R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  Some of the older men, pillars of the local constituency parties since pre-war days, were already toying with Communism, and a majority of the youngsters were casting around for Communist candidates, swearing that nothing would improve until capitalism was confronted with the demand of a majority to wrest power from the hands of the few.

  He was able, nowadays, to regard pit politics objectively, and it struck him at once that the miners were being unfair to men like MacDonald, Snowden and Jimmy Thomas, the jovial ex-railwayman. Against every forecast, and with the minimum funds at their disposal, they had emerged from the last general election as the majority party. It seemed to David uncharacteristic of the long-suffering Welsh to expect an instant solution of tormented domestic problems in the face of international depression. Local Labour stalwarts were fighting back, however, and he attended one of their meetings, addressed by a fiery Doncaster speaker, called Routledge, whose co-speaker was a young woman, a lucid platform speaker and clearly a person of education. Enquiries established that she was an Economics graduate, with an Honours degree gained in Manchester.

  She received a good, if ironic hand from the men when she sat down, after talking for twenty minutes on the Labour government’s present difficulties, and when the meeting dissolved into a dozen argumentative groups, and tea was served by the women workers, Ewart, the husband of his sister Gwynneth, offered to introduce him. Routledge, the Doncaster man, had spoken at previous meetings in the area, and Ewart knew him well. The girl, he said, was travelling about to gain experience for a bid at the next election, and her name was Forster, Christine Forster, a Yorkshire lass well in with the party executive. ‘Not that I give her a dog’s chance wherever she stands,’ Edward added. ‘She’s sharp enough, and can talk the hind legs off a donkey, but why waste deposits on a lass at places where even a man like Routledge couldn’t dent the Tory majority?’

  He introduced Davy, using the reverent voice the uneducated miner habitually reserves for someone wearing an educational halo. ‘My wife’s brother, Davy Powlett-Jones – schoolmaster he is, at a big college, in England. But he hasn’t forgotten where he comes from, have you, boyo?’ After which, slapping David’s shoulder, moved off and joined the group surrounding Routledge.

  Ewart’s implied dismissal of her was not lost upon Miss Forster, who smiled and said, ‘Your brother-in-law is very proud of you, Mr Powlett-Jones, but he doesn’t give a slice of streaky bacon for my chance of getting elected. Neither does anyone else in the Valleys.’

  She looked far more personable down here on floor level, away from the yellow glare of the footlight bulbs. She had thick brown hair, lighter than Beth’s, sharp green eyes and an exceptionally clear complexion, as fresh and pleasing as a flower. She had a long, thinnish nose, that some would have said spoiled her looks, but David decided suited her figure, the exact opposite to Beth’s figure, he found himself thinking, with no well-defined curves but long, elegant legs. Her accent was what these people would call ‘posh’, but he could detect a trace of Yorkshire in the broad vowels and clipped consonants. She seemed to know what she was about, and had come to terms with the prejudice against all women candidates among constituency workers.

  She said, politely, ‘A college, he said. What kind of college, Mr Powlett-Jones?’ and he replied, smiling, ‘Every school bar a red brick council school is a “college” to Ewart. He has the Celt’s veneration of all educational establishments. My place isn’t much to write home about, a small public school, called Bamfylde.’

  ‘Bamfylde? In North Devon?’

  ‘Why, yes. You’ve actually heard of it?’

  ‘Heard of it? I’ve visited it! One Sports Day, several years ago, when I was still at school myself. One of my cousins went there. His name was Ridgeway, my mother’s sister’s eldest boy.’

  ‘The Ridgeway who was there in 1925. A tall boy? A first-class miler?’

  ‘He did win the mile that year.’

  ‘But of course I know him. He was head boy of my house, just before I took over. He put up a first-rate show the night we had a bad fire, and helped me get the boys out. I’m delighted to meet you, Miss Forster. How and where is he? I don’t think I’ve had word of him since he left. That would be in 1926,’ and as he spoke he realised why the girl’s strong features had seemed familiar as she had advanced downstage to speak. With so many faces imprinted in the memory, however, it was difficult to compare one with another when a coincidence like this occurred. Now that he had a chance to look at her closely he could see a resemblance to Ridgeway’s bone structure, particularly as regards the nose and jaw.

  ‘I believe he’s in tea-planting in Malaya,’ she said, ‘but I can’t be sure. We’ve lost touch lately. All the other members of the family are true-blue Tories, so I’m cut off from family chit-chat. A case of “Turn-Christine’s-face-to-the-wall”, you could say.’

  He laughed, liking her wry sense of humour, and remembering how it would have appealed to Beth. Whenever he met a young woman he caught himself comparing her to Beth, and measuring her by Beth’s standards. It was morbid, he supposed, after four-and-a-half years, but there it was, an instinctive reflex that time was transforming into a habit.

  He said, offering her sugar, ‘I think it’s encouraging, a person like you, with a good degree, coming over to us,’ but she replied, ‘Nonsense! No one who thinks and observes, could do anything else in present circumstances. The majority of my University set vote Labour, and two are nursing constituencies in the North. I took my time waking up to what was going on. Five years ago I was a snooty little bitch from a nouveau riche family, who regarded myself as a cut above most folk.’

  ‘I can’t believe it, but what changed you?’

  ‘The General Strike. That was in my second year at Manchester and Manchester is a good place to see what goes on below stairs. Almost as good as here. The textile industry up there is in a terrible way, and unemployment is even higher than in the north-east. But I suppose Bamfylde is true blue, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is,’ he admitted, cheerfully, ‘but I’m chipping away at it. My subject is history and that gives me an advantage.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Well, think of the ammunition at my disposal. The Peasants’ Revolt, the Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, the Chartists. Not to mention the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Peterloo and the Mutiny at the Nore. What chance does a Tory philosophy stand among young animals who spend their entire lives looking for ways to overthrow authority?’

  ‘Do you know, Mr Powlett-Jones,’ she said, ‘you’re putting heart into me. I can’t recall meeting a schoolmaster of your type. Certainly not one from “an English gents’ college”. Look, I’m speaking at an afternoon rally in Newport, on Saturday. Could I persuade you to attend, and sit in the front row? I should like one sympathetic face in a dozen rows of blanks.’

  He said that he would come gladly and meant it. Her enthusiasm reminded him vividly of Beth when she was riding a hobby-horse, but when, later, he told Ewart of his promise, the miner echoed Christine Forster’s own doubts about her ability to help Labour in a way beyond service behind a tea-urn, or selling raffle tickets.

  ‘Pretty little thing, she is, and means well, I daresay. But women and politics don’t mix, Davyboy. No woman elector will cotton on to a lass, in the way she will to a pair o’ breeks. Besides, folk in the Valleys don’t trust anyone outside their own class. If she was a scholarship lass she might cut some ice but she’s not. According to Routledge her folk are stinking rich, boy. Doesn’t add up, to my mind.’

  ‘That’s the most prejudiced summing up I’ve ever heard in these parts, Ewart, and that’s saying a hell of a lot. She’s got a quick brain and the party ought to be able to use young women with her qualifications, who cross the floor on account of deep, personal convictions!’ But Ewart only grinned at David’s sister, Gwynneth, saying, ‘Sounds like Davy’s started looking for consolation in his old age. She’s bonnie enough, I’ll grant you, but too s
kinny for my taste,’ and to illustrate his preference he slid a great horny hand over his wife’s behind. ‘What did you think of Routledge?’

  ‘Not much. He’s too platform-conscious. It was like listening to someone reading from a radical pamphlet and an out-of-date one at that. It’s time you chaps dropped your nineteenth-century slogans and started persuading the floating voter that a Socialist isn’t a home-grown Bolshie. I’ll go over to Newport and tell you what line they’re taking in a city. I hope it’s a bit more sophisticated than here.’

  He found a seat in the middle of a row of empty chairs in the fifth row, although even here he was well exposed, for the meeting, so close to Christmas, was thinly attended and that by the converted, judging from the ritual ‘hear-hears!’ every time a speaker made a point.

  He found himself studying Christine Forster objectively, not merely as a speaker, or even as prospective Labour candidate, but as an attractive woman, with a pair of shapely legs that tended to get between her and her theme. When the speeches were finished he joined her in the committee room behind the stage and, without giving the invitation a previous thought, ‘Why don’t we go in search of something stiffer than stewed tea? Would you care for a drink before you catch the train to Cardiff?’

  ‘I certainly would,’ she said, without hesitation, ‘but I’m not much of a drinker. Two ports and lemon have me giggling. Three are enough to start me singing “The Red Flag” solo.’

  ‘Try beer or shandy,’ he said, and she told him, smiling, that she wouldn’t, for the smell of beer made her sick. ‘It must be an ancestral hangover,’ she said, ‘I come from a long line of chapel teetotallers. Even port, in our house, was always called “medicinal”, so I came to that in stages.’

  She arranged to meet Routledge and other speakers at the station at seven o’clock, and they found a pub called the Prince of Wales that looked less seedy than its neighbours. He ordered port and lemon for her and gin and tonic for himself, and they carried the drinks over to a table under the frosted window of the saloon bar. She was the only woman present and one or two early drinkers gave her disapproving glances.

  ‘I’m sure they take me for a tart chatting up a client,’ she said. ‘Wales has that much in common with the North. Women aren’t any more welcome in the pubs than they are in the pulpits.’

  ‘Tell me a bit more about the North,’ he said, ‘your area particularly. I’ve never been there, except to pass through in my army days.’

  ‘You were in the war? You were old enough?’

  ‘Don’t I look it?’

  ‘No, you don’t, David. You mean, you actually fought in that awful business?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but as we’ve only an hour I don’t intend boring you with trench stories. Tell me about Sheffield. That’s where you come from isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s where I was born, but my people moved out when I was fifteen. Father could afford to by then. He cleaned up during the war, though we were terrace-house before that. He had a tiny foundry, employing two men, in 1914. By 1917 he had seventy on the pay-roll and was turning out shell-casings at about a hundred pounds a shift. Profit, I mean. It still sticks in my gullet.’

  ‘I don’t see why it should. Somebody had to make shells to throw back at Jerry.’

  ‘Not at that price. It’s odd, really, I never thought of myself as lucky in those days, just special, in the way second-generation Victorians thought of themselves if their fathers made a pot of money in a mill or a factory. It never occurred to me that, if the cards had fallen differently, I would have been one of those kids whose fathers were killed out there, and whose mothers were left to bring them up on a pittance. When I did realise it, I felt guilty. I even used to tell girls at school my father “worked for the government”, implying that he was in the Foreign Office, or something of that kind. Later I decided to do something to… well, pay back if you like, using the education his money had provided to even things out a bit. It sounds frightfully smug put like that but I don’t know how else to put it. As a matter of fact, I’ve never admitted that much to anyone else.’

  It was good, he thought, to hear her say that. Like Christine Forster, at this stage of his life, he was in need of encouragement and somehow she did encourage him. He said, ‘I don’t think it’s smug. Honest, maybe, and the kind of thinking that’s rare these days. What are your plans now?’

  ‘I’m on the roster for a candidature, but that doesn’t mean much. The party needs candidates, God knows, but a constituency would have to be pretty hard up to choose a woman of twenty-six. I’ve been on a short-list once or twice, and there’s another in the offing, but I haven’t much hope of being selected ahead of an eligible male. Deaf and dumb he’d stand a better chance than me.’

  ‘Now it’s you who are letting prejudice take over. The party will soon get around to shedding its sex bias. It’ll have to, to ride out the weather we’re headed into.’

  She said, hesitantly, ‘There’s another thing.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Technically I’m a Roman. I’m married, you see. Separated from my husband, but still married. And because he’s R.C. likely to stay that way.’

  He could think of no reason why this totally unexpected piece of information should hit him like an umbrella handle, jabbed in his stomach, but it did, and the fact that it did made him so nervous that he stuttered.

  ‘M-m-m-married! But when? …I mean, you only got your degree a year or so back, didn’t you?’

  ‘I met Rowley at University. He was a don, frightfully brainy, and the youngest member of the faculty at the time. I imagined I was in love. I probably was and still might be if he hadn’t been the person he was, and I hadn’t been the person I was; or became. Oh, I’m not blaming him. He was born a Roman, and their values are different from ours. Not better or worse, just different. It was a disaster almost from the beginning.’ She stopped, swallowed what was left of her port, and said, ‘I’ll risk another, if you want me to go on.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘I’d like to. It’s too long since I talked about it to anyone.’

  He bought her another drink and returned to the table. She was applying lipstick with the aid of a tiny handbag mirror and he found himself noting the movements of the long, supple fingers shaping the cupid’s bow. Her hands were as elegant as her legs, with finely tapered fingers, and perfectly formed fingernails. He also noticed, for the first time, her backward-curving thumb, an invariable sign, in his experience, of a strongly independent nature.

  ‘Rowley was thirty-three when I met him. He was what my mother would have called “gentry”, before she began to think of herself as belonging in the same class and moved to Harrogate. That, in a Yorkshire terrace-house, means class. Yorkshire folk aren’t taken in by second, or even third-generation wealth. His father owned a big estate in Northumberland. I still can’t figure out why he married me. It might have been to forestall his father marrying him to a neighbour’s daughter, with legs like those on that billiards table over there. He was a rebel in those days but first-class at his job. We were lovers for nearly a year before we married, but I didn’t put pressure on him. Maybe someone else did. Somebody senior to him might have found out he was bedding one of the students, and passed it on to the vice-chancellor. I never did find out, and now I never will. Anyway, he proposed and I jumped at it. We were married in his church – he’s a very good Catholic – and naturally I was expected to go along with it all the way. Before and after marriage. It was the after bit that we came unstuck on.’

  ‘Children?’

  ‘The certainty of having a string of them. I lost the first, stillborn, and it was his attitude to that that produced the first drip of acid. He wouldn’t even discuss using any form of contraceptive, or practise birth-control other than their rhythm system. Not even the first time we made love, a few days after I came out of the clinic. We began rowing over that, and it soon led to other rows, over all kinds of things, silly things m
ostly. We said unforgivable things to one another and after a final, blistering row, we parted. He took the initiative, actually, and went to Quebec. He must have planned it in advance, for he’d not only given notice at the University but made arrangement for my allowance to be paid through his family lawyer. He wasn’t mean about money. That was one of his good points, and he didn’t have many when I came to reckon them up. I’ve never set eyes on him since. All that was two years ago.’

  ‘You wouldn’t ever consider giving it another chance? Over there, in a new country?’

  ‘Quebec wouldn’t be a new country to him. It’s more Catholic than the Pope from what I hear. Not that I’ve a thing against Catholics as Catholics. Sometimes I envy them very much. They’ve got something to hang on to, and that’s more than you can say of us heretics. Besides, his people were kind, in spite of the fact that they were opposed to the marriage. I can go there any time, and be sure of a welcome, but I don’t take his money. It’s still accumulating at the lawyer’s for all I know.’

  ‘What did you do after that?’

  ‘Your job. Teaching at a girls’ school in Lancashire, but I was no better at that than keeping a man. I know what I want to do now and nothing is going to stop me. I’m hoping to get into that male club at Westminster and say my piece. On behalf of the working-class in the North, and on behalf of so-called liberated females everywhere. I don’t care if it takes me twenty years. Or maybe that’s just the port and lemon talking.’

  She jumped up, pointing to the clock that stood at ten minutes to seven. ‘What’s special about you, Davy? I’m a very punctual person and you almost made me miss my train. Are you going to walk me to the station after confessional?’