R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  ‘But surely that’s no justification for slaughtering the entire royal family, is it, sir?’ Gilbert had argued, and he said, mildly, that it was not, but one rarely looked for justification in human affairs, only the merciless logic of cause and effect. ‘If the Czar, or rather that neurotic wife of his, had bent a little in 1916, she wouldn’t have been murdered in 1918. Over here, thank God, our royal family had more sense, or perhaps more regard for their own skins. Victoria was the most revered monarch in the world when she died in 1901, but as to real political power, she exercised virtually none compared with her uncle, in 1837. That’s what I mean by bending, and as a nation we’re very good at it, Gilbert. You ask your father if you don’t believe me.’

  Fortunately for David Gilbert père was a left-wing Tory, with a heavy build-up of unemployment in his own industrial constituency. ‘Like to meet that chap,’ he told his son during the holidays. ‘He sounds original for a schoolmaster,’ and Gilbert Junior obliged, introducing them at the subsequent Speech Day, when they had an amicable discussion on the wisdom of nationalising the coal mines.

  This was the way of it, and all that summer and autumn, while Beth was fully occupied coping with the twins in a four-roomed cottage lacking piped water, electricity or even an indoor privy, he was growing into the ethos of the school, so that sometimes it seemed to him he had been here ten years instead of just over three.

  It was often difficult, under the circumstances, to continue studying for his degree, but he achieved slow progress and made tentative arrangements to sit for his B.A. at Exeter University College of the South-West during the forthcoming Easter break. He hated the idea of leaving Beth to cope with two twelve-month-old babies but there was no help for it. Exeter couldn’t give him a degree but it was the nearest centre available for sitting the exam. Long before he went, however, something occurred that entrenched him even more deeply at Bamfylde, enabling him to throw down roots that would take a great deal to dislodge.

  They were passing through one of their tiresome periods, assailed by snow, then by ceaseless downpours, and finally towards the fag end of the Christmas term, by another sharp spell of frost that caused havoc with Bamfylde’s antediluvian water supply. On the last day of February Bat Ferguson approached him with news that his aged French mother-in-law had died in Beauvais, and he was obliged to cross the Channel, attend the funeral and clear up her affairs. He would be away a week, he said, and would be greatly indebted to David if he would live in as resident housemaster of Havelock’s during his absence.

  It was a confounded nuisance but, having lived there prior to his marriage, he was more familiar with the routines of Havelock’s than any of the younger men, and Ferguson invited him to bring Beth and the twins up from the cottage and occupy his quarters for the week. David accepted the chore but Beth declined the invitation to move into the school.

  ‘It’ll be an awful upheaval, with all the children’s things,’ she said, ‘and not worth it for a few days. You sleep up there and come home for lunch every day. I’ll be perfectly all right down here, and I can always send a message by Mrs Ricketts’s boy if I need to. You ought to help out, oughtn’t you? You always told me the Fergusons were kind to you in their old-fashioned way when you lived with them.’

  She packed him off with a bag and he took up quarters in his old room, with its view over the rolling moor. Nothing much was to be seen there now, apart from wan glimpses of frozen stubble and a desolate hillside whenever the wind tore rents in the prevailing mists. Shouts, scuffles and the impact of boots on the setts of the quadrangle below were muffled, and even the clamorous notes of Nipper Shawe’s bell-ringing seemed to come from far out on the moor.

  He called the roll, went the rounds, exchanged a joke with Boyer and Dobson who were Havelock boys, and supervised ‘Silence’, the five minutes dedicated to private prayer by the bedsides. It was a duty he performed with secret amusement, being absolutely certain that young Skidmore, the Methodist parson’s son, was the only boy there who used the interval to commune with the Almighty. After that he followed Ferguson’s Airedale, Towser, into the housemaster’s study, where he built up the fire and spent a couple of hours brushing up on Central European history as far as Charlemagne’s death.

  It was a period that had always confused him and his mind kept wandering from the page, isolating irrelevant incidents from his own past rather than that of Charlemagne’s. He saw himself fishing with his father in the then untainted stream a mile or so above Pontnewydd. He mused for a moment on the chubby face and clear blue eyes of a girl called Olwen Thomas, who had attracted him when he was at the Grammar School. Errant thoughts of Olwen’s smile led him, naturally enough, to a sleepy awareness of Beth and the twins, sleeping as soundly, no doubt, as the seventy-odd boys in the two dormitories overhead. When he heard the duty prefect’s step pass on the stairs he roused himself and, telling himself he was entitled to a whisky for leading a bachelor’s life for a week, poured a stiff tot from Ferguson’s decanter, afterwards re addressing himself to Charlemagne.

  It was no use. Apart from Beth’s spell in hospital, this was the first night they had spent apart since their marriage, more than two years ago, and already his body hungered for her, so urgently that he could laugh at himself as he thought, ‘My God, I wouldn’t care to live celibate again in this place… I wonder if she’s missing me?’ and then the unaccustomed whisky (he was a gin or beer drinker when he drank at all) had its effect and he nodded off, the heavy book slipping from his knees and falling with a soft thud beside the indifferent Airedale.

  Outside the wind got up, whooping down from the moor like a foray mounted by savage hill-tribes but it did not wake him. What did, some twenty minutes after midnight, was Towser’s long, spine-chilling howls, projecting him from the arm chair at a bound.

  The dog was crouching over by the door, feet braced, head thrown back, every hair on his body standing out like the coat of a hell-hound in a Nordic folk-tale. He shouted, ‘What is it Towser? What’s up, for God’s sake?’ and the dog stopped howling and began to whine, weaving his muzzle to and fro, as if terror was communicating itself to him by the scent of something gross and evil.

  David felt his own flesh crawl as his bemused senses grappled with various possibilities. A ghost? Was Havelock’s haunted? If so he had heard nothing of the story, and it would be common currency in Bamfylde, where legends were hoarded like miser’s gold. Boys, perhaps, out on the prowl? That was more likely, and glancing at his watch David reached the door in three strides and flung it open.

  The stench and unmistakable sounds that assailed him were far more frightening than any ghost. Something was burning and, to judge by the volume of smoke billowing in the strong draught on the stairs, it was well alight. Standing there, momentarily paralysed by dismay, he could see a small rosy glow pulsing behind the pall, and hear the soft, menacing crackle of burning woodwork. It was the sound that prompted reflex action, of the kind he had learned over three years of kill-or-be-killed at the Front. Leaping down the stone stairs, with the terrified dog at his heels, he tore open the heavy door of the linen-passage leading to the western arcade of the quad, grabbed Nipper Shawe’s bell that stood on a niche beside the post-box, and swung it. Seconds later he was halfway up the second flight leading to the dormitories, where a stream of boys collided with him, some in their dressing gowns, some in their pyjamas, all pouring down the steps in a flood so that he had to grab the iron rail to prevent himself being carried away with the rush.

  He managed to grab Dobson, somewhere in the middle of the bunch, and bellowed, ‘Junior dorm… boys beyond? Are they all out?’ and Dobson shouted, ‘Yes, sir! Think so! Ridgeway was there counting them…’ and then Dobson was swept away as Ridgeway, the duty prefect, appeared just above him bawling, ‘Steady, there!… Take it easy! The bloody stairs can’t burn, you idiots.’

  He fought his way up level with Ridgeway, a tall, pallid boy, wearing fancy check pyjamas. Odd the things that struck you at
a moment like this for he recalled, even as he grabbed Ridgeway by the shoulders, that Ridgeway was the dandy of the Sixth, with his locker full of fancy ties and purple socks. He shouted, ‘Counted the juniors? They’re all out?’ and Ridgeway wincing, said, ‘Counted eighteen, sir! That’s the lot in there, but the annexe…!’

  ‘Who sleeps in the annexe?’

  ‘I… I’m not sure, sir!’

  ‘Think, man, think!’

  ‘The two Kassavas, sir…’

  ‘They didn’t pass you?’

  ‘No, sir, I’m almost sure they didn’t… it was one hell of a rush, can’t be sure.’

  He said, between his teeth, ‘Take the bell. Go on down and line ‘em up in the quad. Count ‘em again, double-check ‘em and send someone over to the head’s house to phone the Brigade.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ and Ridgeway was gone, leaving him alone two-thirds of the way up the stairs, with the smoke thickening, the glow beyond it spreading, and a sound like ten thousand dry sticks being snapped over in the boarded passage on the left of the landing.

  He identified this at once as the heart of the fire, a draught funnel running immediately above the linen rooms below, but the identification seemed unimportant. What obsessed him now was the thought of the two Kassava brothers, almost surely cut off in the little annexe just beyond the junior dormitory, two first-termers from India, the sons of a rajah’s physician so they said, who slept in Havelock’s as spillovers from Outram’s, very short of bedspace that term. He thought, with a sickening fatality, ‘They probably don’t even know the geography of the bloody house, but there’s nowhere they could have gone, except through the junior dorm and past Ridgeway,’ and clapping a handkerchief to his face he dashed into the disordered senior dorm and down its length to the connecting door. But here, to his amazement, he was checked. There was no hope of going beyond it for the fire seemed to have run along under the floor and burst out of the pipe vents beside the washstands. The junior dorm was blazing from end to end, the fire concentrating at the extreme end, where the annexe lay.

  He could not go on but he was terribly unwilling to leave. He stood there dithering a moment, the iron clamour of the bell reaching him from below, a background rhythm to the swelling tumult down there. Then somebody coughed at his elbow and in the light of the flames he saw Boyer, who gasped, ‘They’re out on the roof sir! Between the two gables… Ridgeway’s shouting to them to move along… Better go, sir… before the floor caves in!’

  They ran back through the senior dormitory, across the landing and down the two flights of stone stairs to the quad, and as they went Boyer said breathlessly, ‘Roused the head, sir, Mrs Herries phoned Stoke Steps and Challacombe. The village team shouldn’t be long… Head’s taking a roll-call…’ and then they were in the quad and Ridgeway was pointing up at a steep ‘V’ between the two gables at the north-west angle of the quad. In the rosy glare outlining the roof he could see two small figures, peering down into the surging quad, and right below them Irvine, chivvying a squad of about a dozen boys, ranged around the tarpaulin that covered the cricket pitch on rainy days in summer.

  It seemed to him astounding that the tarpaulin could have been located so quickly, and even more so that everybody but the Kassava brothers were right here in the quad, ignoring Ridgeway’s shrill commands to go down the passage to Big Hall for a call-over, but staring upward at the two little figures crouched behind the guttering. He understood then, however, that the Kassava brothers would never jump, that they would have to be pushed, or shown some safer way down, and once again his trench reflexes came to his aid, and he grabbed Boyer by the arm, saying, ‘That rope in the covered playground – the one with the hook… And the lighter rope, holding it to the wall… we’ll have to get them!’

  They crossed the quad at a run, elbowing boys out of their way, and in ninety seconds were back with the ropes, a thick one fitted with a brass hook, part of the makeshift gymnasium equipment, and a long coil of clothes-line rope, used for fastening it back when it was not in use. Boyer said, ‘We could fasten one to the other and throw it up… But even if they grab it they’ll be too scared to make fast and slide down…’, and he saw Boyer was right, and that someone would have to carry the lighter coil up to them.

  He said, ‘I could make it from the Remove window… There’s all that creeper and the drainpipe. Find the head, tell him what I’m at, and keep that tarpaulin team in position. Never mind the bloody roll-call, the fire’s confined to Havelock’s, no other house is involved yet.’

  He thought Boyer said, ‘Come with you, sir,’ or something like it, but he could not be sure. He was gone by then, pounding up to the steps to the Remove that was situated immediately below the gable ends one storey down. There was plenty of light here, not only from the glare above but from the quad lamps. It took him no more than seconds to join the ropes, force open the tall window and scramble through on to a tiny, lead-covered platform surrounding the braces of the drainpipe.

  There was just enough room here to pause and regain his breath. Looking up he saw he was now about sixteen feet from the ridge between the gable ends but the fire beyond the inner gable was spreading rapidly. From this angle it seemed to be on the point of engulfing the gables. He lifted one foot and wedged it into a clutch of creeper, then hoisted himself up another foot or two, the lighter rope gripped between his teeth. He had a curiously intense feeling of isolation up here, as though he was separated from the sea of upturned faces below not by some thirty feet but by the height of a mountain. It was oddly silent, too, despite the steady crackle of the flames and the soughing gusts of wind fanning them. The drainpipe was rusty under his palms but the creeper seemed tough and fibrous, sufficiently so to support his weight, so that he went steadily upward until he could have reached out and touched the two white faces peering over the edge of the guttering.

  It would have been simple enough if he could have called to the boys, telling them to stretch out an arm and take the rope but this was impossible with the rope clamped between his teeth and in any case they seemed immobile, wedged there like a couple of gargoyles. So he pushed on over the gutter, its rough edge tearing at his jacket and his outflung hand found a leaded ridge to give him a final purchase. With the rope entangled in his legs he rolled on to the platform, sat back and began to haul, looking over his shoulder for a crevice or leading edge where he could fix the hook when he had drawn it up.

  Kassava Major came alive then, moving forward a few inches to help him pull, and between them they hauled in the full length of the lighter rope, and then the hook and a few feet of the heavier rope. It would be too short by a couple of yards, he would judge, but with so many below this was nothing to worry about. The immediate problem, having wedged the hook under the inner window ledge of the annexe, was to persuade the boys to trust themselves to the rope. He said, addressing the elder Kassava, ‘It’s the rope from the gym, strong enough to support a horse. Can you shin down it? If you slip there’s a tarpaulin to catch you.’ Kassava Major’s voice seemed steady enough as he said, ‘I’ll do it, sir… but the kid…’ and he left the sentence in the air, spreading his hands outward in what struck David as an oriental gesture of resignation.

  He was right, of course. Kassava Minor, rigid with terror, was a child of eleven. Nothing would induce him to project himself over the edge of the drop. He made up his mind on the spot. ‘We’ll have to lower him… Explain what he has to do… he’ll take it better from you,’ and he hauled on the heavy rope until he drew it in and made a loop of the loose end.

  The elder boy seemed to have completely recovered his nerve. Above the roar of the flames he could hear Kassava Major repeating over and over again, ‘It’ll be all right, Jimmy… Do what sir says… Just do what he says,’ and between them they managed to slip the loop over the child’s shoulders and tighten it round his waist, but once that was done they were no farther on, for Kassava Minor clung to the guttering with both hands, and with his full weight braced to the r
ope David could take no part in prising them loose. He saw Kassava Major’s right arm move then, just once and very swiftly, up and then down, and suddenly the rope went taut, and Kassava Minor was suspended below the guttering and he was able to pay out, a few inches at a time, until suddenly the rope went slack and he could haul it up again, finding that in that tiny interval someone below, with their wits about them, had climbed on to the tuckshop roof and untied the cradle, giving him another three or four feet to spare.

  There was no time, and no need to peer down to satisfy himself that the younger boy had made a safe landing. Showers of sparks shot from the windows of the annexe and smoke was thickening, masking everything about them but the stark silhouette of the gables and the roof of the head’s house immediately opposite. They had little chance of surviving. The orange flames, shooting horizontally from the annexe window, would blast them from the crevice at any minute and send them plummeting down to the quad. He could not see Kassava now, despite the glare, and might not have realised he was alone up there had not the roar from the crowd announced the plucky kid’s safe arrival thirty feet below. Then he saw that he must shift for himself and rolled on his belly, testing the anchorage of the rope before projecting himself backwards and outwards, over the gutter. His jacket caught again, ripping clear down the front and he seemed an interminable time going down. Then, inexplicably to him, Irvine was there, and Howarth wearing a bright plum-coloured dressing gown, and old Algy Herries shouting, ‘Take him inside! Take him across to my house…’ and he felt himself half-lifted and swept clear of the press and the next moment he was sharing a sofa with Kassava Major, who was grinning and rubbing the knuckles of his right hand. He said, vaguely, ‘Where’s your brother, Kassava?’ and the boy said, almost apologetically, ‘He’s still out cold sir. I had to do it. He was like… like a limpet, sir!’ and grinned again, holding up his bruised knuckles for inspection.