Walking quickly, he goes into an adjoining room. Here there are bones, white dry bones' Along the walls there are skeletons of frogs and insects, all displayed neatly in glass cases. But up on the ceiling, hanging from two thick chains, is the huge skeleton of a whale. The boy cannot move, he cannot take his eyes from the monster. As he looks up, he imagines the gigantic white ‘jig saw puzzle’ of a body swaying to and fro, tiny cracks appearing in the ceiling, cracks which grow larger until in a cascade of plaster and rubble the whale crashes down on him, the dry bones splintering on the floor. The boy panics. He scampers through the door, down the long corridor. He bumps into an attendant who shouts at him, but he keeps on running. He reaches the pottery room and with both hands wrenches open the carved oak door and lets in a wave of bright sunlight. The door is left swinging open, and he hurries home. R. GLASS (5U). Club News THE CHESS CLUB Moving to Handcross has meant an end to our participation in the Brighton Chess League but there has been no lessening of interest in chess. Meetings have taken place regularly on Tuesday evenings and the inter-House tournament was decided only on the very last match of all. An innovation was tried in the individual tournament whereby the early rounds were played on club evenings. This proved very successful and meant that only the semi-finals were carried over into the spring term. A junior ladder-competition has ensured that interest in the game has not been confined to members of the senior school, and several promising juniors are joining the lower boards of their House teams. Balfour House's triumph in the inter-House tournament came as a surprise to some, but their victory was well merited. They played on the whole more steadily than the runners-up, Einstein, and proved once again that tournaments are won and lost not on the first three boards but on the last seven! Jacob Klein's emergence as the strongest individual player in the school was a matter of time. His chess has always been imaginative and he has now deepened his knowledge of opening technique and improved in the middle game. His endings are still his Achilles heel (like most of us!) and when he masters this phase of play he will be a really strong player. Jack Beatson met him in the final and he too is a much-improved player. Page 15 Previous Page Next Page Back to Main Page