A War Romance

by F. W. Harvey

  That impulse Willie possessed, and indulged to the full in ‘Widdicombe Fair’, ‘John Peel’, and ‘Barbara Allen’. His passion for sweet and ordered sound dated at least as far back as petticoat days and before he could do more than – at the first phrase played – crawl along the passage to the room where the piano was. Also he was not alone in his pilgrimages, although Eric had not been born, and was in the words of his brother’s later taunt ‘only half a seed’.

  You would probably not guess that Willie’s companion then was a hedgehog. This queer little beast which inhabited the garden for one summer actually ran races with the boy in order to listen to the music. Do not think this a story invented – Why should it be? – it is not clever enough. It merely happened. Scores of times, on the player going to the door to open it, she (for it was usually Mrs. Harvey) found the baby and the prickly pig together on a mat.

  The child sang, but the hedgehog didn’t, through it screamed terribly and almost as loudly as a stuck pig when trodden on.

  Besides the things already mentioned Willie greatly enjoyed two books that were read to them by Miss Bradley. One was called Madam How and Lady Why and the other The Heroes. They were both by the same writer.

  The reading (in their lunch hour) took place usually under the old chestnut tree, which had a nice though lumpy natural seat in its toes. On this Miss Bradley sat while the boys lay in the grass at her feet listening, and playing with the fallen brown polished chestnuts, and their cases that seemed to Willie to resemble green hedgehogs. He learned then that the prickles served for the same purpose to both plant and animal in protecting the life inside. It was knowledge of this sort, dropped casually, that he grasped, and made his own, rather than that of the school-room.

  There, in spite of his two years handicap, Eric mainly beat him. His was a quiet plodding nature; Willie’s curious and erratic. Eric at that age learnt because he was told to do so, but curiosity, which impelled Willie to tie a worm in a know to see whether he could undo himself, was the only thing which caused him to learn. Once his curiosity was roused he could learn twice as fast as his brother, but till that was done he could, or would not learn at all.

  A chart of Eric’s progress would show a straight line slanting steadily upward. Willie’s went rather in a series of irregular jags:– the upward shoots showing the exact points at which subjects had seized his imagination. In this sense, he had no will power.

  Eric’s will drove his brain like a little horse. Neither boy had the slightest aptitude for arithmetic, but Eric did his sums. Willie didn’t. When he was kept in, he waited till Miss Bradley had turned her back, and then – escaped. He had none of the sense of duty which caused his small and breathless brother to chase one of the hens for three quarters of an hour on a hot afternoon, not out of playful cruelty, but because, if you please, he had heard someone remark that such a hen ought not to be allowed to sit.

  Another of Eric’s mysterious characteristics is illustrated in a stock phrase of frequent annoyance to Miss Bradley having been at pains to draw and contrast the characters of an historical period. The men were possibly King Henry 8th and Cardinal Wolsey. ‘And were they good men?’

  This, in a little piping treble, was always Eric’s enquiry. And it drove Miss Bradley nearly wild. Sometimes Willie would join in the persecution. But this was merely to tease the poor thing. Eric was serious. He hated to think that they were not good men, however appearances might seem to be against them.

  This is the more curious because his knowledge of good and evil was no greater than those ancestors of ours before they had fallen to the lure of the subtil serpent. Eric was so obviously still in Eden – a rosy-cheeked cherub dressed in a sailor suit!

  ‘Were they good men?’ ‘Was he a good man?’ The phrase in all its possible variations became a sort of proverb. It was a saying which endured as a humorous catch phrase between the brothers as long as they lived. Years after in trenches Willie heard the self-same guiltless enquiry uttered and was torn between tears and laughter.

  They were two lucky boys not only in having a rather remarkable woman as their teacher, but also in that added freedom which resulted from her remaining also housekeeper upon her brother’s farm. My previous reference to governesses carried no ill-intentioned meaning. These boys were lucky in being taught for two hours every day and in being not ‘governed’ during the rest of it. (It would certainly have been hard to find anyone capable of doing it.) They were lucky in that their attendance ‘at school’ caused them to walk each day through a mile of Gloucestershire meadows. (Here much is suppressed that could be uttered).

  They were lucky most of all, in a fellowship which then first sprang up between them founded upon common duties (done or avoided) and cemented by the fights and wrestles which prolonged their ramble home so that Bill Trigg who watched them from a turnip-field on the hill averred that on more than one occasion a short half-mile took them the best part of two hours to journey.

  These two boys could fairly fight, and then forget. They were only children.

  CHAPTER II

  ‘Shades of the prison house’

  In shadow of the tower, joined actually to the Chapter House, and forming part of the structure of the great Cathedral of Gloucester is ‘The King’s School’.

  Hither, soon after they had been promoted to knickerbockers, came Willie and Eric. Here they were taught the usual things.

  But more important than what they were taught, were the things they learned. And these things were bound up less with their lessons than with the place.

  It was one of the schools founded by King Henry the Eighth, no doubt from the spoil of the monasteries. Over its windows were lettered the names of famous Gloucestrians which included those of John Whitcliffe, and Robert Raikes, whose first Sunday School (suggested by the sight of so many wretchedly tattered and fighting ragamuffins in the Sunday streets of his own city), was located in a small half-timbered house near by.

  Neither he, nor that other, the great preacher (to many chiefly famous as having lived at a Gloucester Inn mentioned by Fielding in Tom Jones), caused the boys much thought, but they could not help being influenced by the general atmosphere of the place they lived in, and especially by that of the city surrounding it.

  Every Monday morning their mother drove them into town in the pony cart, dropping them a street or two from the school in tender anticipation of those tears which at first sprinkled that six-day parting. And each Saturday (which was market day) their father took them home in his gig.

  This was a great day. After the mid-day meal, for which, being weekly boarders, they remained, they set out for the market through streets of a city crammed with country people.

  Through crowds jostling but invariably courteous they drifted to the market square, tree-shadowed, divided into sections for accommodation of the beasts then to be sold. The horse sheds were on one side. By three o’clock the business of the day was often done, and the boys and their father would watch the unsold animals side-lined up, and started home, before driving out together in the gig.

  But on important fair days and especially at Barton Fair much might be seen of humour and excitement ere the market closed.

  Then hundreds of tiny Welsh ponies invaded the square; and scores of wild green-ribboned Irish horses shown off by yet wilder Irishmen who ran them up and down regardless of any life or limb till purchased – possibly for mere safety’s sake – by one or other of the scramblers.

  ‘Hurroo! oo! Look at him! Look at him, gintlemen! The rent payer! The fortune teller! What’s his colour worth? What’s his shoulders worth? Stands like a lion! Walks like a lawyer’s clerk! Gallops like the host of hell! None of your yearlings with his tail done up! Look at his teeth. Oo! Hurroo!’

  People were knocked down, but nobody ever hurt, so far as one could see. They just got up and bought the animal that did it! It was a great time for the boys who watched. And beside all this there was a pleasure fair of ‘Roundy-Horses’, ‘Swi
nging-Boats’, Cokernut-shies’, with endless side-shows of ‘Fat Women’, ‘Skeleton Man’, and freaks generally.

  They would not have been boys had they not liked the pleasure fair better, at the time, and begged for another round on the steam horses when they might have been riding a live one at the head of six others into the quiet country, or sitting behind their father’s old mare in the gig watching the lamp-shine on the playing buckles till they turned the last corner round the rick-yard and were home.

  The truth is that the things which most impressed them were not the things which influenced them most. The things which influenced them most, they took for granted. They were happening so regularly, so quietly, as not to be noticed.

  Take them in order. First the pang of separation (though but for a week) from home, and with that pang which never lessened, (although its expression in babyish tears soon changed into cheery ‘Good-byes’), a growing consciousness of what home meant to them, and an increasing value put upon that meaning.

  Continued small shocks of parting caused a continual pondering over what was left behind, and an increasing fondness; for it is Life’s rule that love shall so be begotten upon human hearts:– that is by separation: and also that the greater the love the greater the sense of separation. Saints to God, lovers to the beloved, children to their homes, the double paradox holds, and is that to know, one must be separated, and that the nearer one comes again the greater is the division seen to be. Spiritually considered what is all this earthly existence but a chance to know God by separation from Him. In the womb of His thought how could we, being unconscious, know Him, and how love? But once born …

  This Truth is (as the newspapers have it), applicable to all things to which Truth may be applied, but our concern is in its application to Willie and Eric.

  The first and most enduring result then, of their becoming weekly boarders at the King’s School was this love of home. It never left them.

  The second was an experience which was to be widened all through life – contact with and criticism of quite unfamiliar people.

  Criticism – whether appreciation or depreciation – demands standards. These, the boys had, in their father and mother and the farm hands:– kindly people. Kindness of men and of the earth was an atmosphere they were familiar with – the only one.

  It was with a feeling of bewildered astonishment that they took breaths in an atmosphere which was undeniably different. Not that there was any bullying of the Tom Brown sort at this school; only they encountered beings so different from those to whom they had been accustomed.

  One single incident may stand in illustration. On the first day, utterly un-self-conscious: with no shyness; Willie in the ‘break’ went with the rest of his class into a play-space (it was not a ground, but a gravelled walled-in space) where larger boys were kicking about a tennis ball.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked a big boy.

  ‘Willie Harvey’ he answered at once.

  The big boy laughed. He took Willie’s cap and flung it over the wall.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked Eric, as Willie still gaped in astonishment; and without waiting for a reply, he took his cap, and flung it in the same direction.

  Poetic justice being awake and observant sent to the aid of Willie seven insane devils who roused him from his trance and caused him suddenly and with violence to kick the tormentor’s shin, and while he rubbed it, to seize and send his cap to join the other two. The bell rang. A master came up. Vengeance was postponed.

  This is sufficient to indicate the beginning of a process of education for which little more can be said than that it fits boys for the world. Willie had ‘stood up for himself’ – and his brother. Never till then had it been necessary.

  And a yet more interesting fact is that, with allowances for age, he and the cap-thrower became very good friends.

  Another introduction to our age, and the world into which they were to pass at a later date, was through the masters, whom they found to be very different from Miss Bradley.

  The difference was largely the same difference as exists between employers of labour in the old days and employers of labour to-day. It was absence of personal contact, and it was due not to the men themselves but to a system.

  These shareholders in their limited company for an also limited education were kind people – as kind maybe as their former single employer – but the present system of business caused that kindness to remain at home. Their concern was to teach, and it had to do with pupils – not boys; in the same way as modern business concerns itself with ‘hands’ – not men.

  The result was a rather similar antagonism which if unreasonable was not without excuse.

  Neither of the boys had ever attempted to cheat Miss Bradley though they might on occasions defy her, but now …

  Eric acquired his nickname Hezekiah through the audible whisper of that word in class to Willie. In home work and upon every other occasion possible Willie did Eric’s essays, and Eric did Willie’s sums. It was of any permanent value only that it cemented an already firm friendship. The system provided a common enemy to be fought and hoodwinked wherever possible:– needless to say that was not so often as they hoped, for masters are not all fools. But they only made them the more cunning.

  Such was their common practice and in the circumstances it was inevitable. There are schools of size which still advertise a special and personal interest in their pupils. No doubt they do their best, and think that what they say is true, but it is a lie. The system makes such a thing impossible.

  This is to generalise. But to come to facts, Eric once attempted to treat a sympathetic master as he would have treated Miss Bradley – as a friend. Trigg had found a mumruffin’s next in a tall hedge at home and Eric possessed with excusable excitement communicated the news as soon as he came into class on Monday morning. But the lesson happened to be scripture. His friend promptly (and no doubt rightly) snubbed him and twenty four boys roared with laughter.

  For this and similar reasons life for the two boys came to be lived, not in school where in an ideal society it would be lived most fully, but outside; and then, since they were young, not on playing fields, but rather at home, in the week-ends.

  Long after Eric had forgotten or put away all the conventional mental equipment he donned at that academy of learning he remembered the mumruffin’s nest pointed out by the finger of Bill Trigg.

  A ball of feathers with a long tail, known to Gloucestershire folks as the mumruffin, is elsewhere called the long-tailed tit, or in certain country places ‘Bottle Tom’. Its beautiful oval nest formed of wool and moss, coated with lichen and lined with feathers, is in every sense of that ill-used word a marvel.

  In this snug cradle it will rear twelve or more young, and in winter months you may see the whole family flitting with undulating movements from tree to tree, and hanging in an inverted positions from the ends of small twigs in search of insect food.

  Its nest that year was in an apple orchard opposite the farm house, and both boys were enthralled in watching the family’s weekly progress. Even after Barton Fair, the first thing they did on arriving home was to rush out to the place to see that fruit pickers had not disregarded their emphatic orders that the little home was not to be interfered with.

  And it had not been. The King’s command would have been no more effective to those labourers (we do not call them ‘hands’ in the country) than the wishes of those two children.

  But besides this love intensified by separation of their home and the country: besides the little world of new characters driving them to re-value the old: besides the spectacle of bustling life which so richly coloured the ancient city each market day: there still remains to reckon as a influence: quiet.

  Teaching at the school shall not detain us further than to say that it aimed at grounding rather than grinding. The Oxford and Cambridge local examinations were essayed annually with fair but not overwhelming success; and ‘honours’, being rewarded wit
h a school holiday, were eagerly hoped for even by those who had no ambition to attain them. But the passing of examinations was no worshipped fetish even among the masters. ‘You come here not so much to learn, as to learn how to learn’ was a favourite and salutory saying of the ‘heads’ at their annual giving of prizes.

  The motto was admirable. Whether the means of enforcing it were as ideal may be questioned, but at least they were those generally accepted then that Bill Trigg was educated and some of the masters were not. Exactly.

  As was to be expected from the ages of the boys, it was during this period that they successively made the discovery of their sex, without however any noticeable signs of that hysteria now fashionably attaching to puberty owing to the works of writers not uninfluenced by a popular taste for such things.

  The discovery of a natural appetite is neither good nor bad; but it is not likely to be particularly ‘refined’, especially when the young voyager is directed by fellow school-mates.

  That was, and is still the general though not invariable custom of schools. Obviously it is not a good one; although less productive of permanent harm than we are asked (against experience) to believe by certain sex-obsessed moderns.

  The Church is in many ways a wise old mother.

  The school was, as I have said, a cathedral school. Mother Church’s old-fashioned physic for growing pains was annually administered to those boys who seemed to require it. Were not confirmation regarded as a sacrament it might still be regarded as a medicine. Of course it is both – the one through the other.

  Willie and Eric, or to be more precise Harvey I and Harvey II, were both (but not in the same year) confirmed at the cathedral in shadow of which they worked and played: whose choristers were their school-fellows: whose chimes twice by day and night for those four years flung a single quaint tune upon the wind.

  Consider without foolish flippancy or hysterical exaggeration that physical change which had come upon them, and its more than physical potencies. Comprehend, if only from this natural standpoint, the gathering up and turning of this tidal force into channels of spiritual ardour and brave adventure.