R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  ‘But I don’t?’

  ‘No, and that’s curious too, for you’re only a year older than Simmonds, our head boy. Can you explain that?’

  ‘The job, maybe. A nurse, even a pro’, is always in charge. She’s mobile and her patients aren’t. It makes us seem bossy.’

  She would be a wonderful person to have around in the common room at Bamfylde, he thought, poised to puncture all those balloons of complacency and pomposity. He said, thankfully, ‘No man in his senses would mind being bossed by you, Elizabeth,’ and kissed the top of her head, but she was not to be dismissed in this way and said, ‘Save that, Davy, and go on with what you were saying. If you did write what would you write? Would it be plays?’

  ‘Good Lord, no. Plays require a very special technique, and most playwrights serve an apprenticeship as actors. I’d write historical biography, but in a different way from academics. Most studies of the past are written by professional scholars, and dry as dust unless you’ve done your homework on the background. The ordinary reader has got to see historical characters as flesh and blood.’

  ‘But how would you discover human touches after all this time?’

  ‘I suppose by putting two and two together. Fashions and attitudes change every generation but people don’t.’

  She seemed to ponder this. Finally she said, ‘I think you’d do it splendidly, David. Who would you like to write about?’

  For possibly the first time in his life he gave his potential subject matter serious consideration. ‘Well, now that you raise the question, the royal tigress for one.’

  ‘Who on earth was she? Boadicea?’

  ‘Someone much nearer our own time. Margaret of Anjou, the French wife of Henry VI.’

  ‘Never heard of her. Tell me about her.’

  He gave her a potted history of Margaret of Anjou, as the charabanc bounced along the road from Caernarvon to Menai Bridge, then round the tortuous coast road to Beaumaris. She listened attentively and it reminded him that he was becoming as didactic as old Judy Cordwainer and he broke off, saying, ‘Look here, that’s enough of that. I’m beginning to talk like a schoolmaster off duty and that’s a sobering thought.’

  ‘Why? After all, you are one.’

  ‘I don’t care to be recognised as one wherever I go. You’d see what I mean if you met some of the codgers in our common room,’ and that, he thought dolefully, was unlikely.

  But was it? For a moment his imagination conjured with the wholly delightful prospect of absorbing her into the Bamfylde scene, so that he saw her, fleetingly, as someone always on hand to encourage and sustain him. But then common sense caught up with him as he thought, ‘What the hell have I got to offer a girl like her? Two hundred a year, Mam to help out, and a life removed from everyone but boys and old trouts, who would tut-tut at the powder she dabs on her nose!’ and he recalled the opinion expressed by Howarth under the fives court on Armistice Night, concerning the unwisdom of trying to combine marriage with a job requiring so much dedication and monastic seclusion.

  The fancy remained, however, and unconsciously she kept it glowing, particularly when they said good night after tea and bread and cheese at her brother-in-law’s. She came out with him into the backway that ran behind the shop and it seemed to him that she was just as reluctant as he to bring another gloriously fulfilled day to a close. When he kissed her, as gently as he had the previous night, she said, with her delightful lack of inhibition, ‘Here, let me show you! I won’t break, Davy!’ and threw her arms round his neck, kissing him in a way he had never been kissed and leaving him breathless with gratification but also a trifle dismayed at such irrefutable evidence of a far wider experience than he possessed. He said, still holding her close, ‘Have you had lots of boyfriends? You must have, a girl as pretty as you.’

  ‘I’ve had my share,’ she admitted gaily, ‘but never one the least like you, Davy.’

  ‘How am I supposed to regard that?’

  ‘As a compliment, of course. No, I mean that! Most men don’t need much encouragement, I can tell you.’

  ‘But I do?’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t have to apologise for it. All the boys I’ve known would have taken full advantage of the way I threw myself at you and I can’t say as I’d blame them. By now I would have been fighting them off.’

  ‘I’d back you to take care of yourself, Elizabeth. You seem to me to be pretty well equipped to stand on your own feet in all kinds of ways.’

  ‘Not that way always.’ She was silent a moment. Then she went on, ‘Two or three of the boys who took me out the first year I was nursing tried it on, and made me feel a bit of a prude for holding out. There was always the chance of the war going on indefinitely, and them being sucked back into it. I don’t think it was squeamishness on my part. It was a thought, in the back of my mind, of bringing a poor little beggar into the world whom nobody wanted, who would probably end up in an orphanage. So there you are, Davy. I’m still a virgin. Like you.’

  Her perception diminished him a little and she was quick to sense as much. ‘What’s wrong with that? You’re not the kind of person who would go looking for a prostitute. You’re too fastidious for one thing. I daresay that’s what kept you clear of the brothels out there.’

  ‘Good God! You know about that kind of thing?’

  ‘David,’ she said, chuckling, ‘use your head, lad. I’ve been nursing for two years!’

  ‘But not servicemen.’

  ‘What do you think nurses talk about in their free time? Crocheting?’

  He laughed. ‘You’re a very surprising person, Elizabeth. What old Algy Herries, my headmaster, would call “A bit of a card”. Same time tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, please!’

  He kissed her again, but as the week sped by he began to be aware of a sense of desperation that was not moderated by her promise to write once a week, ‘no matter how rushed we are’. Her train to Chester, where she was catching her connection to Swansea, left at midday on Sunday, and his spirits were at low ebb as he accompanied her to the station. It was no good telling himself he was exaggerating the terrible need he had for her gaiety and warmth, that something positive might develop from their correspondence, that they had made tentative arrangements to meet in London where her parents lived when she took her paid holiday next September. September was a long way off, and all kinds of things could happen before then. She might get bored writing. She might meet someone far more eligible in that hospital, probably crammed with young men with gratuities to spend, and four years’ lost youth to make up.

  They hung about waiting for the whistle to blow and when it did the blast hit him in the belly like the signal for an attack. The train began to move and he watched it slide away with a terrible finality, carrying with it all his hopes and certainties. It had moved about ten yards when he responded to an irresistible urge to stop it and sprinted along the platform until he was level with her compartment where she stood framed in the window. ‘Stand away!’ he shouted, clutching the brass handle, ‘Coming with you!’ and at that the guard, lower down the platform, roared his disapproval. A second later the heavy door was swinging free and he was inside the carriage on his hands and knees, and she had reached over him and slammed it and they were alone, Elizabeth looking at him with a stunned expression as he scrambled up, dusting himself.

  ‘What on earth – Davy – you’ve no luggage…’ and then she threw back her head and laughed and he caught her in his arms, so that they lost their balance and collapsed as the train gathered speed.

  ‘To hell with luggage,’ he said, ‘I’ll catch a train back from Chester, pick up my stuff and go on home to Bamfylde. It won’t be any fun here without you. Besides, there’s something I’ve got to know, and it can’t wait on letters. Will you marry me, Beth? I’m very much in love with you, and if you wouldn’t mind being the only wife under forty at a school miles from anywhere…’

  He got no further. She caught his arm, pressing his hand fervently agains
t her breast, crying, ‘Why, of course I’ll marry you! Just as soon as you like. And as for living on the moors in Devon, with all those boys and funny characters you’ve told me about, I can’t think of anything nicer! Ill tell you something else too. I’m jolly glad you didn’t propose to me solemnly, by letter. This is much more romantic, the first really romantic thing that’s ever happened to me. There!’ and she kissed him, first on the ear, then on both cheeks and finally on the mouth, so enthusiastically that a smudge of dust, gathered in his headlong fall into the compartment, transferred itself from his forehead to hers.

  3

  They had planned to be married in August, a week or so after the school broke up, and he had had a chance to make the half-ruinous cottage in Stonecross Bottom habitable after sub-leasing it from Farmer Brewer, the taciturn tenant, for fifty pounds a year. ‘A typical peasant-robbery,’ old Howarth called it, especially as neither landlord nor chief tenant was prepared to contribute a penny-piece towards rethatching, reflooring and generally renovating the place. It was not the outlay of capital that bothered him, however, but the shortage of skilled labour during that first, brilliant summer of the peace, when the sun shone from early morning until late evening, as though trying to make amends for the unremitting drizzle of successive Flanders summers.

  Nobody recalled a summer as hot and dry as this, not even the long period of unbroken sunshine that preceded the outbreak of the war in 1914. The streams went dry and the grass withered. Cow-parsley, heavy with white dust, drooped in the hedges, and a special meeting of the Governors had to be called to do something about the drainage system. Everyone turned as brown as a longshoreman and the cricket pitches were bumpy and sun-slippery. ‘A damned menace to batsmen,’ Carter, himself an enthusiastic cricketer, declared after Simmonds, the head boy, had returned to the pavilion with a bump over his eye that would not have disgraced a prize-fighter. But for all the drought, and the euphoria the long sunny days produced in class, Bamfylde revelled in the heat, and Sports Day, the first dry Sports Day since 1914, according to Herries, was a tremendous success. So many of the parents seemed to have acquired expensive-looking motors that the sports field looked like Lords, as scores of fashionably dressed mothers and pretty sisters nibbled their ices, and God alone knew how many war profiteers sat around smoking cigars and practising refined vowel sounds. All this from the sardonic Howarth, who stood throughout the afternoon at the finishing line, with stop-watch in his hand, and inevitable Gold Flake in his mouth. There were plenty of Old Boys, too, some of them, including Cooper and Fosdyke, in khaki, and a few others on crutches.

  ‘There’s a whiff of national recovery about,’ Algy Herries remarked, watching Cooper win the Old Boys’ 880-yards at a canter. ‘Something tells me we’re getting back on course and, if we are, here in the wilderness, then everyone else must be, my friend. We’ve got a healthy waiting-list already, and when the post-war crop of babies grow up – a majority of them boys, please God – we’ll have to tackle the Governors about the new wing behind Outram’s. I doubt if I’ll be here to see it full, P.J., but you will, since you’ve burned your boats by taking a wife! She’s a fetching gel, I hope. We could do with a little uplift in that direction, although Irvine seems to be setting a spanking pace.’

  Irvine was the first of the reinforcements Herries had promised him, a genial, bullheaded, heavy-shouldered young man, almost exactly his own age, who arrived via a shortened ex-subaltern’s course to teach geography to all but the Second and Third Forms, where Judy Cordwainer still campaigned for neatness in preference to speed and accuracy.

  Davy soon made a friend of Irvine, despite the fact that he was a breezy extrovert, with limited imagination. Alone among the staff Irvine had an active service record, a year and a half spent in Palestine, where he received a foot injury severe enough to get him shipped home and discharged a year before the Armistice. The wound had healed satisfactorily but one of his great toes had been amputated, leaving him with a curious, bobbing walk, as though, at any moment, he would over-balance and turn a neat somersault. He had a good Army and Varsity sports record, despite his slight disability, and promised to prove very useful when the rugby season began. In the meantime, before even settling in, he produced a blonde wife, a pretty, talkative girl with a pink and white complexion, violet eyes and a quick smile, who was no sooner introduced to the Saturday night dancing class than the senior boys were queueing for foxtrots and one-steps.

  Phyllis Irvine’s tremendous popularity among the boys was a source of uproarious amusement to Irvine, a cheerful fellow who would laugh his head off recounting the circumstances under which he lost his toe. ‘Damnedest thing you ever saw,’ he said, telling the story to David over a gin and lime, in the tiny sitting-room at Havelock’s. ‘We were lobbing five-nines from lorry to battery in a chain, and I happened to sneeze just as I laid hold of one of ‘em. I dropped it, and didn’t feel a thing until I came to after the anaesthetic, and saw my foot slung up to a gantry, swathed in bloody great bandages. Then I knew about it all right, and reckoned myself damned lucky it was one of ours and not one of theirs. Slice of plum cake really, since I missed the draft when we were pulled out and went in at St. Quentin, just in time for the Big Push. My battery was wiped out on March 21st. Jerry went through it like a dose of salts. Chum of mine defused my five-nine and sent me the case before he went west, poor devil. Phyl and I intend to use if for an umbrella stand.’

  That was Irvine, whom the war seemed to have touched very lightly, but he was honest enough to draw a sharp distinction between his eighteen months in the Near East, and David’s three years on the Western Front. ‘Damned if I know how any of you chaps stuck it out without going loco, old man. Bloody shambles, they tell me. Don’t wonder you holed up here the moment you got the chance, but I had second thoughts myself when I climbed aboard the old buggy down at the station. Reminds me a bit of Sinai – with vegetation, of course. I’m a bit worried about Phyl sticking it out in winter. Everyone except you and Carter are practically superannuated, aren’t they?’

  ‘You’ll get used to it after a term or two,’ David said, ‘and if I was you I wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to move on. You might get a better social life but you won’t find a more easygoing head and even some of the old stagers grow on you after a bit.’

  ‘Well, maybe you’re right, but Phyl says she’ll be relieved when your missus arrives. She says it’s a bit like going back to school herself, with old Mother Kruger searching her desk for lipstick and letters from boys. The kids themselves seem a decent lot, taken all round. Is that your experience?’

  David admitted that it was, adding that every time he moved among the seniors he had to remind himself that they were not so much sausage meat, queueing for Haig’s mincing-machine.

  By now, however, he was adjusting to all grades, enjoying teaching in a way he would not have thought possible a year ago. He had his own methods with the syllabus and had already introduced a range of new text-books.

  His formula for teaching history seemed to produce good results, simple stuff up to Middle School, with the emphasis on personalities rather than text-book landmarks, and from then on any amount of free discussion on topics likely to crop up in the question papers of the junior and senior Cambridge exams. In the Second and Third Forms he instituted a question-and-answer system of oral tests, taught him by Howarth, who did not trust written work. ‘Like to find out on the spot how much has sunk in before I waste too much breath,’ he said. ‘When I’m sure I concentrate on the odd plant or two, where a modest crop can be expected. Damned waste of time marking all those bloody little test-papers, half of them cribbed. Nobody can hide ignorance at an oral round. Line the little beggars up, number ‘em off, and throw spot questions at them. Give ‘em three seconds before they pass and the first boy who comes up with the answer moves up to where it all started. Let ‘em try and play fast and loose with that box of tricks.’

  It worked, as David soon discovered, but so did a
n innovation of his own that he employed not only in the Second and Third forms but also in Middle School, and just occasionally in the Fifth. This was to capture the attention of the class by a whiff of scandal, or a bizarre episode that the academics would have dismissed as trivial or apocryphal.

  His first real success was with the story of Owen Tudor’s siege of the widow of Henry V, giving him licence to draw a lively picture not only of court life as it was lived in the mid-fifteenth century, but also of Newgate, and the administration of justice. He scored again in the blood-and-thunder-loving Third Form with a blow-by-blow description of Colonel Blood’s attempt to steal the Crown jewels, an incident that led him to a general assessment of Charles II’s character and policies. He sometimes started a class on a new period by plunging straight into an account of a particularly colourful incident, usually one with cliff-hanger aspects, like the flight of the Young Pretender after Culloden. All the time, with whatever period he was dealing, and whatever the age and standard of his audience, he strove to make history come alive, and would compare statesmen of the Tudor and Stuart periods with men like Lloyd George, whose antics featured in the daily headlines.

  Sometimes, if he was lucky, or dealing with one of his favourite eras or characters, the lesson would fly, and both he and his class would be surprised by the five-minute bell, warning them that it was time to put away books and forage in their desks for the next period, or disperse to the dining-room.

  For the rest, he was pretty well extended supervising sports, performing roster duties in the dining hall and dormitories, and helping out with activities connected with the Old Boys’ Association, of which Cordwainer had been secretary for twenty-five years.

  It was in this area that he began to perceive hidden qualities in the meticulous, unsmiling Judy, among them a fanatical loyalty to the school, that showed itself in endless letter-writing and formidable documentation. Judy had a phenomenal memory. He could tell you the age, occupation and address of every paid-up member – and there were many hundreds of them – but Judy’s approach to Old Boys was never moderated by the passage of time. He still addressed distinguished members of the Governing Board (or such of them who had been boys at Bamfylde) as though they were thirteen-year-olds, presenting a botched exercise, whereas the Old Boys, for their part, treated him with tolerant amusement, and never resented his honking dismissal of what he sometimes denounced as a slovenly approach to problems of patronage and administration. Even when suggestions were put forward by Sir John Riscoe, who had been responsible for all troop movements in the northern command during the war, or Brigadier Cooper, who had been on the staff of General Plumer throughout the battle for Passchendaele Ridge, he would still honk them down if they trespassed on his preserves, and David would not have been surprised to learn he had hurled his keys at them into the bargain.