THE NIGHT WAS VERY DARK

Claude’s night was very dark. Uncharacteristically, he had slid gently, ever so gently into that dark night of dementia, unraged against the dying of his day. Now the darkness held him firm, with never a spark of his explosive exuberance peeping through.

Claude: always the enthusiast, always the mad faddist whose schemes were more numerous and even more evanescent than Toad’s. In the dim sky of our boarding school existence, his passage was that of a fiery comet, his duration in that remote galaxy merely a year. God knows we had some odd characters as masters or general assistants in that dreary place. Given his brief appearance, Claude out-topped them all.

Each had his nickname, of course, usually a derivation of his real name, some of which were odd enough in themselves. There was ‘The Ant’, for example, derived from ‘Antonius’, a vast trunk of man who could have played front-row forward for any Rugger team, and whose fists were great balls of meat, to be feared in any of his rare displays of temper. The same man who spiced his Latin Lessons with sensitive readings from Kingsley’s “Heroes” or Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome” was sometimes referred to as ‘The Bull Ant’ – rather unjustly, I thought, given the baiting of one or two of us blockheads. Then there was “Useless” Eustace, who made our early years of Chemistry a total joy, or an extreme misery, depending on his mood. I’ve never known a more mercurial person in my life, though he never raised a hand to any of us, even in his fits of deepest depression. He introduced us to “1066 and All That” and “Twisted Tales from Shakespeare”. His replacement was a one-eyed, gaunt young man, who had no trouble with discipline, probably because we never knew just whom he was looking at or asking questions of. None of us dared misbehave: he held us mesmerized. His knowledge of Chemistry was somewhat wacky, his experiment demonstrations highly unpredictable. Thank goodness he performed them himself and would not let us loose on his chemicals. We wondered if he had lost his eye in one of his less fortunate experiments. When he could steal a few minutes from an experimental ‘event’ he would produce a copy of Dickens’ “Pickwick Papers” from somewhere in his voluminous gown and read us excerpts. Whilst he himself convulsed in paroxysms of laughter, we stared stonily back at him — some out of teenage malevolence, some because we could not comprehend his laughter-choked readings.

There were several others, ‘The Rod’ or ‘The Morgue’, who seemingly professed whatever subject where another master was lacking — ‘The Rod’, no doubt resulting from the good book’s “Spare the rod” exhortation, ‘The Morgue’ from his deadly serious demeanour: I can’t ever recall his laughing. Though he often took English classes, he never descended to ‘treats’ from his favourite authors – if he had any. He often professed Latin, and though bits of Ovid and Catullus were dangled before us, they were always sanitised and completely humourless; they had been ‘Morgued’. As well, there were ‘The Phonse’, Old Alf, Charlie the Fly, The Grock, Bing - each as memorable as his nick-name.

The non-teaching staff were almost as memorable, especially our chefs. Harry the Hawk, was an ex-shearers’ cook, whose language and repertoire of stories could be lurid, on the rare occasion he had imbibed too much brandy. Severe strictures attendant on his continued employment probably deprived us of his rich experiences of shearing life. He disappeared one day to be replaced by a gentle, very introverted and dull character, whose dedication to the bottle was reflected in our nickname for him: ‘Bacchus’— a not wholly appropriate appellation, as he reflected not an ounce of Bacchanalian enjoyment. He even died on us, poor man. We had never felt anything but quiet sadness for him during his time with us.

Odd assortment as the staff were, we tolerated them all and even developed a strange affection for them –akin, probably to the feelings captives develop towards their captors.

Claude was the exception, possibly because he was with us barely a year. He was third in the line of our Chemistry Masters and projected an air of the superiority of Chemistry above all other disciplines. That year we rarely saw the inside of the laboratory, our lessons consisting of copying vast amounts of notes on the various methods of producing iron, smelting steel, refining gold and such like topics. From a love of Chemistry I was driven to abandoning it from my senior year’s subjects, though I came second in the class in the final Chemistry exam for the year. I suspect he had little real knowledge of the subject and had been coerced into teaching it as no self-respecting Chemistry master could be coaxed to the school. His enthusiasm for the subject was, like his other enthusiasms, just make-believe.

He was nick-named ‘Claude the Fraud’. Unkind as it was, there was so much truth in it. Very early in the year he had enthused over creating a menagerie for the school. We captured a magpie, a possum and a fruit bat and surrendered a rather vicious ferret to the cause. They were temporarily housed in a deserted chook-pen until separate cages could be provided. There the grand scheme faltered. God knows what happened to the animals. Hopefully, like our ferret, they managed to escape. The next scheme was a play night. Our class, directed by Claude, was to contribute “The Monkey’s Paw” but it, and the play night, never eventuated. Euchre tournaments, skipping competitions to encourage ‘nifty footwork essential for boxing’ (there was no boxing ring, no boxing gloves, but that was no obstacle –‘they would come soon’) and axe chopping competitions (at least we had several axes) did come to some fruition but then just fizzled out. There were other ‘simply marvellous ideas’ petering out before anything was done.

Then, the end of the year, and Claude simply vanished — the magician in his own cloud of smoke.

Now I learned of his being in a dementia institution, the volcanic eruptions of his enthusiasms and schemes sunk into extinction. His situation was obviously beyond any fraud; my trivial disappointments in the man as I had long ago perceived him, of no account set against the monstrosity of the tragedy I now saw before me: it was I who raged against the dying of his day.