shrieking as part of a time-wasting jape that needed to be curtailed immediately. He strode over to the boy and, for the first time in his teaching career, tried to use his physical strength to force a boy to pay attention and obey his commands. But brute force simply didn't work and he had been puzzled as to how Robert was managing to remain stuck to the desk when his hands were clearly waving about in the air and punching out as if he was trying to attack some unseen assailant. And then it happened. Paul Hudson found himself flung across the classroom floor. The boys reported that it looked as if the master had been thrown by someone, and at this point they felt sure that they were witnessing something of the supernatural at work. Hudson himself told us, in confidence, that he had the impression, as he crashed against a wall, that some older man had shouted at him to, 'get out of the way you blasted fool'.

One of the boys decided to go and find the headmaster and started off on a run, but the door slammed shut and he couldn't get it open again. And in the midst of all these strange goings-on, Robert Stantour was still lying across the big desk and screaming out as if he was suffering some incredible pain. And then, just as suddenly as all this commotion had begun, it was over. The door opened easily, the headmaster was sought, staff from neighbouring classrooms came hurtling in to try and quell the riot that had disrupted their teaching. What they found, they all report, was a boy draped over the table and sobbing, a classroom full of boys who seemed struck dumb and frightened, and a respected colleague lying in a corner. It looked, to these new arrivals, very much as if this scene could only be explained as being the aftermath of a serious assault, and they very much feared that while an attack by a pupil on a teacher would be bad enough, this was possibly a case of teacher against a boy. Nothing that any of the other boys in the room said seemed to make any sense at all and it took a firm command from the headmaster to bring about the necessary silence before a proper assessment could be made.

It was the headmaster who first recognised the signs of clinical shock in both Paul Hudson and Robert Stantour. The boy in particular looked as if he could slip into unconsciousness at any moment. And it certainly looked as if the rest of the boys in the room were pretty dazed. The school nurse and other designated first-aiders were next to arrive, and then the chaplain was found. A few minutes passed, Mister Hudson seemed to be coming round, the boys were still producing incoherent accounts of what they thought they had just witnessed, and then, amidst the babble of conversation and confusion, there was laughter.

Well, not quite laughter but giggling. Everyone stopped speaking, the first-aiders suspended their ministrations, and slowly, ever so gently, Robert Stantour pushed himself up off the desk, and stood up. Massaging his backside he had turned to the headmaster and made the announcement which, bizarre as it may sound, made more sense of the situation that anything that his classmates had managed to suggest. "I guess the old man has got his revenge".

And it seemed as if this indeed was the only explanation that made any sense, despite the fact that of course, 'sense' and rationality were being set aside. In the headmaster's office, Robert Stantour was calm and collected as he told a small group of us about what he had experienced.

A local general practitioner took the boy into the first-aid room and after a short examination returned and told us that it did indeed look as if the boy had suffered nothing less than, and nothing more than, an old-fashioned caning. The weals were apparently perfectly visible, four lines in parallel and two criss-crossing lines to form a painful X. In the circumstances it was obvious that our collective duty was to call the police and turn the whole thing over to their specialists, as we all knew that a GP couldn't be expected to accept that a fifteen year-old boy had just been caned by the ghost of a troubled headmaster.

By then Robert's father had arrived and once again the boy recounted his experience, and I for one was certainly increasingly inclined to accept that he had reached the right conclusion. As he himself said, 'I know that it doesn't make sense, but it's the only thing that makes any kind of sense'. The whole group of us, headmaster, Robert, the doctor, Paul Hudson, Mister Stantour, and I sat in total silence for a few minutes. Robert did indeed seem to take his seat in that careful manner that was so familiar to me from my own schooldays. It seemed to me that several possible explanations were still available. The boy was a known joker and it wasn't beyond belief that he had managed to inveigle someone into caning him in advance before flinging himself over the desk. The opening of the door might perfectly well have been a simple coincidence. But how then did a grown man end up flying across a room? Why had Paul Hudson been unable to get the boy off the desk? So many questions.

It was as we sat in our collective reverie that my eyes fell upon the surface of the headmaster's huge and very fine antique desk. The headmaster himself noticed the same thing at the very same moment. We approached it together and by then the others were also standing, having noticed the well-known volume. I left the headmaster to open it. The old leather binding was stiff enough but the book fell open easily enough on that familiar page and that fifty-year old sentence leapt out at us.

'Stantour, R., disrespect, insubordination and defiance, 6 strokes, and'.

Only now, the sentence had been completed, and in the appropriate column, the flourishing curls of OML Simpson's signature indicated that the punishment had been administered. I have to admit that I had to hold back a bit of a snigger when I read the words that completed the line, for now it read: 'Stantour, R., disrespect, insubordination and defiance, 6 strokes, and to remain in short trousers so long as he is a member of this school.'

I wasn't the only one to sense the old headmaster's humour combining with his anger at an upstart youth to produce such a fitting punishment even if the crime itself seems so insignificant and trivial to us now. We agreed among ourselves, unanimously including Robert Stantour, that no one else need be involved. Some sort of explanation was going to be needed to put a stop to the obvious rumours and stories that must have been flying around the school already. It was Robert's father who made the practical and simple suggestion that Robert, Mister Hudson, and the Headmaster, should make a joint announcement at the end of lunch to the effect that the school had been well and truly taken in by their Golden Jubilee commemoration of that fateful day when Richard Stantour had provoked such apoplectic rage in the revered Doctor Simpson that the old man had suffered that fatal heart attack. Some might object that the commemoration had pushed the limits, but it was Halloween after all and boys and staff alike were bound to appreciate that a fright is only to be expected.

But I did have a long chat with my ecumenical colleague, for doubling up as school chaplain while running a parish meant that I really needed someone else's viewpoint on how to deal with the paranormal aspects of these strange events. He's a sound guy with a solidly practical approach to pastoral issues, and we did manage a good laugh when we got on to the delicate question of whether we should have recourse to the formal rite of exorcism in the school buildings. For he questioned the appropriateness of using something intended for matters of great evil to rid a school of a ghost that used traditional disciplinary methods to impose order on schoolboys. "Let's face it, there must be loads of headteachers who would give anything to have such a ghost on their team."

We opted for a simple blessing late one evening when the cleaners were finished and the school was empty. But the story doesn't end there.

For poor Robert Stantour, who has managed to be so mature and capable in this whole affair, has been wearing shorts to school every day. Apparently the pain of the caning remerges in full strength if he even tries on a pair of longs at home. He's explained his choice to his schoolmates as being about maintaining the Stantour tradition of defying convention, but I know that he really hopes that his sentence might be commuted in some way.

So both to settle things in my own mind, and in hope that I may find a solution for the poor lad's dilemma, I have done as much research as I can into this most peculiar series of events and set my thoughts and conclusions down in this journal. But I can't help but feel that something amazing has come out of it all, for Robert Stantour has literally pulled up his socks and is now achieving results at the very top of his year-group as well as putting in some incredibly effective performances on the rugby field. He looks set to be headboy in a couple of years, but I'm not sure that we can really have a headboy who is the only lad in school who wears shorts. Some way must be found to deal with this.

In the meantime, if you happen to come across this account you will know why, in our sleepy little market town, a fine-looking sixteen year-old youth is to be seen looking somewhat out of step with the times as he walks to and from school in those old-fashioned grey school shorts. I'm sure that many who see him must pity him, thinking that the unfortunate lad has such out-of-touch and strict parents. But there again, it's probably just as well that they haven't an inkling of the true story behind those bared knees.