R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  ‘They say it gets a man down in the end. That chap talks just like my uncle Edward. He was invalided out two years ago, but my governor has stopped inviting him over. Seems to think he’s… well, almost pro-Hun… pro-Jerry. I don’t think he is. I mean, how the hell could he be, with one eye and one leg gone?’

  David was sweating when he reached the stairs but in the privacy of his rooftop room, lent to him until he took up his quarters in Havelock’s House at the start of the summer term, he found he was able to take a more encouraging view of the conversation. At least Gosse had begun to think outside his prejudices. And at least doubt had begun to cloud the Classical Fifth’s conventional picture of the war, as drawn for them by Northcliffe and Bottomley. And also, as a bonus, Starchy had corrected himself when using the word ‘Hun’. Did it matter a damn if they thought of him as a Bolshie?

  The Sixth Forms had to be handled very differently. In a way he equated them with the very youngest boys in the school, for they were exceptionally vulnerable at seventeen-plus. If the war dragged on for a few months, some of them would be out there and they were all too aware of it. The Rupert Brooke approach – “Breast expanding to the ball” – spent itself long ago, and disillusionment was general among all but the fanatics and armchair strategists. Sometimes it seemed to him that the foul blight had already touched these youngsters, so that he saw them stripped of their high spirits, leading some forlorn attack on a German sector, defended by heavy machine-guns, and belching mortar fire. They pressed him shyly for technical details, extensions of questions posed in the drill books of the Officers’ Training Corps that paraded twice a week in the plantation and on the hillsides beyond. He humoured them, feeling his age here more than in any other part of the school. The gap between him and the eldest of them was no more than four years but it might have been fifty.

  And then, towards the end of term, a week or two after Ludendorffs shattering breakthrough on Gough’s Fifth Army front, with the appalling prospect of Paris falling, and the British being flung back on the Channel ports, there was another incident that left its mark on him yet encouraged him to see his presence here as something of real value.

  Algy Herries told him at breakfast that young Briarley’s father, a captain in the Rifle Brigade, had been killed on the Lys, and the boy had been told the news by Ellie, who usually took it upon herself to perform these melancholy chores. ‘The poor little toad is sunning himself out front now,’ Herries said. ‘Suppose you go and have a chat with him?’

  ‘What could I say that Mrs Herries hasn’t already said?’ David asked, and Herries said, airily, ‘Oh, I don’t know… something about all the chaps who have gone on ahead, maybe. And perhaps what it’s all in aid of,’ and at this David guessed Herries had heard, through the Bamfylde grapevine, of his ‘Bolshie’ chats with the Fourth and Fifth Forms, but was giving no clue as to whether he approved or disapproved.

  He went out into the forecourt where Briarley sat on a seat under the huge cedar that spread itself across the headmaster’s lawn. The boy looked stunned but more or less in control of himself. He sat very still, his hands on his knees, staring down across a field of rough pasture, part of which had been dug over for potatoes. Beyond the violet skyline granite outcrops of the Exmoor plateau winked and glistened in the pale sunshine, but nothing moved out there. The spring landscape looked as lonely and desolate as Briarley.

  He sat down beside the boy, saying nothing for a moment, but then he saw Briarley’s lip quiver and lifted his arm, resting it gently on the boy’s shoulder. He said, at length, ‘Was he a professional, Briarley?’ and when Briarley nodded, ‘We couldn’t have held out this long without them, lad. They taught us everything we knew in the early days,’ and then, when the boy made no reply, ‘Do you care to tell me about him? I’ve served in the Lys sector twice. Maybe we met, spoke to one another.’

  He could not be sure whether his presence brought any real comfort but it must have eased Briarley’s inner tensions to some extent for presently he said, ‘I didn’t see a great deal of him, sir. When I was a kid he was mostly in India or Ireland. He came here once, on leave. Last autumn, it was. We… we sat here for a bit, waiting for the school boneshaker to take him to the station.’

  ‘Did he talk about the war, Briarley?’

  ‘No, sir, not really. He only…’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘He said if anything did happen, and he was crocked and laid up for a time, I was to be sure and do all I could to look after the mater while he was away.’

  ‘Are you an only child, Briarley?’

  ‘No, sir. I’m the only boy. I’ve got three sisters, one older, the others just kids.’

  ‘Well, then, you’ve got a job ahead of you. Your mother is going to need you badly. That’s something to keep in mind, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I suppose so, but…’

  He began to cry silently and with a curious dignity, so that David automatically tightened his grip on the slight shoulders. There was no point in saying anything more. They sat there for what seemed to David a long time and then, with a gulp or two, Briarley got up. ‘I’d better start packing, sir. Algy… I mean the headmaster said I was to go home today, ahead of the others. Matron’s getting my trunk down from the covered playground…’ And then, in what David thought of as an oddly impersonal tone, ‘The telegram said “Killed in action”, sir. What exactly – well, does that always mean what it says?’

  ‘If it hadn’t been that way it would have said “Died of wounds”, and there’s a difference.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ He was a plucky kid and had himself in hand again. He nodded briefly and walked back towards the head’s house. David would have liked to have followed him, letting himself be caught up in the swirl of end-of-term junketings, but he could not trust himself to move. His hands were shaking again and his head was tormented by the persistent buzzing that always seemed to assail him these days in moments of stress. He said, explosively, ‘God damn everybody! Where’s the sense in it…? Where’s the bloody sense, for Christ’s sake?’ And then, like Briarley, he was granted the relief of tears.

  2

  There were plenty of moments during that period of initiation when he was able, to his own surprise, to put the war out of mind and find handholds that promised hope of a climb back to objectivity. Occasionally it was in class, when he was interested in some particular aspect of the syllabus, but more often it was in the common room, rubbing shoulders with the assortment of eccentrics that the arch-eccentric Herries had assembled round him to tide him through the war.

  They were not a very likeable bunch but one had, David assumed, to make allowances. The older men were petrified in the Victorian mould, some of them so deeply rutted that they appeared to regard the war as a tedious and irrelevant interruption to their careers or well-earned retirement. Of the younger bunch, the C.3 men were almost pitiable, feeling themselves terribly handicapped as civilians in authority over four hundred boys, almost all of whom had fathers, brothers and uncles at the front. There was one among this latter group who was teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, Meredith, a twenty-five-year-old diabetic, with a sallow complexion and huge defenceless eyes. Meredith’s classes, David learned, usually ended in a riot, and he was said to stand on the rostrum and let the tide of ribaldry sweep over him, bleating, ‘I say there… I say, you fellows…!’ Beyond that he would make no protest. Meredith had a curious sideways-sloping gait, moving over the ground with long strides, one shoulder raised an inch higher than the other. The boys had taken to mimicking him and some of them did it rather well, occasionally, it was alleged, lurching up to the blackboard in his actual presence and taking over, while Meredith stood helplessly, whimpering, ‘I say… I say, you fellows…!’ Herries had done what he could to help and even advised Meredith to take a cane into class, but when the poor devil followed this advice even worse chaos resulted. Boyer and his ilk, pretending to be terrified of Meredith’s ineffectual swipes, fled i
n all directions. When cornered they fell on their knees, shrieking for mercy.

  The older masters showed no sympathy at all with the poor chap and frequently complained of the uproar resulting from his classes. Carter, the only younger master apart from David who had been in uniform, was the most persistent common-room nag, and David soon conceived an intense dislike for the man, whose conceit amounted to arrogance.

  Carter was a stocky, rather florid man, with smooth red hair that he kept oiled so that it gleamed like wet rust. He had a long inquisitive nose, rimless glasses and no eyelashes to speak of. On the strength of six months’ service as a Territorial officer, at a camp in Northumberland, he claimed David as a war comrade, explaining in great detail how a knee injury, received in a pre-war football game, had been responsible for his discharge in 1915.

  ‘Let me down with a bump, old man,’ he said, during one of his interminable reminiscences, that made David think of himself as a newly joined officer buttonholed by a patronising major. ‘Damn thing gave out the week my draft was due to leave for France. Most of them went west at Loos, of course. Damned awful show, Loos. Badly bungled, I gather.’

  David murmured that it was, and that he had seen some fighting in the area, but Carter was not interested in positive experience, preferring to talk of his triumphs on the drill ground outside Newcastle in the early days of Kitchener’s army. He was still very much the martinet, with a small army of his own, the school O.T.C., and was extremely put out when David politely refused to join the Corps.

  ‘Damn it, why not, old man? We could use a chap like you, someone with trench experience. I daresay you could teach us a few wrinkles if you cared to, and the top brass regard the O.T.C. as the nursery of subalterns, don’t they?’

  ‘If they do then God help the lot of us,’ said David, the Welsh lilt edging back into his voice as it often did under stress. ‘The average life of those kids out there is three weeks. Good God, man, they don’t even have time to learn when to duck!’ and at once regretted his testiness. He need not have bothered. Carter was exceptionally thick-skinned and said blandly, ‘Well, that’s war, old chap. Can’t win a war without losing a few. However, I’ll not take no for an answer. The head tells me you’re still convalescent. We’ll talk about it again later, eh?’

  He drifted off, unaware that the convalescent was having the greatest difficulty in restraining himself from committing assault upon his person, but the moment he was out of earshot Howarth, the senior English master, said, ‘Ignore the poopstick. Most of us do, whenever we can,’ and he at once felt cheered, for he was by no means sure, at this stage, whether Herries would expect him to take part in O.T.C. activities. He said, cautiously, ‘Is that true about his knee?’ and Howarth, reluctantly laying aside his Times, said that everybody at Bamfylde took that knee on trust, as the medical board must have done, Carter being but thirty-one years old. He added, however, ‘The devil of it is it gives him the edge on all the civilians about here and being Carter he makes the utmost of it. Maybe somebody was lucky he was crocked on the football field. Shouldn’t care to have him lead me into action, would you?’

  ‘No, by God, I wouldn’t,’ David said, and at once saw the testy, taciturn Howarth in a new light. Up to then he had been very wary of the man, a notable disciplinarian, with the reputation for possessing a bitter tongue. No one at Bamfylde, save Herries himself, had escaped Howarth’s sarcasm, but he was recognised as a first-class teacher who had the respect, if not the affection, of the boys, even the wild ones in the Lower Fourth. When the other masters had drawn their dishwater coffee from the tarnished urn and moved off, David said, ‘You’ve been here a good many years, Mr Howarth. How would you say it compares with other schools, schools of the same standing?’ and Howarth said, for once without irony, ‘I can tell you that. It compares extremely well under Herries. It’ll never be a Harrow, a Clifton or a Rugby. That chance passed us by when our numbers dropped in Bull’s day. But I think of it as a first-class second-rater. Or could be, when the wartime chaff is blown away, and the Governors spend some money on the fabric.’ He seemed to reflect a moment. ‘I stayed when I might have moved on and I’ve had my chances, especially in the last few years, when my age group has had it all their own way. But if you asked me why I don’t think I could give you a specific answer. Maybe it’s because I like and respect Herries. He’s an original.’

  ‘You don’t look for originality in this profession, do you?’

  ‘You do here,’ Howarth said shortly, and abruptly terminated the conversation by picking up his Times, leaving David with the impression that Howarth was someone on whom it might be wiser to reserve judgment. He was right about Bamfylde as regards originality, however, as David soon discovered when he became better acquainted with the older men on the staff.

  There was Cordwainer. There was Acton. And there was Gibbs, respectively known as ‘Judy’, ‘Bouncer’ and ‘Rapper’. The Sixth called the trio ‘The Magi’, for each, in his different way, was a man of distinction. Judy Cordwainer taught geography as his main subject, and elementary mathematics to the juniors, but he did many other things. He played the organ at Stonecross Church, where the school worshipped on Sundays, marked out the cricket and football pitches with fanatical precision, presided over the school stationery cupboard and even taught woodwork. Judy came of the generation of schoolteachers who practiced before the age of specialisation and could turn hand and brain to anything once he was persuaded Bamfylde had need of his services. A tall, austere man, with cadaverous features, he was without a sense of humour, but his unswerving loyalty to boys and colleagues more than made up for this and, over the years, he had acquired a gratuitous popularity. Wags were fond of explaining how he came by his nickname, back in the nineties, when he had been housemaster of Outram’s, a post he had relinquished in favour of Carter on his official retirement. It appeared that Outram’s was cock-house that particular year and were expected to win the house cup for rugby, but their final game against Havelock’s showed a lamentable lack of form. Cordwainer, disgusted by their poor performance, trotted up and down the touchline shouting encouragement to their rivals, who finally won both match and trophy. Cordwainer’s own fifteen were so outraged by this treachery that they styled him Judas, softened, over the years, to Judy.

  A standard entertainment at Bamfylde was to crowd round the stationery cupboard in the Remove in order to witness Judy issue replacements. He would refuse to renew an exercise book unless he was satisfied that every page of an old one was covered with scrawl, and would sharpen an inch of pencil and uncross Waverley nibs when boys presented evidence of spent equipment. He had a high-pitched, honking voice, and despite his age could still subdue a classroom, hurling a huge bunch of keys at inattentive pupils and sometimes hitting the hot water pipes in a way that sent an echoing clang through all the classrooms of Lower School. He had a passion for neatness and precision. Later on David saw him award marks to Third Formers with wrong answers, rejecting correctly answered exercises that were decorated with blots. Cordwainer saw Bamfylde as a kind of rural Athens, and probably thought of it as the centre of the cultural universe. Being as bald as a tonsured monk (and looking like one in his voluminous gown) he would wear his tweed cap in class on cold mornings and stand honking there, a perfect prototype of the old-style dominee, whose methods were unchanged since he came down from Cambridge in the early seventies. Indeed, a parody of Judy Cordwainer, one of the standard turns among the juniors who could exactly reproduce his honking voice, usually began with one or other of his favourite precepts – ‘I’ll have method before speed, d’ye hear?’ or ‘Oh… prince of fools! Take it away, slovenly numbskull!’

  By contrast, Bouncer Acton was a hearty, excessively amiable man, an ordained priest who ministered to a small parish north of the school, where he occupied a rectory used as a spill-over for new boys. Everyone liked Bouncer, who taught divinity throughout the school, and Latin to the juniors, but everyone took shameless advantage of his sligh
t deafness and nearsightedness, and the fact that he preferred to look over rather than through the steel-rimmed spectacles perched on his pudgy little nose. It was said that Bouncer had donned those useless spectacles while taking part in a charade as a boy, and had subsequently forgotten them, leaving them perched there even when he went to bed. The bolder boys were fond of asking Bouncer earnestly phrased questions concerning passages in the Bible relating to Lot’s incest, circumcision, concubines, how much the elders saw of Susannah, and the Virgin birth, but he would always answer straightforwardly, seldom suspecting he was being hoaxed. On occasion, however, he could be savage. His standard punishment, for the few misdemeanours he detected, was a volley of four penal marks and this meant one hour’s drill on Saturdays. As four was the limit allowed, and any penal marks in excess earned the delinquent a thrashing, this had the effect of keeping skylarkers in purdah for the remainder of the week. The wags were equally expert at mimicking Bouncer, who had pendulous cheeks that quivered when he bobbed up and down, the trick that had won him his nickname.

  Rapper Gibbs was different again, a wizened insignificant-looking man, who taught music and accompanied the popular choral and operatic societies that Herries had founded on becoming headmaster. Rapper’s soubriquet stemmed from the short pointer he used on the knuckles of blundering amateur pianists, but despite his asperity he was an excellent tutor and music, David discovered, played a prominent part in the cultural activities of the community.

  There were some two dozen masters on the staff in the spring of 1918. Apart from outstanding characters, like Judy, Bouncer, Rapper and the sarcastic, withdrawn Howarth, there were several other oddities, some of whom David did not get to know until the following term. Ferguson, for instance, a volcano of a man who taught French, and would never utter a word of English during a class, ignoring boys who addressed him in their own tongue. His habit of prancing up and down the classroom, using his gown like a sail, had earned him the nickname of ‘Bat’; Barnaby was an amiable, erudite man who taught Latin in Senior School, and was said to be inordinately fond of porridge, even the glutinous concoction ladled out in Hall every morning throughout the school year. There was the motherly Mrs Parminter, who presided over the Second Form, and was so formidably corseted that her substantial bust projected like the flying buttress of a Gothic town hall. She was known, on this account, as ‘Ma Fender’, but the smaller boys, particularly those newly removed from home, were glad of her comfort and sympathy. There was only one other woman on the staff, Mrs Gorman, the elderly Matron, who was inflexible and matter-of-fact with patients and malingerers alike. No one had coined a nickname for her until a returning Old Boy, happening to seek her out for relief of some minor ailment, emerged with a slip of paper marked ‘M & D’, that meant, so he told his audience, ‘Medicine and Duty’, thus establishing a legend that Mrs Gorman had served in the R.A.M.C. in the Boer War. After that the boys referred to her as ‘Kruger’.