That They Might Lovely Be
Page 38
‘I am not sure that would have suited me either.’
‘Are you glad to have moved to Dunchurch?’
‘Oh yes! Especially now we are no longer overwhelmed by funerals.’
‘I did feel so for the Rector. You see, it was the same for Dr. Furnival. One moves into the area and takes over a practice. One does not expect to have half one’s patients dead in six months.’
‘Whatever the influenza did to Dunchurch and Herne Hill is nothing to what went on elsewhere. They say it ravaged Europe.’
‘It is why they call it “Spanish”. The Latin male is known to be particularly predatory … Oh, there is Mrs. Cordingley. I shall just incline my head. One does not want to be too familiar. No sign of Mr. Cordingley, I suppose. Though hardly surprising. If they make no secret of the fact that he has been in prison, how can he possibly show his face in public?’
‘But it’s not as if he broke the law as one of those conscientious objectors.’
‘So oddly named, don’t you think? When it is we who object to their conscience! ‘“Conscientious Objectionables” would be more apt. I am sure the Rector wishes matters of conscience were left to the professionals.’
‘I have not heard him say so.’
‘It stands to reason, don’t you think? Otherwise a trollop hawking her wares, a callow youth drifting from one menial job to another, or even a featherbrained woman without an ounce of gumption would be able to claim the same right as their betters to behave as they thought fit. Conscience, I fear, for many is an excuse for moral lassitude. But I am distracting you from your duties. Here are Mrs. Perch and Mrs. Kingsnorth. How kind of you to grace our village fête! Mrs. Jackman will pour you some tea though I am afraid it may be dreadfully stewed.’
‘Good afternoon. We have never missed a summer bazaar, not since we were children. Our poor mother, you know, always had such a bond with Dunchurch and the villagers.’
‘Look there’s that little boy. Mrs. Furnival, do you see? He’s crawling under the tables over there. I saw him earlier on in a world of his own, running about over by the ha-ha.’
‘It’s the Simmonds boy. The schoolmaster’s young son. “In a world of his own” is about the sum of it, poor thing. They say he’s best ignored. A little like some timid bird, he’ll freeze if he thinks he’s watched; except this boy will never sing. He’s quite mute. Never speaks. Though seems to understand if spoken to. Very sad, no doubt. Dr. Furnival has said he’d like to have him thoroughly examined but the family are against it. They seem to think he’s happiest left a little wild. I suppose he’ll go to school in time. It’s probably a blessing that the school’s his home. Provision can be made—oh, look!—he’s noticed us watching him. Do you see how he tries to disappear? If we look away, he’ll be gone. Yes! There he goes! A little scurry and he’s off to play elsewhere.’
‘Funny little fellow!’
‘But one wonders how he’ll be when he grows up. I wouldn’t like a lumbering village idiot roaming the lanes.’
‘There’ll be an institution for him if ever he becomes a nuisance.’
‘By the time he’s grown, there’ll be spaces in asylums where the mad soldiers are housed. I doubt that many of them will make old men.’
‘Sad for the family for there was an older boy who died in the war.’
‘He’s commemorated in the West Window.’
‘They might have hoped this boy would be a blessing.’
Chapter Nine
Friday, 16 July 1937
In less than an hour its grounds and the triangle of lanes which bound Winscot School would be silent. The cobbled playground and the limestone walls would exhale the heat of high summer. The groundsmen would have left off their sweeping and clearing, retreating into the outbuildings on the edge of the school estate for their cider and bread and cheese. In the gardens, an occasional butterfly might flit over the vegetables or settle on the last spires of valerian but the birds would all be roosting and not even a desultory call would be heard. Only the distant bleating from the sheep in the fields in the combe would be audible. The dreamy laziness of the summer holidays would settle and it would be impossible to recall the wild energy which now shook the place.
It was the end of term and three hundred boarders were intent on getting away. For most, those who would be travelling by train, their trunks had already been despatched, roped and labelled, to the station. But there was still hand luggage to keep close. Different groups of children were assigned to different teachers who would escort them as far as Bristol Temple Meads but, inevitably, when one had friends in other groups, whom one would not see now until the new term, it was sometimes imperative to escape from one’s own group, carefully corralled at one end of the lane, to pass on that essential snippet of information, to reiterate that promise, to reclaim whatever it was that had been packed in someone else’s bag.
It is like an evacuation, Anstace thought, as she strolled up from Combe House. Except the babble of noise is essentially exuberant. If these were people in flight, what I’d hear would be more strident. There’d be shouting. Orders would be barked. As it is, the staff seem pretty successful at remaining good humoured while they marshall their excited charges. They know that they’ll be free of them in a couple of hours and then their own holidays can start. But it is extraordinary how impervious children can be to organization. The here and now, the imperative of the moment outweighs any consideration of what needs to happen.… There! That teacher has put his foot down. He’s had enough. But the girl’s got a defiant look to her eye. She knows he can’t do much with the holidays ahead of them. It will only be force of character which enables him to keep her in check for as long as necessary. But now he’s turned away and seems more interested in that pretty young teacher standing on the steps. The girl’s noticed; she’s back out of line again, cavorting with her friends.
Now the fleet of buses, which would carry the schoolchildren to the railway station, was turning in from the main road. The noise level rose and continued to bounce around at roof level until the last of them had been packed off. Only those who were to be collected by car were left.
Anstace observed the different rituals of greeting as these children were collected. Gender was the determining factor. Mothers kissed their sons or daughters without distinction. Fathers would kiss their girls, perhaps on the cheek perhaps on the forehead, but they channeled all affection for their sons into a handshake. One or two fathers, she noticed, might ruffle the hair of a young son and, occasionally, the handshake might be supplemented by clasping the son’s shoulder or upper arm. None embraced or kissed their sons. The older their boys were, the more they withdrew from them into a brusque, gripped formality. Gentleness was taboo. No father, Anstace was sure, would ever brush his son’s cheek affectionately as she saw some mothers do. None would link his arm into his son’s and saunter off for a chat before starting their homeward journey. Where did this reticence come from? What made men so fearful of demonstrating affection?
She was not taking Bertie away until after lunch. She had driven down the day before and stayed the night with Kenneth Southall in Combe House. The day had begun early with the noise of the young boys in the adjacent boardinghouse being roused and despatched, room by room, to go through their ablutions. Bertie was a house-prefect and had his own responsibilities to ensure that the arrangements for the last day ran smoothly to Kenneth Southall’s instructions. Anstace had last seen him herding the boys up the lane in time for breakfast.
As she walked back to Combe House, she saw him ahead of her laughing with three other young men and a girl who were piling into an open-topped motor before they drove off, passing her in the lane, emanating youth and independence and beginnings.
‘My friends,’ said Bertie, still standing with a hand raised in farewell.
‘Are they leaving Winscot too?’
‘Yes. All done. Don’t know when I’ll see them again.’
‘You must keep in touch.’
‘Let’s go in and find Kenneth and Peggy. Are you all packed and ready? We’ll go as soon as I’ve helped Peggy make up a lunch. It will be a long drive.’
‘All packed.’
They had practised the same end of term rituals now for nearly half his lifetime. She had only once missed a holiday when Bertie stayed at Winscot, spending the Easter break with Kenneth and Peggy at Combe House. Of course the changing seasons made a difference—driving off in winter for Christmas was never the same as when starting the long summer holiday—but now all those departures were gathered up, conflating into a single occasion: this last time when Bertie would leave Winscot not for the duration of a mere holiday but forever. They would no longer have the rhythm of school terms shaping their lives. Anstace, who had never felt she could trust Bertie to the railways, would no longer have to make the journey across England, back and forth, three times a year. Packing, unpacking, the feeling that residence anywhere was only temporary, would cease to colour their living … which raised the question again for Anstace: where would they settle?
As if reading her thoughts, Bertie said,
‘I shall want to come back here sometimes.’
‘Yes. But it’ll just be to visit and probably only in the holiday time when Kenneth won’t be busy. But he might not work at Winscot forever, you know.’
‘Someone else might take over Combe House.’
‘They might. Lots can change. We mustn’t mind. But, yes, we can come back. I’m sure they’ll love to see you.’
‘We shall be bereft without you, Bertie,’ said Peggy, coming in on their conversation with a hamper of prepared rolls, boiled eggs, tomatoes from the greenhouse and a punnet of strawberries.
‘Bereft,’ he repeated.
‘It means “feeling sad because you’ve lost something” but I know we haven’t lost you. You’re just off to begin the rest of your wonderful, wonderful life.’
There was more of the same from Kenneth and the children. Bertie had always lodged with them. He had been more of a day-pupil than a boarder but, as he grew to be more senior, he had taken on responsibilities for the boys, boarding in the house, and, in time, any distinction between boarder or day-pupil had been irrelevant.
Anstace was acutely aware that it was the Southalls who had provided a family life for Bertie. She could never have done what they had. She owed them an enormous amount. They had given Bertie far more than the financial arrangement which she had had with them demanded. Their own children and the boarders, who had passed through Combe House over the years, had given him companions of his own age and drawn him out of the feral isolation which had characterized his early years at Dunchurch.
She could not have rescued Bertie without them and she knew she would always be immensely grateful to them. She had given over to them the rearing of the child she had loved. It had not been an easy gift. The holidays with her had been interludes in the main business of growing up from child to man. Every end-of-term, when she had collected Bertie, she had been jolted by the changes in him. Of course, his growing mastery of speech had been most noticeable at first. This had developed into conversation, though always stilted and often sprinkled with bizarre non-sequiturs, which marked a developing mind. He had grown: upward and then outward, acquiring breadth across his shoulders; his chest had filled out. He became more muscular through regular exercise (last autumn, he had acquired notoriety on the rugby pitch as a fearless tackler). And now, she noticed, he had started to shave (Kenneth would have shown him how) so the hair that had begun to soften his jawline was gone. She wished she had seen all these developments as a subtly gradual thing and not at termly intervals. She wondered if this would have given her an approximation of motherhood. She envied Peggy and she wished she didn’t.
Anstace, therefore, was not sorry to wave away her cousins that morning as she drove Bertie eastward, first to Joachim Place. Where next had still to be decided.
Tuesday, 14 September 1937
Anstace had not taken Bertie home to Dunchurch for over a year now and she knew that the longer she left it, the harder it would be to run the gauntlet of interest and weather the storm of gossip which would inevitably blow up with renewed vigour. Still she held back and the arthritis and sciatica with which Dorothy Lean was now afflicted was enough excuse for keeping Bertie exiled in Saffron Walden during the summer. Joachim Place, however, was not where he belonged and he lacked Anstace’s ingrained ability, borne from her own nomadic childhood, of settling rapidly into every place he stayed.
Anstace was dead-heading the dahlias in the west border when Bertie, fresh from a long cycle ride, flopped down on the lawn.
‘Bored,’ he said.
‘You can help me.’
‘You’re pottering. I want something proper to do. There’s nothing to do here. I ought to be back at school.’
‘You’re too big for school now.’
‘So what am I the right size for?’ He was sulky.
This was not a conversation which could be postponed. As he lay sprawled at her feet, hungry, no doubt, from his exertions and therefore grumpy too, she realised how little he knew how to control his energy. His size belied the child.
‘There are other things to do which aren’t pottering. Come on.’
At a recent social occasion on the back of one of her committees, Dorothy Lean had resumed a slight acquaintance with Louise Matthaei, now Lady Howard. Their paths had first crossed in the war when Miss Matthaei had come to the notice of the Quakers following her dismissal from her post at the Univeristy of Cambridge because her father was German. Now she was recently returned from India where she had married her dead sister’s widowed husband and then, a few years later, acquired a title on the back of his knighthood. The frisson of scandal which surrounded her was of no interest to Dorothy Lean and Lady Howard, no doubt sensing this, had been only too grateful to talk about other subjects and, most particularly, the obsession she shared with her husband for eradicating the use of chemicals in agriculture.
‘In India, the yield which the peasant farmers are able to extract from their small patch of land is remarkable. It’s a question of balance. Vegetable matter and animal waste from herbivores, properly combined and allowed to rot down, with occasional aeration to improve the agency of bacteria, delivers a beautiful material.’
‘Extraordinary!’
‘It is a far cry, you can imagine, from my work with the International Labour Organisation.’
‘Indeed. But, as a gardener, I can understand the pleasure of working with soil. My niece and I (she has a real eye for design, you know) often remind ourselves that good gardening is all about partnership: Man not just working the earth but working with its properties.’
‘Sir Albert’s focus is on large-scale agricultural practice of course. However, no doubt the same principles could be applied to the gardener’s pile…’
Lady Howard had then been drawn off to discuss her concerns for those Germans seeking refuge from the National Socialist regime but Dorothy found herself pondering this principle of respect for the soil.
She found in Anstace an interested disciple. They read up on Sir Albert Howard’s work and had an idea that his theories might well translate into a domestic environment. The idea of engaging Bertie in applying this new, ‘organic’ gardening now drove Anstace.
‘Come on,’ she said, and led him to the back of the garden where vegetable refuse from house and garden was dumped.
Over the following weeks, they worked on a system of composting which sought to ensure they combined all vegetable waste from both kitchen and garden in a balanced way. Under Anstace’s direction, Bertie began by instituting new piles: grass clippings, prunings, vegetable peelings. He then combined these into a fresh heap, alternating layers as more material became available. Occasionally, he would add a forkful of horse-manure. He would regularly turn the h
eap.
The whole enterprise encroached on more of Dorothy Lean’s garden than the original garden-pile had occupied and she insisted on some sort of screening so that the mounds were not visible from the house. Bertie turned his hand to constructing a rustic fence from chestnut palings before planting a selection of native hedgerow plants, blackthorn, hawthorn, spindle and beech, against it. He was keen, once these were established, to layer them as he had seen the countrymen doing in Dunchurch.
Anstace was touched by his faith in her ideas.
‘We shan’t know if our compost is any good until we use it in the spring, you know,’ she explained.
‘You can tell it is. It’s cooking. It smells the same way as a good meal in the oven.’
She laughed. But he was right. There was a wonderful chemistry at work at the back of the garden. In the same way as a good cook could release the properties of different ingredients to create a wholesome, tasty dish so he and Anstace strove to provide the perfect conditions for the dead vegetable matter to be transformed into a fertile medium for new growth.
‘Imagine the roots twisting their way through our compost. No stones. No lumps of clay or pockets of dry sand. What was the new word? “Friable”? Everything turned into a friable soil. Everything has died but nothing is wasted.’
‘Did you learn about the world’s elements, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, those sorts of things at school?’
‘The others did.’
‘Everything is made up from the elements. You are and I am. The animals and plants, they are too. All the elements combined in wonderfully complicated ways like a fantastic puzzle which no one really understands. When a seed sends out its first root into the soil, it starts absorbing some of these elements so that it can grow into a strong plant. Different plants need different elements and that is why, I think, we have to make sure that our compost is balanced. It’s all a bit of guesswork at the moment but we’ll learn.’