R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  Watching his performance David felt he had earned the right to a little smugness, for Ringer Crispin was only one of many manifestations of the new reign. Aside from the Gilbert and Sullivan revival, Renshaw-Smith’s Choral Society was thriving, spurred on by a Certificate of Merit gained in the Devon Music Festival, and his changes in discipline had produced no explosion. After the oppressive atmosphere of the Alcock era, there was a geniality in the common room that had not been evident in the ‘twenties, when Carter kept tempers on edge most of the time. Hislop settled in effortlessly, a different Hislop to the bull-necked extrovert who had shouted the odds on the sports field. He had developed a flair for maths somewhere in exile and, even more surprisingly, a taste for authority, so that Gibbons, Havelock’s new housemaster, appointed him house-prefect the day he reached the Sixth. David, watching him take parade one morning, wondered how he would act if he stumbled on a pontoon school in the old smokers’ hideout behind the stacked trunks in the covered playground. Or what he would do if he caught one of his cronies studying the formbook. Howarth and Barnaby seemed to have entered into a tacit conspiracy to give him the kind of loyalty they had given Algy, and sometimes he saw the three of them as the new Magi, ageing harmoniously in the wilderness. Grace, her stillness seasoned by a developing sense of humour, was a great help to him during weekends and holidays, and even parents accepted her as his semi-official chatelaine, whereas Old Boys of recent vintage never thought of her as anyone but his deputy.

  Thus, one way and another, the gap left in his life by Chris closed to some extent. He missed her, of course, but not as keenly as he would have thought. Mostly he was so busy, too busy indeed, to heed his publisher’s plea that he begin work on another historical biography.

  Financially he was better off than he had ever hoped to be, with a salary of six-fifty a year, free living expenses and about three hundred a year from royalties on The Royal Tigress. Chris told him his book was on display in Montreal bookshops, and that there were two copies in the University library. She wrote, on the average, once a week, chatty, mildly affectionate letters that seemed unrelated to the woman he had held in his arms in the seedy bedsitter at Bilhampton. She had detached herself, somehow, not only from him but from the British scene, so that sometimes he wondered if she would ever settle here again or, if she did, would see him as someone too pedestrian for her taste.

  The centre of what he thought of as his political gravity was shifting and he was inclined, on the whole, to lower his sights and put his faith in tradition, in ripeness, habit and continuity. Even old Howarth commented on the change when David championed Britain at a gin-party discussion in Nicolson’s on Howarth’s fifty-sixth birthday.

  ‘I can give you twenty years, P.J.,’ he said, jovially, ‘and Barnaby can give you fifteen, but at heart you’re less of a radical than either one of us, notwithstanding that reputation you once had as a firebrand. You should watch it, lad, before the Bamfylde fungus gets a fatal hold on you.’

  But then, he told himself, he had excuses for feeling paternal these days. Chad Boyer appeared the first day of the Christmas holidays, seeking temporary quarters, and when David asked him what he meant by ‘temporary’ he looked, as Algy Herries would have said, ‘felon-shy’, and added, half-apologetically, ‘Well, the fact is I’ve just taken a three-year lease on your old cottage, over at Stone Cross, P.J. A bachelor room is out, I’m afraid. You see, there’s Alison.’

  ‘Alison who?’

  Boyer grinned. ‘My wife, Pow-Wow.’

  ‘Great God, you’re not thinking of getting married?’

  ‘I am married,’ Chad answered, grinning. ‘Alison and I are on our honeymoon, as from last Tuesday. We were married in a Manchester Register Office, and she’s outside now, awaiting the abbot’s permission to cross the monastic threshold. Shall I fetch her in?’

  ‘Well, for God’s sake,’ David said, quite taken aback, ‘you’ll have to, won’t you? You can’t expect the girl to bivouac on Exmoor in December,’ and he ran to the window to peep out at a still, rather keyed up figure, hunched in the passenger seat of Boyer’s ancient Austin Seven. She had flaming red hair, a small, pinched face, and a very definite air of uncertainty, so that he called, ‘Grace! Go out and fetch Mrs Boyer in while I give this room a tidy.’

  It was very difficult to surprise Grace, even at twelve-and-a-half. She threw aside her apron and ran out into the forecourt, where they watched her trying to coax Alison Boyer out of sanctuary. Boyer said, ‘It’s that Scots girl I mentioned at Easter, Pow-Wow, the one who was a domestic at the school, and came to me for coaching. I suppose you think I’m crazy on my salary.’

  ‘That depends,’ David said, remembering his own spot proposal on Colwyn Bay railway platform, in 1919. ‘How did it develop, exactly?’

  ‘We were both lonely and very much down in the dumps, and… well, we kind of grew together. She’s a real brick, and a tonic when she forgets to be shy. She’s got the Celtic awe for all seats of learning. Oh, I daresay you’ll think me an absolute idiot for saddling myself with a wife at this stage, but there it is and I don’t regret it. I asked her to marry me the day I got your letter saying you’d wangled it.’

  He moved around the room, glancing at all the familiar pictures and pieces of furniture brought over from Havelock’s. ‘It’s like a dream, Pow-Wow. I mean, you being Gaffer here, and me on the staff. Sometimes I pinch myself and wonder if I’ll wake up in that bloody awful attic I occupied in that prep school, or find myself back in the Havelock dorm, with Dobson and Ridgeway snoring away on either side of me.’ Then, seriously, ‘They say you’re making a rare go of it, Pow-Wow. Would you say you were?’

  ‘Feeling my way, Chad. It’s trickier than it looked from the outside. I’m even beginning to appreciate some of Alcock’s points of view, particularly as regards parents.’

  ‘But not us, I hope?’

  ‘No, Chad, not you. The O.B.s have been marvellous, and so have Howarth and Barnaby. They’re beginning to call us the New Magi now, the heirs of Judy, Bouncer and old Rapper Gibbs.’

  Grace came in with Alison, who looked even smaller and more uncertain in the open. She gravitated to Boyer at once and David noticed, with approbation, that she obviously adored him. Her red head finished level with his broad shoulders, and a gleam of sunshine, touching her hair, made it glow like a fire in a draught. She had cornflower-blue eyes, a small chin as resolute as Beth’s and the kind of handknitted jumper that Beth had worn when she was dressing on a nurse’s salary. He thought, ‘It’s odd he should be bringing her to that old cottage of ours. Like watching yourself in a mirror of time… hard to believe Beth made her bow to Algy and Ellie in this room, thirteen years ago…’ but then he remembered his manners and said, ‘I should be used to Chad surprising me, Mrs Boyer. Congratulations, and I hope you’ll be very happy here. Chad was, but it’s going to take us a little time to get used to him at the distributing end of authority. He was a holy terror here in his salad days.’

  ‘Och, Chad’ll do fine,’ she said, with almost staggering directness. ‘It was time he moved on. It was only a wee school. Nothing like this.’

  Her unexpected forthrightness made an immediate impression on him so that he thought, ‘She’s just what he needed, come to think of it. Someone to rally on, someone who matters to him,’ and when Grace accepted Alison’s offer to give a hand with the lunch, he said, in response to Boyer’s interrogative glance. ‘You’ve got more sense than you think, Chad. I always had a morbid fear you’d turn up one day with one of those mincing little blondes, all promise and no performance. My mother would approve of Alison instantly, and so would Beth. They both had a preference for down-to-earthers.’

  Two

  * * *

  1

  CHRIS WROTE EARLY IN THE NEW YEAR, WHEN HE WAS beginning to wonder how soon it would be before he heard her pleasant Yorkshire brogue over the phone, asking when and where they could meet. But she wasn’t coming home, after all, or not for some c
onsiderable time. She had been selected for what she described as a ‘McKenzie-Solomon Travelling Scholarship (financed by a couple of reformed robber barons, buying their way into heaven with an educational trust fund)’ and would be working in Western Europe for six months, a trip that would take in shortened courses at Strasbourg, Rome and Munich Universities. And after that, on the strength of the travelling scholarship, she was committed to lecture her way across the States, all the way from the eastern seaboard to the Pacific.

  She wrote, with a touch of her old breathlessness,

  I was lucky to be selected but I was slow to accept. It meant not seeing you for almost another year, and even that isn’t certain for, at this stage, I’m not sure how many cities the U.S.A. tour takes in. However, if I am to play fair with the people who sponsored me I owe it to them to be available for a candidature in early ‘34. I see the date of the next General Election as ‘35 but I may get pushed forward at a by-election much earlier. I’ve decided to resign the South Mendips candidature. Not even Keir Hardie could win that seat from the Tories, but that’s enough about me. I treasure every scrap of Bamfylde news you send and am sure (despite your becoming modesty on paper) that you are proving a whale of a success as headmaster of that hallowed establishment! My love always, Davy dear… and I miss you so, and will go on missing you… your male gentleness and your sanity. Where did you get them both? Not in the trenches and not, I think, in the Valleys, where folk are exciting and amusing but intolerant. It follows that it must have been at Bamfylde, and that’s funny when you think of it. I always saw those places as bastions of prejudice…

  He accepted the letter, despite its breezy reassurances, as virtual disengagement, a gentle placing of their association on a platonic plane, and although this saddened him it was not unexpected. Like him, she was finding fulfilment and their inclinations no longer pursued parallel courses, but divergent ones, likely to carry them farther and farther apart as each of them spread their wings. He was sure now that she would never willingly exchange politics or even an academic life, for the role of a Martha, here in the wilderness. While he might have adapted, she never would. Always she would see herself as a walk-on player, meriting a leading role. Perhaps the only things they had ever had in common were physical hunger and a deep, personal loneliness.

  He folded the letter, feeling that he needed time to reflect on an answer, and went into the Sixth to take his period on current affairs, beginning halfheartedly, his mind still on her implied renunciation but, as always, warming to his theme, and the rallying questions of Hislop and others, who enjoyed these occasions as much as he did.

  The letter spurred him to make yet another decision, to enrol a commercial tutor and start courses in shorthand, bookkeeping and typing as soon as the new classrooms were ready. It had been put forward by several parents and at least one Governor a year ago, when he first took Alcock’s place, but it had made no special appeal to him then. Bamfylde had produced several merchant princelings over the years, but few of them entered commerce at the clerical level, despite the usual poppycock talked by fathers about the importance of starting at the bottom. Businessmen’s sons, he noted, invariably began their business life several rungs up, but now times were changing rapidly. More and more Old Boys came to him, or wrote to him, with tales of long spells of unemployment, and the inadequacy of a formal education in the scramble for jobs on an open market. It was time, he thought, to give seniors approaching school-leaving age a head-start, by introducing them to the kind of jobs they might have to use as footholds in the free-for-all of competitive business.

  There was, however, another and strictly personal reason for introducing a commercial course, and it was Christine’s letter that brought it into the open. Grace would be thirteen in May, and could expect about four more years at school. Nothing would please him more than to have her back here permanently. With the prospect of her acquiring secretarial skills at Bamfylde he could hope to reduce those four years to two. Bamfylde needed a woman’s touch at the centre of affairs, and she was already half-qualified for the job. She knew hundreds of Bamfeldians by name and almost as many parents. Algy said she was tarred with the Bamfylde brush but in softer hues – ‘Shades of sweet pea, wouldn’t you say, P.J.?’

  The builders moved in during a dry spell in January and everyone had to adapt to the uproar and vast array of bricks, wheelbarrows and cement mixers about the place. When the foundations of the new wing were dug, and the first line of bricks had been laid, Stratton-Forbes wrote suggesting they should place a school muster-roll in a cavity, and this was done at an informal public ceremony. Even David, however, who thought himself attuned to Bamfylde’s eccentricities, was surprised by the orgy of commemorative inscribing that followed. Half the boys in the school scratched their names in wet concrete, some of the bolder ones defacing the pier supporting the stone where the memorial plaque would be fixed. He took no counter action but mentioned the outcrop at assembly one morning, referring to that particular section of the foundations as the wailing wall, and advising vandals to beat their heads against it in moments of stress. It was a successful joke, of the kind he was beginning to fashion nowadays, and a matter for secret pride when he discovered that the facing side of the new block was permanently dubbed The Wailing Wall.

  He gave Chad and Alison Boyer an unusual wedding present that spring, undertaking to pay for the installation of an indoor privy at the cottage. ‘Beth and I abominated that feature of the place,’ he told them, when they were moving in. ‘It’s no joke to wade across that yard in dressing gown and slippers in a north-easterly. I’ve given Grover instructions to take in a small section of the landing and connect it with the kitchen wastepipe.’ When Boyer said, chuckling, ‘It’s lucky we aren’t displaying our gifts at a wedding breakfast, Pow-Wow,’ he said, ‘Ah, you may laugh now but Alison will live to thank me for it.’

  The term slipped by and it was Easter before he knew it. The sodden moor to the west came to life again and the Sunsetters began their traditional task of preparing the cricket pitch. Then, suddenly, it was full summer again, with extra half-day holidays reintroduced for the important cricket matches, and the inter-house drill competition, and Certificate ‘A’ examination, conducted by a spruce young captain sent from the War Office.

  He was still disinclined to take an active interest in the Corps, apart from keeping a fatherly eye on the band, now capable of playing Sousa’s marches, ‘Soldiers of the Queen’, and many another martial tune, but still saddled with the derisory title of the Orpheans. The School Forum made progress, and another innovation, a housemasters’ fortnightly conference was successful, although Howarth was cynical about it. ‘No more than a cast-iron excuse to skip a period and sit around guzzling coffee, P.J.’ he said, but Algy approved. He was over here a good deal nowadays, sometimes to the shameful neglect of his parish, and was already recruiting for next term’s Pirates of Penzance, but warned that, when the nights drew in, David would have to take over production. ‘My eyesight isn’t what it was,’ he said, ‘and it would be undignified to finish my time here upside down in a bog.’

  ‘No more than a case of the moor claiming its own,’ David told him. ‘How many years have you been up here now?’

  ‘Forty, counting my five-year stint under Wesker,’ Algy said. ‘Half my lifetime, and I count the other half wasted. Look at me, my boy, well beyond the allotted span and I could still head the Second Form round the buildings, given a modest start!’

  ‘I believe you could,’ David said. Then, diffidently, ‘How am I making out, Algy? For my private ear alone?’ and Algy replied, cheerfully, ‘Fair to middling. What are your own conclusions?’

  ‘Rather on the lines of a hospital report, “as well as can be expected”, but I still find authority over the senior staff a bit embarrassing. Can’t help feeling, sometimes, that it’s a bit of a liberty to give orders to chaps like Howarth, who were learning their trade when I was learning to read.’

  ‘The p
oint is you don’t, P.J. One of your rare qualifications – and I flatter myself I spotted it a week after you came here – is that you have the knack of gentle persuasion. Men like Howarth respond to it, even when they have reservations about your policies.’

  ‘They aren’t my policies at all, they’re extensions of yours, Algy.’

  ‘Perhaps, but where do you suppose I got mine? Invented ‘em? Of course I didn’t. Something rubs off from everything you read, observe and tinker with. The job’s really no more than a lifelong process of subconscious distillation of other men’s successes and failures. Point is, most chaps in our line of business let their arteries harden at thirty-five and become their own worst enemies on that account. Self-doubt never did anyone any harm, so long as it’s offset by the gambling spirit. And by all accounts you’ve got your share of that. Your prefects don’t beat any more, I hear.’