Yet there were clouds on the horizon. The scoutmaster was also the boys’ Headmaster, and he disapproved of Ian’s ambivalent attitude to rules and procedures. Despite having made Ian a prefect at school, he passed him over for promotion to Patrol Leader, and then rubbed salt in the wound by demoting him from Second. He told George that Ian suffered from ‘chronic immaturity’ and confided his belief that this check to the boy’s lack of application would spur him to greater effort. In fact, it only reinforced Ian’s sense of failure. It was time for the Spartans again. With furrowed brow, his father told him,
“At Thermopylae in 480 B.C., a vastly outnumbered force of Thebans and Spartans was able to hold a mighty army of Persians at bay. All three hundred Spartans fought bravely. They did not despair. In the end, they were all killed defending the mountain pass. On their burial mound were inscribed these words, attributed to Simonides, their leader:
Go, tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,
That here obedient to their laws we lie.
That is the essence of Duty. As a Scout, you too have a duty: to uphold the Scout Law. In certain lawless parts of the world, as I have seen myself, in times of revolution or insurrection, Boy Scouts have had to direct traffic when the police left their posts fearful of retribution at the hands of the people they were supposed to serve, those who had had to pay them bribes to cancel traffic tickets or lose incriminating files. That, too, is Scout duty. Of course,” he continued, “you need not remain a Scout if the burden is too much for you…”
Ian’s lips trembled. He pictured vividly a small Scout in a large hat, scarcely older than himself, alone in a sea of impatient trucks and buses, sweat pouring down his dark face as he tried to do a man’s job, his uniform his only badge of authority in a world suddenly bereft of it. No, leaving the Scouts was not an option, certainly not leaving in shame and disgrace. He went to his room. He picked up a paper clip from a shelf and began methodically to prick the inside of his forearm until he drew blood, revealing his sense of his own inadequacy in painful self-loathing. Surveying the marks on his flesh the next morning, he decided to redeem himself during the forthcoming Bob-A-Job week, which coincided with the Easter holidays. His mother Evelyn, he noted, had helpfully placed her school copy of Wordsworth’s Ode to Duty by his bedside. We did this in school, she said.
‘Bob-A-Job’ was Baden-Powell’s idea, a fundraising activity and community service initiative, during which friends, family and neighbours would pay a participating Scout a shilling, colloquially known as a ‘bob,’ for each task or chore performed. That week, and with unusual zeal, Ian washed cars, shopped for an elderly widow across the street, mowed lawns, raked garden plots, weeded patios and vegetable beds, walked a St. Bernard and babysat a family of cats, painted a garden shed and tidied up a bar built into a garage, taking a lingering look at the centrefold models plastered above the bar before reminding himself that a Scout is clean in thought, word and deed, little suspecting that the winds of change would shortly sweep away such puritanical inhibitions, even within the Scouting world. His aim was to eclipse the record of his own patrol leader, Rountree, who had raised three pounds, sixteen shillings the year before. When he had collected four pounds, ten shillings, Ian assumed that victory was his, only to discover on the Monday that his rival had gone one better, and had collected over five pounds. He was, however, heartened by his father’s praise, which was not often or generously given.
