Donkey Boy

by Henry Williamson

  However, he had to be cunning, to throw him off the scent. He ran down the lane between the two fences, showing himself at the turn into an alley leading to the road itself; then dropping on his hands, he doubled on his tracks and when he came to the fence, he ran to the other end of the passage, bent double. This brought him to the site of the marn pits, beside where the elms had stood. Waiting until the man had gone, he crept on all fours to the edge of the thicket of elm suckers growing around the stumps of the parent trees, and following a run used by dogs and cats and members of his Band, reached the back fence under cover.

  After dinner he went to school by a roundabout way, down Charlotte Road to Randiswell, then up the lane and round the south side of the cemetery to Skerritt Road, hurrying through that straight street of bad repute and arriving at school, with Cranmer beside him, half a minute before the bell rang.

  After school Cranmer was waiting for him. Phillip went home by way of Skerritt Road, with his new friend who walked beside him almost without speaking, after the first shy request by the Boys’ entrance, “Shall us walk together?” They said goodbye outside the lower entrance of the Cemetery.

  The next morning, avoiding the house of the sinister Ha-ha man who had changed a bowler hat to a white straw to disguise himself, Phillip went the long way round to school, and found Cranmer awaiting him before the gates of the cemetery. With a shy grin the boy walked beside him, offering to carry his satchel. Phillip said “No thank you”—for some reason he felt very good and polite when he was with Cranmer—because Cranmer might have the germs of disease on him.

  He was pleased to have someone who looked up to him, and who was trying, he knew, to copy him. The two talked about things unconnected with the school as they walked beside one another every day. Knowing that Cranmer’s father was out of work, Phillip did not ask him what his father did, in case Cranmer was ashamed. He took some bread and dripping with him one day, and asked Cranmer to have some; but “No fanks” said Cranmer, “I mustn’t take your food, reely.”

  “I’ve had a lot already. Besides, we’re friends aren’t we? Have this piece, go on.”

  “Are you sure voo don’ mind? Straight, don’ voo want it?” By the way Cranmer wolfed the bread and dripping it was the first food he had had for a long time. Phillip took him a slice of bread and dripping every day.

  Cranmer had a great liking for Phillip, and spent most of his time out of school hanging about in the hope of seeing him in the distance, even. Once Phillip saw Cranmer on the Hill, but Cranmer hid in the bushes. He thought of Phillip as very rich, and therefore a superior being to himself altogether. When later Phillip went the other way home, he used to look back sometimes along the High Road to wave to Cranmer, for always the poor boy would be waiting there until he was out of sight. He gave him a sweet now and again, when he had some, and Cranmer would push cigarette cards into his hands, which all the boys were collecting, and then shyly run off to another part of the playground.

  *

  On Sunday afternoons there was excitement on the Hill, or that area by the Socialist Oak where men stood on camp stools and boxes they had carried up, and spouted. Phillip and Gerry went there specially to see the fun, hoping there would be fighting, and with great luck, the mounted police be called out to charge the Socialists. These were funny, very nearly unreal, men who stood by their red flags and talked about revolution, altruism, bloated capitalists, and one of them, Mr. Chivers, an old gentleman, very thin, who wore a straw hat and no overcoat (though it was winter) spoke mildly about utopia to a very few listeners, and was, as Gerry said, mad but harmless.

  The best fun of all could be got from a very small man, almost a dwarf, in a frock coat, top hat, and thick spectacles which made his eyes look like frogs’ eggs when the tadpole was just beginning to grow in the jelly. He had recently returned from prison, where he had been sent for resisting arrest after a fight when his hat had been knocked off by someone in the crowd who had called him a “Little Englander” for saying that the Boers had had justice on their side in the recent war. He had demanded an apology from the hat-knocker, and in the scrap following, the little man, who had lost his glasses and was blind without them, had inadvertently pushed a constable, and so was frog-marched down to Randiswell Police Station, to the jeers and boos of the crowd following this anarchist. Now he was out of Wormwood Scrubs, and the centre of attraction once more beside the Socialist Oak.

  Standing on his portable stool, the fuzzy-grey-haired man in the top hat and, Uncle Hugh had said, low centre of gravity, was now shouting about the need for prison reform. He had, he said, saved a piece of bread from his daily diet, to show his fellow Britons, in the Land of Free Speech, Magna Carta, and the Bill of Rights, just how the inmates of His Majesty’s prisons were treated.

  A froth like shaving soap lather was in the corners of his mouth as he slapped the piece of bread in one hand, to illustrate how hard it was, how poor in quality, being yellow instead of white.

  “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is in the twentieth century of so-called reform and progress, when men, and women, have to be fed on food which the beasts of the field would refuse!”

  This well-known agitator lived in the High Road, in the basement of a house where he repaired boots and shoes for a living. Mr. Kings-Lynn, for that was his name, yelled from the stool on which he stood, holding his unrolled umbrella on his arm, “You won’t find me standing for Parliament, ladies and gentlemen! I would not pollute myself, or my wife and children, or my neighbours, or the fair name of Kings-Lynn, by appearing in that Temple of Unrighteousness! In that collaboration of Sodom and Gomorrah! That Upas Tree of Hypocrisy that poisons all in its purlieus! That combination of Midas and Mephistopheles! That conspiracy of Shylock and the Golden Calf! No, my friends!” screamed the little man, raising face and arms, showing celluloid cuffs, to the sky, “YOU WILL NEVER FIND ME IN THE SELLING PLATE FOR THE GADARENE STAKES!!”

  His head dropped. His arms fell by his sides. He was spent. He let out a long sigh, and wiped his lips. Looking up, almost in a whisper he said, “History points only too clearly where the prophet ends up!”

  With a sparrow-like detachment the speaker then raised his silk hat and scratched his head. Having set his shiner square on his head once more, he felt for the hard piece of bread which only a few moments before he had put back in the pocket behind the tails of his frock coat. Holding the bread aloft, as though it had given him renewed inspiration, he said in a voice of plaintive winsomeness, as he leaned forward confidentially,

  “Do you know where you will soon probably be finding me, ladies and gentlemen?” He shook the square of yellow bread round the skyline. “Not in the cesspit of the House of Commons! You can have my head examined if ever you find me there! No!”

  Abruptly changing his tone, Mr. Kings-Lynn declared sternly, as he shook a finger at an imaginary Bench of Magistrates in Greenwich Police Court, “I will tell you where I shall be! I shall most probably be found, after what I am going to say to you this afternoon, in——”

  “—in your basement banging old boots!” shouted Phillip in his treble voice, and ducking down, he ran away through the laughing people.

  The story got about; Mrs. Feeney heard it; and the next day she repeated it to Hetty, who laughed until the tears came in her eyes—for she had sometimes listened to the funny little figure who spoke every Sunday afternoon by the Socialist Oak—and then went in next door to tell Papa the joke, because he had the same sense of humour as herself. She told Dickie, when the children were in bed, and he, too, laughed.

  “That fellow’s a wind-bag,” he said. “Kings-Lynn, what a name he has picked for himself! Why didn’t he call himself Norfolk-Broads while he was about it?” and Richard laughed again, this time at his own joke.

  Politics were in the air. Just before election day there was a meeting at night in the Randiswell Baths, and Richard took Phillip to hear the Unionist candidate, Major Coates, speak. When they got there the doors were clos
ed, the meeting was full. However, as they waited outside, a window opened in the red brick tower above and the top half of Major Coates looked down. White starched cuffs showed below his sleeves, a bunch of flowers in the lapel of his frock coat, his cravat under big winged collar only less small than the big white moustachios. The Candidate beamed down.

  “My friends——” he got so far as saying, in the rich, easy voice of a real gentleman, when boos and cries and counter-cheers broke out from the faces assembled below.

  Phillip shouted “Hurray! Hurray!” as loud as he could. Major Coates, leaning his elbows complacently on the window sill, and showing three inches of starched cuff with diamond links, waited until the noise subsided, then held up a hand and said, with a wide smile,

  “My friends, I see below me a schoolboy. Now I will give him a very good reason why he should hope for tariff reform, because the Unionists would put a tax on all imported birches!” and waving his hand, the well-fed figure disappeared, leaving Phillip unhappy as he stood silent beside Father, for he had cheered for Tariff Reform and Major Coates, not against them.

  When he told Cranmer the next day, Cranmer said he was Unionist too.

  “Though if my hold man finds hout he’ll belt me, for all ar street is fer t’other bloke, Wassiznaime.”

  Chapter 29

  THE BLACK LINE

  THE red and grey African parrot lived through the winter, accompanying the rooks to the potato and cabbage fields, the grass of the recreation grounds, and the other immemorial feeding areas of what was left upon the face of Kent north of the Crystal Palace.

  There were other interesting things for Phillip to see and talk about at that time. After the general election new works were put in hand by the Progressives, among them the felling of the old elms along the High Road leading to and beyond Wakenham School. Gangs of navvies, with them Cranmer’s father, who had been out of work for more than a year, dug out the roots after the timber had been thrown and hauled away. The High Road was being widened and prepared for the coming of the new electric trams of the London County Council.

  It was the same in the High Street. The old trees lining the turnpike along which Julius Cæsar had marched with his legions, and Henry the Fifth had returned from Agincourt, and which had seen many another historical scene—“And this will particularly appeal to you, old chap, where Dick Turpin the highwayman often must have galloped”—were sacrificed to the idea of progress, said Father. Well, they were going to complete the ruin of England.

  Phillip was used to hearing Father talk like that, as Father sat in his armchair evening after evening, reading from The Daily Trident, often with snorts and other expressions of disgust, while Phillip did his homework at the table behind the greying paternal head, in such a position that he could not be observed reading the brown Pluck Library, or maybe the magenta Union Jack on his lap. Father had taken the gas mantle from off his bedroom light, to stop him reading in bed; and he had to go up every night at half-past-eight, to conserve his energy for the coming scholarship examination. Phillip was no longer allowed to lock the lavatory door, and occupy the seat for an hour at a time.

  But Phillip had not always to go in there to read. He had gone to try and ease the awful itch in a place he dare not tell even Mummy about. He was too ashamed. Once, feeling the itch which would not go, he had seen lots of wriggling little white worms. He sat for hours on the pan, trying to get rid of them, but there were too many.

  *

  One afternoon Phillip came home from school and sat at the kitchen table doing his homework before tea, in so quiet an attitude that Hetty wondered what had happened now. Leaning over him to stroke his dark hair—a thing which he always tried to avoid from his mother nowadays—she saw that he was looking studiously at his homework book. There, on the open double page, was the purple circle of a rubber stamp, with a smaller circle inside, and the words LONDON COUNTY COUNCIL printed around the rim, with Wakenham Road School. In the centre of the circle, which was about as big as the crown piece Dickie had given her for safe-keeping during the days of their secret betrothal, were the initials A.G above the printed word EXCELLENT.

  “Oh Sonny, what have you done, dear, to deserve that?”

  Hetty was so surprised that she did not think of the oddness of her remark. “Did you really get that from Mr. Garstang, dear?”

  “Yes, Mum. For Composition. I thought I was going to get the stick,” he said, nonchalantly. “Instead, Mr. Garstang stamped my paper.”

  “An Excellent’! Oh Sonny, I can’t tell you how glad I am! For Composition, you say? May I read it?”

  “No, it isn’t any good, really.”

  “What did you write about?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  He sat on the exercise book, pulled a new Pluck from his pocket, and began to read it.

  “Can I have some dripping toast for tea, Mum? I’m rather worn-out.”

  “Of course you shall, dear! Only I think a little mouse must have been at my dripping bowl. Look at this!” and Hetty took the bowl from the larder. Knife thrusts had lifted out half of it. “And a little mouse has been cutting himself some extra slices of bread, too, I fancy. You can always ask, you know, dear, if you are hungry.”

  The next afternoon, being a fine sunny day, Hetty put on her best frock, with its trailing edge to the skirt, and bodice with flounces at the neck and sleeves, her hat with its upturned brim like a shallow oval truck holding artificial flowers, and with sunshade to complete the effect, walked to the school to see Mr. Garstang.

  She was saddened to see the gaps where the elms had stood for so long, and the wide white squares of concrete piled for the new pavements, and heaps of dark wood blocks for the new roadway; still, it would mean an end to muddy boots for the mothers.

  Entering the school by the Girls’ and Infants’ playground, she went through a swing door, passing a classroom hurriedly when little heads craned up from desks within to observe her going by. Coming to the hall, she saw a small and solitary figure in blue serge Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers standing at the foot of the pitch-pine stairs leading up to Mr. Garstang’s study. It was Phillip, standing on the Black Line.

  “Oh Sonny,” she whispered. “What are you doing there?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, in a whisper, as he rubbed his palms on his coat. He had been keeping them moist with spit, as that was supposed to deaden the sting of the cane.

  *

  About half-an-hour previously, while he was sitting quietly at his desk, a boy had come into Standard Four, and said to Mr. Twine, “Please sir, can Phillip Maddison come to see the Head Master,” and Phillip had followed him out in trepidation into the hall, to see Mr. Garstang there, with about fifty boys standing silently in a semicircle about him. Mr. Garstang looked gravely at the newcomer and said, in his deep voice,

  “Well, my friend! And who told you the story of Rubber Balls, which seems to have gone the rounds of the school?”

  The words and tone struck terror into Phillip. He could not speak. He stared unwinking at the face above him.

  “Have you lost your tongue, my friend?”

  Phillip tried to speak, but only a dry Adam’s-apple click came from his throat.

  “Come, speak up! You were vocal enough in recounting the story, I am sure. Now tell me, who told it to you?”

  It was an awful story. Cranmer had told him, and it had seemed very funny when he had heard it, as they had been walking together to the cemetery gate, where Cranmer had turned back with a smile saying, “So long, mate, see you to-morrow. ’Ere?” The story had been about an old woman who had fainted in the High Street and her daughter had cried out, “Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?” A deaf pedlar standing in the gutter with a tray just then cried out his wares, “Rubber balls! Rubber balls!”

  “Well, Phillip,” said Mr. Garstang again, “you see before you all the boys who have repeated the silly story, one to another. I have called you all out together to tell you that it is a s
illy story, and that such things should not be repeated in this school. I want to trace it to its source. Now, my friend, who told you?”

  Phillip stared in fear at Mr. Garstang. Would he be caned, with all the others? Moisture ran into his mouth. He felt cold drips under his arms. Jack Valiant in the Pluck Library would never peach.

  “Come on, speak up.”

  “I d-d-don’t know, sir.”

  Mr. Garstang looked at him intently. After a pause he said, “Then you are the boy who brought the story into Wakenham Road School, are you? I am surprised, Phillip, for you are the son of a gentleman, and should be the one to set a good, not a bad, example.”

  Phillip hung his head, and began to cry. He would never be given a scholarship now.

  “Very well, my friend, go you and stand on the Black Line! You other boys now go back to your classes, and do not let me catch any one of you repeating such stories again! I shall see you later, my friend!” and Mr. Garstang climbed the stairs in silence as the last tiptoe blakey ceased to clink on the wooden floor.

  *

  Phillip had been standing there about half-an-hour when his mother arrived. She had not been in the school more than half a minute when the door above the stairs opened, and Mr. Garstang came down.