R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  ‘Now some of you might think that is a very damp squib to conclude the regular fireworks display we have had here tonight, with so many kind speeches, and the giving of such splendid farewell gifts, but it isn’t, you know. It’s very relevant, to me at any rate, relevant to what we’ve all been engaged in up here on the moor all these years. For Chuff Rodgers, bless his thick skull, never won a prize or a race in his life. Neither did he find time to do the only thing he was equipped to do – raise a family. He was killed at First Ypres, but I still remember him. Rather better than I remember Petherick. As a matter of fact, when I came across his name this morning, I thought of him as one of our outstanding successes.’

  He may have intended saying more but nobody gave him the chance. After a dithering moment he sat down and reached for the beaker of water. Because the story was so typical of Algy it touched an emotional spring in his audience that could only find surface in applause of the magnitude no one had ever heard in the Big Hall. David, joining in, forgot to notice if the armour of Alcock’s implacability had been dented but then, suddenly remembering him, he glanced that way again, and was momentarily certain that Chuff Rodgers’s handkerchief had achieved what all Algy’s jokes and nudges had failed to achieve. Very deliberately Alcock unfolded his arms, uncrossed his legs and bent towards the floor. It was only when he straightened up that David realised he had been fooled. Alcock’s head came up like a stork’s, neatly and tidily, as he replaced the table napkin that had fallen when Algy lifted the water beaker. His long fingers busied themselves straightening the creases and then, as he refolded his arms, his expressionless eyes resumed their neutral scrutiny of the middle distance.

  David thought, with an inward qualm; ‘Carter was right. He’ll never identify,’ and wondered what the near future had in store for everyone cheering the tubby little man in the centre of the stage.

  2

  Before half-term he had acquired a variety of nicknames. It was held at Bamfylde that a nickname, even when the bestowal was derisory, none the less implied absorption into the family. Alcock was the exception to this rule. The very nature of his nicknames signified his separateness, rare even for an instant failure, or a boy or master who had never rated a nickname.

  Howarth, the one member of the staff who did not appear to be rattled by the man’s remoteness, called him The Mandarin. Barnaby, paying his usual tribute to the classics, called him The Stoic. ‘A Stoic of the woods, a man without a tear,’ he quoted, and there was something stoical about Alcock’s detachment, as though he had set himself a task that absorbed the last dregs of his nervous energy, leaving absolutely nothing to spare on the units of the school as people rather than pieces of a jigsaw puzzle to be contemplated from above and ultimately, one hoped, allotted their proper place in his neat, tidy mind. Always, they came to realise, his mind. Never his heart, providing he had one under the trim alpaca waistcoats he wore.

  He had been widowed, it was said, many years ago in Africa, but no one could be sure of this or, indeed, of anything out of his past. Alcock’s personal life was double-padlocked against them all. His degrees, which were impressive, and his educational achievements in the Dominions, were there for all to see. Beyond this nothing. Nothing at all, so that communication with him, from the first day of his first term, was reduced to a kind of sign language. ‘Of the kind,’ jested Barnaby, ‘that a cautious trader might use to barter with a native despot of unbelievable taciturnity.’

  Grudgingly, as the weeks passed, they conceded his few good points. Under him, in a matter of days, the administrative machinery of the school achieved the smoothness and impersonality of a heavy turbine engine, tended by a dedicated engineer, who had identified every nut, bolt and piston of its composition. He had the knack, also, of maintaining an awed and hushed discipline, without raising his voice, and he achieved this with his eyes, quite expressionless unless he had occasion to stare anybody down. When this happened, as it frequently did, the eyes were those of a man fanatically involved in himself. Steady, penetrating and terribly chilling. His face, if one happened to study it without meeting his gaze, was at odds with his personality, in that it was slightly puckish, with deep creases on either side of the prim, contained mouth, topped by a clipped moustache. But instead of softening his eyes the creases had the reverse effect, converting what might have been sardonic humour into an icy impatience, so that one was left with the impression that Alcock believed himself to be living in a world peopled exclusively by fools of one kind or another.

  His administrative expertise was effortless, that of a Trappist monk with a high spiritual reputation. He seemed to solve day-to- day problems without giving them a fleeting thought, but although his decisions were effective, inasmuch as the problem was solved on the spot, there was about these snap decisions the neutrality of a mathematical equation. One had a feeling that all they needed in the way of a signature were the letters ‘Q.E.D.’.

  This first became apparent in his marginal involvement in games. It seemed that he approved games, always providing that they were pursued as a means of exercising bodies. No more and no less, deserving no more prominence in the curriculum than, say, a bi weekly hour of Swedish drill. His first time-table was a masterpiece of precision, with not a minute of anyone’s day wasted. His review of the school diet and reorganisation of the kitchens produced startling gastronomic improvements, welcomed alike by staff and boys, who had muddled along for years on lumpy porridge, burned toast, tough beef, doubtful stews, semolina puddings and strips of treacle tart that the boys called dry-dock wedges. Under Alcock even the fabric of the old place took heart. Surfaces, dull and scarred for a generation, began to glow, and the sun found its way into long-forgotten corners. Scuffed coconut matting was banished from the central aisles of the dormitories, replaced with fibrous material that looked exactly like congealed oatmeal. The boys soon found a name for it, calling it ‘Donkey’s Breakfast’. Out-of-the-way windows, some of which had not seen a leather in months, lost their ribald slogans, written in ancient dust, and down at the church scores of laboriously carved initials disappeared overnight under thick coats of pew varnish, the smell of which was capable of materialising the new headmaster the moment a head bowed in prayer.

  For that was Alcock’s way. He was never once present as the actual agent of these changes and transformations. Nobody ever saw him perform or initiate them. They simply happened, and whenever they did one or other of the senses proclaimed that Alcock had been there. Alcock had heard, seen and decreed.

  He took the modern Sixth for advanced maths and here, it was claimed, he occasionally emerged, if fleetingly, as a man rather than a force, using symbols as a lesser mortal might use a quotation, or a piece of apparatus in the laboratory. But once the bell had clanged he withdrew into himself before he had so much as stepped down from the dais and they were left with the familiar enigmas; who was he, and why? What secret forces kept his batteries charged? What did he think of them as people and of Bamfylde as an institution? Was he dismayed or satisfied with his results so far? Was his withdrawal due to a terrible shyness, or was it a personal preference? Did he like the job or did he regard it as a penance, stoically performed? Nobody knew the answer to any one of these questions.

  Here and there, as the term unrolled, he left a clue, as in the case of his silent assault upon the sanitary system, and the clue indicated that he was a fastidious man who had been appalled (justifiably, some thought) by prevailing conditions down at the Bog.

  Nothing effective had ever been done about the Bog. Under Algy, as under his predecessor, it had remained medieval until, presumably, Alcock had stumbled upon it by chance, at once summoning an army of plumbers who transformed it overnight. Under its heavy coats of whitewash, and sporting its shining array of copper cisterns and pipes, it suddenly assumed the aspect of a twentieth-century privy in a small, well-administered township. There was no question now of flushing fugitive new boys into the open by the time-honoured ruse of a ‘fireship�
��, that is to say, a bunched-up newspaper, set alight and launched downstream. The cubicle partitions were raised by more than a foot and, as was inevitable, all the entertainment value of the walls disappeared under the whitewash. It was now a sterile, featureless place, and even the sanitary-minded regretted its passing.

  It was the transformation of the Bog that brought about David’s first brush with the new man, touching off a series of smouldering rows that had the effect of changing the system by which David had measured time over the last decade.

  In Algy’s day every season had a focal point, some of them disagreeable, but a majority associated with sparkle of some kind. Now this was changed utterly. Weeks merged into one another, starred only with head-on collisions, and he could never be sure when one of these confrontations would occur, or even how some of them began. They were bracketed, in his mind, as a series of ‘times’. The Time of the Missing Edict. The Time of ‘Stoker’ Monk’s Pipe. The Time of the Stoic’s Statute of Limitations, and so on, a long period of ding-dong strife, ending in an eruption that tested his staying power to the utmost, and set him examining and re-examining all the underlying reasons for withholding his resignation.

  The very first of these clashes stemmed directly from the facelift at the bog. As usual, it came out of an indifferent sky.

  The boys, they learned in the common room, had yet another nickname for the new head, a tag that puzzled everyone, even Barnaby, mintmaster of nicknames. They called him ‘Noble’, and the word was so much at odds with Alcock’s image that the staff pondered its origins unceasingly, Barnaby claiming that it cost him sleep. Questions in the form of hints produced no satisfactory answers from the boys. The boldest evaded the query, the timid declared it was outside their experience. David stumbled on the answer one lunch-hour when, on his way up to the pavilion, he popped into the Bog when all its official patrons were in Big Hall.

  The first thing that attracted his attention, aside from the transformation, was a large official notice, presumably prepared by the headmaster’s secretary, Miss Rowlandson, for it was professionally typed on foolscap and pasted on the angle of the wall sub-dividing the building into two unequal halves. It was a typical Alcockian decree. Boys would refrain from clogging the drain with refuse. Every effort would be made to trace culprits who persisted in this disgusting practice, and so on, and David glanced down it until his eye stopped at a pencilled addendum to the typed surname under the signature. Someone had printed, in bold capitals, ‘AND NO BALLS’, after the word ‘ALCOCK’, so that it was clear how the nickname had originated. It was obviously a codeword for the addendum. He removed the notice and hastened to put Barnaby out of his misery.

  Barnaby was very impressed. ‘It shows a certain dignity, don’t you think? It makes its point, while masking its basic vulgarity. There’s logic in it too.’

  ‘Logic?’

  ‘Yes. I imagine they think of him as a eunuch. I’m not suggesting he is, of course, but you might look for that terrible separateness in someone who has been castrated, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Are you implying that Alcock is psychologically frustrated, and that accounts for his detachment?’

  ‘How do we know? What do any of us know of his childhood, boyhood or ancestry for that matter?’

  ‘Freudian cock,’ David said, ‘and you know it, Barnaby. You’re just playing with words.’

  ‘But of course,’ replied Barnaby, swiftly. ‘Do I ever do anything else?’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ growled David, ‘and apart from Carter – of all people – no one here seems alive to what might happen to us all under that bloody cipher.’

  ‘Cipher? Well, that fits too, but I see him more as an eccentric, an eccentric with a strange knack of getting things done, P.J.’

  ‘Howarth made the same point but it doesn’t console me.’ He tore the notice into small pieces and dropped them into Barnaby’s wastepaper basket. ‘Fine. He gets things done. The grub improves. The Bog is rebuilt. The church pews are revarnished. But what’s happening to the tone of the place? The real Bamfylde, Algy’s Bamfylde? This used to be a lively, noisy, happy school. Alcock has subdued it in a matter of weeks. What might he do in a year or two, sitting up there on his bloody private Olympus? All right, maybe Carter and I are especially anti because we were passed over, but I for one never expected to land that job. Damn it, Barnaby, you’re a pretty discerning chap most times. Can’t you sense a creeping paralysis?’

  ‘I can smell dust raised by a brisk new broom. I wouldn’t put it higher than that. And, even if you’re right, institutions of this kind aren’t frozen. They like to prattle about tradition but change is at work all the time, and the pace has speeded up appreciably since the war. You’ll join me for coffee, I hope?’

  ‘Not today, thanks,’ David said, for the man’s neutrality irritated him, equating, as it did, with Howarth’s on the same topic. Only two days previously he had had an almost identical discussion with Howarth, and had been surprised to discover that Howarth had drawn up a balance sheet as regards the new man’s innovations, deciding that Alcock emerged with a small credit balance. He had said something else, too, doubtless aimed at dispelling David’s misgivings. ‘Why worry? He’ll spend himself in a term or two. That kind of chap always does. Bamfylde isn’t an old foundation, as schools go in Britain, but it’s old enough to slow his gallop,’ and when David denied this Howarth said, spitefully, ‘Then go and mull it over with Carter, your new friend. You and he are in cahoots now.’

  It was an overt display of jealousy on Howarth’s part. A little of the cordiality that had developed between them during his feud with the Outram housemaster had been dissipated by the armistice and this retort proved that Howarth was no more proof against the occupational hazard of schoolmasters than the next man. As for the feud, it struck him as absurd that he could have maintained it for so long, for now they were on the best of terms, drawn together less by their shared failure on the day Alcock was appointed, than by a common distrust of the new man and his methods. Twenty-four hours later David had a chance to assess Alcock’s uncanny grasp of the minutiae of school life.

  When the boys assembled by houses after morning school, preparatory to dispersal to Big Hall for their midday meal, the head emerged from his quarters through the door opening on the quad and took over the parade from Heffling, the duty prefect. He said, in his quiet, carrying voice, ‘Before you disperse – a small matter, but one I require to be cleared up before lights out. A day or so ago I caused a notice to be posted in the latrines, regarding the disposal of litter. This notice has been removed by some unauthorised person. I require whoever removed it to return it, with a written apology. He will be admonished, no more. If he has insufficient moral courage he may return it to me anonymously. That is all. Carry on, Heffling.’

  Heffling, somewhat taken aback by the terms of the ultimatum, called the parade to attention, and dismissed it. The boys streamed off into the corridor and over them, like a swarm of bees, buzzed a cloud of speculative guesses. For here was an unusual use of the traditional code of honour that was supposed to apply to a situation of this kind. It had, in effect, been turned inside out, for while, from time to time, appeals for culprits to own up and face the consequences had been made by authority, it was only resorted to in cases of grave breaches of discipline, usually involving clashes with outside personnel, farmers, tradesmen and the like. Judy Cordwainer, David recalled, had been a great believer in extracting confessions by a threat of collective punishment, but Algy rarely employed the device. David could even recall what he had once said of it: ‘Germanic! Don’t care for it. Has the smack of the hostage system, and it’s damned lazy too. Our job to catch the burglars, without holding a pistol to their wives and families.’

  Forty-eight hours passed before Alcock launched his second ultimatum, appearing through the same door at the same moment in the school day. This time Winterbourne was duty prefect, and David could have sworn he winked in the direction of th
e knot of housemasters, waiting, as by custom, for parade dismissal before going into their own lunch.

  Alcock said, in the same reasonable tone, ‘Er… pertaining to that missing notice. No one has come forward. No one has returned the document anonymously. I have therefore no alternative but to take steps that will involve the innocent. Unless that notice reaches me by lights out today Saturday’s half-term holiday will be cancelled.’

  There was an involuntary buzz at this, loud enough to cause Alcock to call for silence, before handing the parade back to Winterbourne. Barnaby said, as they passed through Fifth Form arch, ‘Here’s a how-de-do, P.J. What now, I wonder? Do you keep mum, and inflict injustice on the least of us, or volunteer for six of the best from the Noble Stoic?’ but David, profoundly irritated, derived no compensating humour from the situation. ‘All that, over a damned little warning! Doesn’t that highlight the idiot’s inability to communicate? Algy would have made a joke about it, posted another notice, and threatened the hide of the next boy who removed it.’