Camilla Grudova is the author of The Doll’s Alphabet, Children of Paradise and The Coiled Serpent. Her anarchic and often inexplicable short stories recall the distorted fairy tale landscapes of Leonora Carrington, Angela Carter and Barbara Comyns, and her novel unfolds in a similarly surreal vein. She lives in Edinburgh.
Hear an audio extract of ‘Ivor’ here
‘Ivor’
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We are all second, third or even fifth sons. We were sent to Wakeley Boarding School aged eight for Year Five and stayed on until Year Twenty. We didn’t count how many years that was, or fully comprehend how much time constituted a year; we were just excited to go off to boarding school like our fathers and older brothers, to leave the nursery. We were disappointed not to go to the same school as our fathers and eldest brothers, but so were our sisters, who were not sent to school at all. We were given a brochure from Wakeley: there was an illustration of a beautiful, dark-haired boy playing rugby on the cover. Our nannies packed up our teddies and toys, photos of our families, shortbread and chocolate. Some of our nannies wept; we did not know why: we assumed we would see them again soon.
Wakeley was in the middle of the countryside. Which county, we couldn’t say. Some of us remembered our fathers saying they were taking us to Derbyshire, others to Somerset, though a senior student with a passion for nature said based on the studies he did of animals and flora on the school grounds we were in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. The land surrounding the school was beautiful and hilly; the grounds so extensive we had no need to go beyond them. There was a stable with horses, a swimming pool, tennis courts, a library, a graveyard, a chapel and several dormitories each with its own housemaster and tutors. We had advanced lessons: every year for biology, a zoo donated an elephant fetus for us to dissect and for months the specimens lay in tanks and jars of formaldehyde in our classroom like wrinkled old raincoats. There was a big grey computer that could do sums. Languages we could study ranged from Arabic to Russian.
As younger boys, we had to do tuck shop runs for the seniors in our house who had their own rooms, a mark of their status. Chocolate bars, haemorrhoid cream, newspapers, boiled sweets, Gentleman’s Relish, malted milk, cigarettes. One senior would cane us if his newspaper was wet. We didn’t like the seniors and didn’t understand how they could look like our fathers and grandfathers yet were still boys at school wearing the same striped ties and caps as us. The headmaster told us they were special boys who had a lot to learn before going out into the world and that boys who entered the world too soon missed school and their friends terribly. We half forgot about these older students unless doing chores for them. We had our own classes, games, celebrations, clubs – the Cheese Club, the Ancient Rome Club, the French Club. The older boys blended into the antique furniture of our houses, red-faced and dusty like velvet armchairs or spindly and brown like side tables.
As we got older and became seniors ourselves, we were dependent on those tuck shop excursions, those moments of forced tenderness from the younger boys. We recognised the disappointment of a damp newspaper, pages stuck together, but as new, young boys we did not understand.
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Continue reading ‘Ivor’ here.
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