by Dirk Bogarde
“Fishing?” she said in a silly way. Because what else could they be doing? Reg just looked at her and nodded his head, and Perce didn’t do anything. She looked vaguely round her and said: “I think I’m lost, I can’t find the bridge.”
Reg swung his rod into the air and looked sullen. “Up behind you, on the road,” he said gruffly, and re-cast his line so that I heard the bait plop into the still morning water.
“Thank you,” said the lady and then she held up the bunch of flowers for us all to see. No one said anything, so she turned and started walking back the way she had come, towards the bridge, stepping carefully over the mole hills and tussocks. She didn’t look back and I was glad, because we had been very rude, but she hadn’t spoken to me so I didn’t feel I was quite to blame, and I didn’t dare speak or move because of the pike and Perce’s face, which was very red and cross.
“Bloomin’ nuisance her. She’s always about when I get here. Always up and down the river she is, like a bloomin’ witch.” He reeled in his line and told me to give him another grasshopper because the one he had was drowned and not jerking any longer. While he baited the hook again we all watched her scramble up the bank to the road and then walk across the bridge swinging the stick in her hand; she was smelling her bunch of flowers and didn’t look back at us again.
“A foreigner, isn’t she?” said Reg.
“Londoner. From over there at Rodmell,” said Perce, skewering the biggest grasshopper onto his hook. “They say she’s a bit do-lally-tap … she writes books.” He swung the wriggling bait out into the still pond-like water and muttered something about never getting any peace and quiet. As the float plopped into the water and bobbed gently on the ripples from the tide, we all settled down again to fish. Which was pretty boring I was beginning to think.
So I just lay back quietly in the grasses, and watched the sky and wondered why there were so many witches in Sussex.
The bus from Seaford had just rumbled up to the Market Cross when we got back to the village, so I knew it was pretty late and that Lally would be fidgeting if I didn’t hurry on up the hill to the cottage.
We hadn’t caught the pike. Of course. No one really believed that we would, it was just a “try”. Perce said that it was the pale-faced lady who put him off the whole day.
“Every time I sets meself down by that little pond-place along she comes wagging her stick and talking away to herself. Potty she is, so would anyone be living right next to a graveyard.” He was grumpy, but Reg said it was the bait we had used; next time we went, he said, we should take a bit of fresh liver or something really tempting. But Fred Brooks from the bus said that the pike was just a “rumour”, never mind what old Hallam over at Selmeston said, and that he’d been trying for the same pike ever since he was knee high to a duck, and had never had any luck, and that you’d have more luck trying to win the Irish Sweepstake than trying for the pike at Beddingham.
And that seemed to be that: so I just ambled home through the village and across the river and up the hill to the house. The sun was starting to set away behind the gully, and the shadows of the ash and oak were already quite long across the rutted path. The sun was orange-glinting on the diamond panes of glass in the cottage windows, and when I threw my arms up in the air, and stood with my legs apart, my own shadow looked very long and thin, with a tiny little head at the top, like the Long Man of Wilmington.
At the top of the gully, almost where our orchard started, a small white dog came skittering out of the bushes, barking and squealing and then dashed back again, and I knew that it was probably Mr Aleford and his brothers ferreting. And then they all came up through the hedgerow from the gully, with sacks, and a long pole with five rabbits hanging by their legs from it, and the little white dog, Tiger, leaping and jumping for pleasure. We all waved cheerfully and they went on down the hill laughing and talking. Suddenly Mr Ben turned round and called up to me, “Hey? You lost this then?” and he threw something like a ball up in the air towards me. I couldn’t catch it because I was carrying my shoes and the satchel, so it rolled rustling into the grass at my feet.
“Butterfingers!” called Mr Ben. “Found it down the warren there, thought it must have belonged to you, reckon it got stuck in a hole and the badgers got it. Been there all summer by the look of it. Cheerio!” and he turned and went after his brothers.
It was George.
Even though it hadn’t got a head or a tail or legs or anything, it was clearly George—but now he was just an empty shell looking like someone’s old hat, with four holes in it. I took him up and went on up the hill.
“Will you dig a grave?” said my sister kindly, knowing I was miserable and trying to be nice. But I shook my head and finished the last bit of my gooseberry fool. Lally poured herself another cup of tea and clonked the spoon about.
“Not much point in having a funeral for just a shell,” she said cheerfully. “It’s like making a grave for a suit of clothes, isn’t it? And no one would want to do that. George has been all eaten up by badgers and ants and that’s that: you should have put a string on him like young Fluke told you in the first place. You should always put a string on everything you want to keep, from buttons to tortoises.”
She really seemed not to know how miserable I was, but my sister did; anyway part of it, even if it wasn’t the part she liked, had been hers too … so she understood better.
After supper, she came down to the pump with me, and we started to wash the shell so that all the mud and chalk swirled away. But it wasn’t very much good because it was all scratched and chewed up looking and made me even sadder, so I just filled the two buckets for the washing-up and we humped them, slopping water, back to the kitchen. Lally took one, and set it on the copper to boil, and took the other with her to the sink for the rinsing.
“Cheer up, you two! You’d think you’d lost a shilling and found a farthing! It’s a lovely summer evening, go out and enjoy it before bedtime.”
I started to dry up a cup rather slowly while she swirled the suds about and clinked and clonked the plates and saucers onto the draining board.
“I think it feels like the end of summer now,” I said.
“Aren’t we the little actor then!” said Lally, drying up a bundle of forks. “All summers have to end sometime you know … can’t have a summer without a good winter, can you? It stands to reason. It has to get the land ready for the next time. Can’t be summer all the time.” She stacked the forks in a neat pile and started on the knives, wiping them hard against her apron before she polished them on the drying cloth.
My sister hung the cups on the dresser hooks and arranged the plates back on the little shelves.
“I mean to say!” she said suddenly. “If there wasn’t a winter whatever would happen to Christmas! Wouldn’t it be simply awful with no Christmas! And you can’t have a Christmas without a winter, can you? You couldn’t have one in summer … not possibly.”
“They do in Australia,” I said grumpily but pleased I knew.
“Oh, Australia! They do everything upside down there, because they are upside down from us, everyone knows that. I expect they even play cricket on Christmas day with nuts or something.”
Lally bundled the knives and forks into a drawer, took up the tablecloth, shook it out of the window, and started to fold it, singing happily away as if she had no cares at all in the world.
Of course it didn’t matter to her, really, about George; she didn’t really know that I was feeling so miserable because I had been careless and let him wander and go off on his own and get eaten by badgers and so on. That was, anyway, all my fault. She just went on singing away “Dawn With Thine Rosy Mande” as if nothing awful had happened at all.
She even slammed the drawer shut hard, with a bang, when she put the cloth away, and sang even louder. No one cared. Not even my sister: she was mucking about with a jug of flowers on the table, so I just decided to go out into the garden and have a bit of a think, and be on my own.
/> It was cooler outside. The sky was flat and almost mauve-coloured. Bats swooped like little kites over the wigwams of runner beans in the vegetable garden as I wandered up to the iron gate and out into Great Meadow, holding George’s shell in my hands, and wondering why everything had suddenly gone so beastly and sad-feeling.
I heard my sister rustling through the raspberry canes behind me, and the iron fence squeak as she clambered over it and lumped into the meadow. And then she was walking, quite quietly, just behind me, not saying anything, and I knew that she really was a bit sorry for me in her own peculiar way.
Up at the top of the gully, where they had all been ferreting, the grass was trodden and muddy, and there was a bit of rabbit’s fur caught on a clump of thistles. But there was no sign, this evening, of any rabbits as there usually was: they had all gone.
“Is this where they found him?” said my sister in a low voice.
“Yes. They were after the rabbits.”
“Poor little things … what are you going to do with that then?”
I looked down at the chewed-up old shell.
“Just chuck it away, I think.”
“Into the gully?”
“Yes … into the gully.”
We walked slowly over to the chalky edge and looked down into the shadowing little path which ran along the bottom among all the roots and tree trunks. It looked very cold and lonely there. A blackbird blundered away worriedly into the hawthorns and then I suddenly threw the shell high up into the air: we both watched it as it made a wide arc against the fading sky and then fell swiftly into the dark branches over the gully.
For a moment there was silence and then we heard it clitter-clatter-clotter down among the leaves and stones, then everything was still again.
And that was that.
Part 2
Winter
Chapter 9
In my school report for the Lent Term of 1933 Miss Polyphemus, my Housemistress, thought it necessary to observe that “He has still to learn that life is not all cushions and barley sugar.” An odd combination of delights, one might think. However, she was right.
A small, eager, middle-aged woman, rather like a Jack Russell, she dragged me unwillingly through Mathematics, applauded wanly from a deck-chair when I muffed a catch at Cricket, and sloshed about in muddy Wellingtons with a whistle in her mouth while I stood shivering with cold on the touch line during Football. I know that I tried her patience to the limits.
I hated all three. Mathematics, Cricket and, above all, Football. I found them totally illogical pursuits. I could never, and still cannot, understand why anyone should want to hit a very hard ball with a non-resilient bat high into the air so that someone else could run up and down a scrubby bit of grass until the ball is retrieved. Nor could I see, and I still cannot, the delights in kicking and hacking, and pushing, and shoving, about in mud and wet so that a small leather sphere should reach some designated area of space between two wooden poles shrouded in mist or freezing fog. As for Mathematics I simply didn’t believe them.
It was no good telling me that some wise Arab, scrabbling about in the sand decided, all by himself, that Five should be Five and that twice that number should be called Ten. I couldn’t accept that at all.
Miss Garlick, who took us for Botany, was marginally kinder in giving me two “Goods” for Diligence and Apprehension, although she had to add that she wished I was “More accurate, both in drawing and writing” and Dr Chanter, predictably Music, was glowing with two ‘V. Goods” and a genial comment in a flourishing pen that I was “Working very well indeed.” It was difficult, even for me, not to be able to learn the words of “The Vicar of Bray” or “Hark Hark the Lark”. The tune took a little longer.
The remainder of the report was grey. Dr Lake’s final comment, in crimson ink at the bottom of the page, betrayed a good deal of suppressed irritation and weariness. “He makes me impatient. But I am trying to be more philosophical about him. Only time will tell.” Trying, was underlined.
It just did not occur to me that what Miss Polyphemus said was not so: although I might have chosen other words than “cushions and barley sugar”. I thought life was simply splendid. I had no reason to think otherwise. My days revolved about two pivots, if one can have two pivots. The Cottage in Sussex, and Twickenham.
Not counting my home and family which was, of course, the centre anyway. My life, as far as I could make it, was a total splendour of Summer and Constant Sunshine in which nothing unpleasant was ever allowed to happen. The fact that I was not God, and that unpleasant things did occur from time to time, was simply not my affair at all. I had an amazing way of setting those aside, and obliterating from my mind and being, the things which were boring, dull or distressing. Like my father, I managed, quite skilfully, to set aside the disagreeable parts of life so that I coasted, cheerfully enough, from the Cottage to Twickenham without taking a great deal of notice of the things which littered that happy road. Things which, from time to time, did crack my shins or cause me a bothersome, not to say painful, stumble from my happy Seat of Grace. School, and all those who served within it, from Pupil to Teacher, was a bore and a place where one marked time until the doors opened again and one was released into Pleasures. School was Outside. And most people were Outside. And anything which was Outside was simply that. And did not affect me so far as I could help.
My family, the Cottage and Twickenham were all that mattered to me. Beyond them all else was a blank.
A sad state of affairs.
It was not that I was shielded, or cosseted, really. In fact I was not. My sister Elizabeth and I were both brought up from a very early age to fend for ourselves, to be quite self-sufficient, to work for our pleasures and physically to earn our weekly pocket money. Nothing came too easily. We were members of a young family, and they had to work hard for all they had, and we had to do the same. We lived in a world which was almost completely Grown Up. We delighted in our parents’ friends who were mostly painters, writers and journalists, and found most children dull, retarded or childish. So we didn’t bother with them. We didn’t need them, we felt, and they got in the way. We never made close friends, or stayed at their houses ever; and seldom asked them back to ours. Unless forced by adult politeness. We liked each other better, and our father and mother and Lally provided us with all the pleasure, excitements, and delights we felt we could possibly wish for.
A very smug attitude indeed.
A rather insular life? A little in growing? We didn’t think so. Nor do I now. It harmed no one: beyond ourselves. And it was about to change.
The Report, quoted above, was alas! only one of a number. They grew very slightly better as the terms went by; but not much. I finally “made it” in Botany, Bookbinding, Metalwork and Drawing. Everything else was just “V. Fair”.
My father, who had distant ideas of sending me to Fettes and then watching me proudly follow him dutifully along the dusty corridors of The Times until I eventually took over his chair as Art Editor in the Art Department, began, reluctantly but clearly, to realise that his dreams were just that.
The chances of my getting into the Gas, Light and Coke Company were brighter than the possibilities of my even reaching the gates of Fettes. Let alone Printing House Square.
My idleness, my backwardness, my apparent inability to grasp the fundamentals of scholastic life were blamed, possibly correctly, on the fact that I had not been sent off to a Boarding School from the start. It had been a constant battle between my parents, she refusing, he begging. I waged a neutral war. And stayed.
Time which had now been lost for twelve years had to be regained somehow. The visions of Fettes and The Times, though dimmed, still gleamed like an afterthought, through my father’s disappointment. He did all that he possibly could to redress the wrongs. I was sent, willy nilly, to a very expensive tutor for a year in a grey stucco house in Willow Road, Hampstead.
I can only remember that it was an unpleasant shock and one which I fo
und a little harder than usual to obliterate quite so easily from my existence. I don’t, oddly enough, remember very much about it. Obliterating was still at work whatever should befall me. I don’t even remember much about the Tutor except that he was very old and wore a celluloid collar and lace-up boots. There were two other boys there with me, one older and one the same age. But they were keener than I so I hardly ever spoke to them, and the eldest one was extremely busy with something rather complicated like Trigonometry. We sat round a green baize table. The Tutor at one end with an empty chair at the other. We vaguely wondered who it was for until one day a silent, elderly lady slid into it and sat there knitting during a long lecture on the Lowest Common Denominator. She only came once. Sensibly.
I spent most of my time gazing out of the window at the trees on the Heath, and the Tutor spent most of his sleeping, or speaking, in a low murmur, to the Trigonometry Boy. It was a lethal, dull, boring year. And did me no good at all. At the time. But as far as I was able I did try, although to little effect. I simply sat there planning books or poems or a new, and usually improbable, plot for a play.
Eventually, and despairingly, I was removed and sent back to the school up the hill. Where I prospered exceedingly after my time away by Producing, Writing, Directing and Acting in my own versions of “Just William” and the other William stories. These were done during the school breaks, and my unfortunate class-mates, bullied, cajoled and sometimes even blackmailed, into playing in them, were forced to relinquish the delights of football, marbles and cigarette card swapping for the doubtful pleasures of giving highly embarrassed performances in smaller roles than mine.