R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  ‘No, they don’t and never will under me. That was something I always thought you’d sit on, Algy.’

  ‘Never had the nerve. I was lazier, too. But I approve, none the less. You seem to be bringing on a decent lot of seniors, but don’t be surprised if you come across the odd rotten apple. You lay odds with yourself that you know how to spot them from afar but every now and again you come a mucker, particularly as regards the selection of prefects.’

  ‘What do you do then, Algy. Demote him on the spot?’

  ‘Never. Bad for the system.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Gives the old lags in Middle School the notion they can unseat any perk providing they go the right way about it. No, you tail him, everywhere he goes, until he gets nervous and keeps looking over his shoulder. That tames ‘em. They either pull their socks up or leave a term or two ahead of schedule.’

  ‘You see, I still have to consult the oracle at least once a week.’

  ‘I should think so. I was the despot here nearly twenty-four years, and you’re coming up to your second. Be reasonable, old son. If you lived two lifetimes you’d still be carried away in a box without knowing the half of it.’

  2

  Sports Day, Whitsuntide Reunion and Opening Day.

  Carter, suave and successful-looking, arrived for Sports Day, telling David he now had over two hundred boys and was, in his jubilant phrase, ‘fairly coining it, old man’. David did not envy him. His approach was too much like merchandising, as Howarth was quick to comment on over a gin and tonic that night, when dusk had fallen, and the last parental car had swept off down the drive.

  ‘Man might as well be churning out those bloody little gnomes for suburban lily-ponds,’ he growled. ‘A place of that kind isn’t a school, it’s an assembly belt, with the staff stationed at stipulated intervals, screwing up nuts and applying the odd touch of solder.’

  Many others appeared that same day, some of them faces that David had not seen in years, and a few he had never seen at all. One comparatively new friend was Mrs Hislop, whom he had first met when she restored her son to them in his first term as head. A Northerner, she found it difficult to express gratitude but managed it somehow. ‘That man Alcock did the boy a good turn,’ she said. ‘Pulled him up short and don’t think I didn’t know he needed a jolt. But you did him an even better turn by letting him come back again. My guess is you’re going to be proud of him before he’s finished.’

  ‘In a way I already am,’ he told her, ‘but for Heaven’s sake don’t tell him I said so.’

  At Whitsuntide there was a swarm of visitors, among them Stoker Monk who, now that he was at liberty to smoke himself to death, had taken up rowing and renounced the weed. Twitted on this account, as he and David contributed their quota to the sustained uproar in the Old Boys’ bar, he justified his eccentric behaviour. ‘After that first pipeful in the Third, when I wasn’t sick but everybody else was, I had a reputation to maintain,’ he said, ‘but now, who gives a damn whether I smoke or not?’

  Archer the Third elbowed his way forward, back for the first time since leaving in 1924, and reminded David of the occasion when he got lost during a run-in and the whole field had to be turned out to search for him. Archer, now a captain in the Royal Engineers, had seen action on the North-West Frontier. ‘They recommended me for a decoration for completing a bridge under sniper fire,’ he said, ‘but I’d swop that experience any day for the two hours I sat under that hedge, waiting for you to show up. Never so pleased to see anyone in my natural, Pow-Wow.’

  It made him feel, as the day wore on he was now a sizeable thread in the Bamfylde pattern of legend. Skidmore drove up, confirming every prophecy made about him by appearing in a dog collar, just as they had feared when he spent so long at his prayers, but unlikely, David concluded, to qualify for martyrdom. He had charge of a big Methodist church in what he called ‘the Yorkshire Bible belt’, a place where ‘the presentation of a good Messiah every year is the key to the kingdom of heaven’. It amazed David to hear Skidmore talk like that and he put it down to a general broadening of the mind among Methodists since the recent amalgamation of rival factions, a subject upon which Skidmore had some interesting comments. ‘If we can do it after all this time, then any denomination can,’ he declared. ‘Wouldn’t that be something? An amalgamation of all the Christian churches in Britain?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s a pipedream, Preacher,’ David said, but Skidmore said he wasn’t so sure. ‘If things get rough enough it could happen,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll live to see it.’

  ‘I hope you do,’ he said, and turned to greet the younger of the Kassava brothers, Jimmy, the eleven-year-old who had clung to the ledge until his brother had knocked him out so that he could be lowered into the quad like a sack of flour. Kassava was now a lieutenant in the Indian Army and his brother, he told David, was walking the wards in Manchester Infirmary and had plans to practise in Delhi. It made David glow a little to hear all these titbits but it also made him aware of his age, as though he had come to Bamfylde as a toddler instead of an old-young crock of twenty-one. Time, they said, speeded up after one’s thirtieth birthday, and it seemed to be true in his case, for here he was, at thirty-seven, feeling as superannuated as Algy. Then something reminded him that others were growing older. Blades buttonholed him, in order to introduce his fiancée, a shy, extremely pretty brunette, with a pleasant smile and a low-pitched voice. Blades had gone into publishing and talked enthusiastically of David’s best-selling account of the Wars of the Roses, tucking his publishing card into David’s breast-pocket – ‘In case you don’t get the best terms with your people when you come up with something new,’ he said. ‘They say we don’t poach authors, but that’s a polite fiction.’ Talking to them David recalled a comment by Julia Darbyshire, after she had shown him Blades’s parody of Herrick, written in her honour – ‘He’ll make some lucky girl a wonderful husband one day…’ and it looked as if Julia might be right, for the girl gazed at Blades all the time he was talking, glance steady and lips slightly parted, as though she could hardly wait to get him to bed. He wondered then whether Blades had told her about his brush with the Second Form mistress and decided he had not. She was the kind of girl who wouldn’t want to know, and Blades was sharp enough to realise this.

  He drifted off then, to take Alison Boyer into tea, for Alison was quite overwhelmed by all this parading and gossiping, and all the smartly dressed women strolling about. She said, in an urgent aside, ‘They’re awfu’ fine, some of them. I hope my outfit didnae let Chad down.’

  ‘Don’t ever worry about letting Chad down, Alison. One of the most sensible things he ever did, and in his youth he didn’t do so many, was to marry you. How are your evening classes coming along?’

  The evening classes were those devoted by Boyer to Alison and Chad had told him she tackled them with fanatical zeal. ‘She’s even approached Barnaby about elementary Latin,’ he said. ‘I thought that was going over the top a bit. Damn it all, why does she need Latin?’

  ‘To draw level with you and keep your end up with all the other masters’ wives.’

  ‘But good God, Pow-Wow, no master’s wife here knows a word of Latin.’

  ‘That’s so, and acquiring some would give her the edge on them and you the edge on their husbands. The Scots are a very competitive lot, Chad. How do you suppose they managed to populate Canada single-handed, give or take a handful of English fur-trappers and remittance men?’

  Opening Day was a more ceremonious occasion, with Lady Hopgood pulling the tapes on a sheet of tarpaulin screening the inscription plaque of the new wing, and any number of county dignitaries standing around to contribute a dutiful round of applause. The new block looked horribly raw against the grey stone and weathered red-brick of Big School but Algy, commenting on this in a breezy speech, said the sleet that came over the moor between October and March would soon take the gloss from it. By Christmas, he assured them, the block would have learned to lurc
h into the wind, like all the other buildings on the plateau.

  The new hall was all but finished then and work began on the classrooms above. The O.B. Fund had topped the ten thousand mark, and the Governing Body were successful in getting an overdraft at the bank, so foundations were dug for the gymnasium and sports room that were to replace the covered playground, the fives court and library block. If the money ran to it there was provision in the plans for a dozen new studies but if subscriptions slowed down Fifth Form studies would have to wait on better times. David, contemplating the overdraft, extracted some comfort from the fact that the drop in numbers had levelled off and next term’s figures promised an increase of about a dozen, with the waiting-list still fluctuating around a hundred mark. ‘We’ll break even at about three-fifty,’ the bursar told him, but Barnaby came up with a very ambitious idea, although it was one that would have to wait upon a sizeable legacy or endowment. ‘The great thing nowadays,’ he said, ‘is to catch ‘em young. What we ought to aim at, P.J., is our own prep department, catering for upwards of thirty nine-to-ten-year-olds, and a bright young graduate to run it. That way we should soon climb to four hundred again and be absolutely safe. Think about it. The country won’t always be wallowing in this slough of despond. Even Wall Street is picking up a bit, I hear, in spite of that chap Roosevelt, who seems to have scared the bankers half out of their wits.’

  David did think about it but deferred it until they had a slice of luck, of the kind they had in 1912, when a wealthy and eccentric father, having lost his only son in an overseas drowning accident, died a widower, leaving twelve thousand pounds to Bamfylde solely because the school had been mentioned in his son’s last letter home, written the day he died.

  Then, with building progressing rapidly, the summer term slipped away, and everybody went home, and he and Grace toured the Western Isles as far as Skye, then came south again, where he left her to spend the last fortnight of the holidays with her grandparents at Elmer’s End.

  He had a big backlog of work before the new school year opened in mid-September, and was glad of Boyer’s help, spending a good deal of his time in the cottage, where Beth’s rowan tree and wild Devonshire garden were thriving.

  It was after contemplating them, on his way back to school one warm September evening, that he turned aside at the lych-gate and went down the path to the Bamfylde preserve, on the excuse of satisfying himself that the sexton was mowing the grass.

  He had no morbid feelings about being here, in the secluded spot under the yew where Beth and Joan had lain since that unforgettable summer of 1925. Over the years his memories of them had merged into the school, riding the western skyline. Their dust was as much a part of it as that of Judy Cordwainer and Bat Ferguson close by, and of his own flesh and blood too, he thought, as he stood with the evening sun warming his back and looking across the huddle of Ma Midden’s farm and Chad’s cottage to the higher slope of the moor. Blackbirds sang here and all but the Bamfylde headstones, or the few raised to newly dead villagers, leaned in one direction or another. Gray could have written another elegy here, he thought, and then doubted it as, beyond the low hedge, he saw a sports car rush past, hurrying towards the farm. A stray Old Boy, no doubt, anxious to assure himself that Ma Midden still made the tastiest pasties in Devon.

  He went into the church and sat down to collect his thoughts. He often came here these days, ostensibly to work something out but actually to escape the clamour of school and yet remain within call. It was odd, he had told himself more than once, that a man born and raised a Welsh Baptist should seek and find peace here in what his mother would have dismissed as a Popish church, and he was recalling Preacher Skidmore’s remark on the prospects of a sectless Britain, when he heard steps echo on the slate slabs outside the west door, then the door opened, and a familiar voice said, ‘Had an idea I’d find you here. Boyer said you were on your way back but I didn’t pass anyone.’ He stood up, dumb with amazement. ‘Yes, it’s me! The perennial bad penny, home from the sea.’

  It took him ten seconds to convince himself that Chris was standing there, leaning against the oak door and smiling across at him. Chris Forster, sunburned, relaxed, and far more sure of herself than the girl he remembered even in their carefree Windermere days.

  ‘Why the blazes didn’t you ring or write? Why didn’t you let me know you were home? I’d quite made up my mind you had gone for good. Damn it, you haven’t sent so much as a postcard in weeks!’

  She said, quietly, ‘Stop being a bear and come over here and kiss me. It wouldn’t be the first time in this church, would it?’

  He dived round the end of the pew and threw his arms round her and they stood there for several minutes saying nothing. Behind the swift rush of affection he was aware of a number of inconsequential things; the sunburned V on her neck; the fact that she wore her hair in the fashionable long bob; an unfamiliar perfume, that reminded him vaguely of sandalwood; a persistent blackbird, whistling a repetitive theme in the big yew clump beyond the belfry tower, things that somehow compounded Beth rather than her. She said, gently. ‘I’m not home for long, Davy. It’s very much of a flying visit and I’ll explain why. But first I’ve a surprise for you outside in the car. It’s all right, don’t scowl! It’s male, but it isn’t a husband.’

  They went out into the evening sunshine and up the path to the road where a little sports car was parked, the kind of silver grey toy some of the wilder spirits drove when returning to school a term or two after they had left. It was empty and he said, ‘You mean that? The car?’ and she laughed, calling, ‘Ulrich? You don’t have to hide! Where are you?’

  A dark, rather sallow boy of about ten sidled into view, returning from the direction of the farm, hidden by the bend in the road. He was a continental. David could see that at a glance and this was established not so much by his clothes, grey knickerbockers and pork-pie hat, with a little feather tucked into the band, but by his bobbing little bow in David’s direction. He was a spindly, undernourished little chap, with large, melancholy eyes that at once sought Christine’s, apprehensively he would say.

  She said, briskly, ‘This is Herr Powlett-Jones, Ulrich, headmaster of the school. Don’t be shy. He’s a very kind man. Come over and shake hands.’

  Ulrich approached gingerly, hand fully extended continental fashion, and when David shook and released it, he stepped smartly back, made another little bow and came smartly to attention.

  ‘Ulrich,’ she said, ‘has just lost his father and his mother died a year ago. In a way I’ve adopted him, haven’t I, Ulrich?’

  The boy’s defenceless eyes sought hers again, so that David thought, ‘He’s in a rare pickle of one sort or another, and she’s fishing him out of it,’ and Ulrich at once confirmed this, saying ‘Always you have been most kind, Fraulein Forster.’

  ‘We’ll go back to school now, Ulrich, for I have to make arrangements for you,’ and the child climbed obediently into the back seat, where he folded his arms and sat very erect, looking as expressionless as a page on ceremonial duty.

  Chris said, as David squeezed in beside her, ‘His name is Meyer. I’ll explain about him later. He’s been fed. I introduced him to Rigby, who kindly took him down to the kitchen and while he was eating I looked for you but couldn’t find you. Then a groundsman said you were down at Boyer’s cottage so we both came looking.’

  She was like Grace in that way. She never forgot anything he told her about the school and was well aware Chad Boyer had been one of his favourites and had recently joined the staff. She was a fast and expert driver. In a flash they were shooting up the east drive and skidding to a halt on the forecourt gravel.

  ‘Would it be asking too much to let Ulrich stay here with you until term begins, Davy?’

  ‘That’s no problem,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell Rigby to bed him down in the sanatorium. The boys return on Thursday and when they do he can go in Nicolson’s until you collect him.’ He turned to the child, now standing to attention. ‘You d
on’t have to be correct here, Ulrich, and certainly not in the holidays. Go with this gentleman, and he’ll show you where you can sleep,’ and as the door closed behind child and butler, ‘You’re a great one for springing things on me. You haven’t really adopted him, have you?’

  ‘Not officially,’ she said, ‘but I intend to, providing it can be arranged.’

  ‘Well, it can’t,’ he said, ‘I’ve had occasion to go into these things, and as our law stands someone in your situation wouldn’t be allowed to adopt a boy. Maybe Canadian law is different. Has he any relatives in the States?’

  ‘No, Davy. None.’

  ‘How long do you want to board him?’

  She said, looking at him steadily, ‘Permanently, Davy. If it could be arranged. I’m getting him registered as an official refugee and in time, if all goes as I hope, he’ll take up British nationality, but I don’t want him regarded as a charity boy. I’ll pay his fees.’

  ‘You will? Two-fifty a year?’

  ‘Well, not me exactly, an organisation set up for cases like Ulrich by the Jewish Rescue Committee in the States. I’m not worried about that part of it, it’s more or less fixed. The point is, I want him to have affection… help… someone to turn to. He’s been through a dreadful time. His father was kicked to death in front of his eyes in July. I almost witnessed it myself. Those bloody Brown Shirts, out on the rampage.’

  ‘His father was anti-Nazi?’

  ‘His father wasn’t anti anything. He was a harmless little jeweller and his shop was picketed in an anti-Jewish demonstration they staged. You must have read about what’s going on in Germany since that foul little bastard took over but maybe it hasn’t registered over here. Well, it’s real enough there, a daily occurrence. There are scores of Ulrichs in Bavaria alone. I should like to have scooped them all up but I had enough trouble getting one out.’