Free The Chinese Garden by Rosemary Manning Page A

in the army, no doubt?’
    â€˜No, Miss Lucas. He is a doctor.’
    â€˜Oh, a doctor.’ (Air slightly chillier, but not cold, for doctoring was, after all, a profession, even if not so honourable a one as soldiering.)
    â€˜Have you brothers, Rachel?’
    â€˜Yes, I have three.’
    â€˜Ah, no doubt they will be at the Military College.’
    â€˜I’m afraid not –’
    The eyes glared fiercely at me. The sinews of the neck were drawn as tight as a military strap. For a moment sheseemed at a loss for words, so enormous was my family’s crime in following peaceful professions. Then a gleam came into her eye and she said – quite seriously, I must emphasize, and without any jovial attempt to put me at my ease – ‘You will have to be the soldier of the family, Rachel Curgenven.’
    For drill we assembled outside the house on the flat sweep of the drive, surfaced with flints which cut one’s gym-shoes to pieces. Unless it was actually pouring with rain, drill was always held there, or else on a piece of raised, bumpy concrete adjoining the school chapel. No matter whether the midday sun beat down upon our unprotected heads, or a westerly gale blew upon our shivering bodies, no matter whether frost sharpened the soft contours of the park, or (as was commoner) swathes of mist obscured the trees and the little round shrubberies, and marshy vapours filled our lungs as we Breathed … Deep! Breathed … Deep! drill must be held out of doors, for this was part of the toughening process of the system.
    â€˜Arms … Swing! Arms … Swing! Knees … outward … Bend! Stretch! Bend! Stretch!’
    The commands echo in my mind still.
    Miss Lucas’s sadism found its fullest outlet in the punishment drill, which took place for one hour on Saturday afternoons on the grim slab of concrete immediately outside the chapel. This was roughly the size of a tennis court, and the concrete seemed to have been made by workmen infected with the same malignant humour as Miss Lucas, for it was rough and stony and full of unexpected holes and excrescences designed to trip the unwary or fatigued offender. It did not improve Miss Lucas’s temper that in having to conduct punishment drill she invariably missed every school match, and Miss Lucas was an ardent upholder of Bampfield’shonour on the games field. The exercises she chose, therefore, were designed to punish, and were pursued until the unfortunate victims were almost dropping.
    The drill was always preceded by an inquisition into the reasons for which the punishment was being given, for Miss Lucas liked to know what she was punishing. Suitably scathing comments then accompanied her orders, individuals being picked out by name, and the worst offenders sometimes given a harder and longer grilling. She always took care to provide herself with a dossier on each child’s origins and family connection, and this affected her treatment of individuals, her judgments being further reinforced by a retentive memory which fastened up each misdemeanour like a gobbet of meat in the thorny larder of the butcherbird. Bisto was especially the focus of Miss Lucas’s sadistic hate, for her father was only in the Marines, a service she regarded as most inferior; and Bisto possessed, also, a quiet, enduring temper which Miss Lucas interpreted as impertinence.
    Saturday was cold with the peculiar cold of Somerset that is three parts damp, exhaled from the sodden earth and spreading over the ground a layer of frigidity, a sub-atmosphere which the soft, ineffectual winds of the district never dispersed.
    Margaret had suggested to Rachel going over to Stoke, a village technically out of bounds, but dear to them both. Rachel remembered her promise to Bisto and hesitated.
    Margaret’s temper was short these days. ‘All right, all right,’ she said, ‘I can take Rena. Go and smoke cigarettes in the shrubberies and