R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  They were, David decided, a very colourful lot, but apart from Herries himself he was unable, during those first weeks, to strike up a friendship with any one of them. It was as though he had joined a band of castaways on a desert island, the lone survivor of a subsequent wreck, and at first he was inclined to view his isolation as the inevitable result of his own mental confusion. In the end he took his problem to Herries.

  ‘In a sense you are an outsider, my dear chap,’ he said, ‘and that’s the reason I grabbed you the moment you showed up. You’re the bridge, don’t you see? A passage over a generation gap, and it isn’t the conventional generation gap we all have to cross if we know our business properly. Your gap, caused by the war, is semi permanent. It might take twenty years to close.’

  ‘But some of the chaps on the staff are only a year or so older than I am,’ David argued. ‘There’s the C.3 men, and Carter.’

  ‘It’s not a matter of years, but of experience, don’t you see? What are our casualties to date? Not far short of three million, I’d say, and a third of them dead at eighteen-plus. No one who hasn’t been out can imagine what it’s like. Mentally a man like you must have aged about a year every month, and that makes you immeasurably senior to theorists like me, and faithful old buffers like Cordwainer, Acton and Gibbs. Someone has to tackle the job of nudging all those young rascals over the threshold into what I sincerely hope will be an entirely new world. We can’t do it because we’re even more adrift than they are and haven’t a compass reading between us. In a year or so I daresay we can find you some help. Hang it all, everyone in his early twenties can’t be dead or maimed or gassed. In the meantime you’re on your own, lad.’

  He thought about this during his long tramps across the moors and his moochings around the silent and deserted buildings during the Easter holidays, when most of the staff and all the boys were gone save a dozen who lived in the head’s house while their parents were abroad. It was a sombre thought but it represented the challenge that he, and Herries, and the Osborne neurologist thought of as therapy, and with the slow return of vitality, and a surer grip on his nerves, he began to respond to it in a way that revived his self-confidence.

  The news from the front was bad but his infantryman’s eye had taught him to read between the lines of press reports so that, alone among everyone he met in this backwater, he was able to assess the problems of the German vanguard, who had far outrun their supplies in the surging advance that began on March 21st. Right now they were crossing the old battlefields of ‘fifteen, ‘sixteen and ‘seventeen, devastated country where the difficulties of the victors would be more formidable than those of divisions falling back on base areas. Eventually, he supposed, there would be a counter attack, spearheaded by the Americans, so that on the whole he was optimistic of the eventual outcome.

  By the last day of April, when the school reassembled, he was scanning the newspapers for signs of a large-scale holding operation and found his opinion eagerly solicited by boys whose fathers and brothers had been caught up in the spring debacle.

  ‘Will the Yanks attack, sir?’

  ‘Is our own show under way, sir?’

  ‘Do you suppose Jerry has shot his bolt, sir?’

  It was curious, he thought, that even the fourteen-year-olds were more instinctively aware of what was at stake out there than men thirty, forty or even fifty years their senior. In a way, in a perverse way, it might even be hopeful.

  Three

  * * *

  1

  HE WAS FINDING HIS WAY ABOUT, FAMILIARISING HIMSELF with the great, sprawling barn of a place that straggled halfway up the rise behind the grey-stone buildings of the original Bamfylde, built of imported materials that always seemed at odds with the honey-coloured local stone used for the extensions.

  There were really two schools here, the tall squarish pile that reared itself four sides of the quad (and even after seventy years of Exmoor weathering, still looked like a baroque folly) and the utilitarian additions added over the years, that had already adapted themselves to the green-brown hillside, a straggle of farm buildings, and unfenced pastures bounded by the sports fields in the south and west, and plantation windbreak to the east, and the crest of the moor to the north. Herries and Howarth were right about the decaying fabric. It had needed extensive renovation long before the war began. Now it was beginning to look seedy, scarred and very shabby.

  Most of the classrooms, together with Big School, and the headmaster’s house that occupied the whole of the south side of the quad, were housed in the older block. Big Hall, the kitchens and all but one of the dormitories, were in the newer block. Long, stone-flagged passages connected these quarters with the quad. Branching from it, one floor up, was a wainscoted passage known as the Rogues’ Gallery. Here, in a sombre row, hung portraits of Bamfylde’s five headmasters, including a younger, cherubic-looking Herries. Opposite them, posed in wide-eyed, dutiful groups, were football and cricket teams, reaching back to the earliest days of the school when nobody wore special clothing for games and everyone played cricket and football in workaday boots and shirtsleeves. There was a veritable warren of music rooms, laundry rooms, a boothole and a stray classroom or two about here, together with a school museum and, on the floor above, a range of attics used as storerooms. There was also a garret where, once a fortnight, the barber from Challacombe, the nearest market town, plied his clippers. One of Algy Herries’s aversions was overlong hair and the boys, from the Fifth downwards, were shorn at frequent intervals. For a day or so after the appearance of Bastin, the barber, known and reviled as ‘Sweeney’ by the boys, everyone on the premises (the Sixth had won an exemption charter) went about with a whitish skull and Bastin was seen to drive away with a sack of clippings. The boys swore that he used them to make hairshirts that he sold to monks, but David later discovered that a condition of his contract was to dispose of his debris after a mass haircut, the school being desperately short of domestic staff.

  Apart from the headmaster’s house, which was spacious and comfortably furnished, and some of the quarters occupied by living-in masters, the premises were bleak and daunting to a newcomer. When he left the temporary refuge of the O.B.A. President’s room, David was given a sitting-room and tiny bedroom in Havelock’s House, ruled by Ferguson, the French master. Mrs Ferguson was a Frenchwoman and reminded David of the black-draped madames he had seen counting their takings in estaminets behind the lines. The Fergusons were a staid, methodical couple, who left him to his own devices in his limited free time, and he grew to like his little sitting-room that looked south over a stretch of moor dotted with birchwoods and the rhododendron forest he had noted on his first walk from the station.

  The aspect of the moor changed dramatically during his first few weeks up here. When he had arrived, in early March, the countryside had a wind-swept, breathless look, as though its hardihood had been taxed to the limit by winter gales and frosts, but even before the summer term opened, spring had enlarged its hold. All the beeches and elms in the two drives began to sprout new leaves, a sheen of bright green varying the mottled pattern of gold and russet, and a rash of primroses appeared in the breast-high banks, relieved every few yards by great plumes of cow-parsley and a scatter of scarlet campion. Soon, in the folds under the copses, where the little river Brent ran to join the Bray or the Barle (it seemed undecided which) acres of bluebells dusted the margins, like early morning mist masking the shallow valley. The sky patterns changed minute by minute, now streaked and dappled with bluish trailers, now a jumble of plumped-up pillows, gashed by gusts of wind that came soughing down from the upper moor. This high land stretched away into the far distance, a series of brown and grey ridges, broken here and there by the blur of woods where pockets of ash, sycamore, thorn and elderberry had found some kind of refuge from the north-easterlies and south-westerlies that Herries said took turn and turn about from October to May.

  The air and its landscape improved his health, soothing his ragged nerves and i
nducing a state of suspended dreaminess when he was not occupied in class, or with games, or dormitory supervision. Slowly, week by week, the Western Front began to recede, an old wound he was learning to live with, and sometimes the war seemed so remote that it might have been fought by Wellington or Marlborough. He was helped in this by his growing rapport with the boys.

  He had his favourites or, if not favourites, then his star-performers, whom he saw as he had once seen the section leaders of his platoon. There was a star-performer in every group and round him were gathered his acolytes. The mystique of leadership was as obvious here as in the trenches and he found he could soon spot the rankers marked down for a stripe. Boyer, of the Lower Fourth, was such a one, with Dobson as his runner-up. Blades, in the Upper Third, was another, a handsome boy who took the leadership of his group for granted and was said by Howarth to have an original mind. ‘Might even write some good verse when he matures,’ Howarth said, and then, as though unwilling to forgo the characteristic touch of acidity, ‘Poor devil!’ Below Blades, in the Remove, was Bickford, a lumbering fourteen-year-old, lazy as a mastiff in the sun and attended, wherever he went, by his two henchmen, Rigby, a farmer’s son, and Ford, whose father was said to be a bookmaker. Bickford, although indolent, was a bit of a bully, much feared by the urchins of the Lower Third and Second Form, over whom he held sway, a slothful, medieval despot, who could be mollified by tribute or subservience. The sort of boy, David thought, who needed watching, although his grin was infectious and he could sometimes exhibit a certain inventiveness. David discovered this one day when Bickford made use of a warped floorboard to set the stationery cupboard rocking without apparent agency, declaring that the manifestation was proof of the existence of the Remove ghost, a failed master of Bull’s era who had, so the story ran, swallowed salts of lemon and been buried in Stonecross churchyard with a suicide’s gravestone placed at a different angle from all the other monuments.

  He grew to like some of the older boys in the Sixth, most of whom would be leaving to join one or other of the Services at the end of summer term. Cooper, Fosdyke and Scrubbs-Norton were typical of this cadre, boys who had come to Bamfylde in the last year of peace, and were now prefects and far better at keeping order than some of the younger masters. Their eagerness to get into uniform touched David as nothing else was able to. He already saw them in their Sam Brownes and British warms, seeking an opportunity to prove themselves as men, and while he was often tempted to introduce them to the stark realities out there, he never did. It would have been like telling five-year-olds that Father Christmas was a myth. He did get as far as accepting their shy invitations to take cocoa with them in their studies after prep, and would sit there discussing the war news with them, news that came to Bamfylde a day late in a bundle of papers from Challacombe. Luckily it was getting progressively more cheerful, with the successful British counter-attack at Villers Bretonneux, a unified Allied command and, in the first days of July, the beginning of the Le Hamel offensive. Farther south, in the Chemin des Dames area, the French were still taking a hammering and there were some spectacular German advances but these, David assured them, would soon peter out, as all offensives did in the nonstop slogging match. More and more Americans were landing in France, and the general pattern of the summer fighting was becoming clearer every day. ‘I think Ludendorff may have shot his bolt by the time you get back here in September,’ he said, cautiously, but then Cooper reminded him that most of the Sixth would not be returning for the autumn term, and all he could do was offer up a prayer that somehow these babies would be kept in training bases until the promised all-fronts counter-attack was launched.

  The climax came, for David Powlett-Jones, on the eleventh day of August, just before he set off on his belated visit to his mother at Pontnewydd. Screaming headlines announced the breaching of the Hindenburg Line and unheard-of advances by the British in most of their sectors, places where, only a year ago, the gain of a few hundred yards of quagmire was won at the cost of a hundred thousand casualties.

  He took Northcliffe’s journal up to Herries’s thinking post and read it very carefully, his heart-beats quickening when he came upon the familiar name of some devastated village where no building was more than a foot high, and the soil was rich with the bones of the dead of earlier battles. There could be no doubt about it now, surely? Cooper, Fosdyke and Scrubbs-Norton were reprieved. They would take their place in some office or factory, or perhaps spend a pleasant spell at one of the universities, after which, no doubt, they would marry some fluffy girl and have children of their own, earmarked for Bamfylde if they were boys.

  He toyed with the fancy for a spell, visualising a subdued thirteen-year-old young Cooper, or a young Fosdyke, who would be coming here halfway through the nineteen-thirties, and the prospect must have caused him to smile, for suddenly he heard Herries’s chirpy voice say, ‘Good news, P.J.? My stars, it would have to be to fool me! I’ve been inflated and deflated so many times by that rag that I’ve stopped reading it, apart from casualty lists.’

  David said, ‘It’s real enough this time. We’ve broken the Hindenburg Line. I’d stopped believing that was possible. It’ll be open warfare from here on and that’s something positive.’

  ‘Was that worth grinning at?’

  ‘In a way, sir.’ He could always talk uninhibitedly to Herries. ‘As a matter of fact, I was smiling at the prospect of Cooper’s boy sitting under Mrs Parminter in the Second in a dozen years or so,’ and he smiled again when Herries’s tufted eyebrows shot up. ‘Pure speculation on my part, I’m afraid. What I mean is, the chances are that Cooper will live long enough to marry and have children. If he does he’d want to send his boys here, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘They all do,’ Herries said. ‘Without them we should wither, I’m afraid.’ He sat down on the shaft of the horse-roller, parked up here in obedience to his decree every time the roller-gangs finished a stint on the cricket pitch. ‘Haven’t seen so much of you lately. Settling in?’

  ‘I think so, sir. What do you think?’

  ‘You’ll do. You’ve frightened one or two of the old stagers, I’m told. Oh, don’t let that bother you. It never did me. If you can’t smuggle your own convictions into the curriculum you might as well go away somewhere, dig a hole and live in it.’ He lit his short pipe and puffed contentedly for a while. Then, cocking one eyebrow, ‘How do we look to you?’

  ‘I’ve been very happy here, sir.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that. How do we seem to be trundling along to someone from outside?’

  David hesitated. It seemed a propitious time to make a point he was very eager to make.

  ‘I can only answer that from an academic standpoint, Headmaster.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘It’s the text-books I’ve inherited. Most of them were printed about the time of Victoria’s first Jubilee. How much say does an unqualified man get in the choice of texts?’

  ‘Depends on the man. You? I wouldn’t pull on the bit unless I thought you were rushing your fences. You’re a bit inclined to. Not that that’s unusual in a chap your age. What kind of history were you taught as a boy?’

  ‘Strings of dates and battles. The Treaty of Troyes and the War of Jenkins’ Ear.’

  ‘Ah, that fellow Jenkins. I always thought that was a bit of liberty, passing his ear around Parliament like the plate at church. Still, it worked. They had their war, didn’t they?’

  It was always difficult to decide whether or not there was a coded message in Herries’s puckish good-humoured talk and this time David decided to put it to the test. ‘I think we should have different text-books for different ages,’ he said. ‘The subject needs to be introduced with colour – Alfred’s cakes, Bruce’s spider and so on, but it ought to progress from there without getting dull.’

  ‘What’s your prescription?’

  ‘To catch the interest in Lower School with the legends, move on to a more solid diet in Middle School, and then use half the periods fo
r free discussion in the Fifth and Sixth. Especially the Fifth, when they’re coming up to School Certificate and Matric. Discussion promotes original thought, doesn’t it? And I believe most examiners like originality, even when it reads like heresy.’

  ‘Something in that. Maybe you’d like to work out a syllabus for next term. After all, you’ll have more latitude then. I’ll get someone else to take the Lower School in English. It won’t be Howarth, of course. He likes his subject too much to reach down. Maybe one of the new chaps, there are a couple coming. Why the frown, P.J.?’

  ‘If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d like to continue English with the Second and Third. I know I’ll have to start reading for my own degree, but I can manage. The fact is… well, it might sound absurd, but those extra periods have helped. Helped me, I mean. In rediscovering Gray, Cowper, Tennyson and Goldsmith, and those excerpts from some of my old favourites, like Silas Marner and Westward Ho!. The mugging up enabled me to get things into a better focus.’