Fruit on the Bough: A heartfelt family saga about a brother and sister

by Ursula Bloom

  The child’s first letter home implored that he might be immediately removed. Mr. Andrews sent for him, and explained with a sneering smile that all letters were censored. He suggested that the little man should write again in the kind master’s study. The kind master would dictate to him. Twit, sodden with tears, rewrote the letter. Had he had Jill’s spirit he would have run away, but his one idea now was to grin and bear it. He had no conception of possible escape. The boys were his chief tormentors. By day they set upon him, and he dreaded the night when he was left to their mercies in the dormitory. He hated the coarse food, which he could not eat, yet he had not the sense to starve himself into the ‘San.’ He liked the games. They were the only bright spot in an otherwise wretchedly bleak outlook. His health, however, would not permit of an active interest.

  The bad food and the small care which Whoreham meted out to him were responsible for a growing weakness. He had no initiative. His stubborn obstinacy, combined with his ignorance, was responsible for the big change in him. Neither Isobel nor George had considered it to be part of their duty to talk openly with their children. Isobel ‒ the more modern of the two ‒ had intended to discuss sex matters when Twit and Jill were old enough. She had never decided upon the correct age. At nine, Jill had approached her mother, having been told some startling facts by a loquacious gentleman of ten.

  ‘Johnny says babies grow inside their mothers,’ said Jill, seeking information.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Isobel promptly. ‘That’s not true.’

  Jill regarded her mother with some amazement. A lie was so wicked. Johnny had given her ocular demonstration of the truth of his statements by indicating a cat very much in kitten. Jill, believing that it was rude to contradict, asked suavely: ‘You are quite sure?’

  ‘Quite,’ said Isobel uncomfortably.

  Jill made a mental note that she could never ask her mother anything again. Isobel was not honourable in her explanations; she hedged. These knotty problems, Jill decided, must be solved by oneself. She understood the mammals easily enough, and it was silly to make so much mystery about it. But it was perplexing as to how the baby got there. How did she know that she hadn’t a baby growing inside her? This gave a delicious and exciting fillip to her imagination. Perhaps she had, and did not know it. The ornithological aspect was more difficult. Eggs puzzled her considerably, and for hours at night she lay awake seeking an explanation. Hens laid eggs every day, but people did not have babies every day. There seemed to be no conclusion at which she might arrive.

  Twit, not having the same vigorous imagination, did not care. The baby business cropped up at school, but he was not interested. He was born male, therefore he was unlikely to be inconvenienced by having babies. He could see no object in it. He did not associate his own budding instincts with the baby question, and no one saw fit to tell him. Twit was the unhappy product of an age that was stupidity personified. It preferred youth to shatter its body with helpless ignorance. It believed that ignorance to be less disgusting than the explanation of simple laws to simple minds. The Edwardian era was far more dangerous than the Victorian, which was shocked at everything. It was, of course, more pernicious than the neo-Georgian, which is shocked at nothing. Its children were lucky if they escaped with any remnants of morality at all. Pre-war England took perversion to itself and fostered it. Later it lifted amazed hands in horror at the post-war England, which brought the 1914 nurslings out into the garish light of truth.

  Twit, knowing nothing and caring less, went his own sweet way. The world was his enemy. His mother coddled him, caring for him with Elliman’s embrocation and cod-liver oil, but helping him in none of the vital ways in which a man child needs help. Jill only suffered in spasms by reason of her femininity. A woman is for ever the hunted in contrast to man the hunter. She is passive rather than active. The debatable question of the eggs was unlikely to harm Jill seriously, whereas the problem of himself was very likely to injure Twit. Mr. Andrews treated all his scholars as ‘the dear boys.’ They might be seventeen or seven, it made no difference. With the admirable discernment of men of his age, he believed that they all had the same desires. ‘The boy’s mind is usually in the peppermint jar,’ he was wont to say; and believed it to be a brilliant epigram. He knew nothing about boys, treating them as merely creatures of wilful mischief, whose hearts were in their stomachs. He delighted in the rod and rule-abiding citizenship. He had an almost sadistic passion for cruelty, which he glossed over as being purely disciplinary. This man did not even know himself.

  Twit sat at the bottom of his form with a grim determination to learn nothing. At home, Isobel screwed and pinched in her frantic desire that one of her children might obtain some fragment of education. She believed that the money was dedicated to a good cause. She was ignorant of the futile effort to which her economies were in reality dedicated. Twit sat before an ink-splashed desk. He made boomerangs out of pen-holders, and a patent affair of his own called ‘the flying bat.’ This he devised out of loose sheets from old exercise books spiked together by disused pen-nibs. Twit may possibly have gained some small aeronautical knowledge, but nothing else.

  Nothing else at all.

  II

  Outside the dormitory window, the cherry tree lifted its wide branches, starry with white blossoms on brown twigs in the spring; green with kindly sheltering leaves in summer. Later the green would drip as though with blood as the fruit ripened. In winter it would be dark in ebon nudity. Twit’s bed happened to be near the window, and although Stinker was the custodian of this cherry-tree business, one night it fell to Twit. At nine a master came the round. Mr. Powell was yellowed by jaundice, rutted by the despair of the place. He knew that he would never get a rise, that he would never get anywhere. He saw himself in the blind alleyway of hopelessness. Mr. Andrews had taken him because, having no experience and no qualifications, Mr. Powell had had to come cheaply. Mr. Powell had taken up schoolmastering because he could think of nothing else, and his aunt had suggested it. She was a highly respectable woman and she believed that schoolmastering was a gentlemanly profession. Mr. Powell ran through the dormitories carrying his guttering candle. He never even waited to say good night, for the simple reason that he did not care if anybody had a good night or not. It was all the same to him. He would return to the squalid little staff room with the others. He hated them. He hated everything. He felt that it was all part of the general hopelessness, himself, Ruthven, and Neil, three rats in a trap, and the trap the staff room. Mr. Ruthven was old, greyed with the dry-rot of school life. The routine had turned him cynical. When he put out the lights he came in his old gym shoes, hoping to catch some young lad out of bed. Mr. Ruthven liked detecting wrong-doing. He had persuaded himself that he did it for the good of the dear old place, for law and order, and the future of the youths themselves. In reality it was nothing of the sort. He had been bullied at school himself, and now was his opportunity to take it out of somebody in return. In the face he was like a fox, with enormously bushy eyebrows, and peering little eyes set too closely on either side a thin pointed nose. He came along moving very silently, and for this reason they called him the Fox, just as they called Mr. Powell ‘Yellow Fungus,’ because he was jaundiced. Sometimes it was Mr. Neil ‒ known as Nelly ‒ round and girlish-looking. Mr. Neil had not long been a schoolmaster, and could still live life for the fun of the thing. He did not care. He was merely a boy himself, and he had the youthful faith that ahead lay something better.

  That night it was nearing the end of the summer term and the cherry tree was vividly green beneath the window. It was Yellow Fungus who went the round. He came and went furtively yet rapidly, like the flicker of candle-flame, because he was going out with Mr. Neil to try his new motor bicycle. That was if the motor bicycle would start; usually it wouldn’t.

  The moment Mr. Powell had gone, Martin got out of bed. He was fully dressed. The very sight of Martin was inspiring, for the younger ones remembered that he had private means, kept Stinker as a
fag, and that he had made eighty-one runs in the Fathers’ match at mid-term. He came in a nonchalant manner making for the window, then halting beside Stinker’s empty bed.

  ‘Hello, where the hell is that brat?’

  A chorus of thin squeaky voices piped up. ‘Please, he’s in the “San” with a bilious attack.’

  Martin nodded. He dug Twit in the ribs with a playful but pinching finger. ‘Hi, you. You’d better keep cave for me.’

  ‘Yes, Martin.’

  ‘You keep awake and let me in when I come back, and no shirking. If you go to sleep I’ll give you twenty of the best to-morrow. Savvy?’

  ‘Yes, Martin.’

  ‘And no playing the fool. What’s your name?’ with the air of a grand gentleman who cannot be bothered by such trivialities.

  Before Twit could explain that he was Grimshaw, a chorus of voices explained for him.

  ‘Old Combies,’ said they.

  ‘Look here, young Combinations, you understand what’s what?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Twit sulkily.

  Martin put his long legs over the window-sill and his dark head disappeared among the quivering leaves. Twit shut the window after him, and the dormitory fell asleep.

  III

  Twit knew that if he stayed in the warm and comfortable bed he would disgrace himself by sleeping. He was annoyed with Martin. Suddenly he was fired with the idea of following and seeing what Martin was doing out there. The idea flittering through his brain intrigued him, and would not be quashed. He got up, pulling on the despised combinations, his shirt and the shoddy suit of cottony tweed that had been the best Isobel could buy him. He levered himself over the sill and was received by the anguished green leaves of the cheery tree. It offered a most convenient ladder to the grass below. Looking up after safe descent, Twit perceived the school white and shining in the starlight, and the dormitory window left wide open. He had not been able to close it from the outside because the slats between the panes offered no finger-hold. He did not care. He was in a new world, a scintillating, moon-washed world, and school mattered no longer. Even the trees and flowers looked strange. He ran down the drive, under cover of the shrubberies, ducking unnecessarily beneath yew and elder. But the ducking added piquancy to the adventure. He came to the big gate with the notice additionally bold in the eerie light ‒ ‘Whoreham School for delicate sons of gentlemen. Principal Revd. H. Andrews, M.A.’

  Twit turned along the silver ribbon of a road, twisting like a frosted band. To the left lay the village. He knew this, because twice a week they went there to the swimming baths. The place lay cuddled into a dip of the road, with hills rising in green rounded hulks about it. The square-cut battlemented tower of the church suddenly struck him as being singular. By day it did not stand out so. But now every battlement was etched in the white light against an Ethiopic sky. The whole country was unlike the world that he knew by daylight. It was alien. It was a new, deliciously amorous world of gay adventuring. Twit came cautiously to the first cottage. A sneaking delight assailed him. If he once discovered what Martin did on these nocturnal jaunts of his, he could use that knowledge as a lever. Martin was making his adieux. Deeming it wiser to be discreet, Twit, cap in hand, entrenched himself behind a convenient but unromantic mound of earth.

  The girl with Martin was one of the villagers, Twit supposed. She was plain, with very long hair, that Martin caressed lovingly. He kissed her. It was quite sickening how he kissed her, again and again, as though he liked it. He called her by her name, and it seemed that it was Vera. Twit stored it all up in his mind; he could imagine Martin’s face when he brought out this precious name! Martin would be red and angry but unable to help himself. Then, suddenly and most unexpectedly, Martin kissed her again and strode away schoolwards. The girl walked into the cottage, the door shut with a clatter, and a rasping bolt was shot. Twit came out of his ambush. His first idea was to catch Martin up; then he thought better of it. Martin might be in no mood to receive him graciously; far better let the prefect get home unsuspectingly and then creep in after him.

  Haltingly, at a distance, Twit followed Martin. He watched the senior reach the cherry tree, climb up into it, and lever himself across the sill. He watched Martin shut the window and lock it. The importance of the locking did not at first strike Twit. Allowing Martin time to get to bed, Twit climbed the tree and endeavoured to lift up the window. It would not lift!

  Just at first he supposed that it was some strange whim of Fate. He shook the window. Then when it showed no sign of yielding to him, he remembered that he had seen Martin lock it. He became panicky, beating with his fists on the panes. He must wake some of the other boys. Unfortunately, owing to Stinker’s adjournment to the ‘San.,’ there were none of them near the window. Nobody answered his frantic thumpings. To add to his plight, the bough of the tree that was supporting him broke off. Hurtfully he slithered into a receiving labyrinth of leaves and short pricking twigs. Twit, now thoroughly scared, decided to give up the attempt. The silver and white of the moonshine, which had looked so enchanting earlier in the evening, seemed to be ominous. It was crude in its definite outlines. The longer he looked the more afraid he became. He longed for Isobel. He desired Jill in a clinging, helpless abandon. In his dilemma he chose the very last course that Jill would have taken had she been there to help him.

  For a little while he wandered about trying to find an unlatched window and failing. Every moment added to his fears. Finally he decided to approach Mr. Andrews’ house, and seek admittance there. As he turned the corner he beheld the Fox and Nelly standing talking on the step. The night had been hot and the journey on the motor bicycle had not got them far. Yellow Fungus had gone off to bed when he had been unseated for the third time before they got out of the drive. Nelly was a child with a new toy, and he had to explain to somebody that it was not the fault of the motor bicycle. Nelly would never have noticed Twit, for he did not care much what the boys might be doing. They had his sympathies. But the Fox was a different personality. He was for ever nosing into affairs. He perceived Twit coming out of the shrubbery.

  ‘Ha … boy,’ said the Fox, and then adopting that oily, hyper-polite tone of inquiry, ‘and what is the boy doing, pray?’

  ‘I’m locked out, sir,’ said Twit.

  ‘Boy locked out,’ announced the Fox, and he sneered. ‘Very interesting. Let us hear some more, boy.’

  Twit, feeling that the situation was an awkward one and being anxious to clear himself of all blame, began again. ‘It was Martin, sir. He went out to see a girl in the village and I had to keep cave.’

  ‘Ha,’ exclaimed the Fox, ‘ha, a girl, eh? Ha!’

  Twit was taken indoors under escort. He told the whole story to the Fox, and later to Mr. Andrews. He was then allowed to go to his dormitory in peace. He undressed silently. He was not at all sure whether things had panned out well. Anyway, he had got back to bed, and that was something.

  IV

  He had not got out of the scrape.

  Next morning the whole school was assembled. Across the forms Twit beheld Martin’s eyes set like beacon-lights upon him. They were hot with resentment, they were defiant. Somehow Twit felt vaguely uncomfortable.

  Mr. Andrews gave them a lecture on getting out at night. It had come to his notice, he said, and he was pained. He should have to take extreme measures. The prefects had undoubtedly been remiss, in fact he had found to his amazement that one of the prefects himself had been guilty of this unlawful egress. He asked Martin to stand out. Again Martin’s eyes met those of Twit. Twit asked himself how could Marty know? There was the Head talking away. He would have to make an example; he would have to take what might to the young and foolish seem to be a strong line. He had wired for Martin’s parents and Martin would be expelled. Twit felt his mouth going dry. He endured an odd pricking sensation down the backs of his legs and in his throat. He had not expected this. He had not expected the beating that he himself received at ‘break.’

  V
>
  It seemed unfair, after he had told the Fox what was afoot, and shifted any blame carefully away from himself. He decided that he would tell Isobel the moment that he got home. She would take him away from this school which did not understand him or his codes.

  Worse followed!

  Martin, awaiting the arrival of his parents, had remained in the school library, seething with fury. He knew who had told about him; it could be nobody else save the little fool in the combinations. He had noticed the window being open when he returned, and supposed that the kid had left it like that in case he went to sleep. Now he knew that the little ass had been in the garden all the time and, finding himself locked out, had sneaked. Martin only prayed that Fate might deliver young Combinations into his hands. Fate was kind. Twit, smarting from the beating that he had received, and snivelling loudly, passed up the corridor. Martin heard him. He shot out a lean hand and gripped Twit by the Eton collar.

  ‘Come hither, my lad,’ said Martin gruffly; ‘a word with you, my friend.’

  He jerked the terrified Twit into the room, slammed the door to upon them both and shot the bolt.

  ‘Now,’ said Martin, ‘what the hell do you mean by sneaking?’

  ‘I didn’t sneak,’ quivered Twit.

  Jill was an expert liar. She never lied if there was any chance of detection. She lied in a glib and superb manner, running no risks. Twit, trying to copy her, blundered.

  ‘You blasted little liar,’ flared Martin, ‘do you know what I am going to do with you?’ Twit made an attempt to scream, but instantly the finger set inside his collar jerked it closer, almost to the point of suffocation. He gurgled instead. ‘I’ve a damned good mind to kill you,’ hissed Martin into Twit’s convulsed face. ‘It’s what you deserve.’