R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  If they had the relationship must have cooled, David had never been close to the man who took Ferguson’s place as French master. He was well up to his work, they said, but difficult to know, another who seemed unable to identify with Bamfylde, in the way the Old Guard had before and throughout David’s time. He had private means and drove a red sports car to and from his lodgings in the village. He was also reckoned a highbrow, on account of regular visits to town and Bristol where he patronised obscure productions in club theatres. Molyneux got along reasonably well with the new man and now confirmed as much, refusing to co-operate in any way. ‘Ridiculous gesture,’ he said, returning the petition. ‘Damned surprised at Carter going to these lengths, and even more surprised at you and the others abetting him. Kind of thing that belongs in the Lower Third, doesn’t it?’

  ‘We don’t think so. Carter has a point about the effect it might have on Monk’s career.’

  ‘Monk is Outram’s pigeon. He certainly isn’t mine. Try Howarth, and see what change you get from him.’

  But David went first to Irvine, where another shock awaited him. Irvine also refused to sign, on the grounds that Alcock would interpret his signature as a climb-down regarding the disputes between them concerning the amount of emphasis to be placed on games.

  ‘But that’s ridiculous,’ David argued. ‘This has damn all to do with games.’

  ‘Indirectly it has. I’ve stood up to him about free periods for training, and I mean to tackle him again when the cricket season opens. This would give him the edge on me and, in any case, what the devil has Carter ever done for any of us? He’s always had his eye on the main chance.’

  David left him and made his way up to Howarth’s study, where Howarth heard him out, his expression even bleaker than usual. He said, ‘Can’t understand why you’re trotting about the place pulling Carter’s chestnuts out of the fire. I realise you and he had signed articles, but Carter is still Carter, isn’t he?’

  ‘I don’t think he is,’ David said, voicing a persistent thought that had kept recurring to him since he quitted Carter’s study. ‘Something odd is happening to Carter. He seemed to me almost hysterical. He’s been brooding a lot about Alcock over the last two terms, mostly about Alcock taking house decisions out of his hands, but he’s not had a direct confrontation as I have. Or not until now.’

  ‘Let me see that silly petition again.’

  Howarth took it, adjusted his pince-nez, and read it very carefully. ‘Well, there’s a hint of hysteria here,’ he said, and then, shrewdly, ‘I hope to God it isn’t rubbing off on you, P.J.’

  ‘I’ll survive it,’ David said. ‘And survive Alcock too, I wouldn’t wonder. I suppose the truth is we all had it pretty soft under Algy. He was my sole experience of a head.’

  ‘He wasn’t mine, and there’s no tyranny like it if you happen to strike it unlucky.’ He pondered a moment. ‘I’ll sign the damned thing. Monk has potential, and who the devil am I to penalise a boy for smoking? If you denied me my forty a day they’d soon be calling for me in a plain van.’

  He took a pen and signed with a kind of snarl and David thanked him and withdrew. ‘What the devil is happening to us?’ he asked himself, moving down the steps and recrossing the quad to Outram’s. ‘In spite of occasional bickering we used to be a team. Now everybody’s pulling a different way.’

  4

  Carter’s hunch was correct. Within an hour of receiving the petition, signed by Carter, David, Barnaby, Acton, Gibbs and Howarth, Alcock relented, if that was the word. The reprieve was granted on two conditions, both, to Carter’s way of thinking, harsh. Monk would be allowed to sit the examination and finish the school year but there could be no question of his staying on after that. He was also required to submit himself to a public dressing-down in Big School that night and concerning this Carter had misgivings.

  ‘Even Alcock can’t beat a man in the Upper Fifth,’ he told David, and when David suggested that he might make an exception, Carter shook his head. ‘He’s against corporal punishment. I know that from something he said during our discussion.’

  ‘Well, that’s at least one thing we have in common,’ David said, ‘for you all know my views on it. It’s always seemed to me a miserable confession of failure on our part. So what else can Alcock do but jaw?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Carter said, gloomily. ‘We’ll soon find out.’

  They soon did. Immediately before prep bell all the boys, including the juniors, were crammed into Big School, and Alcock swept in with Monk in tow. There was just the faintest suggestion of a sigh when they appeared, prompted perhaps by the tacit implication that the old Stoker was seen as a heretic about to be burned at the stake. David noticed then that Alcock was carrying the Stoker’s fourth pipe, the usual monstrosity, with a curved stem and a bowl of impressive proportions, again carved in the likeness of a negro’s head. He held the ungainly thing between his finger and thumb, so that Howarth muttered, ‘Looks as if the dam’ fellow is handling a rattlesnake. Why the devil doesn’t he throw it in the wastepaper basket and be done with it?’ But Alcock had more ceremonial intentions. Standing well forward on the rostrum, with the abject Monk slightly behind him, he held the pipe aloft for everyone to see, and began: ‘I am probably correct in assuming everyone present knows why we are assembled. It is to draw your attention to a disgusting habit practised by the wretched boy you see beside me, a boy I happened to catch indulging himself on school premises, with this so-called symbol of manhood in his hand. You are aware, of course, that every school has strict rules against smoking. Apart from a health hazard, it is generally regarded as a grave infraction of discipline. Yet Monk saw fit – indeed, has seen fit on previous occasions – to set the rule at defiance.’

  He paused for a moment, an actor getting the feel of his audience. Then he continued, ‘It had been my intention to expel Monk forthwith. The fact that I had second thoughts is due, solely, to an urgent intercession on the part of his housemaster and some of that housemaster’s colleagues. All stressed the fact that I had issued no specific warning concerning the automatic penalty for smoking, adding that Monk was due to sit an important examination in June. Those reasons, although not strictly relevant, had validity. I was moved by them. I took them into account. However, you may take it as read that no extenuating circumstances will influence me in the future. Any boy caught smoking, or found in possession of a pipe, or cigars, or cigarettes, will be sent home within the hour, notwithstanding his age or the circumstances. In the meantime, however, in order to underline this example, I propose to destroy this implement in your presence,’ and to the amazement of everyone present, including Monk, he reached into the folds of his gown and produced a claw-hammer.

  David had the impression then that Alcock had quietly gone mad and was about to use his hammer on Monk as well as the pipe, but then his attention was deflected by a movement of the head’s right hand, as he laid the hammer aside, raised his left arm high above his head and snapped his fingers twice. At the signal, Potter, one of the junior kitchen staff, made a self-conscious entry carrying a tin tray, of the kind in daily use in the dining-hall. Setting it down on the desk he retreated wordlessly, stepping down from the rostrum and disappearing as unobtrusively as he had appeared. Alcock placed the pipe on the tray, picked up the hammer, tried it for balance, and then delivered his first shattering blow on the bowl, smashing it so effectively that fragments shot across the dais and ricocheted from the panelling. Five other blows followed until the pipe was in small splinters, the clang of each impact shattering the silence of the big room. As the final clang died away a loud buzz of exclamation arose and under its cover David murmured, ‘He’s dotty! He must be…!’ but Howarth said, ‘Not in the least. In his way he’s an artist. It will add flavour to every cigarette I light from here on…’ But by then Alcock was calling sharply for silence and at once a sense of anti-climax descended on them all. From the rear of the big room somebody was heard to smother a laugh and the sound w
as so distinct that everyone’s head turned, trying to identify the culprit Alcock said, crisply, but still without raising his voice, ‘Will the boy who finds this amusing step forward?’ and there was a stir among the two ranks representing the Sixth as Sax Hoskins moved out into the central aisle and stood there, nearly six feet in height and not, David would have said, as shamefaced as he should have been.

  ‘You, Hoskins?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Would you mind telling us all what prompted you to laugh?’

  ‘I… er… couldn’t help it, sir.’

  ‘I see. You couldn’t help it. That is all you have to say?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. You’re a prefect, I believe.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Next term, under normal circumstances, you would have become head boy of the school?’

  ‘Well… yes, sir.’

  ‘You are no longer a prefect, Hoskins. Prefects are expected to co-operate with the headmaster in the maintenance of discipline. That is all. You may dismiss.’

  They rose as Alcock descended the two steps to floor level and swept out. There was no point in anybody making the least attempt to stifle the loud buzz that followed his exit. Everyone, masters as well as boys, contributed to it, and the only two present who had nothing to say were Carter and Monk. The first sat beside the radiator looking stunned. The other moved closer to the desk and looked down at the small heap of debris in the tray. The rest of the staff moved out in a body, turning, by common consent, into the quad where Maxton, the third official bell-ringer David could recall, was already swinging his handbell for prep.

  Barnaby said, ‘I like to think we have just witnessed the compulsive act of a throwback. That was almost an exact reproduction of a medieval book-burning, the kind of thing Tyndale might have been called upon to witness before being burned at the stake. Interesting, don’t you think?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ snarled Rapper Gibbs. ‘It was the silliest piece of cheap melodrama I’ve ever had to witness. The man is a complete ass.’

  ‘Howarth doesn’t agree,’ David said. ‘You don’t, do you, Howarth?’

  ‘Not entirely,’ said Howarth, ostentatiously lighting a Gold Flake, and inhaling deeply. ‘You don’t have to like him in order to concede his originality.’

  But Gibbs had drifted off, and Barnaby began to elaborate his throwback theory, so David turned back towards Big School and was just in time to see Monk cross the quad with Carter. The housemaster’s gait was jerky and in the half-light it looked almost as if Monk was assisting him. He hurried across and caught them as they were mounting the steps to Outram’s and Monk, turning aside, said, ‘Mr Carter told me, sir. I’d like to say thank you, if I may.’

  ‘It was your housemaster’s idea, Monk. I didn’t have much confidence in it.’ And then, ‘For God’s sake, man, stay well clear of the head until the end of next term. I wouldn’t like to see that little scene repeated would you?’

  ‘No sir,’ said the Stoker, seriously, ‘it was a very good pipe, sir,’ and David felt a tide of profound irritation rising in him, not merely with Alcock but with youth and youth’s ability to slough off emotional involvement in all manner of things, not merely an idiotic pipe-smashing ceremony but the stupidity of the entire human race. It was a very disquieting sensation, carrying him all the way back to a time when boys not much older than Monk were exchanging facetious jokes within minutes of walking into a curtain of shell-fire. He said, curtly, ‘Cut off, Monk, and try and stay out of trouble,’ and as the boy withdrew he glanced through the open door of Outram’s, wondering whether he should go in and console Carter. He decided against it. The episode was finished and already, he supposed, absorbed into Bamfylde legend, to be passed from generation to generation until it became apocryphal with Alcock portrayed as a mountebank, chasing Monk up and down Big School with a hammer in one hand and a gaudy pipe in the other.

  He climbed the stairs to his own quarters, wondering how Grace would take the summary demotion of Hoskins, perhaps the only one among them with a true sense of proportion, and was not surprised to see Sax awaiting him on the threshold, holding a record in its cardboard sleeve. Sax said, cheerily, ‘Evening, sir. I was on the list as duty perk to take prep, but as I’m reduced to ranks that’ll be out, won’t it? The head does like us to keep to the letter of the law, doesn’t he?’

  ‘I believe he does, Hoskins,’ David said, and suddenly felt immensely grateful to the boy. He thought, ‘Maybe we can all learn something from him,’ and said, ‘Is that a record for Grace?’

  ‘Yes, sir, came this morning by post. A peaches and creamy number, sir – “Carolina Moon”. Good rhythm, tho’. Harry Roy’s orchestra, playing “Button up your Overcoat” on the reverse side. Would you give it to her, sir?’

  ‘Give it to her yourself,’ he heard himself say, ‘we all need a bit of cheering up, Sax.’ And then, as they went in, he called to Grace that Hoskins was here. ‘Did anyone else laugh, Sax?’

  ‘No, sir. They were all too concerned for poor old Stoker. I think it rattled ‘em a little, sir.’

  ‘It obviously didn’t rattle you.’

  ‘No, sir. To be honest, it just struck me as… well… the funniest thing I had ever seen happen here. I mean, walloping away at poor old Stoker’s pipe with a hammer, and that bit of stage-dressing – Potter coming in bang on cue, with the tray. I don’t mind about the demotion, sir. In a way it was worth it. I mean, you could wait around a long time before you saw anything as funny as that.’

  The near-despair he had experienced a few minutes ago turned itself inside out, so that now he saw youth’s resilience as a miraculous restorative, capable of reducing everything to a laugh. He thought, ‘That’s how it’s been from the very beginning, since the day I first came here, looking and feeling a total wreck. Self-pity was out from the moment Algy collared that boy on the way in from the playing fields… Who was it again? I remember, Daffy Jones, with news of a last-minute recovery by Nicolson’s. And then Nipper Shawe appeared, swinging that bell, and I felt… renewed somehow. I hope to God that’s how it’ll always be, with someone like Sax Hoskins around to remind us that nothing matters much. Except the ability to laugh at ourselves now and again.’

  Grace had dashed out of her room, welcoming an opportunity to abandon her homework, and in a moment they had the record turning. Sax was right about ‘Carolina Moon’. It was a peaches and creamy number, but soothing to the nerves in an odd sort of way. He smiled across at them and went into his study, closing the door on Alcock and all his works.

  Two

  * * *

  1

  HE SAW IT, THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER AND AUTUMN OF that year, as a cross-country ride on a half-broken mount, a succession of jolts, swerves, slitherings and punishing jog-trots, interspersed, every now and again, with a head-on collision, incidents like the lavatory notice row, and the last-minute reprieve of Stoker Monk.

  Looking back on his ten years under Algy, his life seemed, in retrospect, to have been unbelievably smooth, even allowing for occasions like the Havelock’s dormitory fire, the Carter feud, Winterbourne’s disappearance, and his own personal tragedy. Now, with the staff divided and distrustful, the boys bored and bemused, and everyone isolated from the methods and policies Alcock adopted, he was more often out of the saddle than in it, usually, he would have said, just about holding on in hope that some dramatic improvement was around the corner. And yet, for all his misgivings, he never thought seriously of throwing in the sponge and leaving Bamfylde to run itself into the ground.

  The summer up here had always been especially welcome after the frost, wind and rain of the Lent term. Year after year the weather was predictable in May and June, although it sometimes deteriorated towards the end of the term. It seemed settled enough now, after their reassembly in late April, and he made a resolve to enjoy it in spite of Alcock, immersing himself in his day-to-day schedule, and dividing his spa
re time between work on ‘The Royal Tigress’, and excursions beyond the school boundaries, where he could put the school out of mind.

  But then, confronting him in much the same way as the two previous eruptions, the Hislop crisis loomed up and within a few weeks of that the certainty of Carter’s withdrawal and almost total isolation and after that towards the end of the succeeding Michaelmas term, an uncompromising declaration of war, that could only end in outright victory for one man or the other.

  Hislop was the leader of The Lump, a cadre now trapped in that traditional repository of rascals, the Lower Fourth, where one always looked for the originals and (providing one was lucky and patient) promise of better things to come once the natural leaders had moved to the Fifth. Boyer, Winterbourne and Sax Hoskins had been of this ilk, incorrigible at fifteen and sixteen, but worth their weight in gold once they had sobered down and been given responsibility.

  Hislop was a boy who could go one way or the other; towards a modest fulfilment, or to perdition, like Ruby Bickford, now, it was said, spending his father’s money in the Argentine, and living the life of Old Reilly according to ill-spelled letters to former contemporaries.

  Hislop’s father was a publican, a heavy, florid man, with a sharp little wife, said to bully him unmercifully. Hislop got up to all the usual pranks, including the placing of a plaster cast of Aphrodite in Barnaby’s bed when he was absent, then spreading a rumour that there was a corpse on the premises. He had averaged, in Algy’s time, about one hiding a week, but he never minded that, viewing authority, and authority’s visitations, much as the old lag regards arrest and an occasional stretch in gaol. It was this attitude in mind, of which David and other old hands were well aware, that made his admission so surprising. One would have thought that, given the circumstances, he would have swallowed his loss, and gone about his business, without taking a course that was bound to lead to one hell of a row.