Donkey Boy

by Henry Williamson

  Miss Fanny Whittaker said, “Pay attention, children.”

  They all looked up.

  “Now I have something very important to say to you all. Has anyone lost any money this morning?”

  She had got so far when Phillip, having pulled the glove from his pocket, threw it under the grate, and hardly had the coins jingled on the stone when he called out, “Look, I have found this!” and getting off his chair, picked up the glove, and carried it to Miss Fanny.

  Miss Fanny Whittaker looked at Phillip. He held out the glove heavy with pennies. She took it without a word, exchanged a look of her dark eyes, which seemed set in some remote, far-off pain, with her sister May, standing by the blackboard with the names of the Norman Kings of England and the dates of their succession chalked upon it; and went out of the door.

  The lesson was resumed. Phillip forgot about the pennies soon afterwards, which meant that no one mentioned the matter again. He never felt in the pockets for pennies again. Nor did he ever cry again, while at the school. The personalities of the Misses Whittaker were such that not one of their pupils was ever in distress. He liked painting pictures and drawing, and sums about apples and horses galloping and history where cakes were burned and Hereward the Wake had a secret path through a swamp, and Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

  Richard remarked the change for the better in Phillip, and said to Hetty: “You see, I told you he needed proper discipline,” and Hetty said: “Yes, dear.” She did not show her husband the children’s reports for she did not want him to know that in the exams at the end of term Phillip had come bottom in his class in every subject. There was one consolation, in his Conduct report, which was Good.

  Christmas brought great excitement. Two rows of Japanese lanterns were hung across the sitting-room ceiling from corner to corner on Christmas Eve; while after lots of brown paper parcels of presents had been carried into the front room, the door was locked, and the key hidden in Daddy’s pocket. Then Daddy dressed up as a detective. He wore a funny hat and had a bullseye lantern shining in the dark of the coal-cellar. He told them a wonderful story of nearly catching a butterfly with the lantern and a net, on the Hill, only bad men attacked him and he fought them and knocked them over and they all ran away, but when he went to look for the butterfly it was gone, and it was ever so rare, called a Camberwell Beauty. It was a wonderful lantern, and you could hide the light by turning the shutter, and no one could see you in the dark.

  O, if only he could have a lantern like that for a present, to put on his raft when he went down the Thames, wearing a hat just like Daddy’s. Daddy said that one day if he was a very good boy he might give him the hat and the lantern too, to look for butterflies and moths with. In bed that night Phillip tossed and turned, thinking of having a hat to go over the ears in snow and a dark lantern, and of what Father Christmas had brought him, and if he would see Father Christmas when he filled his stocking hung on the rail at the bottom of the bed.

  O, he could never, never go to sleep! His mind raced and raced over hundreds of things and places, far away over the sea where sharks jumped with spikes of bamboo cutting their stomachs and black men and esparto grass hammocks and lions and temples with priests burning joss sticks and Joey the old dog and the gipsy woman who might have stolen him and turned him brown all over if he had not hidden his name from her, and said he was Mr. Cornflower.

  Then Phillip heard Father Christmas coming, so he closed his eyes in terrible excitement and hardly dared to breathe and he was frightened to open his eyes for Father Christmas would be sure to see, for like God he knew everything, being up in the sky and able to look down always.

  There were sounds in the room and rustlings and the noise of things going into a stocking like when a stocking was pulled over a shoe in hide-and-seek in Aunty Dorrie’s house with Jerry and Ralph and when Father Christmas was gone he got out of bed to look and Mummy came into the room and said, “Oh Sonny, why are you not asleep?” and he said: “Mummy, I heard Father Christmas come just now, quick, quick, pull back the curtain and you will see him on the roof, for I heard his sleigh-bells when he came down the chimney!” And Mummy said: “Wait till the morning, dear, to look in your stocking, for you must get some sleep, you are so very very excitable, and you must rest your brain, dear.” Mummy kissed him, and he kissed Mummy, and when she was gone he looked in the stocking, smelling the orange and the apple; licking the whip-top to taste the wood and to try and find out the colour; sucking the sugar mouse, and biting just a teeny-weeny bit off its nose; counting the nuts; feeling a box of marbles and a big glass blood-ally. There were biscuits; a sherbert bag; a licorice boot-lace; a wooden pencil box with pencils and pens in it, rubbers, and nibs; a rubber ball; and a banana. He put them all back, with a feeling that hundreds of starling birds were running up and down inside him all singing and whistling and trying to fly out of his throat.

  After breakfast they all went into the front room, and unpacked the parcels. He had a brown football from Uncle Hilary with black stitches in the leather, which was hard and greasy like a real one; a bird-book with lovely photos from Aunt Viccy; a penknife with two blades, one big and the other small, from Aunty Bee; a disappointing prayerbook from Aunty Belle; a red book for collecting stamps and a big boy’s white jersey from Mummy; a walking stick with a silver band and a real gunmetal watch from Father; a box of chocolates from Aunty Bigge; a lovely box of Nürnberg gingerbread from Minnie; a pocket book with words printed on it in gold and Mallard, Carter, & Turney, Ltd. from Grandpa and a five shilling piece; a dozen handkerchiefs and half-a-crown from Grannie, and lots of Christmas cards, including one from Mona Monk who Mummy said was in an Institution. Phillip asked what this was and Mummy said he would not know if she told him, and after thinking about this Phillip thought that if he would not know if Mummy told him, would he know if Mummy did not tell him. So he asked Mummy to explain, and she said it was a sort of school, and he must write a nice letter of thanks to Mona, and she would also send her a parcel of clothes which Mavis had done with.

  Phillip had given Daddy a box of matches, a toffee apple, and a packet of pipe-cleaners; and for Mummy some curling pins and a reel of strong thread to sew boot buttons on with, from a poor man who had come to the door one day. They were very pleased with their presents, saying they were just what they wanted, and he felt he was a good boy.

  Then Daddy opened his surprise, in a big wooden case. It was a musical box, that played big thorny round tin pieces of music which clanged when you shook them. He said it was a German Polyphone. It was lovely music, like the bells of St. Simon’s when you were walking over the Hill to hear Mr. Mundy preach and the anthem afterwards, but the Polyphone was much nicer.

  The Polyphone played during dinner of turkey, Christmas pudding, and mince pies. Afterwards Daddy carried it and put it on a table in the corner of the front room, and then went back to the sitting room to read a book called Lorna Doone. Mother said he might want to go to sleep, so they must creep upstairs when they went out of the front room. It was lovely in the front room, with Mummy and Mavis, with a blazing fire and lots of nuts and figs and tangerines and preserved fruits to eat. Mrs. Feeney washed up in the scullery, to give Mother a rest. Mrs. Feeney had come to cook the turkey, and was having hers in the kitchen when Father got up and said: “Please do come and join us at Table, Mrs. Feeney, it is Christmas when all old friends come together,” and Mrs. Feeney said: “Oh, I can’t do that, sir, thank you all the same, for I know my station,” and Father said: “Your place is with those who owe you so much for your good service, Mrs. Feeney,” and so Mrs. Feeney had had dinner with them. Mother said that Mr. Feeney had gone into the hospital for incurables in London and she was all alone in the world now. So Phillip gave her his sugar mouse for a Christmas present.

  Chapter 17

  RETURN OF THEODORA

  THEODORA MADDISON, after several weeks of sailing along the south and west coast of France, in a Greek schooner carrying a cargo of Turkish tobacco, arr
ived at the port of Bristol with the mixed feelings of one who had been abroad nearly six years. After saying goodbye to the companions of her voyage she walked to the dock gates and feeling extremely thin and emptied out, a hollow woman, took a fly to the heights of Clifton, overlooking the city, where lived a woman friend of Cambridge days, with whom she had corresponded during her sojourn abroad. It was the last year of the century, and her arrival in the land of her birth left her tremulous and exposed in isolation. She stopped her cab on Clifton Down, after the long pull up from the docks and river below, to give the horse a rest, and also to assemble her thoughts.

  It was chilly in England, after the hazy blue heats of the Mediterranean Sea. And the faces of the people, so white, so shut-in upon themselves; the raggedness of the poor so pallid and dour: so unlike the brown-limbed, merry poverty of the Aegean. Theodora wept a little in her loneliness, as she walked across the grass of the common, where sheep grazed amidst thorns and holly trees. This was her country, which had driven out Byron and Shelley; this was her own, her native land; and engaged in an unjust war against a valiant minority of Dutch colonists in South Africa. Such an unpropitious start for the new century, which was to purge so much of gross materialism of the old century which had just passed away! In some disappointment she returned to the fly, and got in, the horse reluctantly leaving its unexpected feed of grass, to be jogged to Cabot Crescent, where her friend lived.

  The two young women (who nevertheless thought of themselves as matured and staid, being twenty-six years of age) were of like mind, both classical scholars; and so neither felt an uneasiness at the meeting, only restrained joy that the other showed a splendid happiness in her face. Both were full of the project that had been discussed during many letters, to start a school for young gentlewomen that would be based upon the truths of nature, as revealed by the great philosophers and artists of all known civilisations.

  That evening, after a vegetarian supper, the two friends, wearing white hats of Bedfordshire straw with wide brims, starched linen collars with pale blue ties, white blouses, and simple dark blue skirts whose ends were a sensible two inches off the ground, to leave the dust where it belonged—Rechenda had insisted on lending her great friend a set of her clothes from Cambridge days—went for a stroll upon the Clifton Downs. It was a fine evening, and they made their way down to Brunel’s suspension bridge, which spanned the deep gorge over the estuarial curve of the Avon. Theodora still had her sea-legs; the bridge seemed to be swaying, the rocky cliff face opposite suddenly to be lurching. They were approaching, arm in arm, the centre of the bridge, when she said that she felt giddy. They had been walking in the middle of the roadway, but now the passage of several carriages, containing people out for an airing in the warm summer weather, made them seek the sidewalk. Theodora clung more nervously to her friend’s arm, as over the painted steel parapet the tiny ribbon of road beside the river became visible. But she controlled herself; and forcing her gaze upon the shining and steep mudbanks of the river below, said: “I wonder how true the story is, that a young woman fell from here soon after the opening of the bridge twenty-five years ago, and was saved by her crinoline and the soft mud below?”

  “I do not believe it, Theodora. It is apocryphal. Why, surely the passage through the air would either force up the frame of the crinoline, distorting it out of its bell-like shape; or more likely the poor woman would have been turned over by the rush of air, and fallen head first. Like most stories told or opinions held by the majority, it has no basis in fact.”

  They followed the last of the carriages coming in from the Somerset side, and reached terra firma with its green grass once more. Theodora’s spirits lightened.

  “I am sure, Rechenda, that once our school is known, it cannot fail to be but a success. We are on the verge of a wide and deep spiritual awakening, not only in this country, but throughout Europe. It is to the younger generation of women, the mothers to be, that we must look, to receive the new ideas. I will not say our ideas, for that would surely be to show an anogance based on a mere revulsion from the modern scene; for the old poets, visionaries, and artists knew it long ago. Our principles must be based upon a synthesis of all that is clear and noble in the past. We are the heirs of their wisdom.”

  “I was much impressed by the teachings of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi you sent me, Theodora. Oh, he is so clear, so true, so divinely right!”

  “Is it not curious, Rechenda, that though Pestalozzi was famous in his day, a hundred years and more ago, his ideas should still be, in Keats’ phrase, ‘caviare to the general’. Look at the smoke from the factories of Bristol down in the hollow there—what truth can prevail in the wretched conditions of the slums, in the competition of the counting houses, in all the material wealth being created in such sunless places? And how strange to think that Napoleon fought, in part at least, and caused such human suffering, for much the same ideals as Pestalozzi. You know, after Napoleon was taken to St. Helena, he said that if his system could have prevailed, the ‘canaille’ of the big cities would have become the best-educated in Europe.”

  “But he took to the sword to clear the way for his ideals, and so his ideals perished by the sword.”

  “Yes, history reveals that there is no hope in political revolution. The Chinese have a saying, ‘He who slays the dragon, becomes in turn the dragon’.”

  Rechenda could not resist retorting, “And they have another saying, ‘A dragon in shallow waters shall be eaten alive by shrimps’.”

  They both laughed. “Well, we are agreed that our ideals must not in any sense be political. Oh, the dear man Pestalozzi in his castle at Yverdon in Switzerland—I can see him now, among his waifs and orphans, or the flowery slopes under the peaks of the eagles, giving his children—they all called him ‘Father’, you know—the love and tenderness that their very souls cried out for. Now just look at those children, by contrast, over there!”

  Two bands of boys were shouting, taunting, and fighting with sticks around an overturned perambulator. Some had helmets, made of newspapers, on their heads. One boy was crying, holding a bloody nose. Some had button-hole badges in the lapels of their coats, little discs of celluloid imprinted with photographic heads of Baden-Powell, Lord Roberts and Kitchener. They were playing a war-game; but both sides having declined to be Boers, they had combined to set upon a third group of three more ragged children, about an old perambulator filled with sticks for firing, which they had decided was a Boer läger. The boy with the bloody nose had been pushing the perambulator with his smaller friends; now it was wrecked, its contents scattered.

  “You see,” said Theodora. “They have no idea what they have done. They are only reproducing the minds of their parents. The truth is not in any political action, which must always be based on material expediency.”

  She spoke to the injured boy, after the others had run away, and did her best to comfort him. His smaller brother and sister stood by, looking wan. Theodora and her friend set about collecting the scattered sticks, and lifted the perambulator on its high wheels again, to fill it. Afterwards she gave each of them a penny, and the three children went away more hopefully.

  “I have often thought, Rechenda, that I might perhaps serve the better if I went among the poor; but it is the ruling classes that need to know the true way, just as much as the poor. And do you know, I think I have the motto that shall express our ideal; it is one of Pestalozzi’s remarks that he made most often to his children. ‘Without love, a man is without God; and without both God and love, what is man?’”

  So it was determined; and the next day the two friends, feeling that they were doing something enormously risky, went to an estate agent to make enquiries about the lease of a country house, where they would found their new school. The curriculum would include riding and callisthenics; spinning and weaving; singing and drawing; reading, writing, and arithmetic, with classics and mathematics for those who showed an aptitude; botany and natural science, cooking and gardening, shoul
d go with music, swimming and dancing.

  At the end of a week the house was found, in the Quantock hills of Somerset, and near the sea. They considered taking it on a twenty-one-year lease, after an architect had been called in to advise about the practicability of certain alterations necessary for a girls’ school. They went into the details of capital expenditure, and had a deed of partnership drawn up. But before the final settlement, and to allow both of them time for reflection, Theodora, who had written in the meantime to her brothers John and Richard telling them of her return, left Clifton for a round of visits.

  *

  The first was to be a sad one; for her eldest brother John, whom she had seen last in Devon with Jenny his wife, together with Dickie and Hetty and her baby godson Phillip, was now a widower, his wife having died in giving birth to a son, William.

  So Theodora was going first to her old home at Rookhurst, to see John and his boy, who now would be five years old. Then on to London, to stay with Dickie and Hetty, and see her godson, who must be in his seventh year! It was hardly to be believed that the baby she had held on her lap, on the grey bouldered shore of Lynmouth in that remote summer of a vanished century, would now be running about, talking, and perhaps be going to school. She wondered what sort of a boy he had grown into. How she and Hetty, before he was born, had hoped that he would be a poet! Theodora felt a quickening excitement as the train took her south-eastwards, to the town of Colham, to stay a week with John; after which she was going to London, to see her nephew and godson, the little “donkey boy”, who had so very nearly died at birth, and his mother with him.

  As the engine smoked through the countryside, the corn harvest already cut and stooked in field after field, and cattle lying contented in meadows that, despite the prolonged summer weather, still looked so very green after the harsh lands of the Aegean—but how she would miss the flowers in the rocks!—Theodora felt her heart renewing itself with the thoughts of England rushing upon her eyes through the open carriage window.