The Munich Dilemma
by Sinbad

Chapter 2

Milhampton Hospital smelled of disinfectant and made Chris wrinkle his nose. Ricky walked between Chris and Mr Jeavons into the main entrance and a uniformed nurse immediately beckoned them to a row of chairs in the waiting area. She looked at the side of Ricky's head and hurried off to fetch a doctor. Mr Jeavons turned to Chris.

“If I leave you two here will you look after Ricky? Don't leave him until I return?”

“Yes, sir. Of course.”

“Okay, then. Here's some change for the phone box. Phone the school if you need to. Do you know the number?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Don't forget, don't leave until I come for you.” He paused, and then, as an afterthought: “Thank you, Sutton.”

Chris smiled in response, and Mr Jeavons left them sitting there. Chris watched him disappear down the corridor before turning to check on his best friend. Ricky Taylor and Chris Sutton had been friends before starting at Milhampton five years before. They had been friends when their parents lived in Amman, Jordan, and had been evacuated from there at the age of twelve in 1967. They'd both ended up boarding at Milhampton and had stayed friends through their school careers. It had been helpful to both of them to have a firm friend in their first year when they had had to learn the ways of the school and learn to handle the bullying from older boys. They'd made friends with a good group of boys but each still considered the other to be their best mate. And now Chris could see that Ricky was suffering. He looked very pale, even green, his eyes seemed unfocussed and he was not very responsive to Chris' questioning. Chris was very glad when a doctor appeared and ushered them into a cubicle with a bed and a curtain around it. Chris and the doctor guided Ricky onto the bed and the doctor examined him. He checked the wound on his head, now very swollen like a broom handle under the skin all along the side of his head just above the ear, and colourful, shades of blue, green and black. The skin wasn't broken and the doctor seemed to think the skull wasn't broken either. Then the doctor shone a light into Ricky's eyes and pushed a tool like a torch with an attachment on the end into his ear, and asked him a series of questions about the Queen and the Prime Minister which surprised Chris but Ricky didn't seem to find them strange. After banging his knee with a little hammer a couple of times the doctor seemed satisfied. He said Ricky had mild concussion and that the swelling and bruising to his head would get better but that he needed complete rest for a few days. He asked about the school medical facility and Chris told him about the Sanatorium and the nurse who manned it, and the doctor who visited every day.

The doctor wrote a letter which took him quite a long time. Then he sealed it in an envelope and marked it Sanatorium Staff and gave it to Chris to be delivered to the school nurse, and told the two boys that Ricky must stay in bed in the Sanatorium for at least three days and that he could only return to school once the doctor had said he was better. Ricky didn't seem to be paying attention but Chris nodded that he understood.

The examination over, the boys went back to the row of chairs to wait for Mr Jeavons to return for them. Ricky began to doze and he leaned to the side. He was close to resting his head on Chris' shoulder but he would have hurt the swollen side of his head, so Chris got up and sat the other side of Ricky, and pulled him the other way. Ricky soon fell asleep, his head on Chris' shoulder, and began to breathe deep and slow.

It was maybe two hours before Mr Jeavons returned, and Chris was getting cramp in his arm but wouldn't move and disturb Ricky, so he was glad to see the teacher. They woke Ricky as gently as they could and helped him into Mr Jeavons' car – he'd left the minibus at school. He drove straight to the school sanatorium and delivered Ricky into the hands of the nurse. Chris gave her the envelope from the hospital doctor and they got Ricky into one of the rooms. Chris got his outer clothes off him and found his underwear still a little damp from the ducking in the lake so he paused, wondering what Ricky would want him to do. Ricky solved the problem for him by lifting his arms up so that he could pull his vest over his head, and then standing and pulling his own underpants off. He got straight into bed as he was and was almost instantly asleep. Chris planned to bring over his pyjamas and stuff from the boarding house during the next day.

Chris was at School House, the largest of the boarding houses, but Ricky was at Maze Green House and Chris would have to knock at the housemaster's door and ask for permission to get Ricky's things. You weren't allowed to enter another boarding house.

Leaving Ricky to sleep, Chris walked back to School House, tired and hungry. In the dormitory he changed out of his wet clothes and draped them over the radiator, pulled on fresh things and walked over to the dining hall where he was in time to grab some food before the staff there stopped serving. He found a group of his friends at their usual table and told them the story as he ate.

After tea there was a prep period but Chris, in the lower sixth, had a private study bedroom, and didn't have to study in either of the two common rooms. So he sat in his armchair and pulled a rug over his knees and fell asleep. If the housemaster happened to check on him he'd be in trouble but that rarely happened and he slept soundly until the bell went for the end of prep, and then he woke just long enough to get himself to bed and was dead to the world until the next morning.

When morning came, Chris woke refreshed and bright, and remembered he had to get Ricky's things for him. He bounded out of bed, washed and dressed, and ran across to the dining hall for an early breakfast, fried egg, bacon, beans, fried bread, his favourite meal. None of his friends were over yet so he ate alone and took his tray to the rack for washing before heading out of the door, just as the first of his regular eating companions arrived. He explained quickly that he had an errand to run, and hurried over to Maze Green House, and found the door to the housemaster's accommodation. He knocked.

When no-one came to the door he knocked again. And again, and eventually it opened and a woman in a silk dressing gown and curlers opened it and peered at him through bleary eyes. Her gown wasn't tightly wrapped around her, and he had to look at her feet to avoid staring at the mounds of flesh that peeked indecently out. She wasn't wearing anything under the gown, he realised. Her feet were in fluffy pink slippers and he concentrated on them while he explained his errand.

When he finished speaking she stared at him for several seconds before standing back and beckoning him in through the doorway with a sweeping gesture which threatened to open her robe fully. She hadn't spoken a word to him, and continued to glower at him like a grumpy owl.

Chris didn't waste time thanking her, he hopped over the threshold and made for the dark wood door at the end of the corridor that he knew led to the boys accommodation section of the building. Once through that door, which opened when he turned the door handle, though on the other side there was no door handle so the boys couldn't gain access to the housemaster's flat without being invited in, he ran straight through the first dormitory, out through the door at the far end onto the staircase, up the stairs to the upper floor and into Ricky's study. There he took pyjamas and a clean set of clothes from the wardrobe beside the bed, and after thinking for a moment he took some textbooks from Ricky's desk, and the book from the bedside table, 'Hornblower R.N.' by C.S. Forester. He thought Ricky would prefer to read Hornblower than 'The development of English Grammar in the 17^th Century'. He found Ricky's overnight bag on top of the wardrobe and packed the things he had selected into it.

Looking at his watch as he left Maze Green House, through the main boys' entrance in preference to facing the awful wife of the housemaster again, he pondered whether he had time to drop the overnight bag over to Ricky in the San. If he was late for first period he would be made to suffer, it was Mr Randall, who would be certain to give detention for being late. So reluctantly he took the bag to his own boarding house and left it in his sports locker until the lunch break. He had to collect his own school books and then run for his first period class which was across the quad in the Physics lab.

The lesson was tedious – quantum theory, more mathematics than physics. The morning dragged. Eventually lunchtime arrived and he was free for two hours. He collected Ricky's bag and took it over to the san. Ricky was sitting up in bed reading a comic, which he put down when he saw Chris approaching and grinned. He took the bag from his friend and peered into it before dropping it on the floor beside the bed. Chris pulled forward the chair that was against the wall and sat on it.

“You had anything to eat?”

“Yes I had lunch an hour ago. You?”

“No. I skipped lunch to come over here.”

“Thanks. I wish there was something here, but the meal's finished and I don't think you'll get anything out of Matron!”

“No.” The sanatorium nurse had a reputation, born out of long experience dealing with inventive boys wanting to be classed as sick so as to avoid some unwanted lesson or exam. She didn't suffer fools gladly, and approached any boy with a steely determination not to be hoodwinked, and the assumption that the attempt would be made. It was difficult to get past her defences.

The two boys fell silent for a while, as boys will sometimes. Neither felt the need to fill the gap with words, they were able to express companionship without speaking.

A door banged down the corridor. Ricky roused from reverie.

“What are you doing in the hols?”

“Don't know yet. Nothing much, I expect. You?”

“I'm going to my Dad. Might get to see the Olympics.”

“Wow. You jammy dodger. I never get to do anything good like that. Mind you...”

“What?”

“Well, you know the Sail Training Association? The Tall Ships?”

“The 'Winston Churchill', you mean, that you can pay to crew?”

“That's it. I thought about doing it. I asked my Dad and he said yes, but the only cruise I could have done was from Southampton to Bremerhaven and that's in Germany and I'd have had to get back from there somehow. I didn't want to do that on my own. I did wonder about asking you, but you're going to your Dad's.”

“Chris you dolt, it's perfect! It'll work perfectly! You know where Dad is? Where the Olympics are being held this year?”

“Oh, yes.. it's Munich. Is that where your father is?”

“Yes, he's there for the next three years. We could do the cruise and just catch the train from Bremerhaven down to Munich and spend the rest of the holiday there. My Dad wouldn't mind at all and we could fly back in time for term. Why not? Let's do it!”

“You're sure he won't mind?”

“I'm sure. You'll meet my new step-mother, too. She's okay. What do you know about this Tall Ships thing?”

“I got the booklet in the post. You can read it. There are two ships, the Winston Churchill and the Malcolm Miller. Each ship needs a crew of thirty nine in three watches of thirteen, and there's also a professional crew of four, the captain, the first officer, the bo's'un, and the cook. They take thirty-nine boys, sometimes thirty-nine girls, about our age, and we learn to sail the boat. We do everything, and that means climbing up the masts and out onto the yard arms to set or furl the square sails. It sounds like a great thing to do, don't you think?”

“I can't wait. What clothes will we need? Anything special? Shoes, waterproofs?”

With instant enthusiasm the two boys planned the approaching holiday, their optimism quite unaffected by the need to gain the approval, and financing, from two sets of parents, and accommodation from one set.

As is so often the case with absentee parents, the permissions and funding were granted within a few days of the writing and despatch of suitably hopeful letters. They were going!

Ricky was allowed out of the san after two days, but was excused sports for another two weeks, which in his case meant no more sailing until after half-term. And it meant that Chris would be cross-country running on Wednesdays and Saturdays, since the Enterprise dinghies that the school owned needed a crew of two and without Ricky, Chris couldn't sail. Since Chris wasn't excused sports, that meant cross-country running. Chris hated cross-country running and was glad when Ricky was given the all-clear and they resumed their twice-weekly trip to the gravel pit with Mr Jeavons.

Now that the two boys had something special to look forward to, time seemed to slow down to a crawl. Each day seemed to drag on interminably as they day-dreamed their way through their lessons. Mealtimes, usually a noisy affair at the table where the circle of friends ate, everyone with something to say and often several of them saying it at once, were becoming quieter as thoughts turned to the holidays and plans which generally didn't involve school-friends.

Eventually the end of term approached. Chris phoned his parents and his father agreed to come to the school to pick him up. Ricky bought a railway ticket.