‘Well,’ Herries said slowly, ‘that sounds encouraging. If Gray’s “Elegy” still has relevance to you after all you experienced out there, then the sooner the young come to it the better.’ He relit his pipe and over the flaring match David saw he was smiling. He went on, ‘The jungle drum tells me you occasionally feed them something more up-to-date than Mr Gray. Is it true you read the Sixth a poem by that chap Sassoon?’
‘Yes, it’s true. They’re going out there, some of them. It seemed to me that someone ought to do something to counteract all the rubbish these chaps print,’ and he indicated the newspaper he had laid aside.
‘What was it, exactly?’
‘It was a poem called “Memorial Tablet”, that Sassoon published this year. I’ve got a copy of his later poems. Some of them are strong stuff but they have more relevance to what’s actually occurring in Flanders than all the leading articles I’ve read on the war. I… er… I could lend you a copy, Headmaster.’
‘I’d be obliged,’ Herries said, without irony. ‘I like to keep up to date. Well, then, my compliments to your mother, and we’ll expect you back a day or so before term begins.’
‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’
They got up by mutual consent and went down the slope towards the nearest of the outbuildings, but when they drew level with the fives court Herries said, ‘I suppose you’re aware of your nickname by now?’ and David, suspecting it would be ‘Bolshie’, said he had certain suspicions but had thought it best not to pursue them.
‘Oh, it’s an amiable one,’ Herries said, ‘not like some of them. It stems from your… consultative methods in class.’ He stopped, taking his pipe from his mouth and extending his hand. ‘Well, goodbye, “Pow-Wow”. Have a good holiday!’ and he wandered off towards the piggeries. David remained standing by the fives court for a moment, thinking, ‘I’ve had my share of luck, God knows, but running across him beats anything that happened to me.’
He had a curious afterthought then, concerned with a squat, bowlegged, round-shouldered man, who had died underground in the summer of 1913, a man who, even then, had had unwavering faith in him and had never been diffident about showing it. It was as though his father, feeling the darkness pressing in, had called for help on his behalf, and Herries, walking his rounds on this high plateau, had heard him across the width of the Bristol Channel.
2
Just over a year had passed since he had visited the Valley on leave, a month or so before the Brandenburgers’ mortar shell had blasted him out of the war. It seemed narrower and shabbier, a place of steep, huddled streets, fortress-like chapels, rundown corner shops with nothing much to sell, and the familiar tip overshadowing them all. The corporate spirit of the Valley, that had been its sturdiest plant ever since he was a boy, seemed also to have withered, translating itself into bitterness, a different kind of bitterness from that of frontline men, for it lacked the inevitable sardonic humour. There was no jingo stridency here, only a glowering sense of exploitation by politicians, by mine owners, by royalty leeches, by war profiteers. For the vicarious prosperity that had come to other industrial areas seemed to have by-passed the coalfields. No one was encouraged to forsake the industry and enlist, or join in the scramble for high wages in the munitions factories. Instead they were expected, almost compelled, to go on dragging coal from the hillsides at twice the speed and without comparable rises in rates. There was an undertone of militancy and strikes, of demands to put the industry on a new and realistic basis, a war that had little to do with the war of the headlines. He sensed what was happening even before he talked to his brothers-in-law, both miners, and although this world was almost lost to him now, fenced off by an education that none of these men had had, and experiences at the Front they had been spared, he still thought as a miner’s son and could identify with their grievances and fear for their future when the need for coal was not so desperate and their bargaining power had been removed.
For the first time he heard men of his own race openly champion the Russian Revolution, and Trotsky’s separate peace at Brest-Litovsk, an act that many Welshmen in the line had regarded as a betrayal, but which miners here saw as a portent of enormous social significance. Ewart Griffiths, married to his elder sister Gwynneth, was the first to put this into words when he said, ‘There’s a rumour we’re going to be asked to dig coal and help turn the Bolshies out but I’m telling you, man, they’ll get no bloody help from us down yer! Time we started our own bloody revolution, Davyboy.’
His mother, miraculously, was untouched by bitterness. The tragedies of her life did not show in her round, smooth, unmistakably Welsh face, with its pink and white bloom, still there after sixty years in the valleys, and forty-odd years of making twopence do the work of a shilling. She still kept the little terrace house spotlessly clean, still spoiled her five grandchildren, still cooked an appetising meal from the cheapest ingredients, and glowed when he told her he was now teaching in a school of four hundred boys, a place she would surely think of as a Gentleman’s College. To her this was a far greater achievement than surviving three years on the Western Front, scholarship representing maturity, warfare being a little boy’s scuffle in the street outside. ‘Been that proud of you, Dadda would,’ she said, when he told her his post had been made permanent. ‘There’s a wonder it is! That Dadda should know it all those years ago, and your brothers Hughie and Bryn too, for you were the only real bookworm of the litter. Are they feeding you well down there, boy? You could do with more flesh on your bones, but maybe that’s on account of all those hospital slops they gave you when you were hurt in the fighting.’
He reassured her as to his health, but as he did so a thought struck him. He said, ‘God knows, you’ve earned a rest, Mam. Why don’t you pack your things and come back to Devon with me? It’s beautiful country down there – like Wales in Grandfather’s time – and we could rent half a cottage from old Mrs Bastin, the wife of our lampman. He’s got a splendid garden, chock full of vegetables. You’d like it down there.’ But she said, sadly, ‘Nice to be asked it is, Davy, but my place is here, so long as I can give Gwynneth and Megan a hand with the children. Besides…’ and she glanced through the gap between the freshly-laundered curtains of the tiny kitchen, contemplating a view of her lean-to shed and the uniform backs of the houses in Alma Street, ‘whatever would I do with myself in a strange place among strange folk? I was born yer, and I’ll die yer among my own people. It’s different with you. You’ve moved on, as Dadda said you would.’
He left it at that, but soon the stale, claustrophobic atmosphere of the little town began to oppress him so that he thought longingly of the miles of moorland he could see from his dormer window in Havelock’s House. In the last week of August, when the newspapers were trumpeting the British advance on the Ancre and the capture of Bapaume, he slipped away, promising to return for Christmas. Late the same evening, he caught the Challacombe train for Taunton and got out at Bamfylde Bridge Halt, revelling in the two-mile tramp up the twisting roads to the sportsfield gate, still lacking a hinge and leaning outwards.
Dusk was settling in the highest folds of the moor and the scent of honeysuckle and thyme came to him, together with the pungent whiff of grass clippings where old Tapscott, the one groundsman remaining to them, had been scything the grass on what would be the scene of the autumn house matches. The school buildings, from this angle, were silhouetted against a tangerine sky, where the sun was sliding down behind the sentinel beeches of the west drive. He thought, ‘It’s the damnedest thing… I’ve been here six months but it’s already more home to me than Pontnewydd. Can’t imagine being anywhere else…’ and vaulting the crippled gate he moved up towards the southern fringe of the Planty, as the boys always referred to it, then down past the cricket pavilion and swimming pool to Herries’s thinking post and a blur of light showing in the headmaster’s house. ‘It’s a niche,’ he told himself, ‘and damned if I don’t cling to it as long as I can!’ It struck him, passing the Gothic arch
into the empty quad, that niches, like most other things, were likely to be in short supply for ex-servicemen in the years ahead.
3
The world of school enfolded him. By half-term even the mounting relief that the war was nearly over was muted by the immediacy of Bamfylde’s problems, by the trivia of existence within the periphery of his work and personal encounters. When Bulgaria sued for peace, in early October, he was very elated, but only for an hour or so. Leatty, the games coach (who also acted as assistant bursar) had persuaded him to replace Wilton, the running captain, as chief whipper-in for the fortnightly cross-country events and this was no sinecure for a man eight months out of hospital. Bamfylde took its runs seriously and in rough country like Exmoor, the post of whipper-in was equivalent to a rearguard command. Small boys, lagging a long way behind, and unfamiliar with the country, had been known to get lost. The job of whipper-in was to co-ordinate the efforts of the prefects who were not running colours and keep the laggards closed up over a five-mile course.
And then, on his very first run-in, Archer the Third had to go missing when call-over was held in the quad and the boys were about to disperse for high tea.
It was almost dark then and inclined to be foggy. With storm lanterns and a band of volunteers he headed back beyond Stonecross, where Archer the Third was found snivelling in a gully, nursing a twisted ankle and the fear of death from exposure. They carried him home sedan-chair fashion and when he sat down to his pea-soup David was in a worse state than Archer, and so stiff that he had to haul himself up to the staff bathroom and soak in soda. He had forgotten all about Bulgaria.
It was easy to see how ageing men like Cordwainer and Acton had become so barnacled, tending, as the seasons passed, to identify the universe with Bamfylde and Bamfylde’s concerns. Decisions like the date of speech-day, which pitch should be used for the house semi-finals and crises like the influenza epidemic that filled the sanatorium in ten days, or the near-mutiny of the O.T.C. over threadbare puttees that kept unrolling during manoeuvres, had a way of enlarging themselves into events of tremendous importance. Who was the locker-pilferer in Outram’s? Was he boy or domestic? Who was covering for Howarth, himself down with flu? What could be done to stem the overflow of the brook that flushed the latrines, inevitably known as the Bog?
Surprisingly, it was Algy Herries who restored to him his sense of proportion once a week when he announced, often with tears in his eyes, the death of yet another Old Bamfeldian in action, and spoke a few words about the boy’s years at the school. It was a sombre, almost masochistic duty he inflicted upon himself but David, who was beginning to get the full measure of the man, understood why he performed this weekly penance. He would see it as an obligation, to speak aloud, possibly for the last time, the name of a youngster, or perhaps someone who was not so young, whose shouts had once been heard on the pitches beyond the pointed windows of Big School, a person who had taken away with him some tiny part of the ethos of the school, planted in his mind and muscle during his time here. It was on these occasions that David would get a glimpse of that multitude of khaki-clad figures who had disappeared in the slime of Passchendaele, or fallen on the chalky wilderness of the Somme. For casualties, despite the Allied surging advances almost as far as the battlefields of August, 1914, were still trickling in, four in August, three in September, two more in October, one of them Bristow Major, who had been head prefect the term before David joined the staff and whose younger brother, Bummy Bristow, was still in the Upper Fifth.
But then, like a thunderclap, it ended. Word came over the telephone – from Second Lieutenant Cooper, of all people, now training as a demolition expert in London – that he had it on the best authority (an uncle in Fleet Street) that a cease-fire was to be declared at eleven a.m. the following day, and although no newspapers confirming this stupendous news could be expected until late afternoon, Algy took a chance and announced a school holiday, with leave to go into Challacombe, if transport could be arranged. Local boys disappeared but a majority stayed on, pooling their pocket-money to empty the tuckshop, and Ellie Herries was set to work with other masters’ wives to perform a prodigy of baking for a communal supper and sing-song in Big Hall instead of the usual Prep.
The immediate effect upon David was to increase his popularity as the one member of the staff who had fought at First Ypres, Loos and Neuve Chapelle, and who was regarded, somewhat to his embarrassment, as the ultimate authority on all things martial. He was cheered when he made his way up to the dais, luckily a little in advance of the other masters save Bouncer, who was there to say grace, and found himself blushing, for although he felt an immense sense of gratitude he could feel no personal achievement in survival when nearly a hundred Old Boys had died.
He kept his gaze on the floor until Bouncer had subsided, but there was worse to come. When the school orchestra had assembled and the singing began, they chose numbers that the troops had sung so repetitiously down all the roads of Picardy and Artois, ‘Tipperary’, ‘Who’s Your Lady Friend?’, ‘Long, Long Trail’ and the like. To someone who had heard these choruses sung in that setting it was unbearable and soon, but inconspicuously, he escaped, slipping out through the sculleries to the cinder path leading to the piggeries. And here, unashamedly, he wept, blundering through trailers of mist until he found the path to Herries’s thinking post, and pausing there, gulping down the dank, night air but still with earshot of the uproar in the Hall. He thought, desperately, ‘For Christ’s sake… what is there to sing about…? Why does it have to be a celebration when it ought to be a wake?’
He lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply, and he was still there when he saw a match flare down by the fives court. Feeling the need to communicate, he made his way down, certain that he would discover that Algy Herries had excused himself under similar pressures.
It was not Algy, however, but that dry old stick Howarth, the English master who had once advised him to ignore Carter’s appeal to join the O.T.C., still the basis of a feud between them. Howarth’s pince-nez flashed in the glow of his Gold Flake. He smoked, they said, forty to fifty a day and this was not his only vice. Rumour had it that he also accounted for three bottles of gin each week in his cosy rooms at Nicolson’s, where he was housemaster.
He said, greeting David, ‘Saw you slink off and decided to take the same route. Obliged to you for the hint.’ And then, in the friendliest tone he had so far employed, ‘I imagine you’ve even less stomach for it than a slacker like me, P.J. But I’m human, after all. Bristow Senior was one of the brightest boys I’ve ever taught. He wrote to me several times from France. Said he was going into publishing with his step-father and would have made a success of it, I daresay. But he had to die, at eighteen. For what? Can you tell me?’
‘Not yet. I might, in a decade or so.’
‘You’re another of the millennium boys, then?’
‘Not necessarily. But something hopeful must emerge from it. If it doesn’t it’ll be our fault – yours, mine and Algy’s. Even the fault of the old stagers, so long as they stay on the job!’
‘The devil of it is,’ Howarth said, ‘I never did go along with all this hang-the-Kaiser balderdash. I’ve never been able to hate the Germans. Have you discovered Heine yet?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘Try him, sometime. He’s got a trick of suiting all kinds of moods. Tonight’s for instance – ‘Enfant Perdu‘, Houghton’s translation –
But war and justice have far different laws,
And worthless acts are often done quite well;
The rascal’s shots were better than his cause,
And I was hit – and hit again, and fell
– appropriate, wouldn’t you say?’
‘It’s appropriate to the whole generation.’
Howarth said nothing and, more from a need to divert his own gloomy thoughts than his companion’s, David added, ‘Didn’t Heine write a lot about love?’
‘Yes, he did.
The old dre
am comes again to me;
With May-night stars above,
We two sat under the Linden tree
And swore eternal love.
Again and again we plighted troth…
Here, what the devil has got into me?’ and Howarth hurled his cigarette across the gravel, as though its trail of sparks would purge him of sentimentality.
‘Has Heine personal significance for you?’
‘He did have, a long time ago.’
‘Were you ever married?’
‘No.’ There was a pause. In the darkness David could sense Howarth doing battle with himself, trying to break through the home-baked crust of reserve that he wore like a breastplate wherever he went. Finally he said, ‘I was to have been, when I was about your age. But she made the right decision. She married a stockbroker. It wasn’t the financial aspect,’ – he said this almost defensively – ‘she just couldn’t see herself as a schoolmaster’s wife, and I don’t blame her when I look at some of the old birds roosting about here. Besides, this is a job for a bachelor if you mean to make a go of it. Miserable pay, no real prospects unless you strike lucky, and a fresh family every four to five years. What woman in her senses would take that on?’ He stood up, lighting another cigarette. ‘What the devil are we doing, sitting here in the fog and talking drivel? Come up to my rooms and let’s do our celebrating in the warm,’ and without waiting for David’s assent he stalked off, leading the way through the quadrangle arch and up the steep flight of slate steps to his quarters.
That was the beginning of his tacit alliance with Howarth and he was to be grateful for it, for Howarth, by far the prickliest pear of the common room, was a counterpoise to Carter and one or two of the older men who had already begun to identify him as a radical. He had a conviction that this was not so much on account of his discussions with senior boys on the war, or his championship of a poet like Siegfried Sassoon, who had bravely challenged the establishment the previous year, but because they saw him as someone better qualified than they were to communicate with a generation that had moved into adolescence in the last four years. Howarth, for his part, recognised and accepted this, as indeed did Herries himself. Their patronage probably encouraged men like Carter to think of him as an interloper currying special privileges on the strength of his war record.
R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield Page 6