Chapter 13: One Small Step

July 1969, age 14

So my fifteenth summer was an interesting time. We played strip revision twice more, but with the proviso that we not go beyond oral sex. A few of the group were frustrated with that rule, but I was strangely relieved. The downside was that the knife-edge excitement of the first time was gone. In any case, the exams were soon over so the whole revision group came to an abrupt end, at least until the next year.

In the last few weeks before term finished, I competed in the regional Air Cadets swimming gala, where I won a race but didn’t dominate across the board as I had back at primary school. Then came our annual summer barbecue, at which Ellie and I managed to sneak off for a hurried fumble. And the school year closed with reports being sent home, mine revealing decent exam results and that I’d got all my preferred options choices. Hallelujah!

The night of Sunday 20th July 1969 was something very special. My family had all tried to have a siesta during the afternoon, as we were going to staying up very late to watch something on television. We were going to watch Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. It was past 3am by the time it actually happened, but watching it live and hearing Armstrong’s immortal words of mankind’s giant leap made up for the tiredness next morning.

We went to Lake Como for the first three weeks of the holiday, though Uncle Will had tried to veto it. We bought him off by inviting both him and Harry’s mum to come along. The travelling contingent seemed to get bigger every year, as I took Harry, Peter and Tommy, and Caity had three of her school friends. Caity tried to convince me to take the twin brother of one of her companions, but there was no way I was going to facilitate her bringing a little boyfriend along. If I saw a boy within twenty metres of Caity, I would knock his lights out.

Since the shared experience of the strip revision games, my mates and I were pretty uninhibited around each other, and teenaged bravado led to inaugurating a new holiday tradition of midnight skinny-dips. Or rather 1am skinny dips, as that was a bit safer. We took turns to stay up and wake the others at the right time, then we stripped in our rooms, crept through the house naked and went down to the pool. After a few goes, Peter changed our destination to the lake, but we only did that once as it was bloody cold.

On Monday 1st September 1969 there wasn’t a coup in Libya. The history books had already rewritten themselves, but I watched the news carefully just to be sure. The Crown Prince became King Hasan as planned the following day.

Our intervention had involved passing intelligence to the Crown Prince in the form of names and detailed plans from future history. The Crown Prince had a considerable desire for self-preservation, so the infamous Colonel Muammar Gaddafi had been quietly executed along with his co-conspirators in the Free Officers Movement, far from the reach of television cameras or courts of law. Clearly, the game of thrones is a dangerous one that you win, or you die. There is no middle ground, especially in the middle east.

Pan Am flight 103 had disappeared from the history books, presumably saving many lives, but Libya’s new history had some twists in it that made my stomach churn. I would be digesting that for years to come and figuring out what more I should do.

When we arrived at the newly named Raynes Park High School for the new school year, all was not quite what we’d expected. Our year group was termed ‘fourth form’ (equivalent to Year 10 today, or American 9th grade), and there should have been three other year groups below ours, thus giving us considerable seniority. The bloody government managed to screw that up for us by shifting the entire first and second forms into an entirely separate ‘middle school’. That meant that we now only had the third form to lord it over. And above us, the fifth form, lower sixth and upper sixth still viewed my year group as low-born inferior beings to be tormented whenever possible.

Bullying was rife at boys’ schools in the 1960s, but few were brave enough to try anything on me with my bodyguard ever-present. Harry had no such protection. Harry had a perfect trifecta of sore thumbs making him stick out. First, he was a new kid joining an established year group. Second, his strong Yorkshire accent were like nowt else on’t planet. And finally, like a bright neon sign hovering above him saying ‘please beat the shit out of me’, he was my best friend. Peter and Tommy hadn’t had any problems from being associated with me. Harry wasn’t going to be so lucky, as the embarrassment inflicted upon a few bullies by my bodyguards was going to boil over into one almighty mess.

It happened at lunchtime on the Friday of our second week. We’d just had English, where Harry was in a lower ability set to the rest of our circle, so we usually met up in the refectory. Three of us made it; the other didn’t. I’m ashamed to say it took me about five minutes to start worrying, and another few before I did anything.

At that point in my life, I had been trained in logical thinking rather than knee-jerk reactions. I could see two possibilities: either Harry was somewhere voluntarily, like maybe he’d gone to the library and got held up, or he was somewhere against his will. That might mean he’d been detained by his teacher. Or it might mean something worse.

I abandoned my lunch to go and narrow those possibilities, accompanied by my bodyguard, Ewan. We found no sign of him in his English classroom, or the library, or the school office. That left a run-in with bullies the most likely option. Flushing someone’s head in the toilet was the preferred entertainment of bullies, so next we checked the three closest bathrooms, with no better results.

Rather than continue searching the whole school, we headed back to the refectory in case he’d appeared there in the time we’d been gone. Peter and Tommy looked as concerned as I was, and Pete told me that Bruce Lupson, one of the fifth formers I’d had a run-in with, had just returned with his crew laughing and bragging about something.

I was convinced that Harry was in trouble. For all I knew, they could have beaten him up and left him unconscious somewhere. If it had been me missing, our company’s veritable army of security staff at sites across the country would have been on a war footing by now. We had a 24-hour fast response team based at our Marvel Tower headquarters and procedures for calling in off-duty people as needed. The company took security very, very seriously to ensure the safety of every employee, customer and family member. Today we had failed. Maybe. This could all be perfectly innocent, but I couldn’t take that risk.

I turned to Ewan and told him: “Call in the code”.

He looked uncomfortable, telling me, “I’m not allowed to unless it relates to you”.

I gave him my death stare and told him, “Do it right now or tomorrow you’ll be unemployed”. We stared each other out for a few seconds, then Ewan pulled out his walkie-talkie and said two words, repeated twice.

Within seconds, the shadows who had been sitting in their car outside school would be in the building, one alerting school staff and the other two heading for us at a run. Meanwhile, Ewan was giving further information over the radio, probably to Dan.

I noticed that Bruce Lupson was watching us and making more jokes with his cronies. I was fighting the urge to go and beat the crap out of him (or die trying). Peter didn’t have nearly as much self-control as me, and marched right over to demand: “WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE LUPSON?”

Ewan abandoned his radio call and stepped in to restrain Peter from behind, pulling him back a little.

“I don’t know what you could possibly mean”, Lupson replied in a taunting tone. “Is something the matter?”

I heard the pounding footsteps of two big guys in dark suits approaching between the dining tables as Ewan intervened, “In a few minutes time the police are going to descend on this school to do a room by room search. If any of you gentlemen want to reconsider your allegiances, I suggest you do it quickly, because we will throw the book at anyone who’s broken the law. And I don’t just mean detentions.”

With that, he pulled Peter back to our table, where the shadows had taken post either side of me. One of the guys asked Ewan, “Safe to the Cottage?”

“No”, I jumped in. “We stay here. There’s no threat to me. But double check that Ponytail is safe and on alert.”

I had long since cracked the codewords the security guys used. Ponytail was Caity. I was Backstroke, in reference to my swimming. Could have been worse, I thought. Butterfly would have been too girly, and breaststroke might have given the wrong (or perhaps right) impression.

One of the shadows started another radio conversation to check on Caity, while Ewan just said sadly, “You’re gonna get me fired kiddo”.

He had genuine concern in his voice, and I liked Ewan a lot, so I gave a little ground. “We can move to a more secure room if you can arrange one.”

It was still lunchtime, and there were lots of kids in the refectory either eating or watching the drama, so Ewan nodded and started shepherding me, Peter and Tommy out towards reception. Before we even got there, I was given my confirmation that Caity was fine, which was one less thing to worry about.

Our arrival at the school reception desk coincided with a screech of car brakes outside. I saw several of our guys jumping out of the car and hurrying inside, having presumably driven at break-neck speed from the house. The headmaster was also waiting for us looking far from happy. He accosted Ewan, vociferously demanding an explanation.

Ewan kept his response perfectly calm. “Sir, you have a missing pupil, and I need your assistance to find him urgently. First, would you arrange for all your teachers to return to their classrooms and visually check whether Harry Redpath is there? Second, you need to end lunch early so that all pupils can be directly accounted for via afternoon registration. And third, we will need to take over your staff room as a base for operations and a safe and discreet place to keep Finn until this is over. Will you do those three things quickly please?”

He whined a little more but grudgingly agreed, disappearing off to the staff room. Moments later the bell rang early, and students and teachers streamed through the corridors. As Ewan moved our contingent into the staff room, I noticed a fifth form boy say something quietly to Peter in passing. Peter did a double take, but he didn’t hesitate for long, quickly catching up to Ewan. I didn’t hear what was said, but once we were ensconced in the staffroom, Ewan took two guys and headed off somewhere.

The next few minutes were an agonising wait. I’ve never been particularly patient, and I was too distracted even to take notice of the secretive inner sanctum known as the staffroom: somewhere no student ever enters and lives to tell the tale. Dan arrived soon after, and I half expected an ear-bashing for bending rules. But he had other priorities just then, so I went back to being impatient.

Five minutes later it was all over. Harry had been found, and he was safe. The all clear codeword was given, standing down everyone that wasn’t already here. The off-duty guys who’d been called in would get very nice bonuses at the end of the month. If nothing else, it had been a useful test of a system designed to work with military precision.

When Ewan reappeared with Harry at his side, I noticed that my friend was wearing PE kit, which was odd. I didn’t ask questions; I just grabbed him for a hug, joined by Pete and Tommy. I could feel wetness on my neck and knew Harry was quietly crying. I was going to kill that bastard Bruce Lupson. I noticed Ewan talking quietly to Dan, who didn’t look happy.

We spent the next half hour in the staffroom, until a detective from Scotland Yard appeared, summoned by Dan through unconventional means. If he’d simply rung 999, we would have been sent a couple of local bobbies, and nothing would have happened in a hurry. Instead, he rang a former colleague at Curzon Street (headquarters of MI5), who in turn rang a colleague at the Yard, who dispatched a Detective Inspector and a Detective Sergeant.

The story that emerged was that Bruce Lupson and two of his cronies had grabbed Harry after English and frogmarched him down to the empty gymnasium. They had stripped him naked, gagged him, tied him to a gym vault with his privates on display, and written “tiny little cock” on his chest with a downward arrow. Then they’d turned out the lights and left him in the windowless room, presumably to be found later by the next class using the facility. Our PE teacher Mr Sampson had been with Ewan when Harry was found and corroborated the state he’d been in.

The police promised they’d interview the boys Harry had named, but didn’t see much chance of prosecution because it was Harry’s word against theirs.

“Inspector,” Dan said, “let me make it absolutely clear that you are going to arrest those boys, they are going to be charged, and they will have their day in court. Whether or not they are convicted is far less important than setting the precedent that bullies will face severe consequences. And once they’ve been charged, I suggest you have the boys processed into the care of social services, as the absence of good parenting skills in their home lives seems to be a clear fault in need of remedy!”