R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  It was a kind of miracle to watch her tackling her formidable exercises in the solarium. He had expected a pale, withdrawn child, heaving herself around on crutches but it was not like that at all. At first she was as shy with him as he was with her but after his third visit they adjusted very well and he was astonished, and a little touched, by her curiosity about the past, asking him all kinds of questions to supplement her fragmentary memories of the last year in the cottage and the few short weeks they had shared at Havelock’s.

  She said, almost gaily he thought, ‘I remember bits, Daddy, but mostly it’s all mixed up, and there’s a lot I don’t remember at all.’

  ‘Do you remember the actual crash?’ he asked, fearfully, and she said she did not, recalling nothing whatever of the final trip they made to Challacombe, not even the inoculation immediately preceding the accident. Her memories, it seemed, were concentrated on the last year at the cottage, leading up to the move to school and the Easter she and Joan had spent with Grandfather Marwood, at Elmer’s End. She remembered the last new boys’ tea-party Beth had given, in September, ‘…because it was the day a boy with glasses upset the tea-pot on Towser.’

  ‘Ah, that was Rowlandson,’ he said, ‘he remembers that too, and will laugh when I tell him you do. How much do you remember about Mummy and Joan?’

  ‘I remember Mummy bathing us in front of the fire in a tub, and wrapping the towel round us to look like Indian girls. And her singing instead of reading a story when we went up to bed.’

  ‘Singing what, Grace?’

  ‘A song with a lot of words, that all came out in a rush. About a queen it was.’

  It was like a dart and the impact made him catch his breath. It had been one of Beth’s songs from The Gondoliers, that year’s Gilbert and Sullivan, and the laughter behind her voice came to him now, as clearly as though she was serenading them from the terrace outside. He steered her away from memories after that, telling her of his plans for her when she was finally discharged from hospital, tentative as yet but sketched over the last few weeks after Harvey-Smith had said she could be home by the start of autumn term.

  ‘You’ll have my old room overlooking the moor,’ he said, ‘the one I slept in, and used as a study before you were born. The builders, who are working at school now, are going to fix it up and make it pretty and Mrs Arscott, our new Second Form mistress, is going to give you private lessons for the time, to help you catch up. You’ll have to look after me at Havelock’s, because I’m all on my own there apart from the boys, and Mrs Herries says she’ll teach you to cook. Would you like that?’

  ‘I’d like it very much,’ she said. ‘Could I give new boys’ tea-parties?’

  ‘Why, that’s a splendid idea! So you shall, as soon as you’re settled in. I’ve arranged with old Hodge to give you riding lessons too, on that pony of his, the one that used to scrape his hoof at the door for bread crusts. You’ll be able to saddle up and ride down to see Ma Midden whenever you want, and over to the village to do the shopping. Granfer and Grandmummy Tilda (‘Tilda’ was Mrs Marwood’s collie, and the twins had used her to distinguish between their two grandmothers, ever since they were three) will come down here and see you, and take you out once in a while, and I’ll come again at half-term. Keep at those exercises, won’t you, love?’ and he left her, a little hurriedly, reflecting thankfully that she was a cheerful, uncomplicated child, and likely to prove a great comfort to him in the years ahead.

  Summer term had already begun when he paid his visit and he was due back on Monday but then, spending Sunday with his father-in-law, the strike was upon them, and there was no hope of returning by rail. He got through, with some difficulty, to the bursar’s office, and was somewhat taken aback when the phone was answered by Carter, who happened to be in the office while the bursar was out. David explained the circumstances, asking Carter if he would tell the head he would be back at the earliest opportunity, and was puzzled rather than annoyed by Carter’s breezy rejoinder, ‘Right, Powlett-Jones! Leave it to me.’ Then, ‘A case of hoist by your own petard, eh, old man?’

  ‘How’s that again?’

  Carter said, in what David had learned to think of as his Sixth Form voice, ‘Nothing, old chap. Only a little dig on my part. After all, you’re for the red flag, aren’t you? No, that isn’t fair, let’s call it pink!’

  He did not trust himself to answer, having learned something about the art of duelling with Carter over the years, but rang off, glowering through the kiosk panes at two special constables enjoying the brief authority vested in them by their armbands. Then, muttering ‘Bloody little swine…’ he walked down the main road towards Clockhouse.

  Carter’s gibe, and his own instinctive sympathy with the miners, based on all he knew of the Valleys, conditioned his approach to the strike from the outset. Temporarily stranded, he passed the time talking to anyone who he thought might give him deeper insight into the cause and effect. This included not only members of the British public (as communicative during an emergency as they were uncommunicative when life ran smoothly) but local organisers, who were holding street-corner meetings to promote solidarity. He also read the British Gazette, Churchill’s broadsheet, impatient with its stridency, and even probed the police point of view from a sergeant guarding a bus driven by an undergraduate.

  What surprised him, dismayed him somewhat, was the apparent absence of acrimony on both sides and the inclination of the general public to regard the stoppage as an impromptu national spree. There seemed no way of communicating to the man in the street the reality of the miners’ grievances and the unsentimental justice of their claim. As a miner’s son he was unable to share the hilarity of the occasion. As a teacher of nineteenth-century history he was all too familiar with hidden factors contributing to the present confrontation. Long hours, backbreaking, primitive conditions above and under ground, miserly pay, the ever present threat of death or mutilation – these were things that men who hacked a subsistence living from the seams had taken for granted over two generations. What stuck in the craw was the underlying conviction in the heart and mind of the miner that, whereas an approach to some kind of equity was apparent in every other heavy industry since the Armistice, his own had got itself bogged down in a slough of bureaucratic wrangling, Governmental indifference and avarice on the part of the mine owners and drawers of dividends. And behind all was a threat that few ever voiced outside the coalfields, the prospect of technological advances hurrying the industry towards a date when the demand for coal dropped away, a little every year, leaving skilled men, now in their late twenties and early thirties, without such bargaining power as they held today, perhaps without a trade to ply. It was like a huge, ugly boil slowly coming to a head, with everyone watching and no one possessing the wit or the spirit to apply an internal remedy and frustration ultimately drove him to the public library to read some of the debates in Hansard preceding the stoppage.

  He found little here he did not know already. There were thousands of words on pay, safety devices, pithead baths and the like, but no one seemed to have commented on the inborn pride in his craft that the miner carried underground every working day. Neither, for that matter, had anyone at Westminster seen fit to acknowledge the modesty of the Miners’ Federation’s claims made the previous year. It made him wonder, not for the first time, if he had made the most of such brains as he possessed by burying himself on a Devon moor all these years, when he might have played some part in the nation’s affairs, either in politics, or as a professional organiser of the Workers’ Education Association, that was striving so hard to improve the education of men and women who had left school at fourteen and younger. But, somehow, illogically, it all led back to Carter and Carter’s type, lucky renegades as he thought of them, who had used their superior educations to infiltrate into the lower ranks of the bosses’ class. He thought, ‘I’ve got to get back there somehow. I’ve got to see how Bamfylde is taking it and whether anyone down there is trying to see our side o
f it!’ It reminded him how deeply rooted were his prejudices against monied interests, that had succeeded in killing his father and brothers, and an entire generation in the years that followed.

  ‘I’ll bloody well get there if I have to walk,’ he told his railwayman father-in-law, ‘There’s no damned sense in what I’m doing, unless I can say my piece at places like Bamfylde,’ and he went out and bought a knapsack, begging a lift on a milk lorry as far as the Great West Road, where he got another lift in an army lorry returning to Alders hot for more troops.

  He walked nearly twenty miles the next day before putting up at a cyclists’ hostel and the day after that, following a succession of lifts and tramps, he came down over the moor near Dulverton, riding a market cart. He made short work of the last leg, arriving at school just after dusk on Sunday, May 9th. The strike still had three days to run.

  He was surprised to learn from Herries that school routine had not been disturbed by more than a ripple or two. They produced their own bacon and vegetables and their milk came from local farms. They had had no newspapers, of course, and Herries was intrigued to hear David’s first-hand account, but said, ‘I appreciate you taking all this trouble to get back here on the job, P.J., but surely you know me better than to have expected it in the circumstances?’

  ‘It was a chance remark that Carter made over the phone that encouraged me to make the effort,’ and he repeated, word for word, what Carter had said.

  Herries said, thoughtfully, ‘You’re very prickly where Carter’s concerned, P.J. Too prickly, if you ask me, but that, off the record, applies equally to him. Do you mind telling me why? I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.’

  ‘It isn’t important.’

  ‘Oh, but it is. To me and to Bamfylde. My guess is that both of you are pretty well entrenched and disinclined to move now that you each have a house. Why the devil do you let him rub you up the wrong way so easily?’

  ‘It’s his general attitude. Not to me personally – you can’t expect to make a friend of everyone in an enclosed community like this – but he always gives me the impression he’s cockahoop at practising a profession, instead of following a trade or craft. That approach is pretty general among men on the way up from nowhere. What bothers me about post-war Britain is that it’s getting worse all the time.’

  ‘Can you be a little more explicit, old chap?’

  ‘Yes. The gap between the collarless and the fancy-tie brigade keeps on widening and it shouldn’t, not after the comradeship they shared in the trenches. I was born into the working class and come from a long line of miners. I’m proud of it. Why the hell should I have to apologise for it to a chap like Carter?’

  ‘But, my dear chap, you don’t have to,’ Herries said, with one of his cherubic smiles. ‘And it isn’t your background that bothers him.’

  ‘Then what does?’

  ‘Your war record. He hasn’t got one to speak of, and he was quick to notice the difference it made to you when you started here.’

  ‘But the war’s been over nearly eight years! Nobody here gives it a thought any more.’

  ‘Except you,’ Herries said.

  ‘I find it hard to forget. Is that so wrong?’

  ‘It’s neither right nor wrong, old son. It’s inevitable. You witnessed those eighty-odd Old Boys of mine blown to bits, and you won’t ever forget and forgive.’

  David said, with some difficulty, ‘Does that imply you don’t approve of me keeping it in front of the boys? You saw those boys die, too. You knew nearly all of them by their nicknames. I’d say they were still very fresh in your memory.’

  ‘One has to strike a balance,’ Herries said. ‘That’s what education is about. Rationality, tolerance, give and take, call it what you like. Carter has his faults. So have you, and all the rest of us. But he’s a first-class man at his subject, and very sound as a housemaster. He’s exam mad, of course, and almost certainly thinks me an old fool for not being, but he has a point. Life is getting more competitive and we have to have a modern side here and might do worse than Carter, judging by some of the science men I’ve interviewed in my time. This is what it boils down to. I’ll be gone in just over a year and some new man will move in. My bet is the Governors will appoint a modern man, but whoever he is he’ll have to learn to lean hard on you and Carter. So my advice to you is to call a truce.’

  He took Algy’s advice. His first impulse had been to buttonhole Carter and challenge him about the phone gibe, but he thought better of it. A few days after his return he was approached by Bamfylde’s sole Free Stater, Paddy McNaughton, now a leading light of the Sixth. ‘I’m in a rare fix, sir,’ he said, with the conspiratorial grin that had been common currency between them since the incident with the pistol. ‘I volunteered to present the T.U.C. case at the Society’s debate tomorrow and I don’t know the first thing about it. Can you brief me, sir? The proposition is, “That the Trade Unions were justified in supporting the Miners’ Federation in recent strike action’”.’

  David grinned. ‘You’re backing a lame horse, aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh, sure I am, sir,’ said McNaughton, ‘but why not? It’s a chance to take another crack at The Oppressors. You know the drill sir. Anyone heaving a bomb at Westminster is welcome in Ireland. I only volunteered for devilment, but now I’m stuck with it.’

  ‘Who’s opposing?’

  ‘Sanders, sir. He’s hot stuff, and does his homework.’

  ‘I’ll brief you,’ David said, ‘and it’s lucky you came to me. I was in London last week, and Sanders isn’t the only one who does his homework.’

  He gave McNaughton several lines of argument to pursue and when the boy had jotted them down he said, ‘er… would it be asking too much to get you to second, sir? We could pull the pants off ‘em, between us.’

  David had taken part in several Sixth Form debates but never on a controversial subject. He said, doubtfully, ‘Would that be fair on Sanders?’ and McNaughton replied, ‘Sure it would, sir. The seconder only has five minutes. All you need do is sum up.’

  There seemed no harm in it and secretly he relished an opportunity of speaking up for the miners.

  ‘Very well, then, but only in support of the arguments you put forward, so don’t go off at the tangent. You Irish have been doing that for centuries!’

  The debate was a cheerful, innocuous affair. Sanders, son of a Conservative candidate in a Liberal-held constituency, was Bamfylde’s most accomplished public speaker and had obviously had a briefing from his father. He trotted out all the old saws in reply to McNaughton’s passionate defence of the workers, loss of trade, breach of working contracts, readiness to put the nation in jeopardy for a shilling, and so on, but coming from a pleasant chap like Sanders the arguments sounded harmless and David saw them as no more than an exercise in schoolboy polemics. His own speech was brief and to the point. He stressed that the mining community was defenceless against the owners and that their work, vital to the nation, deserved a good working wage and better working conditions. The strike was the only weapon they had against exploitation. He or Paddy or both must have converted some among the audience. The motion was lost, certainly, but by the narrow margin of four votes and Paddy claimed this as a victory.

  The sequel was not slow in coming. The next day, entering class to take the Sixth on the Reform Bills of the eighteen-thirties, David found a newspaper cartoon pinned to the blackboard with a thumb tack. It was a particularly lurid one, depicting a leering Bolshevik fishing in British industrial waters, using a bag of bait ticketed ‘£400,000 Bolshevik subsidy’. The sea in the drawing was marked “British Coal Dispute”.

  It was the kind of prank that he, and every other master at Bamfylde (with the exception of Howarth and Carter) was expected to take in good part, but somehow, in his present mood, that was asking too much. He said, ‘Who owns this sheet of toilet paper? I’m not asking who put it there. Who owns it?’

  Sanders rose, looking a little apprehensive. ‘It was
mine, sir.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Yes, where? It’s a simple question isn’t it?’

  ‘My… er… my father sent it. With some other news-clippings. After I’d written home for material on the debate, sir.’

  Boyer rose from the back, looking, David thought, very glum. ‘Nothing personal, sir. Just a joke and we were all in on it, even the chaps who voted with you and McNaughton last night.’

  The flicker of anger that had stirred in him subsided but the ember glowed. He waited, getting himself in hand, before crumpling the cartoon and tossing it into the wastepaper basket. ‘Right. I don’t find it all that much of a joke but I suppose I’m expected to make allowances in the Sixth and I will. However, while we’re on the subject let’s jump a couple of generations from the Reform Bills and I’ll tell you something you might not know. As far as I’m concerned very few here do know, for I’ve never made a parade of it, and I wouldn’t now if you hadn’t sat up and begged for it. I’m a miner’s son. I was born and grew up in a Welsh mining community. I saw, at first hand, the kind of deal those chaps get, and have been getting, ever since the English moved in and made a midden out of their valleys. Most of them bring home fifty shillings a week for a five-and-a-half day week underground, where they might die at any moment. From a fall, from fire-damp, from flooding. There are no pithead baths in most of the pits. The absentee owners drawing royalties on seams thousands of feet below the surface are too damned miserly to install them. So the men wash in tin baths before the fire, scrubbed by their women folk. Think about that. Fifty shillings a week, for a man with a wife and family and it costs around four-ten a week to keep one of you fellows here for eight months of the year. But that isn’t all, not by a long chalk. When I was a kid younger than anyone here I went off to school one morning leaving behind a father and two brothers, working early shift – four a.m. to midday. When I got home that same night my father and brothers were dead. Their bodies were never recovered. Ewan, my younger brother was sixteen at the time. Now let’s get back to the syllabus.’