It was a kind of kettle drum, I think. Raised on a plinth. Cedric thought it would be a jolly good jape if all us pretended to defecate on it for the photo scrapbook. I wasn't so sure. I never really felt like I fit in with my rugger loving, public schoolboy chums. I went along with it anyway - it was better than the immature goading and predictable forced nudity that would have ensued if I hadn't. But there was a problem. No sooner had we assumed our positions than a rather triangular looking man in a filthy tuxedo approached. If you asked me to show you, by raising a certain amount of fingers, how angry he looked, you would die of starvation by the time I'd finished. It was, of course, Herr katzenschneiderblüffendehausmann, the music teacher. His name, as near as I could translate with my fragmentary German, meant "the man of the house of baffling cat tailors". The man himself was as baffling as his name. In forty years of teaching in an English public school, he had never learned a word of English, preferring to communicate in inscrutable gestures and bizarre noises he made with the various instruments he carried around with him. Of our group, only I took music, and so it was that I was elected to serve as interpreter. This was going to take some explaining. SCREECH! went the viola, which had seen better days, followed by the fearsome shake of a tambourine, rather too aggressively near my head if you ask me. My 'friends' guffawed nervously as they waited for my translation. It turned out that it wasn't actually too bad, as Katzo had merely congratulated me on my most recent assignment, and nothing more. But I wasn't going to let my poncey chums know that, oh hell no. I turned to them and said "He says he will NOT STAND FOR SUCH INSOLENCE! Who is first for the stretching rack?" By now they were cowering meekly behind a sheath of sunflowers. Katzo was rather irritated by my prank and yelled "I never said that!" by way of a comical bassoon note and a tinkle on the xylophone. It was rather a bizarre way to convey wrath, but somehow still effective, as my yellow bellied associates shrank back still further"... I was just getting into my stride, and I would have subjected my friends to even more discomfort, but for the fact that we were interrupted by the little girl in white. She was a ghost who would skip down the corridors singing the words to Pop Goes the Weasel in a spooky, reverse-reverb-y voice. We all stepped aside and waited for her to disappear through the wall opposite. I should mention, by way of explanation, that the school had been built on the site of an ancient little girl burial ground. It was not uncommon, when wandering the corridors in search of a midnight snack, to find oneself faced with a pair of twins would would invite you play with them "forever and ever", or, upon returning to your dorm room, to find your bed occupied by a weird scab-faced urchin whose head would spin round and round whilst projectile vomiting on your nice clean sheets. We tended to give them a wide berth. Katzo let out a deep bass note of relief. "All lurk and no playing makes Katzo a dull boy", I said, deadpan, to three terrified faces. The baffled music master seemed by this point to have forgotten all about the kettle drum incident. He blew a few notes on a piccolo and clashed finger-cymbals together, which from experience I knew meant "I'm off to bed dear boy, see you on the morrow". I was having too much fun to allow this, however, so thinking desperately, I concocted a pretext for keeping him there. Instinctively, I danced like a sailor, rather quicker than I had anticipated, if truth be known, to the extent that I looked like a sped up piece of old vintage video. Katzo tinged his triangle incessantly, like a malfunctioning cappuccino machine. His face slanted to one side and he started foaming at the mouth.
"AAAAAARGHHHHHH!!!!!" yelled Tobermore, by now seriously in need of a clean pair of keks. CLOMP went Katzo's prosthetic leg, in excitement. CLACK went his wooden one. SNOODLE went his uranium one as he muffled towards the clan. Not the Klan. I thought I'd best make that clear. But Tristram had a foolproof plan involving galoshes, Eritrea, and a tin of carrot and coriander soup...
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