The Reverend Algernon Herries looked like an ageing, amiable clown. He had a cheerful, piping voice and a fruity bottle-nose, lined with a network of tiny veins and clothed, as though in crude jest, by a swathe of dark, curling hairs, that reminded David of the legs of an insect. White hair rose from the forehead in a clownish peak, giving a false idea of his stature that was short and thickset but still suggestive of agility and precise movement. His face was an actor’s face, that might have been seamed and burnished by years of make up routine. The mobile eyebrows were clownish, too, tufted and pointed like the hair, but below them the eyes were of piercing blueness, the one feature of the face that belonged in a world of earnestness and shrewdness, eyes, David told himself, that would miss little and were there to keep watch over tolerant excesses that could go with a face like that. The man might look eccentric but that did not mean he was anybody’s fool. It therefore followed that he would not waste much time on an applicant lacking any kind of degree or experience, who had, moreover, the Twitch.
Yet the handshake was cordial, neither too firm nor too limp, and as he turned to lead the way down a stone corridor to his study he called, ‘Mr Powlett-Jones, Ellie! Bring tea, m’dear,’ and motioned his visitor into a room spilling over with books and dog-eared papers, indicating the one armchair beside the window, saying, ‘Sit you down. Ellie will be here with the tea in a jiffy. My apologies for your having to walk. We had a boneshaker until Christmas but then Stanbury, who drove it, took it into his head to do his bit and join the Army Service Corps. I do hope they don’t trust him with one of those heavy Thorneycrofts you chaps use. He’ll wreck it, for sure. He was always disputing passage with cromlechs and taking short cuts across patches of bog.’
David began to warm towards him. It was impossible not to, for his geniality was so genuine. But there was rather more to it than that. He was the first civilian David had ever heard inject irony into that phrase ‘do his bit’. For years now civilians had talked about ‘doing their bit’ as though they were on their way to church and wanted everybody to acknowledge their piety.
‘I… er… enjoyed the walk sir,’ he said, hesitantly. ‘The countryside… it’s much wilder than the country around Osborne…’ but then he stopped, biting his lip. He had been on the point of saying something bloody silly about the tortured Flanders landscape. Herries said, with unexpected gravity, ‘How long were you out, Mr Powlett-Jones?’
‘Three years.’
‘Three? Then you must have been under age when you enlisted.’
‘Only a week or two, sir. I went across with a Territorial draft in October. We were untrained but the regulars were badly hammered at First Ypres. I’ve been luckier than most.’
‘There’s no possibility of your returning?’
‘No, sir, I’m boarded.’ And then, with a touch of defiance, ‘I’d be no use to anyone out there now.’ He noticed dismally, that his hands had begun to shake.
Herries got up suddenly and at first David assumed the movement was an excuse to prevent him noticing the Twitch. It was not. He crossed the room and pointed to a fading sepia photograph hanging above one of the bookshelves. It was a very conventional photograph, fifteen lumpish youngsters, ranged in three rows, one lad squatting and nursing a ball.
‘There’s no need to feel isolated from us, least of all from me. That was our 1913 First Fifteen. Twelve are dead and one of the survivors is legless. We’ve lost eighty-seven to date, seventy-two of them known to me personally. My boys.’ He was silent a moment. Then, ‘On July 8th, 1916, I recorded eight names in one week’s casualty list. Does that help?’
It helped but it also embarrassed. Suddenly, inexplicably, David felt his throat constrict and whipped his right hand to his eye. For nearly a minute there was silence in the cluttered room. The bell saved him, saved them both perhaps. Its harsh, clanging note filled the room and then went jangling away to the north as the ringer, relishing his work, crossed the quad towards the longest of the red brick outbuildings. Herries said, ‘That’s Shawe. Nobody is allowed to touch that bell but Nipper Shawe. He was the smallest boy in the school when he came here, so I had to find something to invest him with dignity. It worked, as you see. He now has the strut of the professional town-crier.’
A murmur reached them, swelling rapidly to a sustained clatter, as boys began to pass the window in twos and threes, boots scuffling, voices shrill and urgent. Herries pushed open the casement and hailed the nearest of them.
‘Who won, Daffy?’
A breathless boy paused under the window. ‘Nicolson’s, sir! Eleven–five.’
‘Eleven, you say? Great Scott! Outram’s were leading five–nil at half-time, weren’t they?’
‘Yes, sir, but Monkey scored a try early in the second half and Dodger converted. Then Hutchinson scored two more tries far out in the last five minutes!’
‘He did? Well, good for Hutch! That must have rattled Outram’s. Thank you, Daffy.’
The boy ran on, disappearing in a stream that was flowing through the arch of the western face of the quad. Away in the distance Nipper Shawe was still swinging his handbell. Herries settled himself, reluctantly, David thought, behind his littered desk.
The spate of nicknames, the obvious rapport between headmaster and boys puzzled him. In both his schools the headmaster had been a remote, austere figure. He had never heard either of them use a nickname, or address even a senior boy as a near-equal. His hands stopped shaking. He said, getting some kind of a grip on his nerves, ‘I’ve… er… no degree, sir. I was planning to go up to Cambridge in the autumn of 1914. I only agreed to this interview because the Osborne neurologist insisted. He has… er… some eccentric ideas on therapy.’
‘Really? Tell me.’
‘He said I could apply for a temporary post, and gain experience while the shortened ex-officers’ courses are being arranged at Varsity. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to teach. I’m certainly not equipped for the job.’
The tufted eyebrows came up. ‘Any other career in mind?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Then I’d say the neurologist knows what he’s about.’
Herries got up again. Behind a desk he seemed unable to express himself with characteristic directness. ‘Look,’ he said, suddenly, ‘why don’t you give us a trial? As from now, and irrespective of whether that chap at Osborne is right or wrong? You’d be helping me no end. I’m stuck with a dozen tired men called out of retirement, and two C.3 trainees, rejected by the medicals twice over. Oh, they do what they can, but they come in for a lot of ragging. This overdose of jingoism we’ve had for so long, it’s rubbed off on the boys. You’d have a distinct advantage over the rest of us there. Three years at the Front. Twice wounded. It’s a flying start, man.’
‘I’m very far from fit, sir.’
‘You’ll get fit up here. Everybody does.’ He expanded his barrel chest and David thought briefly of Rugeley-Scott, and his insistence on the benefits of upland air. ‘Besides, we’d make allowances. History is your main subject, isn’t it?’
‘Modern history was to have been, sir.’
‘Could you make a stab at English in Lower School? Ground work? Introductory stuff? As I say, we’re in a rare pickle here. Every school is, of course, but out here, miles from the nearest town, we’re at the very end of the queue. Just how do you feel about hanging around Osborne until those shortened courses are set up, then going up for the minimum two years?’
‘Frankly the prospect terrified me, sir. It’s difficult to make the necessary effort when the only people you meet are crocks, as bad or worse than yourself. They tell me it’ll be much the same at Cambridge. Every man on those courses will be ex-service.’
‘You’re afraid of becoming institutionalised? Is that it?’
‘More or less. I had thought about signing away pension claims, discharging myself and going it alone somewhere.’
‘Anywhere particular?’
‘In the Welsh mountains. I had some good tim
es up there when I was a boy but Rugeley-Scott insists…’
Herries flipped the cover of a buff file.
‘It’s only fair to tell you I had a lengthy letter from Mr Rugeley-Scott. He was very explicit. Would you care to see his letter?’
‘No, sir. I can guess what he said.’
‘The bit about an enclosed community?’
‘I know the clinical symptoms of severe shell-shock. I should do, after seven months in hospital.’
‘Let’s take it as read then. As to “going into retreat”, you could do that here if you cared to. Term ends in three weeks and you could stay around and nurse yourself for a month. It’s very quiet during the holidays. I could show you the country on horseback. We still have a couple of old screws the requisitioned left behind. Or you could walk solitary if you preferred it.’
For the first time since he had been fully aware of his situation David came to terms with his profound reluctance to go home to Pontnewydd. His mother, who had survived worse tragedies, would stay clear of him, but who else would in a close-knit mining community, where almost everyone knew him as ‘Davyboy’? What was necessary, what was absolutely essential in the next few months, was privacy. Privacy, within a community of people cut off from the reality of what was still happening over there.
‘Could you give me a moment to think it over, sir?’
‘I can give you all evening. No need to pound down that road for the five-thirty. Be our guest and sleep in the President’s Room – President of the Old Boys that is. We always keep a room for him, that’s his privilege. I can lend you pyjamas and we’ll root out a toothbrush, although I’m told they’re in short supply like everything else except eggs and bacon. We’re very privileged in that respect. We keep our own hens and pigs.’
He opened the door and stepped out, calling to his wife Ellie for the tea. David went over to the window that opened on the quad. Behind what looked like the changing rooms the light was dying. Through a screen of leafless elms bordering the playing field he could see the orange glow of a heatless sun. Sunsets belonged to his earlier life. In the trenches the sun always set behind the British sectors. There was some kind of bath-house over there and every now and again a towel-draped boy darted across a flagged court and disappeared into a cloud of steam. It was as much a masculine world as Flanders but the difference showed in the speed of the boys’ movements and their high spirits that reached him as half-heard sallies and short barks of laughter. Out there men still laughed but rarely in that way, rarely without bitterness. He thought, ‘It’s what I need, I daresay, but how the devil do I know I could stand up to it? If any one of those kids tried it on, as boys always do with a new man, I might go berserk. Or I might crumple up and pipe my eye, as I nearly did when Herries mentioned that 1913 First Fifteen…’
He braced himself to take a closer look at the photograph. The boys were his contemporaries, their average age about seventeen when that picture was taken. It was even possible to fancy he could recognise one or two of them, so typical were they of all the youngsters who went west in the bloody shambles in 1916. That was the day Robin Barnes copped it two yards from the trench. And Nick Austin, too, although Nick had taken a night and a day to die, too far out to be brought in by the stretcher-bearers. A whole generation gone and here was the next, flexing their muscles for the show, looking forward to it, he wouldn’t wonder. There was talk of a big Jerry offensive, with whole divisions released by the collapse of the Russian front. If things were desperate enough they might even come combing in places like this. Jerry already had. Two prisoners, brought in by trench raiders the night before he stopped the mortar blast, had been seventeen and looked much younger. He remembered them vividly, although he had never thought about them since, a pair of terrified starvelings in uniforms several sizes too big for them, their coal-scuttle helmets sitting on their shaven heads like extinguishers… Could anyone do anything about it at this stage? Suppose the war ended next year or the year after? Would there be anyone left to listen?
Herries and his wife came back together, the headmaster carrying a loaded tray. Mrs Herries was four inches taller than her husband and thin as a beanpole. Her eyes were as kind and shrewd as his and he thought, as Herries introduced them, ‘He’s holding on better than most and so is she… It must be a little like losing seventy-two sons…’ and the reflection helped him to make up his mind. He said, ‘Could I wire for my things, sir? Enough to tide me over?’ and Herries said, casually, ‘Better than that. We’ll telephone the hospital as soon as you’ve had a meal and a look round. Crumpets? Why not? There are certain compensations in being marooned, my dear chap.’
It was dusk in the quad when they went out. They had no electricity up here and a shuffling little man with buck teeth was lighting oil lamps suspended over the three arches and at intervals down the long, flagged corridor to the dining hall. David peeped in and made a rough calculation of numbers seated at tea. Four hundred, give or take a dozen. He followed Herries up two flights of slate steps to a landing giving access to two large dormitories, each sleeping about thirty boys. It seemed a very Spartan school. There were no floor coverings, apart from narrow strips of scuffed coconut matting, and no lockers beside the iron cots, each covered with a red blanket. Under each bed was a laundry basket and an enamel chamber-pot. It was very much like a barrack but some of the headmaster’s brusque geniality had rubbed off on the fabric, enough to make it threadbare-friendly, like an old and shabby rectory. Herries, reading his thoughts, said, ‘We’re not too well endowed and all the renovations we had in mind have been postponed for four years. The carpentry shop keeps us from disintegrating completely. Our numbers keep up, however, a third of them the sons of Old Boys. A few of their fathers were in Upper School when I came here.’
‘When was that, sir?’
‘Summer term, 1904. I always say I came in on the radical tide. It was a year or so before a Liberal landslide. You would have been a child of eight.’
‘I remember for all that,’ David said, smiling. ‘You can’t evade politics in the valleys. How did Bamfylde come to be built in a place as remote as this, sir?’
‘Everyone asks that. It grew from a school for farmers’ sons. About two dozen of them used to ride their ponies to a farmhouse a mile or so nearer the village. Most of the day boys still ride. One of Arnold’s disciples was rector here and talked the local people and county authorities into founding the place, in 1853. We’re a direct grant school, and about a third of our income comes from the Ministry. They leave us pretty much alone, however, and I get my way in most things. Lord Hopgood – this is part of the Hopgood estate – and the Old Boys make all the real decisions. After I’ve primed them, that is. Some of the Governors are Old Boys, others are local government bigwigs, a few of them local tradesmen in the area. I’ll give you some registers and a prospectus to lull you to sleep after dinner. Come on down now. We’ve just time to view the place from my thinking post before it’s dark!’ and he bounced down the stairs, into the passage, across the quad and through the arch leading to the changing rooms and bath-house, moving at a half-trot.
The red-brick block behind the school was shut and silent now. Herries, bustling ahead, pointed to a row of single-storey stone buildings. ‘Tuck-house, stables, junkroom, armoury – we have a very flourishing O.T.C. – and the fives court. Latrines opposite. Have to do something about them soon, war or no war. The only effective flushing we get is by moorland brook. Well enough this time of year, when it rains five days a week, but a problem in a dry spell. Take the left-hand path between those two elms. That’s the cricket pavilion and swimming bath. We had the devil’s own luck there. It was finished the week war broke out. Mind the roller – the chain-gang shouldn’t have left it there. Along under the hedge towards the plantation. I’ve seen that grow. Local wiseacres said trees couldn’t survive in the path of the north-easters but they did. We now have a windbreak I wouldn’t care to be without. Here’s the spot. My thinking post!’ and
he stopped, giving David time to catch his breath. Herries heard him wheezing and was instantly apologetic. ‘I say, old chap, I’m sorry… simply never occurred to me… I trot everywhere. Most of us do up here, except in summer term. Have to keep the blood circulating. But I should have remembered, you’re still convalescent. Take a breather.’
Herries’s thinking post was the stump of an enormous beech, snapped off about twenty feet from the ground. He seemed to have a great affection for it and patted it as though it was a dog. ‘Getting on for three hundred years when it was struck by lightning, in 1912. Lucky job it happened in August, with no one about. Could have killed a dozen of us. Took the sawyers a month to cart it away but it’s still very much alive for me. I used to climb it as a boy.’
‘You were a boy at Bamfylde?’
‘Seventy-three to seventy-eight, but that was in Wesker’s time. Wesker was a brute. I’ve seen him flog a whole class for spelling mistakes in dictation. Damned fool thing to do. Lucky I could spell.’ He paused for a moment, looking down on the scatter of orange lights some two hundred yards below. The outline of the main buildings was just visible, a blue-black blur, quickened by the last pulse of the winter sun. ‘I very rarely flog a boy and then only for two offences. Persistent lying, and persistent bullying.’
David said, suddenly, ‘How do you see it, sir? Education, I mean, the real purpose of it? In all that time you must have formed some conclusions.’
R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield Page 2