3
He played no part in subsequent events, in containing the fire to the top storey by a human chain of bucketeers, senior as far as the first landing, staff and domestics on the flight of steps beyond. He did not see the arrival of the village handpump team, or, some twenty minutes later, the crashing descent of the Challacombe brigade, in their new Merryweather engine. Between them they got it under control by dawn, sending their jets arching across the quad and stopping the spread of flames south to the Fifth form room and his old bachelor’s quarters, or north to the Outram dormitories, the covered playground and the labs. The damage was extensive, two dormitories and the linen room gutted, Ferguson’s living quarters flooded and all its ceilings down, but it might have been much worse and surely would have been but for so many factors that, looking back, made a pattern of his disorganised memories. The Airedale’s spine-chilling howl. Ridgeway’s cool performance at the door of the junior dormitory. Boyer’s timely appearance through the smoke. Kassava Senior’s pluck and resource in knocking his brother cold when he was clinging to the ledge. Carter’s cool lead in evacuating the Outram dormitories, and the Herculean performance of the amateur firefighters and their antiquated equipment from the village. But he saw and evaluated none of these things at the time, for the nervous reaction was swift and salutary and he was back again, physically at least, to a time nearly three years before when a single tiresome incident would cause his hands to shake uncontrollably and the nerves in his cheek to twitch. He spent the rest of the night with the Herries; and Beth, leaving the twins in the care of Ma Midden at the farm, came to claim him in the morning. With her on the scene he quietened down and began to come to himself but slowly and uncertainly, like a man snatched from the sea at his last gasp.
He certainly did not see himself as a hero but there were others, it seemed, who did, and he was made aware of this under circumstances of hideous embarrassment when, on the final evening of term, he went into Big School to take prep for the Lower and Middle School. On the instant of his setting foot on the dais everyone stood up and began cheering, so that he gazed around as if everyone there had lost his wits. After a moment or two, however, he understood that the ovation was for him, and that it was completely spontaneous, touched off by some hidden spring of emotion in the hearts of the boys who had stared up at him and the Kassava boys on that niche. He raised his hand then and when they did not stop he roared, ‘Sit down! Everybody sit! Where the hell do you think you are? At a Cup Final?’ and at that they laughed and resumed their seats, and he too sat and pretended to read but found himself listening to the pounding of his own heart as he thought, presently, ‘I couldn’t leave here after this… This is the end of the road for me, and for Beth too. I thought I was home and dry a long time ago, when I brought Beth here and she liked it, when the twins were born. But they were only stages and this isn’t. It’s a terminus.’
But even that wasn’t quite the end of the affair. Towards the end of the holidays, when he was spending an hour with Algy Herries on the timetable, Ellie looked in with tea and said, ‘The post is in. There’s a parcel for you dear boy!’ and while he was asking himself who on earth would be likely to send him a parcel, and why it should come to the school rather than the cottage, he saw Algy and Ellie exchange the kind of look parents exchange over a Christmas tree when the family are opening gifts, and fumbled with a small, carefully wrapped package bearing a Delhi postmark that only increased his mystification. Then Algy said, impatiently, ‘Here, give it to me! You’ll let the tea go cold!’ and took it, stripping away the wrapping to reveal a square cardboard box. Inside, bedded in blue velvet, was a slim, very elegant gold cigarette case, inscribed with his initials.
He stared at it uncomprehendingly until Algy said, with a chuckle, ‘Go on, open the wretched thing. Touch the spring and tell us who’s playing Father Christmas in April.’ He touched the spring and inside was a visiting card bearing the name S. E. Kassava, M.D. (Edin.) F.R.C.S., and when he lifted the card there was an inscription above the hinged clip that read, ‘In deepest appreciation‘, and underneath it the date of the fire.
He said, wonderingly, ‘It’s magnificent…! But he didn’t have to do that… Why, young Boyer would have shinned up that drainpipe if I’d let him. So would Irvine or Ridgeway or anyone else if they’d thought of it.’
‘But that’s the point, dear boy,’ Ellie said, her Adam’s apple sliding up and down with emotion, ‘They didn’t. Or not so quickly. Now, Algy, put that horribly complicated-looking time-table aside and have tea. We’re supposed to be on holiday, aren’t we?’
Four
* * *
1
1922, 1923, 1924. THE YEARS UNFOLDED, SEASON BY SEASON, term by term, with a pleasant, almost timeless rhythm, as though Bamfylde, tucked away under a fold of the high plateau, was a planet in its own right, only marginally involved in the rest of the solar system.
Ordinarily, sometimes for months at a time, the planet spun an unremarkable orbit, within the ageless succession of spring, summer, autumn and winter, changeless or so it seemed to David, with its traditional sequences marked off in the school calendar issued to every boy on the first day of a new term.
In the Lent term there were the house matches, the second half of the crosscountry season, the Choral Society’s Holy Week Concert, the confirmation classes conducted by Algy Herries, the end-of-term examinations for class prizes to be distributed at Speech Day, and the endless shuffle from class to class and period to period, a marathon that took him, in a matter of thirteen weeks, all the way from the Roman conquest to the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, in June, 1914, and occasionally a little beyond, as when he asked of the Sixth what they made of the poems of Owen, Graves, Rosenberg and Siegfried Sassoon.
He was invading Howarth’s territory here but old Howarth did not seem to mind and was, in fact, grateful for David’s English periods in the Second and Third Form. He was glad these had been fitted into the timetable more or less permanently. An hour or so every week, he was able to commune with Goldsmith and Gray, Swift, Tennyson and Blake, airing the corridors of his mind and opening up rewarding cul-de-sacs on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The same applied to trespasses on Irvine’s subject, when he would draw a freehand map of Europe on the blackboard of Big School and illustrate, with a cluster of sweeping, south-easterly curves, the dramatic switch of Napoleon’s Grande Armée from the Boulogne camps to Ulm and the defeat of the Coalition at Austerlitz in the winter of Trafalgar.
Of his incidental efforts in these directions both Howarth and Irvine would sometimes make common-room jests, as when Howarth said, referring to his introduction of the Middle Third to Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village’, ‘Keep ‘em hard at it, old man! With you clearing the ground in that Lower School desert there’s that much less sod-breaking for me when The Lump gravitates to Middle School! Not all that much less, of course. Most of The Lump doze through Hamlet and Marlowe, damn their churlish souls. But every now and again I find an uncut diamond where I least expect it. Blades is a case in point. Two years ago you started him on mere doggerel, like “The Ballad of Patrick Spens”. Now he plagiarises Robert Herrick!’
‘The Lump’ was the staff name for the inevitable group in every new cadre of boys, those odd dozen or so, who clung together in a sullen, unleavened mass, moving up the school at the rate of one shift a year, and finally coming to anchor in the Lower Fifth, where they grew downy moustaches while making successive stabs at school-leaving certificate.
‘Autrefois Le Lump, toujours Le Lump,’ as Ferguson put it, but this wasn’t strictly true. Now and again, about halfway up the school, a boy’s interest in a subject would quicken, so that he broke free of The Lump and set an individual course. The Lump, incidentally, contributed all the regulars to Saturday penal drill, where they applied the same tactics dodging punishment as they displayed work-dodging in class. It was years before David, who occasionally took the penal squad, discovered why b
oys like Bickford, and his henchman, Rigby, seemed so fresh, and in good heart, after a double round the buildings. The command was always, ‘Rear rank to the left, front rank to the right, round the building – Double!’ Old lags like Bickford would tear round the first corner and wait there until the greenhorns came puffing past the fives court. They would then rise from the seat and join the leaders, nobody having observed to which rank they had attached themselves at the start of the drill. The Lump, however, invariably included many of the most amiable boys in the school, so that David continued to see them as a latter-day equivalent of the old sweats in the platoon, men who were always being promoted and then reduced to the ranks for minor crimes.
The summer term was quite different. For one thing the weather was much better. For another the thirteen weeks were starred with a variety of red-letter days. These included Sports Day, Speech Day, the visit of a field officer from the War Office to judge the O.T.C. drill competition, and a variety of other functions, including several important cricket matches. But the summer event David always enjoyed most was the Whitsun Old Boys’ Reunion, when as many as three hundred Old Boys, a few of whom he taught in his first two years, would descend on the school and indulge in an orgy of reminiscence in the old army hut bar provided for them.
He always felt rather sorry for their young wives and fiancées, many of them shy and pretty, who drove up with the impression that Bamfylde was a compromise between Sandhurst and Blenheim Palace. Once there, however, they were abandoned by their menfolk and could be seen wandering about rather forlornly, searching for the lavatory, or somewhere where they could sit and take tea.
It was Beth who spotted this unchivalrous deficiency in the O.B.A. programme and tackled Judy Cordwainer’s wife about it, so that she found herself appointed hostess to the visitors and persuaded David, as Assistant Secretary of the Association, to give her ten pounds from O.B.A. funds to be spent on fitting up an old linen room in Nicolson’s house as an oasis for bored brides and disconsolate brides-in-waiting.
The Michaelmas term was different again, for it brought a spate of new boys, who were duly invited to the new boys’ teas in the cottage garden. The Michaelmas term, in its opening weeks at least, was a time of renewal, with almost everyone settling to a new routine in a different part of the school, with the autumnal running season and rugby football season and, above all, rehearsals for the Christmas Gilbert and Sullivan opera.
Beth was now a regular in the dramatis personae, having already starred in The Mikado, H.M.S. Pinafore, The Gondoliers and The Yeomen of the Guard. David never succeeded in making more than the chorus but was sometimes called upon to deputise for Rapper Gibbs at the piano, having learned to play by ear in recreational centres and the officers’ mess at Blandford and later, behind the lines in the Ypres sector.
November 11th saw the parade round the War Memorial, where Algy would read the names of the fallen before the two minutes’ silence, followed by the sounding of ‘The Last Post’ and ‘Reveille’. David’s sour tussle with Carter over the stone cross was forgotten during that first service, in 1920, after watching Algy stumble through the long list of names with tears streaming down his cheeks. So the years slipped away but not without the occasional crisis that would highlight a day, or a week, or sometimes a term.
From the personal standpoint they rarely deserved to be called crises. Once the twins went down with measles. Another time part of the cottage thatch was stripped off in a tearing south-westerly. And twice, during the years when Joan and Grace were toddlers, Beth gleefully announced that she was pregnant again and he made frantic efforts to stake a claim on one of the new bungalows that were being built on an extension of the football field, fifty yards south of the plantation.
He was never able to get one. There was always a queue of men senior to him but in the end it did not matter, for Beth’s news turned out to be premature and for a week or two she was down in the dumps. ‘I so wanted a son,’ she said, when he tried to console her saying they could not really cope with five in the cottage. ‘I want a son and I’m jolly well going to have one, so just you get used to the idea! It’ll soon sort itself out when there are five of us, and there had better be before you spoil those girls to death!’
It was a just accusation, as he was always ready to admit to himself, if to nobody else. For him, and many of the boys, there never had been two children like the twins. They were pretty, biddable, and sharp as a couple of pins, and apart from the fact that Beth insisted on dressing them individually (‘I’ll not have anyone thinking I’m stage-managing a showpiece wherever we go!’) only their intimates, like Ma Midden and her arthritic husband Ben, or Ellie, up at school, could tell them apart. They reminded him more of his elder sister Gwynneth than of himself or Beth, for they were all Celt, with round chubby faces, dark curls and creamy complexions. He even declared he could detect the Welsh lilt on their tongues, especially when they were excited. ‘That’ll be your doing,’ Beth told him, ‘but maybe it’s just as well. Growing up in this rural wilderness they’ll soon be talking broad Devon and we shall have a job finding them anything but pigmen for husbands.’
She took this matter-of-fact line with him whenever they discussed the children and subconsciously he understood why. Not only did he spoil them but everyone up at the school did the same, and so did his old mother and Beth’s father whenever they got the chance. In this sense, he supposed, it was important they did have another child and they never went out of their way to avoid having one. This in itself was a bonus, as she would sometimes admit in the heavy silence of the moorland night, when they lay still in one another’s arms in the main bedroom of the cottage.
‘I think we’re very lucky this way, Davy,’ she said, on an occasion quite early in their marriage. ‘It must be absolutely awful to have to go through a chemist’s shop drill every time you want to make love. I suppose people get used to it but I don’t think I could.’
‘You might have to eventually,’ he said, grinning at the moonlit patch of plaster above the bed. ‘If I can’t bully Algy into giving us married quarters someone will be roughing it in the outhouse and it’s not going to be me. I’ve too much on my plate and need my sleep.’
He had, too, for his long-term plans were beginning to mature. They had altered since the days Beth and he had planned how to go about getting his degree. Various opportunities had opened up for ex-servicemen who could claim a spell of teaching experience at a reputable school. He was now working hard for an external London degree, using an Oxford correspondence course that required of the student a minimum of eight hours’ work a week. In fact, David was able to put in more, mostly by reading while supervising in class or prep. He was covering British and European history from earliest times to 1900, social and economic history over the same span, one special subject – he chose his favourite, fifteenth century – and political theory. There was one other paper, translating a historical extract from two modern languages out of a choice of five, and this required special cramming. His French was adequate, but he knew very little German and had to be coached by Ferguson, a fluent German speaker although he did not teach it. His intermediate was behind him now, taken at Exeter in 1921, when he sailed through in four subjects, including English and European combined history, English literature (coached by Howarth) and Latin, in which he gained a poor pass after some steady coaching by Barnaby.
As the time for taking his finals approached he sometimes wondered whether he would use all this effort as a means of moving on, perhaps applying for a more important post at a better-known school, but it seemed unlikely so long as Herries was around. Even before the incident of the fire he had acquired a special relationship with Algy, whose unconventional approach to education made a direct appeal to him, whereas Beth seemed happy enough, despite social isolation.
Against all probability, she had integrated into the school and come to share his love of the untamed countryside, even in its savage moods. Yet it was not her humour and u
nswerving devotion alone that played their parts in banishing the final traces of shell-shock, in healing a mind and body that had survived three years on the Western Front. The cure, to his way of thinking at least, had been wrought mainly by regular access to a woman whose approach to him was maternal, in that she was equipped to ease the tensions that had built up inside him, simply by being herself and absorbing him with a directness and merry-hearted innocence. Simply to lie there and watch her undress in the lamplight was a kind of therapy. The sight of her young, supple body, glowing with health and redolent with mystery, even when she was naked, was a demonstration of wholesomeness and flawlessness to a man who had been in such close contact with everything foul and shattered.
He would watch the lamplight play on her breasts and move, like a sensuous lover, over her thighs and buttocks. Sometimes, by way of a laughing glance over her shoulder, she would assess the intentness of his fond scrutiny before pursuing her unhurried way to bed and bestowing on him a few brief moments of ecstasy that would leave him speechless with gratitude for her presence and for her being.
This was her unique contribution, but the other, broader road back to vigour and full mental health was signposted by boys. Boys of all ages and all temperaments, boys who came to represent for him a world of rich and varied promise, that he had assumed lost for all time in hurricane bombardments under Aubers Ridge and Polygon Wood.
They were signposts of variable aspect. Humour was there, and sometimes pathos, and two incidents stood out during that period, so that he thought of them, in after years, as important crossroads.
The funny one, that had the undertones of an outside world’s tribulations, was the affair of Paddy McNaughton, the Irish boy who staged a spectacular and convincing show of running amok one wet half-holiday, when games were cancelled, and a group of his peers in the Upper Fourth were passing an idle hour tormenting him about his championship of the Irish Free State. That was in the winter of 1921–22 shortly after Bloody Sunday brought about a final crisis in Irish affairs, and Michael Collins, the Sinn Fein hero, made a clean sweep of British Intelligence officers and Scotland Yard men assembled in Dublin to arrest a number of rebel leaders.
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