A Summer in the Twenties

by Peter Dickinson

  ‘Yes, I believe you’re right. Let’s see . . .’

  Father moved a few paces down the gallery, did a full knees bend by Cabinet H and pulled out a drawer.

  ‘I think it’s the one below, sir.’

  ‘Of course, of course, I’m getting old. Yes, you’re right, Tom. One little beggar here’s thoroughly strafed. A good ’un would make the set. Excellent!’

  He was genuinely pleased—pleased as much at Tom knowing the Collection so well as at this new specimen—but he was also play-acting. If he had nothing on his mind it would be inconceivable that he should pick the wrong drawer. Of course there had been an element of play-acting about the whole expedition—it wasn’t a sensible season for bug-hunting in the Pyrenees, but Tom’s allowance wouldn’t have stretched to the trip, and it was understood that he didn’t ask for anything extra. So Father had saved face by forking out from the Collection fund and pretending that Bertie’s invitation fitted in neatly with his needs, though they both knew the money was really a reward for Tom’s success at Oxford, giving him a chance of a brief holiday before the Finals term. Still, that bit of play-acting was over. There was something else in Father’s manner as he brooded for a little at the Pontias, then rose, reflexively sliding the drawer shut with his knee.

  ‘Bit early, of course,’ he said. ‘A lot of ’em won’t be hatching for a month. Nothing else?’

  ‘Nothing much, sir. I was planning to wait for a few more days before I started in earnest, but . . .’

  ‘Yes. Sorry about that. Having a good time of it?’

  ‘Oh yes, sir, Very.’

  ‘Ah . . . Met someone?’

  (‘The trouble with Father,’ Gerald had once said, ‘Is that you keep forgetting how bloody sharp he is. Most of the time you chat away and he’s a harmless old buffer who’s mad on bugs, and then he lets something slip and you realise he knows exactly what you’re thinking about, and like as not every damn thing you’ve done since he last saw you. We all ought to go down on our knees at night and thank God for putting bugs into the world. If Father had been as interested in us as he is in them we’d be living our lives in glass cases with pins through our abdomens.’)

  ‘Well . . . as a matter of fact, yes,’ said Tom.

  ‘Care to tell me her name?’

  ‘Judy Tarrant.’

  ‘Of course. Pretty little piece, eh?’

  ‘You know her!’

  ‘Went to her christening. Parents set on having a boy, I remember, but they were issued with a girl. Some reason or other they knew they couldn’t produce another one, so they made the best of a bad job by calling her Julyan, with a Y—show she was almost a boy but not quite. Don’t know who had the wit to start calling her Judy.’

  ‘She did. She insisted when she was four, she told me.’

  ‘Lot of will-power there—on the mother’s side, of course—the father’s a holy worm.’

  ‘Judy seems quite fond of him.’

  ‘Of course, of course. Shouldn’t have said that. Probably a much more interesting fellow than meets the eye. Often happens when one of a couple makes all the running, you know—turns out the other one’s much more worth study.’

  ‘It’s extraordinary you should know them, sir.’

  ‘Not as rum as you think, Admittedly that’s a cut-off bit of country down in the Wolds, but it’s still no more than the next Riding. If your mother had been alive you’d have been meeting young Judy at dances these last couple of years at least. My fault you don’t go to that many, I suppose.’

  (There was something unspoken here. It had been Gerald’s behaviour, far more than Mother’s death, that had caused dance invitations to the youngest Hankey to be less than automatic.)

  ‘But still . . .’ said Tom.

  ‘Staying with young Panhard, weren’t you? First ran into him at one of Belford’s shoots, eh?’

  ‘That’s right. I knew him by sight at Eton, but he must have been three years ahead of me.’

  ‘Well, Panhard’s land marches with Rokesley, so it’s natural he should be at the shoot. And Belford’s some kind of cousin of the Tarrants, I seem to remember, and they live only a dozen miles further on, so it all hangs together. Things mostly do . . . Tell me, what do you make of Panhard?’

  ‘He’s all right.’

  ‘Brains?’

  ‘I don’t know. He pretends to be a bit of a silly ass, but he isn’t. Not like Woffles Belford, I mean. He often says quite sharp things, but usually he sounds surprised about it, as if he’d said them by accident.’

  ‘Interesting you should say that. Try watching him when other people are talking . . . In my opinion he’s got more than his share of brains. Not your kind, Tom. He’d never he in line for a Double First—not the application, but . . . pity in a way he came into all that money so early.’

  ‘He’s very decent about it, sir. Generous, I mean, and he doesn’t put on side at all.’

  ‘Glad to hear it, but that’s not what I meant. Hardly know the fellow, of course, but the couple of times we’ve met it’s struck me that he’s got ambition—more than his share—and nothing to grind it on. He’s not the sort to make a go of politics. Wilmington collared me last year to meet him in York. Idea was to sound him out about standing as Member for Weighton, but Panhard turned us down. Gave very good reasons, no hard feelings, made out he was very flattered and not up to the job and so on—but my guess is his real motive was he wasn’t prepared to start as low down the ladder as an ordinary County Member. Supposing he’d needed to make his own way a bit more from the beginning . . . see what I’m driving at?’

  ‘You may be right, sir.’

  As the words hung in the air Tom realised that he had allowed a note of detachment to infect them. Father of course perceived it at once.

  ‘Don’t like me putting your cronies under the lens, Tom?’ he said, his voice softer than ever.

  ‘It’s all right, sir. We’re used to it—and there’s no way of stopping you.’

  (And better you should be sectioning Bertie’s character than Judy’s.)

  Father loosed the sudden, direct blaze of his stare—a mannerism that often startled strangers—then smiled and glanced down at the twinkling tubes of the microscope. There was no telling whether the smile was an acceptance of Tom’s mild impertinence or an intuition of the thought about Judy. Tom waited. Interviews with Father did not normally end in the air.

  Behind Father’s left shoulder a window opened onto the familiar but always to Tom heart-tightening view of the Home Farm, the line of willow and alder which showed where the river twisted along the valley, the rising fields of Gatting Farm and Hatchers (so disastrously sold by Grandfather) and beyond them the sharp-edged moor. One evening, when Gerald was fresh out of hospital for the first time, Tom—only fourteen then—had found him standing at this window in the dusk with an empty tumbler in his hand.

  ‘Tom? Glad to see you. You’ll be able to help me down. Got to get back to bed before Birdie brings my tray up and finds I’m missing.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have come up . . .’

  ‘Tosh. What I shouldn’t have done is brought the brandy with me. Thought I’d need it. I’ve been saying good-bye.’

  Tom had followed the half-gesture and seen the decanter on Case F.

  ‘I thought you were staying for weeks, Ger.’

  ‘Good-bye for old Cyril. That’s what he died for, you know. You don’t die for England. You die for a few fields and a slice of hillside. Less, much less. There were chaps in my company who died for one of those bloody little strips of back garden, all dahlias and cabbages, you see from the railway. Question is, can I even stand without something to lean on? No. Put the glass down—don’t forget to come back for it or Stevens will lose his rag. And the decanter, of course. Now, if you can get me to the banisters I’ll go down the stair on my bum . . .’

  To Tom at the time the scene had been mainly embarrassing. He had cringed partly at having to cope with Gerald half-drunk, and p
artly at hearing speech about the unspeakable. Now the shyness was gone, overwhelmed by the knowledge of tragedy—Gerald’s even more than Cyril’s—and the tragedy had been given its Sophoclean dimension by the slow discovery that this view—farms, river and moor, represented the England that he too would die for, if the moment came.

  ‘When are you planning to go up?’ said Father suddenly.

  ‘Full term starts on the twenty-fifth. I’d meant to settle in on Monday—that’s the nineteenth—until . . .’

  ‘Until you met young Miss Tarrant. Sorry about that, Tom. If I’d known, of course, I wouldn’t have wired. Any good if I called it off and you went straight back?’

  ‘No, sir. She’s got to drive across and join her parents at Marseilles the day after tomorrow. They’re on a cruise.’

  ‘Ah well, there it is. She’ll be in London for the season, presumably, and then she’ll be coming up to Yorkshire I should think. You ought to be able to see quite a bit of her one way and another when you’re through your Finals. Meanwhile, if you still go up on the nineteenth that gives us a bit over a week, eh?’

  ‘Yes, sir. What do you want me to do?’

  ‘I want you to learn to drive a train.’

  Tom managed to keep his mouth from gaping but he felt his eyes widen. Father looked up, rubbing his hands like a pawnbroker as if to emphasise the profit in his scheme.

  ‘Been reading the papers?’ he asked.

  ‘Hardly at all, sir.’

  ‘Coal,’ he prompted.

  ‘Oh, I know about the row between the owners and the miners. Didn’t the Government hold a Commission or something and get them to agree?’

  ‘Yes and no. Herbert Samuel made some recommendations which the miners would have accepted, but the owners dug their heels in. The whole industry’s a bloody great potmess, with a lot of ramshackle old mines which can only keep going if they pay the men starvation wages, and those owners are the ones who’ve got the whip hand. The Government bought a bit of time with a subsidy to keep them going, but Samuel’s plan would have meant closures and amalgamations. I met Ducky Gowling in the Club last week and he told me the owners aren’t going to budge, and the subsidy’s due to run out at the end of the month.’

  ‘So there’ll be a strike.’

  Tom was used to Father’s precise knowledge of the shifting currents of politics and business, though he appeared to sail those waters hardly at all. It was as though influential men, burdened with secrets, tried to bury some of their hoard in the mind of the eccentric old bug-hunter, knowing that he would not bother to spend it. So Lord Gowling would have told Father what the owners planned, and furthermore Father would have judged correctly whether Lord Gowling was right, and whether the owners would stick to their guns without their nerve breaking.

  ‘Not a strike, a lock-out,’ said Father. ‘The owners want the men to work longer hours for less pay, and if they refuse they’re going to close the mines. That’s important, because it’s where the trains come in. Last year the Trades Unions got together and passed a resolution that if the miners were locked out the railways wouldn’t move any coal. I think they’ll stick to that—in fact I think they’ll go a good deal further and there’ll he a General Strike and nothing will move at all. Steed Maitland tells me that a lot of the Cabinet are spoiling for a fight—Churchill and Hicks, of course, and haIf a dozen of the others longing to strafe the Bolshie. They’ll tie Baldwin hand and foot, so that he can’t come on with his famous man-of-peace turn, and that’ll force the unions into an all-out strike. I’ve got a bit of sympathy for the miners and not much for the owners—after all, I know quite a pack of them—but if we let the unions close the country down and keep it closed for a month, we’re done for.’

  ‘Bad as that, sir?’

  ‘I think so. On the other hand, I don’t think they’ll last a month, not once they see the strike isn’t working. They’ve got to be shown we can get along without them. It doesn’t matter so much what happens in the factories—takes a long time for people to realise how that kind of strike is affecting them—but if a fellow can look up from his allotment and see the six-twenty steaming through . . . you follow me?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘This is your chance, Tom.’

  The words were almost inaudibly soft, but carried compressed layers of meaning. Cyril was dead, Gerald ruined. The entail by which Gerald would inherit Sillerby would cost too much to break, but it was accepted by all the family, Gerald included, that he would have no children and the male line would continue through Tom. Tom was untested. He had been too young for the war. His achievements—the scholarship to Trinity, the Blue for boxing, the First in Mods—were not the same thing. Father’s argument was on the face of it absurd. Tom knew that one or two chaps at Oxford had volunteered last year for some kind of training scheme in case there was a General Strike, but his impression was that it had been what Father would call a potmess. So unless ten thousand fathers were having similar talks with their sons this week only a train here and there would be able to run when the railwaymen withdrew their labour. The banner of civilisation would not be the smoke of the six-twenty as it thundered past the allotments but a few rare-seen puffs half way across the county. Still, the emotional logic was too strong for reason. Your Country Needs You. The foreshortened index finger pointed straight at Tom’s heart.

  ‘Right oh,’ he said, ‘I’ll drive a train. When’s my first tutorial?’

  Father rubbed his hands again. Clearly he had it all worked out, and even arranged. Grandfather had spent twenty years on the board of the N.E.R., and Father, though having no official connection, still retained a good deal of family ‘pull’. In particular the Shed Manager at Middlesbrough was a chap called Douting, whose sister Rose had been in service at Sillerby until she went into munitions in ’sixteen . . .

  Tom divided his mind, as he often did in the duller type of lecture. He was able to absorb what he was told and recall it when he needed to, but at the same time he could think remoter thoughts, thoughts that had the wandering quality of dream.

  He remembered Rose, a fierce and dumpy girl who cleaned the first-floor bedrooms and carried on a niggling war with Mother’s own maid, the famously neurotic Dora, who had eventually taken one of Father’s guns and tried to shoot the butcher’s boy at Diggleton for not joining up . . . His eye was caught by an April cloud-shadow swooping along the rampart of the moor. In August he would take Judy up there on the pretext of walking up grouse (they were still too scarce to be worth beating). They might even get a few—she was certain to be a corking shot—she could use Mother’s twenty-bore Purdy . . .

  ‘Douting says you’re going to have to be a bit canny,’ Father was saying. ‘He’ll pick a fellow who’s not that keen on striking to give you a ride or two on the footplate. You won’t have to lie, not if you manage it properly. Just don’t give your reasons. People don’t expect reasons, you know. Much happier without them.’

  There was a pause as though the interview had ended and was only waiting for its closing formality—some remark about the weather, or the Collection, or Stevens’s latest fit of temper. It came, but in an unexpected form.

  ‘Packet of money there,’ said Father broodingly. ‘Just the girl, and it’s all coming to her.’

  3

  Market Weighton, 16th April, 1926

  ‘I’M SO GLAD YOU COULD COME,’ she said, separating the words a little as though speaking to a foreigner. ‘I was afraid you might have gone up to Oxford already.’

  Her postcard throbbed in his breast pocket. His whole urge was to pick her up, to hold her close, to feel their bodies seeming to melt into a unit, but she had taken precautions against such a move. He was ten minutes earlier than she had suggested, but he could see from her half-emptied tea-cup and the subsided centre of the untouched buttered toast that she had already been here some time, and had moreover chosen a place in the almost empty tea-room at which he could only sit opposite her, with the stodgy black o
ak of the table between them. There was nothing for it but to fall in with her mood. He touched the back of the empty chair.

  ‘May I?’ he said.

  There was relief as well as formal permission in her smile. As he sat down and looked at her—looked at something other than her eyes and face—he perceived that she was dressed and made up in a deliberately subdued and old-fashioned style. Without quite knowing where the differences of fashion lay he was aware that these were last year’s modes, or even the year’s before. No doubt some of the cause lay in her having driven over from home; her mother sounded the sort to have intransigent views on how the modern girl should dress; but still she wore the clothes, and was now taking a stubby cigarette holder out of a plain crocodile handbag in a deliberate manner, as though they were aspects of a role she had herself chosen.

  ‘And what have you been doing?’ she said brightly.

  ‘Learning to drive a train.’

  That made the mask slip, but before he could explain the waitress was at his side.

  ‘Er . . . tea and toast, please. Would you like some fresh tea, Judy?’

  She was in profile now, staring through the window at a lorry stuck and throbbing while a drove of sheep from the market surged round it. She shook her head.

  ‘No tea-cakes, sir? Baked on the premises—very naice indeed.’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘You ought to have a nice cake, Tom,’ said Judy, still looking out of the window. ‘I want you to.’

  ‘Oh . . . right oh. I’ll have a squint at the cake-tray, please.’

  The waitress withdrew.

  ‘Father wouldn’t have sent that wire if he’d realised I might be doing anything . . . except collecting butterflies for him,’ he said in a low voice.

  She swung round from the window and faced him, recovered now, but a little mocking.

  ‘When she’s brought your naice cake,’ she said, ‘we’ll talk about that then. Tell me about the trains. Which ones were you driving?’