R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  He stood there watching it until it reached him, drenching him through in a matter of seconds. He was standing in a particularly open place, two hundred feet or more above the floor of the valley, where a great belt of brushwood grew both sides of the stream. There was something vaguely familiar about the landscape, as though he had seen it in a recent dream. He recognised the lie of the land, the long straggle of crouching timber down there, the strangely even ridges of the hills, like a choppy sea studded with flotsam represented by boulders and gorse patches. Great arteries of forked lightning lit it up in great detail, tearing jagged rents in the rain curtain and over all, in a succession of ear-splitting discharges, the thunder rolled.

  It was only then that he became aware of the dog and its presence amazed him almost as much as the spectacle. It was Ferguson’s Airedale, Towser, that must have attached itself to him the moment he left the plantation and followed at his heels over God knew how many miles of moorland. The dog was whining, terrified by the uproar, and at every fresh clap of thunder he gave a series of sharp, high-pitched yelps. Finally, getting no response from the man, he ran, still yelping, the full length of the slope to the cover of the brushwood. David did not follow. The cataclysm was a solace, the teeming rain beating over every square inch of his body, a balm. It was the end of the world. He saw it as a kind of climax to the horrors of the day, and, at a farther distance, to days of almost identical uproar in the Salient and the Somme.

  And then, just as the dog reached the floor of the valley, he became aware of a figure blundering up the slope, head invisible, shoulders hunched under a yellow oilskin, and with a small part of his brain he wondered who the devil it could be, and what he was doing down there in such chaos. At that moment the whole sky blazed up and, a second or two later, an explosion of enormous weight burst over him, stunning his senses so that he was only vaguely aware of the arrival of the figure in the oilskin, who seized his hand and began dragging him down, down to the valley until, in the space of a lightning flash it seemed, they were threading a tunnel of dripping foliage leading to a shallow cave in the rock face beside the rushing stream. Inside it was quite dry and the place was clearly inhabited. An array of kit lay about, including blankets and a knapsack. A small fire smouldered under the overhang, obstinate tongues of flame holding out against the hissing downpour.

  He sat down then, limp and exhausted, and as in a dream he saw the figure of a boy, tousled and laughing, emerge from beneath the folds of the oilskin and recognised Spats Winterbourne who seemed, for some obtuse reason, to be enjoying himself, for he said, shouting above the uproar, ‘It’s a corker, isn’t it, sir? Never seen one like this before!’ and then, with concern, ‘I say, you’re drenched through, sir! Peel off and rub yourself down. There’s a towel here somewhere. It’s a bit grubby, I’m afraid…’ and David, hypnotised by the boy, obediently shed jacket and shirt, and began towelling himself.

  It was extraordinarily cosy in here, a refuge not only from the storm but from the pitiless world outside, where women and children were crushed under lorries overloaded with building stone. Mutely he watched Winterbourne busy himself about the fire, putting a kettle on a grid and ladling cocoa from a tin into a thick earthenware mug. What astonished him far more than the coincidence of meeting Winterbourne here, of having directed his heedless steps to the very spot where the boy was hiding, was Winterbourne’s identity with the moor, and the impression he gave of being an integral part of its wildness and remoteness. He had always thought of Winterbourne as a town-bred boy, dapper and clothes-conscious, even elegant in a slightly comical way, but here, in a cave beside a rushing stream, he was a gipsy, moving and doing for himself, as though this was his natural habitat. A sense of curiosity close to wonder invaded him, holding his own tragedy at bay, so that he grabbed at it, as though Winterbourne and Winterbourne’s identification with the moor was a raft in an ocean of misery. He said, ‘You’ve been here all the time, haven’t you?’ and Winterbourne, with a self-effacing grin, replied, ‘Yes, sir. I suppose you were out looking for me.’

  ‘Everybody’s looking for you. Including the police.’

  The boy’s cheerful face clouded slightly but then he shrugged. ‘What does it matter? I’ll be sacked, anyway, won’t I?’

  He sat crosslegged on his blanket, looking into the fire and presently he said, incuriously, ‘You were lost, weren’t you, sir?’

  ‘I was lost right enough,’ David thought, ‘but not in the way he means,’ and said deliberately, ‘I hadn’t the vaguest idea where I was or how I got here. I didn’t even know the dog had followed me,’ and the boy looked quickly, his woman’s eyes sharp with intelligence. He said, ‘Has… has anything happened? Something serious, sir?’

  ‘Yes, but it has nothing to do with you. I’d forgotten you were missing. Forgotten you existed.’

  The bell in his brain began to toll then, slow, ponderous strokes with a repetitive message for him (Beth is dead… Beth is dead… The twins are dead… Everything’s over…) and he gave a kind of sob.

  The boy was beside him in an instant. ‘What is it, sir? What’s happened?’

  ‘My wife… she was killed by one of Venn’s lorries on Quarry Hill this morning.’

  He heard a long hiss of escaping breath as he bowed his head. He could not bear to talk to anyone who had seen her, gay, carefree and terribly alive. Not even a boy like Winterbourne, who could have known her but slightly.

  Winterbourne said, brokenly, ‘That’s… that’s awful sir. No wonder you…’ and he stopped. When he spoke again there was a quaver in his voice. ‘Was she… was she out looking for me, sir?’

  He raised his head. The boy, so heedless a moment since, now looked as scared as a recruit sitting on the forestep awaiting zero-hour. ‘No, she wasn’t looking for you. It had nothing to do with you. She was driving the twins back from Challacombe.’

  ‘The… the children, sir?’

  ‘One was killed, the other seriously injured. I daresay she’s dead by now.’

  The rain continued to thresh down beyond the fringe of brushwood. The stream before the cave entrance boiled, rushing over the sloping stones in a cataract. Thunder still growled and occasional lightning flickered, but the centre of the storm was moving away to the north-east. The lid of Winterbourne’s kettle began to dance and he got up in a single movement, lifted it from the fire, poured water into the mug, and stirred it with the deliberation that attended all his actions. ‘Drink this, sir. Please, you must!’

  David took the mug and sipped. The scalding liquid warmed his belly but his hands began to shake in the old familiar way and he had difficulty in holding the mug. The boy was beside him again, as solicitous as a mother nursing a sick child. ‘Take it easy, sir. Just a sip at a time. But get it down. All of it.’

  It was impossible to resist his gentle persuasiveness. He finished the cocoa and Winterbourne took the mug, setting it before the fire.

  ‘Shouldn’t you… we… start back, sir? It’ll take two hours, even using short cuts, and some of the streams might be too wide to jump. That other little girl… you’ll have to know, sir.’ He waited, and when David said nothing he went on, ‘We could make it to Withybridge across the shoulder. There’s a phone there in the village store, sir. They could send transport and we could wait for it there.’

  David said, ‘You go to Withybridge and call in. Tell them to pick you up before dark. I’ll stay here.’

  ‘You can’t do that, sir.’

  ‘I’ll do what I damned well like, boy.’

  ‘No, sir, I’m not leaving you. We could stay here but then everyone will start looking for you and they wouldn’t find you, any more than they could me. They’ll think… well, it just won’t do, sir. You must see that.’

  After a moment he tried again, in the same insistent voice. ‘The other little girl. She may need you, sir.’

  It was a possibility that simply hadn’t occurred to him but he gave it thought. A gleam of hope probed the farthest r
ecesses of his mind, an eight-penny torchlight, of the kind boys used to read under the blankets, projecting its feeble beam across a vast belfry, where the one-note bell tolled and tolled in his brain. Was it remotely possible that something – anything – could be salvaged from the wreck of his life?

  He reached out and groped for his sodden shirt but Winterbourne anticipated this. ‘Put this on, sir. It’ll be tight but it doesn’t matter if it rips,’ and he began to force a sweater over David’s head, struggling with it until it had passed his chin, then smoothing it down so that it fitted like a skin. Out of the corner of his eye David saw a cardboard portfolio, a duplicate of the one he had found in Winterbourne’s locker. His mind made the connection, telling why the valley had looked familiar from the crest. He said, ‘Have you been here often? To paint watercolours?’ and surprisingly Winterbourne blushed. ‘Yes, sir. I didn’t think anyone knew. About the painting, I mean.’

  ‘Nobody does. I found some of your paintings in your locker. How long have you been coming here?’

  ‘Whenever I could, sir. I found this place by accident, during the Middlemoor run my first term, sir. I didn’t tell anyone about it. It was just somewhere to come when… well, when things got a bit much, sir.’

  ‘A bit much.’ It was a strange typically English way of summarising the enormous pressures Winterbourne had been resisting, and resisting very successfully he would say, all the time he had been at Bamfylde. A boy with an exhibitionist mother and a cold fish of a father. A child who could never escape the harassment of the one and the inadequacy of the other. It was remarkable, really, how well he had weathered the long, stark terms, retreating into himself, his painting and his integration with the moor, that must have seemed a kind of refuge. Algy Herries had been absolutely correct about Winterbourne, as he was accurate in his assessment of nearly all the boys who passed through his hands. Winterbourne was not really a boy at all but a young and superbly adjusted adult, and somehow, understanding this, David felt the terrible weight pressing on him lift a fraction, as Howarth’s words came back to him – ‘Here you’ve got something to hold on to, to live for, to make something of. It won’t make much difference for a month or a year, but it will in the end, I promise.’

  Was there anything in that beyond conventional words of comfort? Howarth’s astringent way of saying that time would heal, or something equally banal? Winterbourne’s private battle seemed to insist that there was, that by submerging body and soul into the ethos of Bamfylde, or some other school with an identical function, he could, in the years left to him, find shape and cohesion in the way he had when he had emerged, equally battered, from an earlier ordeal. They were not the same, as he had protested to Howarth, but in their very difference there might be a chink of hope. For here, in Winterbourne’s survival, was a ledge, a handhold that someone with more courage than he possessed, might use to haul himself out of the slough. He said, at length, ‘About the one in the hospital… you might be right… We’d better start back. Now, before the light goes. How long would it take us? To Withybridge, say?’

  ‘Under the hour, sir.’

  He glanced at his watch, amazed to find that it was after eight o’clock. More than seven hours had passed since he turned his back on Howarth and struck into the plantation. Winterbourne said, ‘It’ll stay overcast and there’s no moon, sir, but we would make it the whole way by ten-thirty. It could be quicker that way, providing you don’t mind wading, sir.’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  He watched the boy pull on his oilskin, damp down the smouldering fire and take a last look round the little cave. He gave the impression of a man taking a final glance at home before emigrating to the far side of the world. They went out, Winterbourne leading, and tackled the long, dripping slope to the crest. The Airedale, subdued now, trotted at their heels. It was still raining but the weight had gone from the downpour. Over in the west there was a small rift in the great banks of clouds and the glint of bronze light beyond reminded him of the glow of a dying fire, or perhaps a few chrysanthemums, glimpsed through a door left ajar. They walked in silence, one behind the other and even under his oilskin Winterbourne still looked dapper and self-contained. He had his mother’s easy grace, and perhaps his father’s sense of omnipotence, conveyed to David over two hundred miles of telephone cable yesterday. As long as Winterbourne led the trek some kind of purpose attached itself to this silent squelch over miles of seeping moorland.

  Three

  * * *

  1

  THERE WERE PERIODS DURING THE THREE YEARS HE SERVED AT the Front that were lost to him. Weeks and even months, when his senses, dulled by physical exhaustion, anaesthetised by the thrum of shellfìre and the sheer boredom of active service in that morass, were expunged from the record of his years as though they had never been.

  The period immediately succeeding the calamity on Quarry Hill was such a time, embracing, as it did the dismal aftermath of identification, inquest and double funeral at Stone Cross churchyard where, only a few months before, Beth had stood with him to watch the irascible Ferguson, and then that ageing perfectionist, Cordwainer, laid in that part of the yard that was, albeit unofficially, a Bamfylde preserve.

  The news that five-year-old Grace had survived the accident, despite terrible injuries, had no power to cheer just then, for he had to steel himself against tidings that she had followed the others. It did not seem credible that a mite her age could survive a compound fracture of the right leg, a shattered left arm, three broken ribs, severe concussion, and extensive lacerations to the right side of the face, the result of being flung clear from the dickey seat and half-buried by a cascade of stone from the overturned lorry. As yet, as the long, thundery spell continued throughout June, she held on, never fully conscious, and all but invisible in a cocoon of bandages that concealed the whole of her face save for the mouth and left eye. He was not allowed to see her for more than a week and when, at last, he looked down at her, lying there among a grotesque array of cradles and pulleys, he wished he had stayed away. There was something obscene seeing her in that fearful context when he remembered so vividly his final glimpse of her from the window of Havelock’s first floor, as the Morgan trundled down the east drive at the start of that frightful day.

  He asked Willoughby, liaising with the surgeon, for a frank estimate of her chances and Willoughby, accepting the fact that he was no stranger to violent death, did not hedge. He said that they were fifty-fifty, depending upon factors that could not be assessed at this stage. ‘She’s getting first-class care,’ he added, ‘Harvey-Smith, who is in overall charge of the case, regards her as a challenge. If her condition improves in the weeks ahead, she’ll have to undergo several more operations, then move on to a London hospital for a skin graft. But there’s a chance, a very good one, I’d say. So try and keep that in the forefront of your mind.’

  It was some consolation, he supposed, or might become one as time went on, but it did not help him to tackle the task of picking up the ravelled threads of his life, and making some kind of attempt to adjust to the bleakness of the future.

  He let Ellie persuade him not to attend the funeral. Alone he could contain his grief. He could not share it with four hundred others and there seemed no point in insisting on a private affair when Beth had been so popular with staff and boys all the time she had lived here.

  In the event there were two tiny sequels to the melancholy event, one on the evening of the funeral, when he was trying to occupy his mind replying to some of the fifty-odd letters sent him by Old Boys who remembered her, and two more from Cooper and Scrubbs-Norton, who did not. There came a discreet tap on the door and assuming it was Ellie, with some sleeping pills Willoughby had prescribed, he called, ‘Come in, Mrs Herries.’ It was not Ellie but Boyer, carrying two tattered books.

  He stood hesitantly beside the desk, sympathy distorting his mobile, amiable features into an unfamiliar and incongruous mould, as he said, with an apologetic cough, ‘Am I… er… disturb
ing you, sir? I can pop in later, I’m duty perk tonight,’ but David, glad of his company, pushed the correspondence aside and told him to sit down and help himself to a cigarette from a packet on the reading table. Boyer looked startled, as well he might. Smoking was high on what veteran Bamfeldians called the ‘watch-it-list’, drawn up by Algy Herries when he put into practice his Roman precept of ‘Few Rules But Unbendables’. David said, noting the look, ‘I know you chaps get through ten a day when you can lay your hands on them. This is one occasion when you don’t have to climb up among the stacked trunks for a smoke. Don’t take it as general, however, or there’ll be the devil to pay. For me as well as you.’

  So Boyer took a Player’s from the packet and inhaled expertly, saying, with a fleeting grin, ‘Er… hadn’t you better light up yourself, sir? In case someone else looks in?’ and when David had stuck a cigarette between his lips, ‘I actually looked in to give you these, sir. I remembered you quoting from them in the Upper Fifth last year. You said you had them both out there, but lost them with the rest of your kit at Third Ypres.’

  He passed the books over and David recognised them as old favourites he had read and re-read many times in the last ten years. Fortescue’s translation of The Memoirs of Sergeant Bourgoyne, and Butler’s translation of The Memoirs of Baron de Marbot. Boyer went on, ‘I found them in the Charing Cross Road during the hols, sir. I was going to keep them as a leaving souvenir, but well… it occurred to me that you could do with a couple of old friends just now. I’ve written in them, sir.’

  David turned to the flyleaves and on each was an identical inscription in Boyer’s devil-may-care hand, ‘For David Powlett-Jones – In Friendship. Chadwick S. Boyer.‘ He said, ‘That was a nice thought, Chad. I don’t think many would have had it. Thank you very much. They were both books I’ve always been meaning to replace but never did.’ He sat musing a moment. ‘I’ll tell you something that might sound odd. They were a comfort to me out there. I don’t know why, unless it was the reflection that, bad as things were, they were sometimes worse for Marbot and Bourgoyne, soldiers at a time when field surgeons used hacksaws and a pint of raw spirit. No, “comfort” isn’t the word,’ he knitted his brows, trying to remember when he had last sat in a dugout, and read one or other of the journals by the light of a candle stuck in a bottle. ‘They had a personal message. Neither man would give up, or even contemplate giving up. They stuck it out and they came through on that account. I suppose I told myself that if they could, then I could. I’ll treasure them, always.’