Porterhouse Blue

Tom Sharpe

Porterhouse Blue

The first book in the Porterhouse Blue series, 1974

To Ivan and Pam Hattingh

Chapter 1

It was a fine Feast. No one, not even the Praelector who was so old he could remember the Feast of ’09, could recall its equal – and Porterhouse is famous for its food. There was Caviar and Soupe a l’Oignon, Turbot au Champagne, Swan stuffed with Widgeon, and finally, in memory of the Founder, Beefsteak from an ox roasted whole in the great fireplace of the College Hall. Each course had a different wine and each place was laid with five glasses. There was Pouilly Fumé with the fish, champagne with the game and the finest burgundy from the College cellars with the beef. For two hours the silver dishes came, a

“An evening to remember, Master,” said the Senior Tutor sebaceously.

“Indeed, Senior Tutor, indeed,” murmured the Master, his private joke enhanced by this unsought prediction.

“This swan is excellent,” said the Dean. “A fine bird and the widgeon gives it a certain gamin flavour.”

“So good of Her Majesty to give Her permission for us to have swan,” the Bursar said. “It’s a privilege very rarely granted, you know.”

“Very rare,” the Chaplain agreed.

“Indeed, Chaplain, indeed,” murmured the Master and crossed his knife and fork. “I think I’ll wait for the beefsteak.” He sat back and studied the faces of the Fellows with fresh distaste. They were, he thought once again, an atavistic lot, and never more so than now with their napkins tucked into their collars, an age-old tradition of the College, and their foreheads greasy with perspiration and their mouths interminably full. How little things had changed since his own days as an undergraduate in Porterhouse. Even the College servants were the same, or so it seemed. The same shuffling gait, the adenoidal open mouths and tremulous lower lips, the same servility that had so offended his sense of social justice as a young man. And still offended it. For forty years Sir Godber had marched beneath the ba

To the Master the memory of his own days as an undergraduate still had the power to send a shudder through him. A scholar in his day, Sir Godber, then plain G. Evans, had come to Porterhouse from a grammar school in Brierley. The experience had affected him profoundly. From his arrival had dated the sense of social inferiority which more than natural gifts had been the driving force of his ambition and which had spurred him on through failures that would have daunted a more talented man. After Porterhouse, he would remind himself on these occasions, a man has nothing left to fear. And certainly the College had left him socially resilient. To Porterhouse he owed his nerve, the nerve a few years later, while still a Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Minister of Transport, to propose to Mary Lacey, the only daughter of the Liberal Peer, the Earl of Sanderstead: the nerve to repeat the the proposal yearly and to accept her a