Chapter 2

And so it went on. The rivalry continued with an edge to it now.

The hunt might have been the final straw.

St G’s had many keen horse riders – plenty of girls loved to feel the warm flesh of a horse between their legs and the bounce of their bodies stimulating their organs. Five of the upper girls were allowed to stable their horses nearby and ride with the Royal Roayl Loamshire Hunt (the Roayl was actually a family name).

The hunt was not allowed to hunt live prey, everybody knew that. They hunted drags because they had a dog pack. Occasionally the dogs would pick up a fox scent and what could one do? They would veer off the established track and head off on the scent that generations of breeding had taught them to follow. In that particular weekend, the five gals were riding happily, jumping hedges and gates, giving the following old buffers a delightful view of tight riding jodhpurs over firm buttocks, when the hounds swung onto the St Benedict land. Small groups of boys, engaged in activities legal and not, ran for their lives as the modern equivalent of a cavalry charge bore down on them. Hunterston Minor left his trousers behind, he was in such a panic. Monaghan O’Reilly had been two thirds of the way up Hunterston’s rectum and was about to ejaculate. He had sensibly kept his trousers on and was able to run for cover holding the waistband with one hand. The famous Arcadian Lawn was ripped to pieces by metalled hooves.

Angus Roebuck – headmaster of St B’s was apoplectic. Instead of ringing to complain, he called the police and solicitors. Naturally the police came and made a thorough investigation and finally concluded that there was not enough actual evidence that a fox had been hunted by dogs. That conclusion was reached at the beginning of the investigation because the Chief Constable was an enthusiastic member of the Royal Roayl Loamshire, but they went through the motions; taking statements: ‘so you didn’t actually see a fox?’. The solicitors tried to pin down the hunt, but there was genuinely no proof of intent to trespass; and St B’s had never explicitly forbidden access to the hunt. The storm became a furore became a difficulty became a lost cause. But St G’s head was personally insulted that Dr Roebuck had referred in a newspaper article to ‘overfed entitled young people being taught that they could ride roughshod over the rights of the common man’ - a clear reference to her five girls. Likening his boys to ‘the common man’ was both hypocrisy of the grossest order and an overt insult – none of his boys were common. She would have revenge.

Mrs Halbrook had always felt slightly inferior because she wasn’t a Dr, but she was actually very respected and well regarded in the academic considerations of school education; still, she wanted revenge. He had complained publicly about illegal acts, so she would teach him about throwing stones when you live in a glass house. She recruited some of the senior girls, along with Miss Haverthwaite and Ms Dong (a teacher employed to teach the girls Cantonese), to start photographing the ‘goings on’ in the grounds. The grounds of the two schools ran into each other; there had never been much need to change that, the sports fields were close to the buildings (the old hall in the case of St G’s, the estate buildings had been the start of the school for St B’s) and then the parkland between had always been a welcome diversion to walk through. Oddly, or perhaps because of the rivalry, or perhaps because the rules forbade fraternisation, the opportunities for encounters in the azaleas and rogering in the Rhododendrons or humping in the Hydrangeas, were never taken up – at least as far as intersex encounters were concerned. Both schools had plenty of opportunity for same sex groupings to explore each other’s bodies. The parkland also offered opportunities for the CSC (an unofficial school club known as the Cocaine Sniffers Club – they had started on Cannabis, moved through various other highs and lows) to meet and try new drugs, or the same drug of preference. At present it was indeed cocaine again. A few good shots of the boys giving younger boys their first snort, and a deputy chief constable was soon having tea with Mrs Halbrook. Fiona Halbrook, her daughter and current First Girl, actually tried to warn Raymond Bageley but he was too arrogant (or too high) to realise. When the boys in blue swooped they nabbed three of the college 2 boys and charged them not just with usage, but supply (based upon the photographic evidence and the amount they had stashed) as well, it was open and shut. The boys were guilty and advised to plead that to get smaller sentences. They still each got 3 years in HMP Barrow. All three were over eighteen, they were adults in an adult prison. They were pretty boys, posh boys; their lives would not be too pleasant.