The Battle for Australia

By John Ifield

Born in the Middle East, Gregorian's desire for acceptance in Australia is thwarted by the old boys' network, epitomised by John Sinclair. Determined to succeed, Gregorian is bribed into undertaking a political career backed by a terrorist organisation.

Australia is seen as a soft target for take-over by this organisastion. Initial acts of destabilisation occur in Sydney and Melbourne, leaving the authorities jittery. Finally, Parliament House is stormed; all Parliamentarians are taken hostage and imprisoned; they will be killed if any rescue is mounted.

Gregorian becomes Prime Minister. The new government is able to control the south-east corner of the continent and becomes accepted through its nationalisation of the banks and the abolition of income tax.

A rescue attempt led by John Sinclair fails and Sinclair's wife, formerly Gregorian's lover, is taken hostage.

A second rescue attempt led by Sinclair is mounted under the direction of a foreign power but all the hostages are slaughtered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Oct 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781452526317

John Ifield

I prefer to be a recluse.

Book preview

1

A nasty piece of work was Hannibal, feared and hated by everyone with whom he had dealings; feared and hated especially by Jasper, his partner in disruption.

No-one was afraid of Jasper; unlike Hannibal, who had the physique and subtlety of a bulldozer, Jasper was small and weak but with an agile and devious mind. It was this mind that Hannibal used.

Jasper had the brilliant and bizarre ideas; Hannibal was the executioner.

* * *

December the first: the Harley-Davidson rumbling along a Melbourne city street bearing two Santa Clauses drew plenty of attention.

It came south down Spring Street, drove across the pavement and into Treasury Place, that placid home to State Government Departments. The bike stopped outside the entrance to No. 2 and the pillion Santa got off. He walked into the lobby, empty but for a clerk behind the reception desk and a security guard.

Ho, ho, ho, he said, getting surprised smiles from the guard and the desk clerk. He pulled a black sphere from under his red jacket; it was twenty centimetres in diameter and had a long black cord protruding from it. He took a lighter from his pocket and lit the end of the black cord; it sparked and sputtered. He bent down and rolled the sphere with its hissing fuse along the carpet toward the stairway.

Two jaws dropped and the guard said, Oi!

Santa Claus did not stay to see his bomb go off; he was back on the Harley’s flapper-bracket and away before the guard had got over his surprise, but by then it was too late.

It had taken the Ordnance Department three days to build this caricature of a comic-book bomb. The fuse was genuine but it was only for appearance; the sphere contained a simple smoke-bomb on a ten-second timer.

The small explosion and the large cloud of smoke did no damage other than to throats, pride and complacency; it got people worried and that was what Hannibal wanted.

* * *

Jasper lived in a state of perpetual outrage. A professional protester, no cause was too trivial for him to take too seriously; his life was a triumph of mind over doesn’t matter. He was a tea-party troublemaker, never getting his hands dirty, and a perennial discomfort to those around him.

He lived well. One did not have to be poor and uncomfortable to be outraged; after all, any discomfort might deflect him from his true purpose: to create expense and annoyance for everyone in the world with whom he did not agree and to persuade others to see things the way he saw them. The missionary spirit burned bright within Jasper’s delicate body.

He lived in what he liked to call The Residency. This was a self-contained suite in a mansion in Toorak, the most fashionable suburb in Melbourne. A real estate agent might refer to The Residency as a granny-flat, but no-one in Jasper’s circle of supporters would be so crass; supporters Jasper had by the score, but no friends.

He liked to think of himself as a mastermind. His aim was disruption and it was he who decided what was to be done. It was he who sent his troops into battle. He was the ultimate controller, the Napoleon, until the Fraternity for Peace sent Hannibal to help.

Hannibal’s aim, like that of Jasper, was to create disruption. Yet while Jasper was content to cause discomfort, havoc and expense to others, Hannibal wanted more. He wanted blood and he didn’t care whose it was.

Hannibal wasn’t going to waste his time with rent-a-mob protesters, wending their way from one ineffectual occasion to another, often with not much more than a few broken windows to show for their efforts. Hannibal’s view was that the greater the number of protesters the smaller the value of the protest, since the appearance on the evening news of hundreds of unwashed and unruly louts hardened the hearts of those observers who might otherwise have shown sympathy. Not that he was interested in sympathy.

Or publicity. Not for Hannibal the cute ‘claiming responsibility’ after an atrocity. For him it was the bottom-line result, the destabilisation and the bloodshed that counted. He neither sought nor would have wallowed in notoriety.

Hannibal wanted simple and dramatic nastiness, the more dead bodies the better and he didn’t give a fig for the cause of the day. He had his own ideology, his vision splendid, his goal: world domination by his people to be brought about by the elimination or enslavement of everyone else. If a few of Hannibal’s men sacrificed themselves in the process, so be it; they would get their reward in the life after death, or so they were persuaded. ‘Brainwashed idiots’ was how Hannibal thought of them, young men brought up to believe that they were oppressed and suffering and therefore entitled to cause suffering in others more fortunate than they, brought up with the basic terrorist mind-set.

Hannibal brought structure into Jasper’s ad hoc little world. With apparently unlimited funds he set up and equipped departments to handle different facets of his nastiness: the Fire Department, whose purpose was to start rather than extinguish — factory fires in the cool seasons, bushfires in the summer; the Transport Department, which specialised in disrupting the country’s somewhat ramshackle rail system and also ran a brace of legitimate taxis with licensed drivers, so useful when distributing malcontents around the city; the Ordnance Department, which provided bombs and incendiaries to other departments; the short-lived White Powder Department, which planted a couple of thousand anthrax look-alikes before Hannibal got bored; the Bulgarian Umbrella Department whose umbrellas never got wet; the Health Department with its supply of cryptosporidium ready to quell any resistance; the Computer Department whose free anti-virus software transmitted the contents of subscribers’ computers back to base; and the Exploding-Santa-Claus Department.

Hannibal had a protégé, a young man in his early twenties whose fanaticism was as breath-taking as his beauty. He had the body of a welterweight boxer, muscled and trim, and a face more suited to a woman than a man in its smoothness and regularity of feature. Women of all ages found him irresistible and he took full advantage of them.

It was this young man who came up with the notion of wheelchair terrorism. He had observed the favourable treatment accorded to people in wheelchairs, from the larger-than-standard car parking spaces to the convenient access ramps and the general right of way granted by the unencumbered.

So why not an elite squad of suicide bombers in wheelchairs?

Hannibal took command. He saw no need to inform Jasper, who was apt to be squeamish when it came to loss of life. He recruited another young man of like fanaticism but repellent ugliness. He bought two wheelchairs identical to those used by the domestic airlines and obtained Semtex plastic explosive and detonators from the Ordnance Department.

The two young men took the wheelchairs apart, reducing them to tubular steel frames. Each section of frame was packed with Semtex and a detonator embedded in it. The wires from the detonators were threaded back through the network of tubing to a series of dry-cell batteries housed in the square section hollow axle that ran beneath the seat. The circuit would be closed when the two plastic end-caps on the ends of the wheelchair-arms were pressed simultaneously — easy to do deliberately, hard to do accidentally.

Every working part of the bomb was thus encased in steel tubing; no sniffer-dog or metal detector would sense the explosive or the wiring within.

More than a decade after the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York, hijacking an aeroplane is still de rigueur for the traditional terrorist; the publicity is excellent, the authorities are made to look incompetent and the terrorists usually get off scot-free.

Hannibal had nothing so trite in mind; he wanted no publicity; he wanted murder and bloodshed.

January the first: the beautiful young man was taken to Melbourne airport, packed with holiday travellers, in the early evening. He had a single ticket to Sydney. He had no baggage. Sitting in his wheelchair he propelled himself to the departure gate. He was very late; all the other passengers had already boarded. He was given his seat allocation and told that he was lucky not to be left behind. This was as planned. A friendly hostess, enchanted by his good looks, pushed him down the ramp to the plane. The young man smiled his thanks.

The ugly young man was at Sydney domestic airport, carrying his single ticket to Melbourne. He, too, was late for the flight, the other passengers already seated. He, too, was wheeled down the boarding ramp and into the plane.

The timing of the operation had not been easy, given the erratic demands of holding patterns and take-off queues, but it would not matter as long as the two flights were boarded within a few minutes of each other.

For each wheelchair there was the same slow progression past the galley then, as the passenger cabin was reached, forefingers reached out and pressed plastic end-caps.

The explosions happened in Melbourne and Sydney within minutes of each other. No-one on board either plane survived. The planes burst into flames, the landing gear collapsing and the fiery fuselages falling to the tarmac like wounded dragons.

No window for a hundred metres in any direction was left intact. Glass shattered and flew through the air, killing and maiming as it went. Fire broke out in nearby departure lounges. It was dark outside; the flames were the only light.

The airport fire-trucks were first on the scene but they could only stop the fire from spreading. The planes burned unhindered, the heat too intense to get equipment close. Civil fire-engines arrived and quelled the flames in the departure lounges. The heat there had not been so severe but quite sufficient for the furnishings to be consumed in a pall of toxic smoke more deadly than the flames themselves.

When the air was safe for the ambulance crews they found few survivors. Those who could run had done so and escaped. Those who couldn’t run were asphyxiated or incinerated.

In all, two hundred and forty people died, fifty-two survived, many disfigured.

The explosions baffled the investigators. They could find neither clue nor motive. That Semtex had been used at both sites was not regarded as significant; it was the explosive of choice these days. No organisation telephoned the media to boast that it was to blame. It was very worrying; that was Hannibal’s aim. Worried people are docile people. Anxiety is contagious.

2

Jasper had no friends. Not even his parents liked him.

Jasper’s father was the chief executive of an oil company. Rarely at home, his life was one long round of meetings, dinners and overseas junkets rewarded with bonuses and options on top of an absurdly generous salary package — the company even paid his income tax.

Jasper’s mother had entered the frenetic six-hours-a-day, five-days-a-week world of stock-broking straight from university armed with good looks, a good figure and a double degree: law and commerce. In spite of strong resistance from her male colleagues (armed with expensive waist-lines, centuries-old prejudices and no qualifications at all), she succeeded and was made a partner. She became known for her sound business brain and for her ambition, both commercial and social. When she decided that it was time to get married she prepared a list of suitable males: managing director status, no conviction for insider trading or the like, preferably no current wife.

She made her choice and she made her husband-to-be think that he was a very fortunate man.

After the honeymoon her mind returned to business. Subsequently, she did take a few months off to bring Jasper into the world, with considerable reluctance on both their parts, but it was not long before she discovered that the joys of motherhood were as nothing compared to the joys of golf. Thus Jasper was reared by a succession of nannies and cook-housekeepers.

And Jasper was so hard to like. Given a small and weak body, his sharp tongue was his only feature.

When he was despatched to boarding-school his first year was one of mental and physical agony. The tiny stature and the unlikable personality made him a natural target for bullies. He wanted to run away but there would be no loving parent to comfort him if he went home; all that he could expect there would be contempt and a fast car back to school. He had no money and there was nowhere to escape to. Jasper, known as The Shrimp, was there for the duration.

How he hated that nickname. Bestowed in ridicule, it had been given to him within twenty-four hours of his arrival at the school. He supposed that it was marginally better than Prawn.

* * *

Attendance at the annual Head of the River day was compulsory. The riverside was a throng of jostling students, no place for Jasper. He made his way to the staging where the shells were launched. Strictly business here, crews to be mustered, oars to be sorted, tactics to be discussed, no time or inclination for horseplay.

Hey, Shrimp! Come here!

Jasper quaked. It was John Sinclair, known as Sinbad, large, powerful, not a bully but definitely one to be obeyed — this one’s nickname a tribute to his abilities in and on the water.

Have you ever coxed a boat? Jasper shook his head. Doesn’t matter. I’ll teach you. You’re elected. Our regular has been smitten with some bug and we’re desperate. Take your shoes and socks off and put this shirt on. Look smart!

Terror struck Jasper but what could he do? Rejecting the idea of escaping by jumping into the river (he could not swim), Jasper did as he was told.

Get in the boat. Sit there. Grab those lines, one in each hand. If you pull on the left one, the boat will go left. Pull on the right one to go right. Your job is to keep the boat on a straight course between the marker buoys. Got it?

Jasper nodded. It sounded simple but he knew that life had a way of exploding in his face.

The boat was pushed off from the staging and eight oars in unison began to propel it forward. Sinbad was sitting immediately in front of Jasper, facing him.

Listen, Shrimp. You’re the cox now. We’re rowing down to the starting line so you can get some practice. Just try pulling on one line at a time and watch what happens.

Jasper pulled on the left line. At first nothing happened; then he realised that the boat was slowly turning to the left. He pulled the right line; again a delay and then the boat turned to the right. He let the lines return to their original positions and the boat went straight. He had no idea why.

Well done, Shrimp. You’re a natural. Now when the race starts just keep the boat straight down the middle.

No-one had ever said Well done to Jasper before. He almost cried.

The next fifteen minutes left Jasper in a daze. He was aware of frantic activity all around him, shouting, movement, shouting, cheers, shouting. His concentration on obeying Sinbad’s orders was total.

The boat had been manoeuvred at the start so that they were in the centre of the marked lane and pointing straight. The starting gun fired and the boat leapt forward. Jasper was amazed at the acceleration. Straight down the centre they went, then Jasper realised that the boat was heading to the left side. He pulled the right hand line and they straightened up; then again the veering to the left, again the correction with the right hand line. What am I doing wrong? thought Jasper. He found that he if he kept on pulling at the right line the boat would stay on a straight course. He had no idea why.

The shouting and the cheering reached a crescendo and then died away. The oars were stilled, the boat glided to a stop. The race was over. Jasper had no idea of the result. He was too frightened to ask in case he had caused some dreadful embarrassment. In front of him, Sinbad had slumped over his oar, exhausted. Now he sat up straight, looked at Jasper and grinned, Well done, lad.

How did we do? Jasper dared to ask.

We won, lad, by a canvas. It was three days before Jasper managed to look up canvas in the dictionary.

They had won. Jasper was not sure exactly what but it did not matter. This was all at once the happiest day of his life.

Not for long. Back at the staging, out of the boat again, Jasper found himself grabbed and swung off his feet. Sinbad had him by the arms and another boy had him by the feet. He was swung back and forth three times, then hurled out over the water to splash down and submerge, too shocked to cry out.

I can’t swim, he thought, I shall drown. His head and flailing arms broke the surface and he breathed again. His feet touched the muddy bottom. He would live!

The entire crew was lined up on the staging, looking down at him and grinning. I am so used to this, he thought. His arms were grabbed again and he was pulled out of the water to stand on the staging, wet and miserable, expecting to be thrown in again. Sinbad shook his hand; the rest of the crew clapped. Still wet but no longer miserable, a bemused Jasper grinned back, shivering half with emotion and half with cold.

You had better get changed, dear. Someone’s friendly mother was standing by him.

I don’t have any dry clothes here.

Well then, we’ll have to get you back to the school. I haven’t got a car here. Perhaps one of the other parents…, she said, looking at Sinbad.

I’ll get my father, he said. Debriefing after dinner tonight, Shrimp. See me in the boatshed.

The shivering Jasper was driven back to the school in Sinbad’s father’s car, sitting in the middle of the rear seat while, in the front, someone’s friendly mother chatted to Sinbad’s father.

* * *

Jasper attended the debriefing, bemused. Each of the eight crew members seemed to have something to say. It was all new to Jasper, this talk of ratings, feathering and blade angles. Just as Jasper thought that he would be able to sneak away, Sinbad turned to him.

Well, Shrimp, you did a good job today for your first time out. Is there anything that you would like to say as the cox?

Mental paralysis set in; then Jasper remembered how the boat had persistently veered to the left. Actually, he said, The boat seemed to want to turn to the left most of the time. I had to keep pulling on the right hand line.

Sinbad looked at him, frowning. Why didn’t I keep my mouth shut? thought Jasper.

That’s very interesting, laddie. Do you have any explanation for this? Jasper shook his head, hoping that whatever it was would turn out to be somebody else’s fault.

Well, then, there are two possibilities. One is that the configuration, the relative positions of the rowers, is to blame; the four on the starboard side are nearer the bow than the four on the port side, therefore they exert a greater turning moment. The other is a simple power imbalance; more horsepower on the starboard side than the port. We can’t easily change the configuration, that would mean taking some outriggers off and refitting them in different places. We can easily shift rowers about, but which ones? We can’t afford the drag of having the rudder off-centre all the time so we’ll start trials this weekend. Well done, Shrimp. You’ve put your finger on something here.

Being praised by Sinbad thrice in one day was too much for Jasper. Tears welled up in his eyes and he beat a hasty retreat.

* * *

Two days later, Jasper was standing motionless at the edge of the playing field, hoping that such would render him invisible and vaguely watching an inter-house cricket match. A heavy hand descended on his shoulder. Jasper flinched. Was this the prelude to some torture? Not this time, just the towering figure of Sinbad.

Shrimp, our regular cox is still down with the lurgi. I want you to sit in again tomorrow. Seven a.m. at the boatshed.

Not one for small talk, Sinbad.

Yes, was all that Jasper could muster, thinking of how cold and wet he was going to be again. He really would have to learn to swim.

The next morning, to Jasper’s great surprise, he was given cheery greetings by the crew. How could they be so disgustingly hearty at that time of day? Three hours later, what had seemed to Jasper to be a game of maritime musical chairs was finished and he, yes, he, gave the thumbs up to indicate that the boat was now running straight.

Well done, Shrimp. Thanks. He was dismissed.

* * *

Shrimp, our regular cox is still malingering, plus he’s thick between the ears. I want you to take over. Five days later and, again, no beating about the bush from Sinbad. No chance of refusing him, either. Learning to swim was suddenly urgent.

Lying in bed that night, Jasper reviewed his new situation. He was the right size to be a cox; he was the wrong size for everything else. He seemed to have an aptitude for coxing; he had no aptitude for anything else. If he became a top cox he would be respected. Not liked, he knew that being liked was not on the horizon, but if he was simply respected then his life would change.

Jasper did become a top cox. It was a while before he noticed it but the bullying stopped. The bullies had found out that they were in for some heavy punishment if they messed with one of Sinbad’s men.

Jasper was still hurled into the water with depressing regularity but now that he could swim he pretended that he thought it was a great joke. Someone’s friendly mother occasionally said hello to him and Sinbad’s father, often at her side, would give him a nod of acknowledgement.

Jasper’s remaining years at school were uneventful. He made no friends; he was a successful cox; he passed sufficient exams to ensure a place at university. He decided to study law; it seemed a good field for a sharp tongue.

* * *

Two weeks after he had left school at the end of his final year his parents died when the company’s executive jet ploughed into a mountain-side on the way to a Canadian ski-resort.

Although he was aware of a sense of loss, Jasper shed no tear. He had not loved his parents, they were just there. The funeral was attended by business people and company employees. Jasper was present but chose to be invisible since few even knew of his existence.

Suddenly Jasper was wealthy. Both parents had been successful; both had acquired property and stock portfolios. It did not occur to him to do anything with the money — an overseas trip, car, clothes. He accepted the advice of the family solicitor and left the properties under competent management and sold all the stocks, putting the proceeds into a cash management fund to provide him with regular income.

With school behind him and university months ahead, Jasper wondered how to pass the time. For years his only concern had been his own survival; now there was no threat. The opportunity to do something was there. But do what?

He had lost his parents but gained space, both in accommodation and in the absence of their disapproval of him. Now the only disapproval was that which he chose to focus on others, mainly his ever-changing domestic staff — nobody else came near him. He rationalised his hermit-like existence on the grounds that it was better to have no relationship at all than to have a bad one. His wealth he took for granted; he had done nothing to earn it, therefore it was of no value to him, it was just there for his convenience.

Like so many with inadequate personalities, little or nothing to offer and nothing to be proud of, he craved power and found some fulfilment in knowing of or causing the discomfort of others. It made him feel less inferior; it was his vengeance. So Jasper looked around for targets for his sharp tongue.

Not hard to find. The protest industry was in full swing. The anti-nuclear rabble had been disbanded but there were new causes: the environment, women’s rights, indigenous rights, animal liberation, anything green, tobacco (but marijuana is good for you), landmines, everything else in good time. Equality was to be achieved by taking from the haves until they became have-nots.

Jasper had no desire to get out there on the street with a bunch of rented rowdies and professional victims unwilling or unable to vacate the role. He despised them. They tried to impose their beliefs (or their paymaster’s) on others in such an uncouth manner that they often did the cause-of-the-day more harm than good.

Jasper chose to write letters to the editors of newspapers around the country, using the pen-name The Recalcitrant Shrimp. The adjective alone made his letters highly noticeable. To his surprise, some people wrote letters supporting his positions, others threatened and chastised. He realised, for the first time, the sensation of power that comes from influencing the feelings of others. He also realised that he did not know very much about any of his chosen targets. How much more effective his sniping would be if he were well-informed.

Being neither a giver nor a receiver of love or friendship, knowledge became Jasper’s stock-in-trade. He made it his business to know what was going on, to find out who was going with whom, to work out the secret agenda behind any generous-sounding public announcement, the interest behind the position. His letters to the editors took on an aura of omniscience. Other letter writers became polarised, seeing him either as the new messiah or as the evil one. His identity remained a secret between himself and the various editors but The Recalcitrant Shrimp became increasingly well known.

He was noticed by a head-hunter from the Fraternity for Peace.

3

Jay Gregorian was only ten years old when he came to Australia. His father had been a prominent banker in what was then known as The Paris of the East who had left when the fighting first started, taking with him his family, his personal wealth and a considerable portion of his bank’s assets. Those assets he had converted to diamonds.

The diamonds were transported to his new country in the sump of his beloved 1937 540K Mercedes cabriolet (he had read his Neville Shute). This magnificent vehicle was said to be the very car used, when new, for ceremonial parades by a then all-powerful political figure in Berlin; someone for whom, years later, Jay was to develop an admiration, prudently left undisclosed.

The Mercedes was now Jay’s, but it had only oil in the sump.

His father’s commercial abilities were complemented by his mother’s beauty and sense of destiny. For her the family was all-important; it deserved the best and she would see that it got it.

To her husband she was the radiant Italian princess with whom he had fallen in love fifteen years before. She was his lover, the mother of his children, the brilliant hostess, the family’s inspiration and the guardian of its honour.

To her children she was the loving mother, the strict task-mistress, the formidable support in times of anguish and the source of their ambition.

She symbolised beauty, goodness, elegance, kindness and common sense. She was perfect.

Her first priority upon arrival in Melbourne had been to acquire accommodation. Only the best was suitable. First a leased mansion, then one of their own, purchased after the sale of some slightly oily diamonds.

Her second priority had been education for her children.

An hour’s drive away lay one of the country’s best schools. A school for the wealthy, the well-connected and for the children of parents with grandeur or the delusions of it; its pupils were drawn from every corner of the nation and from many countries overseas. Those who came here had the opportunity to gain a better-than-average education; more importantly, when they left they would have friends or acquaintances throughout Australia and in many other countries up to half a world away.

It was to this school that Jay and his sister Gina were sent, a boarding school where they knew only each other.

There were to be some wonderful and happy times but boarding school is not easy. Perhaps because this was so excellent a school it created difficulties for its pupils that they would not have encountered elsewhere.

For the large group of children of former pupils there were few hurdles. Most of them seemed to have known each other all their lives, their families or their sheep being closely related. There is a lot of old money on the land, old prejudices too, and its owners stick together. The entry barriers to this group are high, perhaps insurmountable, and if the group is crossed it can be as vindictive as the Mafia, though less subtle.

For the children of the famous, or the infamous as long as they were wealthy, there was recognition and no shortage of eager admirers keen to be of service in exchange for proximity — some of the fame simply must rub off, perhaps some of the wealth too.

For the rest it was a question of survival.

There were two ways to turn survival into success: be a talented athlete or be outstandingly beautiful.

Gina was the latter. Her Mediterranean blood had given her beauty of face and figure and, to a great extent, a pleasant disposition.

Her beauty inspired admiration rather than lust. Most males wanted to put her on a pedestal and serve her every whim. Some fell instantly in love, many were stunned into silence and a few, a very few, pretended that they were unaffected.

For Gina there was no shortage of plain would-be companions, eager to serve the goddess, but she chose, or was chosen by, the only other comparable beauty in the school, the vivacious Shona.

In this there were major advantages for Jay. Who would dare to incur the wrath of his sister by picking on her as-yet-undistinguished brother? Indeed, who would not be nice to him in order to win his sister’s approval, or that of her closest friend?

Thanks to Gina’s beauty both she and Jay would survive. But Jay wanted to do more than survive, he wanted to succeed.

He wondered how. He had the family good looks; he had his father’s cunning but no academic brilliance; he had a reasonably strong body. Sport would have to be his vehicle, but which sport?

Contact sports did not appeal to him. Neither did cricket, since he tended to get bored rather quickly. Tennis he tried but lacked the co-ordination to become anything more than average. And average was not good enough. Athletics had some attraction but, whilst there lay glory for individuals, Jay wanted a team sport to give him some legitimacy in the eyes of his fellows, some admission into their ranks.

He chose rowing. Not very high profile for much of the year but on Head of the River day all eyes were on the rowers and if they won they were gods; that would be good enough for Jay.

The school had eight houses for its students. In these they slept, did their homework and lived for those hours when they were not in class or on the playing field. Inter-house competition was fierce, both in sport and academically. Each house was ruled by its housemaster; his authority was absolute but was delegated to some extent to prefects. It was through prefects that Jay first came to appreciate the phrase power corrupts.

He was fortunate that in his house only two others in his year elected to do rowing: Yingtong and Sinbad. How Jay hated the nicknames that were almost compulsory, especially after he discovered what his was.

The three of them were so different, yet together they were formidable on the water. Their house’s uncoxed four was unbeaten in all their years at the school — the fourth oar changed from year to year but the three of them were the powerhouse. They were also in the school eight in their last two years, coxed by the Shrimp. In both those years they won the coveted Head of the River trophy. The whole school cheered on the riverbank. They were on that evening’s television news. They were heroes. Jay was a success.

A success but not accepted. It was infuriating. In the heady moments of victory he was one of the gang, yet it was the superficiality of sweaty teamwork. There was no true friendship.

Jay did so want to be Sinbad’s friend. He admired his old family status, envied his abilities and his confidence in himself. Yet always, in the nicest possible way, it was made clear that Jay was not and never could be one of Sinbad’s group of friends. The entry barriers to this group were erected before birth.

Gina was in love with Sinbad and he maintained the same barriers even for her. When Gina confided this to Jay he was furious. Now Jay hated what Sinbad stood for; he became determined that one day Sinbad would be forced to admit him and Gina to that circle of privilege and power, but he knew that for that to happen he would