R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  He said, wonderingly. ‘You… you don’t mind? You’re not scared?’ ‘Not in the least. No, honestly I’m not, I’m… well… rather excited if anything. But Willoughby says I can’t have the baby – babies – here, as planned, with Nurse Arscott standing by. I’ll have to go into a Challacombe nursing home a few days in advance. Can we afford it? It’ll cost about eight guineas a week, they say.’

  ‘Good Lord, of course we can afford it if it’s necessary. But are you sure it doesn’t entail complications? I mean, why did he bring that chap here in the first place?’

  ‘Just to make sure,’ Beth said, but nothing would do but that he should go hurrying over to the village the minute prep was over, to pursue his own line of enquiry. Willoughby satisfied him, or at least moderated his anxiety, assuring him that Beth was a good, healthy girl and unlikely to run into trouble. ‘At the least hint of it I’d plump for a Caesarian,’ he said, ‘but I don’t advise it. Go on home, and let her calm you down, old man.’

  And David went, walking ruefully across the little strip of moor that gave access to the junior pitches and then, through a gap in the hedge, down the road to the cottage. As he passed the angle of the buildings housing the prefects’ studies, however, his ear caught the lilting whine of Carrington’s portable gramophone, playing one of his favourite jazz numbers. Part of the refrain, sung in a high nasal tone, came to him in the fading light,

  Yes, I’m goin’,

  Yes, I’m goin’,

  And soon I’ll be hallo-ing

  To that coal-black Mammy o’ mine…

  It soothed his nerves somehow, so that he grinned, remembering that Carrington was jazz mad, and played the saxophone at school dances, familiarising everybody with the latest wave of song-hits from the U.S.A. He thought, ‘Two of them, eh? Well, if they’re boys, and she swears they are, I’ll have two Carringtons here about seventeen years from now. I wonder what they’ll be playing then?’

  He looked back over his shoulder as he vaulted the lane gate at the corner of the cricket field, seeing a violet glow moving like a slowly drawn curtain across the last rays of the sun. In the uncertain light the huddle of buildings no longer seemed incongruous up there on the lower edge of the plateau and he thought, glancing back at them, ‘Well, that’s home, all right, and I’m damned if I let a twirp like Carter turn me out of it,’ and he went down the incline to Stonecross thinking of Blunt and his war memorial as very small beer indeed.

  Three

  * * *

  1

  HE WAS DOWN AT THE LONG-JUMP PIT WHEN LITTLE Stratton-Forbes brought him the news. Stratton-Forbes of all people. The smallest boy in the school, with round, cherubic face and snub nose supporting professorial, steel-framed spectacles, for Stratton-Forbes had a squint they were trying to correct – ‘Before it grows on me,’ as he had remarked, quite innocently, to would-be-tormentors, completely disarming them.

  Sports Day was upon them again by then and some of the junior events were scheduled to be run off in advance. Irvine, who had appropriated to himself the role of sports master, asked David’s help in measuring the cinder track leading to the pit, but Irvine was not the only one at work on the jump. Carrington, the Sixth Form jazz enthusiast was there, and with him two or three other seniors engaged in spreading the cinders, when a breathless Stratton-Forbes appeared and shrieked, at the top of his voice, ‘Please-sir-message-from-the-Head-sir! Head-said-to-say-two-girls-sir-both-doing-well-sir!’

  The entire group, David excepted, exploded with laughter and Stratton-Forbes blinked, wondering what was so funny, so that the incident passed straightaway into Bamfylde legend and Barnaby, that master-coiner of nicknames, bestowed upon Stratton-Forbes the title of ‘Annunciator’, soon shortened to ‘Nun’. Years were to pass before Stratton-Forbes, a very serious-minded boy, fully understood how he came by his soubriquet.

  But David did not hear about this until much later. The annunciation projected him through the beech hedge behind the jump-pit, up the east drive and across the threshold of the head’s house in twelve seconds flat. Carrington, seeing him go, afterwards declared that Pow-Wow had beaten the world’s sprint record, without even trying.

  Algy Herries was standing beside the telephone in the hall, the receiver in his hand, a beaming smile on his face, so that David had no need to seek corroboration before grabbing the phone and bellowing, ‘Powlett-Jones here! That you, Doc? Is she all right?’ and Willoughby assured him that she was as right as rain, except that the lady seemed a little put out they were girls, but had come to terms with her poor showing as a sex-determinator as soon as she was shown the twins. ‘She’s tired, naturally,’ he went on, ‘but who wouldn’t be? The first little monster turns the scale to six-three, her sister at just under the six mark. Faultless performance. Congratulations, old man. Will you put me back to the head?’

  ‘Hold on a minute… when can I see her… them…? Some time tomorrow, first thing? I can get Irvine to cover my periods. To hell with his hurdle course!’ and at that both Herries and Willoughby laughed, and the doctor said, ‘Why not this evening? Say around seven. She’s asleep now but they’ll wake her for supper,’ and David turned to Herries, who nodded, and said, thankfully, ‘Seven sharp then. Thanks, Doc. I’ll get there somehow.’

  ‘All in a day’s drudgery,’ Willoughby said and had his word with the head, leaving David standing to one side and feeling extraordinarily foolish. He said, when Herries hooked up the phone, ‘Er… thank you for sending Stratton-Forbes, sir…’

  ‘He got it right, then?’

  ‘Word perfect. A little too perfect. He blurted it out in front of everyone. Shall we go in and tell Mrs Herries?’

  But there was no need. Ellie, concealed in the archway at the entrance to the study passage, had been present all the time and now came forward.

  ‘Congratulations, dear boy. It’s splendid, isn’t it, Algy? The first Bamfylde twins I can remember.’

  ‘The first ever,’ Herries said, ‘but it would have been better if Powlett-Jones had had a house, and the brats had been born on the premises. Wonderful headline there. “Girl twins born in boys’ school”,’ and he chuckled, as he usually did at his own jokes.

  ‘Don’t tease the poor boy,’ Ellie said, ‘try and be serious for a moment, do! What will you christen them? Was it fixed in advance?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t Mrs Herries, for Beth would have it they were boys. They were going to be David and Jonathan, but now… well… have you any ideas?’

  ‘I have,’ Herries said, unexpectedly. ‘Have you seen yesterday’s papers? They’re canonising Joan of Arc today. There was a lot about it in yesterday’s Times. Your subject’s history. Won’t Joan do for one of them? I’ve always liked the name myself.’

  ‘I’ll certainly put it up to Beth. Joan. Yes, I rather like “Joan” myself.’

  ‘And how about the other?’ asked Ellie. ‘Joan of Arc was unique, wasn’t she? You could choose another saint of course… Ursula, Veronica, Mary… they’re all nice names,’ but Herries cut in, impatiently, saying, ‘Pish, my dear! You’re missing the point. People will never see Joan of Arc as a saint, no matter how much Rome puts out about the poor girl. She’ll always be associated with simple heroics. What we need now is another heroine. An English one, for preference. Any ideas, P.J.?’

  It seemed absurd to be standing here in the tiled hall, discussing his children’s given names with Herries and his wife. Absurd but very cosy and reassuring, almost as if the rubicund, white-maned old chap had really assumed the personality of that earnest bowlegged miner, who had gone into the lower workings of the Pontnewydd pit one summer morning and never been seen again. And thinking this David felt an impulse to humour Herries at all costs and said, ‘How about “Grace”? Grace Darling, of course! Or “Emily”, after the suffragette, Emily Davison, who comes from the same part of the world?’

  ‘I’ll plump for Grace, if you don’t mind,’ Herries said, ‘We’ve had about all we can stand from the suffra
gettes.’

  ‘ “Grace” will do very nicely,’ said Ellie, ‘but for heaven’s sake don’t let him bully you into using those names if your wife doesn’t care for them. He’s always been very silly about names, and that’s nonsense, of course. He’s never liked my sister Maud, simply because he had a nagging aunt of the same name. But here, what am I thinking of? We should be drinking your health, shouldn’t we? Wetting the baby’s head, isn’t that what it’s called?’ and she led them into the drawing-room where Algy unearthed a fine pale sherry that he kept for himself and a few chosen friends. ‘I never waste this on parents,’ he said. ‘Sweet does for them. For the Governors, too, except one or two Old Boys, sharp enough to hang about until the others have gone.’

  They drank to him and then to Beth and the twins, and by four o’clock that afternoon, having skipped his last period, he was halfway to Challacombe by the lower road, the longer but faster route on account of its surface and gradients.

  It was years since he had sat a motorcycle. The last, he recalled was a Brough Superior he rode in the Salient while doing a spell of despatch-carrying. This one chugged along at an uncertain twenty-five miles per hour, giving him time to bask in his own serenity, that merged with the flowering May countryside and made him want to express his glee in song. And soon he did, keeping time with the stuttering beats of the Douglas engine, crooning snatches of ‘Coal Black Mammy’, Carrington’s favourite dance-tune,

  Not a cent, not a cent,

  And my clothes are only lent…

  But I know she’ll think I’m just fine…

  His high spirits expressed itself in other ways, in cheery waves at farmhands he passed, and in squeezing the bulb horn at every bend in the road, and in this way, with two hours to spare, he chut-chutted into Challacombe and stopped outside Gorman’s the florists, to buy an enormous bunch of flowers, remembering as he did that huge bouquet he had bought her the day after her nineteenth birthday.

  She looked prettier and more radiant than he ever recalled, with colour in her cheeks and a triumphant sparkle in her brown eyes. Clearly she was tremendously pleased with herself and said, when he kissed her with the restraint he had shown that first time outside her sister’s dairy, ‘Oh, come on, Davy! Don’t travel backwards! You can do better than that, can’t you?’ and she kissed him, with no nonsense about it, and said she was quite reconciled to the girls because they were unbelievably pretty – ‘Far prettier than I ever was, and prettier than Esther was as a baby and she was the flower of the flock, so Father says. You can’t actually see them but you can nip into the corridor and peep through that glass-panelled door. The staff nurse there is a frightful dragon. You’d think she’d given birth, and I’d tidied up afterwards!’ and as much to humour her as satisfy his own curiosity he slipped out and glanced through the glass panel of a door marked ‘Maternity’, and was rather taken aback by what he saw, a row of half a dozen cots, each, presumably, containing a baby, although he couldn’t be sure because some of the canopies were raised.

  He was still craning his neck there, trying to identify his own children, when a pleasant voice at his elbow said, ‘Mr Powlett-Jones, I presume?’ and he turned, blushing, to confront a slim, blonde woman wearing a red-lined cloak of matron.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’m Mrs Powlett-Jones’s husband. I was trying… er… er which two are mine, exactly?’ and the matron smiled and edged him over the threshold, saying, ‘Just a peep. They’re sleeping and, anyway, you mustn’t stay long. We don’t usually allow visitors the same day but Dr Willoughby said you were rather special. Are you, Mr Powlett-Jones?’

  ‘Every father of twin girls is special,’ he said, quickly getting the measure of her, in the manner boys like Boyer and Dobson had taught him. ‘These two?’ and when she nodded, ‘Well, Beth’s right! They are pretty, the pair of them, but I suppose all the fathers say that, don’t they?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘mostly they stammer and goggle, and don’t say anything intelligible. I suppose you don’t because you’re accustomed to infants.’

  ‘Not this age, and certainly not this sex,’ he said, taking a sudden liking to her. Then a door at the far end of the little ward banged open and a buxom nurse cruised in like a Whippet Tank, and sensing her extreme indignation both he and the matron made a strategic withdrawal to the passage where she went about her business. He returned to Beth’s room, announcing that he had not only seen Joan and Grace but compromised the matron in the eyes of her underling.

  ‘You’re absolutely right,’ he went on, ‘they’re a couple of…’ but she cried, ‘You named them! You called them by name! And I’ve been lying here cudgelling my brains ever since I was told David and Jonathan were out. Joan and Grace! Why, that suits them exactly, Davy! How clever of you.’

  ‘I can’t take credit for it. Algy and Ellie agreed the names between themselves, and presented me with a fait accompli. Seriously, though, I’d like to call them that, if only to please the old couple. Algy’s been splendid all the time you’ve been gone, and I’ve been pigging it up in the President’s room. Since they heard it was twins they’ve begun to think of them as grandchildren.’

  ‘Joan and Grace it is then…’ but then she yawned, so that he said, ‘I’d better take myself off. I can look in tomorrow, it’s a special half-day for the Devonshire Dumplings match. I’ll borrow Barnaby’s Douglas again. He’s umpiring, I think.’

  ‘Please,’ she said, but sleepily, so he kissed her and stole away, walking down the hill into the evening sunshine and feeling slightly less excited than when he climbed it but more certain, somehow, of the unfolding pattern of his life and hers.

  2

  There was no doubt about it. The twins and their presence in the crowded little cottage at Stonecross increased his confidence in himself in a way that everyone about him noticed, not only Herries and Howarth, but the more discerning of his boys, especially those that he had begun to think of as friends. Boyer put it into words when David’s name cropped up during one of those desultory conversational exchanges the old hands indulged in concerning members of the staff who had joined the family after themselves, thus giving them licence to patronise.

  ‘Y’know, history periods were a crashing bore before Pow-Wow showed up but now they’re a high spot. You never quite know what line he’s going to take, in or out of the syllabus. Carrington told me he introduced another book of war poems to the Sixth yesterday. By a chap called Wilfred Owen. Bolshie, of course, but that’s Pow-Wow, isn’t it?’

  But no one could accuse him of Bolshievising history in the junior forms although, judged by his own standards, he was prone to revert to old-fashioned methods. The truth was he would use any means to brighten a period, to leaven it with anecdotes, speculations and sometimes doggerel rhymes that he recalled from his elementary school days.

  There was a great favourite, designed to jog the memory concerning the string of battles in the Wars of the Roses, dull enough in themselves, maybe, but not the way Pow-Wow presented them, for he used them as a means of teaching the Second and Third Forms the art of war in the fifteenth century, and would even turn aside to sketch bills, glaives, body armour and the early ancestors of the trench mortar on the blackboard. As regards the doggerel, he felt it contributed a little to Irvine’s geography lessons, whisking the boys all over England in the wake of the Yorkist and Lancastrian armies. ‘All-Boys-Naughty-Won’t-Memorise-All-Those-Horrid-Hateful-Battles-To-Bosworth’ the Second Form would chant, thus, by identifying the capitals with place names, recalling battles at St. Albans, Bloreheath, Northampton, Wakefìeld, Mortimer’s Cross, St. Albans again, Towton, Hedgley, Hexham, Barnet, Tewkesbury and Bosworth.

  It was a great success, as was the old saw to remind them (God alone knew why they should be reminded) of the fate of Henry VIII’s wives, viz:

  Divorced, beheaded, she died;

  Divorced, beheaded, survived.

  He sometimes invented new ones to raise a laugh, as when he fixed the sequence of t
he Stuart kings in their minds with –

  James was nearly blown sky-high,

  Charles, his son, knelt down to die.

  Charles-the-next hid in the oak,

  James-the-next was a bigoted bloke.

  It was all very juvenile, he supposed, but it added to his popularity, for the boys loved to feed upon staff eccentricities and this was one of his. The broad effect of his free-ranging and highly improvised methods had more important results, however, introducing a fruity generality into his periods, and enabling a class to break free of the cast of history text-books and cruise down what he thought of as the mainstream of time.

  He had always seen history as the Clapham Junction of education. It opened doors on so many other subjects, not only geography, but English prose and poetry, economics, law, religious knowledge and any number of fringe subjects. A brief study of Edward I’s administrative reforms, for instance, whetted the appetite of some – just a few, here and there – interested in the British jury system. An hour or two spent with Lord Shaftesbury’s industrial crusades shed some light on the Trades Union movement, and the strikes headlined in the newspapers. In the Fifth and Sixth Forms it was sometimes possible, in his view, to humanise history to a point where he had seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds questioning accepted attitudes concerning the structure of democracy, and the lessons that were to be learned (but rarely were) from the long stalemate on the Western Front.

  Here and there, of course, he was challenged. Gilbert, a Tory M.P.’s son, boldly disputed his over-facile analysis of the Russian Revolution, but he dealt with him gently, content to point out that the Czarist regime had been overthrown by the abysmal folly of the ruling class, stoking the fire century by century without once opening a valve to siphon off the steam.