Dunster Read Online Free

all truth and honesty, actually like Dunster?
    I suppose I needed him. A boy starting at school, even at St George’s from which he goes home in the evenings, needs a friend so that he has the consolation and protection of not standing alone, a target easily picked off, and Dunster offered his friendship almost too eagerly. But did I like him? Sometimes, as when he showed such a total lack of interest in my theatrical triumphs, I disliked him very much. And yet it was hard not to have some affection for Dunster. He was brave. His continual arguments brought him perpetual trouble. Masters would lose their tempers with him, fling books at him and turn him out of the room. Boys would make fun of him, lie in wait for him and attack him. He would put up with all this with a wan and contemptuous smile and he did not, I have to admit with shame, get much support from me.
    â€˜I didn’t notice you coming to the rescue much when Porker Plumstead and his friends cornered me in the bogs.’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜You like to keep out of things, don’t you?’
    â€˜If I can, I suppose I like to.’
    â€˜There’s nothing much you want to stand up for, is there, old man?’
    â€˜Well, not your idea that Whittington’s Bank is financing the slave trade in Madagascar.’ Porker’s father was on the Board of Whittington’s, which was why Dunster had started the argument.
    â€˜You mean you don’t care about slaves?’
    â€˜Well, yes. Of course I do. Everyone does. But I don’t see that being punched by Porker’s friends round the bogs is going to help the slaves in Madagascar.’
    â€˜You don’t care much about slaves, and you don’t care at all about friendship.’
    â€˜Oh, come off it. Dunster. Now you’re making me feel a shit.’
    â€˜Good!’ He smiled at me with sudden, unexpected charm. ‘That is exactly how you ought to feel.’
    I suppose the truth was that I recognized in Dunster all that I wasn’t. Although I had no desire to be in the least like him, he made me feel timid, compromising, time-serving and, if not envious, in some way inferior. Here was I, waiting for Plays and Players each month to discover who was starring in what, dreaming of being an actor and settling for being a maths specialist because I found it easy. And there was Dunster, enormously concerned about the slave trade and the Race Relations Act and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, thriving on a series of head-on collisions with the masters and the boys which would have left me trembling with nervous exhaustion. And yet most of the time, to my amazement and occasional respect, Dunster seemed to achieve, in the centre of his frenzied universe, an absence of anxiety which I had never known. But then, as I have made it clear to you, I worry.
    Dunster and his journalist father occupied, in almost unbelievable chaos, the top two floors of a house in Camden Town which had been the Dunster matrimonial home. After Mrs Dunster moved out, the father let half the place to a man on the Financial Times who had recently married. The Dunsters despised this couple mainly because of their habit of taking regular meals and the orderliness of their existence. The Dunster cuisine consisted almost entirely of bacon and eggs, eaten with doorsteps of fried bread and cups of strong tea, so that about their home the smell of burning fat indicated that a traditional English breakfast was available at all hours of the day and night.
    I went to his house and sometimes I let Dunster visit mine. My parents lived, as I do now, in Muswell Hill, a high and windy part of north London, with pink and white Edwardian villas dominated by the curious fantasy of Alexandra Palace, from which you can see much of the city laid out like a map. When I was at school, it was the old glass palace with minarets, although the roof had been damaged by a flying bomb during the war and, during one hard