A War Romance

by F. W. Harvey

  Attach these happenings by association to an image of steadfast beauty, visible, tangible, familiar almost as home: an historical monument, a marvel of architectural achievement, and aspiration: a house of worship for a thousand years!

  Having done this you will realise the influence at a certain point and thereafter exercised on the lives of two small boys by Gloucester Cathedral.

  CHAPTER III

  ‘The midnight roar

  Of waves upon the shore

  Of Rossall dear:

  And on the pane,

  The gusty rain

  He loved to hear.’

  You are tired of being ordered about. When is something going to happen? You want the story, Now, now, gentle reader! Like many other people you want something for nothing. What you call the story is easily written, and I am as impatient as you: – but we must earn it, if it is to be of any true pleasure or use to us.

  In covering fourteen important years in seven chapters I have already restricted my output to the amount insisted upon by the Amalgamated Federation of British Readers; but every house must have a foundation – even the airy castle of the novelist – and I am not going to let men fall down by avoidance of a little healthy sweat good for us both. If what you want is a fool’s paradise, you can find it elsewhere. I am going to build.

  In this building of mine, the land makes the characters: the characters make the plot: and the land, characters, and plot, make the story.

  Very well then, Willie left the King’s School soon after he was fourteen, and went to Rossall. Eric remained on for two more years, and was confirmed in the Cathedral as already stated.

  It was the first time that the brothers had been separated, and the result is important as an influence upon their relations similar to that which has been shown to have happened on the occasion of their leaving home.

  At a time when each was developing his own individual tastes and character, this separation broken by holiday meetings enabled them to stand off from one another and so cement affection with critical understanding.

  Rossall was a school of some three hundred boys, standing upon the bleak north west coast of England, in Lancashire.

  As was to be expected, Willie found it a place very different from the one he had left.

  It was self-contained – making even its own gas – and absolutely isolated from the world. Leave to visit either of the towns – that is Fleetwood (which was three miles off) or Blackpool (which was about six) was granted at half term on special application by visiting parents. Save for this, or breaking bounds, you did not quit the school grounds from the moment you stepped inside at the beginning of term to the time of ‘breaking up’.

  In the absence of a single outside interest, the boys threw themselves wholeheartedly into those of the school, or perished of boredom.

  Like all our great public schools it was a monastic institution administered on the monitorial system, and it provided a fine Spartan training. Work and games were compulsory – especially the latter.

  It was not a very pleasant existence for a ‘mens’ however ‘sana’ otherwise than ‘in corpore sano’. But for any undiluted slacker it was hell.

  Willie was fortunate. His old grandfather would have turned in his grave to see that vitality of his put to such uses as Willie put it upon the football field; on the shore at hockey; and at cover point during haymaking time.

  On arrival he found himself in one of the eight houses – and of course the best. After a short period of homesickness, and disgusted marvelling at the extreme ugliness of the country around, he threw himself heart and soul into games, and succeeded.

  At work he was fortunate again in acquiring easily, and indeed without consciously aiming for it, the most useful of all class reputations. He was looked upon as a painstaking fool.

  This to an extent he deserved, since he did at times really try; and the beneficent result was that before long he was enabled occasionally to devote himself to what he liked – which was a good thing – without paying any heavy penalty in lines and other impositions – which are bad things.

  The truth is that while his body fitted excellently into ‘the system’, his mind did not.

  Thus in English literature he would not have been out of his class in the sixth form where he would have taken some interest in it.

  In Mathematics he was out of his class even in Form I.

  Form VI would have encouraged his interest in History and Geography to learn which he needed only to have been shown the interdependence of these subjects and their influence on modern life. Drawing he would never have learned, having no aptitude.

  Form I fitted him for modern languages, which he had not till then attempted. In Scripture he would have fluctuated between and top and bottom of the school. He could never learn the lists of kings of Israel and Judah, though he had an uncanny knowledge of the Book of Job, much of which he knew by heart. He really cared for the gospels, that is for the story of Christ, and His teaching, and was fascinated by parts of Revelation. The rest he ignored save for the rhythm of certain splendid phrases which stuck in his memory.

  As for Music, he would not practise his scales, but won the school singing competition as a dark horse. Also he came out third in the school on a general knowledge paper at the age of fifteen – his class being Form IV. Well, what are you to do with a boy like that? ‘The system’ demands that the test of your chain of learning shall be its weakest link. You cannot blame its priests for putting such an one in a class fitting his ignorance. You can hardly blame the victim for thinking life in school hours dull when even the things he liked were made babyish and of no significance to the mind. You can readily excuse his form masters in such an atmosphere of distortion for regarding him kindly as a nice dull boy to be excused for his keenness on the cricket field.

  Had his parents known the true state of affairs they would undoubtedly have considered their money wasted. But in fact it was not wasted, but spent for things other than they knew.

  Willie’s three years at Rossall were of very real value. If he learned little, at least he escaped cramming his head with a lot that was no use to him … When his position in the house (acquired solely through games) could no longer be ignored he was made a monitor. As such he gradually acquired tact, learned to shoulder responsibility, to take quick decisions, and to appreciate and use organisation.

  Almost all the good he got out of Rossall derived from his House rather than his School. There he was an influence. In addition to his power in directing the tendencies of elder boys, he acquired a great popularity with the smaller and unimportant members of the house. By immemorial custom they should have been ignored. But nobody had suffered more from homesickness in early days than he, and a shamefaced tenderness to his successors in suffering showed that he remembered it. Many an apparently casual word of his dropped deep into the hearts of youngsters who in after days of power and security passed it on to make another link in the chain. It was like a handshake in hell. For of all agonies there is (I aver) none at once so bitter and so unfair as homesickness. Remorse for sin may be terrible, but at least it is fair. Homesickness is a harsh punishment of the gods visited upon all that is noble in man. It is virtue rewarded. It is an answer to all who expect ease as a reward of righteousness and not rather a noble discomfort.

  The unconventional kindness of Harvey was untouched by any such philosophic musings. He did these things, as he did most other things; because he couldn’t help himself. The halo of a moral reformer he must also lack, since the House was in a clean and strenuous period, and not one scandal occurred in it during his three years. He never even coveted that halo.

  One night soon after he had been made a monitor he lay listening to rain. It was drumming a fitful music upon the window of his cubicle. The wind clamoured for admittance, singing wild sea shanties and then (softly) scraps of some lonely tune from Ireland. As the wind’s voice rose and fell so the rain varied it accompaniment. It drummed lustily during
the loud sea choruses. It was like old sailors thumping fists upon a table beating tipsy time. When the voice sank down to a dreamy lullaby, that drumming softened to the slightest sibilant little sleepy tapping conceivable. It was like soft little kisses through the song of a mother crooning to her baby. Dream kisses of dream children; fluttering of little wings upon the darkened panes. Through all this the persistent pulse of the Sea, now harsh now muted came incessantly in a rhythmic undertone.

  Willie sat up in bed listening. It was the sweetest moment of the day. His cubicle was on one side of the dormitory he controlled. The window faced the sea. He put his face to the cold panes and gazed into the darkness. The moods of the wind and rain had got into his head a haunting tune called ‘Spanish Ladies’, and then, overlapping that, the memory of his mother: home: his sweet child’s life to be lived never more except in such hours. The dormitory was silent save for the heavy breathing of sleepers. The school clock struck one: a single not which was instantly swallowed up in the soft noises of the night.

  Suddenly the salt-crusted music: the sweet heartache, were dispelled with an unfamiliar sound. The old curiosity awoke. He listened intently, and heard, first, faint footsteps; then the noise of a lower window being carefully opened; and next a rustling sound of entrance followed by a thud as somebody jumped from the sill into a study below. A burglar perhaps, but more likely a boy … Anyway, Willie was not one to wake up others to share the excitement of a capture. He slipped out of bed, and fled barefooted along the passage and downstairs where he waited concealed in a doorway.

  A soft shuffling … Someone treading nervously in stockinged feet … A moving shadow darker than the rest … Willie sprang out, and brought it down upon the tiling with a clatter of boots carried in hands.

  The prisoner, after fighting furiously, lay still – a knee on each biceps: then gasped, ‘You’re choking me!’ Willie’s hands relaxed a little on his throat.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Bowman.’

  ‘What!’ Bowman was their outside left. ‘And the House match against Christie’s to-morrow:– You swine!’

  ‘I haven’t been –’

  ‘What do I care where you’ve been, or what you’ve done – damn you! No wonder you played the stinking game you did last Satur … Lord, here’s “Chow”!’ ‘Chow’ was the housemaster. His heavy unmistakeable steps were heard on the upper landing.

  ‘Oh God! What shall I do? I’ll be sacked. My mother … Help me out of it, Harvey … O God!’

  Willie pushed him into a study.

  ‘You blasted fool!’ he said.

  A lighted candle appeared at the top of the stairs. It threw into relief a large ruddy face, and an iron grey moustache.

  It descended flickering in little jerks. ‘Who is there?’ said a deep voice.

  They Harvey clad in his pink pyjamas moved slowly from where he stood at the study door, and as if feeling his way, stepped steadily but blindly forward till he came into the vague circle of candlelight at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Harvey, what are you doing here?’ asked the master sternly.

  Without replying, the figure advanced with arms outstretched.

  ‘Harvey!’

  The boy paused; then continued his strange walk till he had actually singed his hair in the flame. ‘Hands!’ he suddenly cried. ‘Hands there!’

  The master looked at him curiously: then – put his arm round his shoulder, and guided him up the stairs and into his dormitory. When he had got the boy back into bed, he shook him awake.

  ‘Harvey’, he said, ‘you’ve been sleep-walking.’

  ‘What! What sir?’ cried Harvey.

  ‘Sleep-walking’ repeated ‘Chow’.

  ‘Sleep-walking!’ echoed Willie: then ‘Sorry, sir!’ ‘Thought I was playing a house match’ he added.

  ‘Hm! you’re thinking too much of football’ remarked ‘Chow’, perhaps truely. ‘Goodnight’, and then, as he turned to leave the cubicle, ‘Good luck for to-morrow, Harvey,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Whether ‘Chow’ had guessed, or was actually deceived, Willie never decided. But they won the match. And Bowman never broke out again.

  CHAPTER IV

  ‘Look at the clock!’

  Willie was leaving Rossall crowned (athletically speaking) with two school caps, robed in triple house colours, at the time when Eric was climbing steadily to a similar position in another school.

  This school, which was smaller than Rossall, stood on the banks of the Thames within a few miles of Oxford. It had a long tradition, and was in many ways a larger and more lively edition of the King’s School which he left soon after his confirmation.

  Eric and the majority of the scholars were boarders, but there was a sprinkling of day boys, and there were no ‘houses’. The school itself therefore circumscribed his life, and was to his activities what ‘Chow’ had been to Willie.

  The development of Eric as a school character inevitably followed the lines of Willie’s. His success was achieved through games, and by dint of something else. You may call it character.

  At this time, and from this time on, the difference in the two boys was very marked. Eric was then stretching into a tall loose-limbed lad whose chief physical attribute, whether shown in those sweet effortless off-drives past cover on a cricket field, or on the football field in his swerving yet straight run at centre forward, was grace: Willie hardening into the stocky strength and ungainly swiftness evident in his play at outside right, and that hawklike pounce upon the swerving cricket ball at extra cover. (A hard drive between cover and ‘extra’ almost invariably swerves from right to left of the fieldsman.)

  And if their physical differences were great, their mental and spiritual differences were (as may be guessed from preceding history) not less.

  Yet it is a fact that the chief difference between them was cause of the chief similarity:– that already mentioned success in games, particularly in such games as demand and almost detached steadiness of nerve in the player.

  While both were admirably, though differently, equipped in body for such success, it must be allowed that many others, less successful, were equipped equally well, if not better. Many were as lithe and graceful as Eric: as strong as Willie. Also it must be admitted that the remarkable vitality of their grandfather found parallel in that of a number of boys descended through other genealogy.

  The important distinction was another matter rooted rather in a certain unconscious preoccupation – in Willie’s case with a mysterious Something described already (though undefined) in that chapter wherein he is shown as having glimpsed a certain secret beauty of Earth: and in Eric’s case, with another Something perhaps more consciously defined, equally deep-rooted:– the thought of God.

  The foolish may laugh at such an explanation, but the fact remains that each by reason of his persistent, unconscious, preoccupation, wad enabled to rise to ‘occasions’ with a lack of ‘nerves’ astounding to their fellow players. And this was due directly to the fact that although consciously and upon the surface each was as anxious to win – to do justice to the side – as any boy in the team, there was already in each Something, huge, not to be ignored even though forgotten, to assure them that the ‘occasion’ was not so great as it seemed: which made each of them treat any match as an ordinary match, with appreciable benefit in the result.

  It could hardly be said of either that he had found vocation. Only he had achieved a beneficent indifference to all that was not vocation. The whisper which said ‘This is not the occasion’ was already audible. The trumpet proclaiming ‘The great occasion is now!’ was not, as yet. This is to repeat that in work and in games a similar preoccupation posessed the boys, which sometimes assisted them in a trial of nerves. And this is to foreshadow the whole future of their story.

  But soon enough will each follow his own thorny maze in quest of Something! Soon enough the vague and wavering shapes of Vocation will take substance crying to them ove
r star-crowned mountains and rivers deep as Death! Soon, soon, the strenuous quiet dream of school-days shatter upon the wilder dream of adolescence!

  Let us forbear awhile to observe or consider the steady growth of the tree of knowledge, even though its fruit be for the healing of the nations, and not as that other. Eden awaits us yet for a little while; and, since all things come to their close, we are fools to anticipate expulsion.

  See then, the Thames meadows golden-green in summer light. See a cluster of school buildings in blue June air. See eleven flannelled boys wearing caps of cherry and white; a host of others lounging round or lying in small companies on the grass to watch the season’s most important match while devouring cherries from paper bags. A sprinkling of old boys and elder brothers are present. The school is batting.

  A fast bowler wearing a blaring Zingari cap has, perhaps by means of its disturbing visual and moral effect, perhaps by reason of a slightly short-length ball with a capacity for ‘flying’, taken or caused other to take, five good school wickets at a total cost of forty runs.

  The school clock strikes five from its high tower above the bowling scrum at one end of the ground. There is an hour left for play. One hundred and two runs are required for victory, but the school have already given up expecting that. Even a draw is too good to hope for.

  ‘Harvey is the only one who isn’t frightened of that brute in the cap’ remarked one youthful disgusted critic to another. But that was not true. The wickets had been lost not by funking, but by foolishness, which caused them to feel timidly forward at bowling, which they over-rated, usually with the result of a slip-catch, followed by a deeply-reflective walk back to the pavilion.

  Out of the total of forth, Harvey had made twenty-three simply by stepping out and driving the good length balls, and leaving the short ones alone in the manner they had all been taught.