Anthony Blair, or Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, to give the hero of our story his full name, was a boy of sunny disposition.  A ready smile played around his mouth as he squinted into the mirror of the third class compartment he had occupied alone for the past hour.  At fourteen he already cut a manly figure.  On the platform where he changed trains, he had thanked the porter politely for carrying his trunk and tipped him half a crown.  ‘You are a proper young gentleman and no mistake,’ the porter replied with a beam of satisfaction so transparent that Blair immediately wondered whether he had been over-generous.  Perhaps a real gentleman would have given just a shilling, or even sixpence?

  His new study companion had plunged his nose into a book, and was writing furiously.  He seemed much older than his years.

   ‘The mater’s done us proud,’ Blair said as he pushed a slice of cake across the desk.  The dark-haired boy put down his pen and took the cake with his inky fingers.

   ‘It’s not bad.’

   Blair detected a Scottish accent.  ‘I’m sort of Scottish too,’ he said.  ‘How ripping that we should be sharing a study.  Do help yourself.’

   ‘You don’t sound Scottish,’ Brown replied.  ‘You could be a Sassenach impostor.’  For the first time, Blair could detect the hint of a wintry smile.  Perhaps he and the dour Scottish boy would be chums after all.

 Blair hesitated.  He had just been reading a story about a boy in Canada who spied for the Mounties on a gang of crooked gold prospectors.  Mandelson was clearly more than just a mamma’s boy if he was prepared to risk spying on the Murdoch gang.

   ‘You’re a plucky lad.  But be careful.’

   ‘Thank you, Blair.  You’re a real brick.  Do you know what I would like to be more than anything else in the world?  I want to be your toast fag.’

  

   Brown silenced his protestations.  ‘Everything’s going like clockwork.  Prescott’s stepped in and taken charge.’

   Prescott was a ‘day bug’ in Hardie’s who came to school on a bicycle, his cap awry and his scarf trailing in the wind.  He was a budding poet and something of an aesthete, with hair flopping over his collar and a volume of verse stuffed into his pocket.  He was notorious for losing his prep, forgetting his books and being generally absent-minded.

   ‘You’re chaffing me, aren’t you?’ Blair addressed his visitor.

 ‘We’ll get Ashdown in on this.  He knows all about tracking and signs and so on.’  

Ashdown was the captain of Gladstone’s house and the leader of the school’s Boy Scout patrol, which he christened the Beavers.  Ashdown had been to camp on Brownsea Island with the great Baden-Powell himself and had learned the secrets of ‘spooring’ and how to survive in the wild. 

‘Fried snake is not half bad,’ he remarked at breakfast one morning.

   ‘We know he’s hiding something,’ Blunkett told Blair.

   ‘You do what you think is necessary,’ Blair replied.  ‘I don’t want to know the details.’

   Blunkett then tried out some of the rich arsenal of methods which had been used at St Stephen’s since time immemorial to keep rebellious fags in line.  He waved a red-hot poker in Mandelbaum’s face, poured cold water over his bed, tied him up with rope and put a sack over his head.  But the man either remained silent, or spoke in a mixture of Russian and German which nobody could understand.

   ‘This business of the missing rifles,’ Campbell went on.  ‘You can’t go on dithering around.  You must tell the school that you know where they are and you’re going to do something about it.  Where do you think they are?’

   ‘I have it on good authority that they’re being hidden at Fat Sam’s.  You know, the Saracen’s Head.’

   ‘That’s a topping story.  I shall write it up for the Rocket and say the forces of law and order are closing in.  Detectives are on the trail, Scotland Yard is on the case, bloodhounds are sniffing around, the villain is cornered in his lair.’

   ‘I don’t know how much of that is actually true,’ Blair interposed.

   ‘If it isn’t it soon will be,’ Campbell retorted.  ‘Never underestimate the power of the press.’

   Murdoch pointed to Campbell, who was vigorously pounding the keys of a typewriter.  ‘He’s cutting a stencil.  We put it in the machine, with ink and paper, and Bob’s your uncle.  Out comes the newspaper, like a rat going down a dunny.’

   ‘And then it will go on the noticeboard in the same way?’ Blair asked.

   ‘Oh no, we won’t use the noticeboard any more.  You see, this is a duplicating machine.  We can print as many copies of the Rocket as we like.  We could print one for every boy in the school, if we had enough paper.  There’s no limit to what we can do.’