A
ood evening.
BROADCAST TALK
Before I outline for you my long-promised plan for our future policy in India I must ask you to bear with me patiently and listen to a preliminary statement which may well seem to you at first to be irrelevant.
Having enjoyed, as Prime Min- ister, your confidence over a per- iod of many years I now wish to repay the compliment and take you into my confidence over matter that will only reach you in a garbled and inaccurate. form in to-morrow morning's papers.
'።
The matters, though personal, whole cannot fail to affect the State inasmuch as it undoubtedly will affect the first Minister in the State..
The name of Banstead is pro- bably unfamiliar to you. He was at school with me. He was in the same house, in fact he slept in the next bed.
bed. We disliked each other on sight. The enmity was fanned into flames over the episode of the collars.
This may sound to you incre- dibly stupid, but nations have be- fore now gone to war for just as trivial a cause as a collar.
Banstead's collars were Mine were not. My people coul n't afford linen collars for me.
celluloid had to put up with one, and Banstead one day found me trying to clean mine.
clean.
I
a
those
It's по use flickering lights over my head. Don't, I beg of you, Control, cut me off. It's a matter of life and death. Please. What was I saying? Oh, yes.
of Celluloid collars go a sort
a bit and duck-egg colour after crack, and everybody can see that they aren't linen. Anyway, my collar gave Banstead his chance. He'd been looking for it for a long time. He went off and col- lected his gang, and they crept up and surrounded me before I knew what was happening. Then they of “John all sang, to the tune Brown's Body":
"Simeon Paul Bartholomew wears a celluloid collar," Simeon Paul Bartholomew
wears a celluloid collar, Simeon
Paul Bartholomew wears a celluloid collar, We'll teach him how to keep
it clean."
It was Banstead, by the way, who found out how much I hated my Christian names. Before he came I was always known by three initials. I liked that. It gave me distinction. Most fellows had only one or two names: I had three. To Banstead my three names now became a joke.
And while they sang they knelt on me, poured benzol on the collar, and then set a match to it. only just got it off my neck in time.
I
Now you know how I got that old ring round my neck that every- body looks at and nobody dares to ask me about. I'm not sensitive be at school. now as I used to
to be. Public men can't afford They stand to be shot at all the time.
But it was more than a sear in the neck that I got that day, Some-
same:
thing seared into my very soul, and I've never been the since. And it had an odd effect on Banstead: He thought that he had burnt me to death, and he never forgave me. Men never do for- give those whom they injure.
There go those lights glittering again. Then you haven't cut me off yet. Please, please let me go It's desperately important that I get this clear to you
on.
I was talking about Banstead. After that collar episode he hated me with a cold calculated hatred that I realised would never die until one
many masters didn't ask him to
of tea so much for his charm manner (he knew how to talk on the subjects they liked all right). as for his capacity to inform.
Knowing all this as I did, I can't think how I was such a fool him. He as to borrow from made borrowing an easy matter. His loans occupied a large place in his notebook. Advances sixpence meant ninepence if re- turned within a week, a bob with- in a fortnight, and so on. Think- ing of those threepences ticking up would give me bigger night- mares at school than anything
to pray" us died. And I used else, except this ring round
night and morning
that it would be he
In spite of his greed he was never ill. I've never known_any- one eat so much. I once watch- ed him eat twenty-seven dough- nuts in succession in bed, and even that didn't make him ill.
I used to wonder how he got all the money to buy the grub he ate. We all had the same pocket money, but sixpence a week was-
Sixpence n't what he spent.
day wouldn't cover what he got gid of in the tuck shop, quite apart from the food he cadged.
Short Story
neck.
my:
And yet somehow there seemed no other way. The sight of him for ever munching invariably. made me so frantically hungry that I just had to go and buy something. He never offered me a sweet in all the five years we were at school together, but he always had his pockets bulging. And then there were those imposi- tions that I was always getting
untidiness. for lateness and Could never endure to stay in doors when the sun was shining and everyone else was out enjoy-
-::- By S.P.B. Mais
He had a notebook in which he entered every fellow's birthday, and he was always there when cakes were being unpacked. And he had an uncanny way of getting masters to ask him to tea. Partly due to that collar of his, I suppose. And partly due to the fact that he was always jumping... up and opening and shutting doors. for people. It only made me go out of my way to be dirty and untidy, and never to open any- thing for anybody.
I've told you about Banstead's notebook. He entered other things in it besides people's birthdays. Whatever he could worm out about them that they didn't want known he wrote out laboriously and fol- lowed up as if he were training to be a detective. And I have very good reason to know that
ing themselves.
But it was no penance to Ban- He stead. He loathed exercise spent his half-holidays sitting in- doors doing lines for other peo- ple, at a price. So far as I know he never got any lines himself. He was far too cunning. But he made a packet out of writing other people's lines. He seemed anxious to be paid.
· never
For one thing he liked having people in his power, and another the rate of interest for
payments was so high ferred
the
longer the bill remained unpaid the better pleased he was. So far as I know he never had a bad debt. After all, it wouldn't do to let masters, know that you'd had your lines done for you, would it?
I'm afraid my borrowing didn't stop at school. He was still lend-
ing me money when we went
to Oxford. And he imposed other conditions there. He wouldn't lend me money until I had intro- duced him to Jimmy Philmorton, the only close friend I've ever had in my life. His aim was clear enough He meant by hook or by crook to take him from me.
What's happened to those lights? They've gone out. You can't cut me off now. You must listen, You must. Listen, listen, please.
Jimmy saw through people. He wasn't having any of Banstead, and he told him so pretty straight. Not that Banstead was easily put off. He was forever dropping-in- to our digs I shared with Jim- my-on the excuse of seeing me. But when Banstead appeared and Jimmy would just get up walk out.
a
And then one evening in June at the end of our second year Jimmy went out without a word, and his body was recovered hours later from the twenver.
upper
They did not find a scrap of evidence that pointed to anything but accident, so accident it was. I kept to myself the crumpled-up letter that I found in the waste- paper basket.
Why? Because I loved Jimmy, and in the hours following the discovery of the body had been born a desire to kill with my own note. hands the writer of that You see, I suspected Banstead. From the moment when he came in with a malicious gleam behind his eyes, to ask if there was any- thing he could do, I suspected him. But I wanted to try and make cer- tain before 1” did anything.
Jimmy pretty well lived for his mother (he fussed round her as though she were a pretty cousin when she came up for Eights Week), and that note was the foul- est product of an anonymous let- ter writer's mind I had ever seen. It said things about Jimmy's mother in a manner that had evidently unbalanced his too sen- "sitive mind. - Knowing Jimmy,
had no doubt whatever that that note was the cause of the "acci- dent."
was never able to trace the writer. I only suspected,
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