R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  Gosse and Meadowes, both blushing, raised their hands.

  ‘Well, come out and tell us about it. How did you make the paper and writing look so old, Gosse?’

  Gosse expanded under her approbation. ‘We boiled, it, Miss.’

  ‘Boiled it? In what?’

  ‘In tea, miss.’

  The Cradlers received this news with gasps of delight.

  ‘That was really Meadowes’s idea, miss.’

  ‘Good for you, Meadowes!’ and Meadowes hung his head.

  ‘And which of you did the drawing and invented the clues?’

  ‘I did, miss. I borrowed Whatmore’s fountain pen because of its green ink and crossed nib. It came out all spidery and faded-looking.’

  She pinned the map to the blackboard. ‘Twenty out of twenty for that, Gosse. And some of these others aren’t bad at all. Dismiss now. I’m going to show the winning chart to the head. Wait a minute, Hookham. Off to tea, you others.’

  They scuttled out, with the usual desk-banging and competitive scuffling, while Hookham remained, looking at the floor. She said, ‘Thank you for helping, Hookham. It wouldn’t have done for me to judge them.’

  His head came up. ‘Why not, miss? You’re the teacher and give the marks.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but you see, I invented the exercise, and you noticed how they all accepted your decision. Would you like to be class monitor?’

  ‘What does a monitor have to do, miss?’

  ‘Oh, all kinds of things. Give out test papers, collect up books, clean the blackboard and even take charge if I have to pop out. You see, you’re the biggest and the oldest now, and they’ll take it from you. They’d skylark with any of the younger ones.’

  He said, doggedly, ‘I’ll be monitor, miss.’ And then, warily, ‘How long will I stay in the Cradle, miss?’

  ‘Just a term or two. Until you get the hang of things. You’re beginning to settle, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’ll get used to it, I reckon.’

  He said it as though addressing himself and she had a conviction that he had made the same affirmation many times over the last few weeks. He had surfaced, certainly, but she had an idea he would sink again if she let go too soon.

  ‘Hookham?’

  ‘Yes, miss?’

  ‘What’s your initial “R” stand for?’

  He looked surprised, ‘Roy, miss.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something, Roy, something I wouldn’t want the others to know. A secret between us. I’m fairly new here as well and getting used to it, a bit at a time.’

  ‘But how can you be? I mean, Dixon Major told us all you were the head’s…’

  ‘It doesn’t matter who I am, I’m new. New at this job and new at the school, so don’t think I don’t understand how hard it is. Put it this way. To play me in they made me a monitor. Monitor of the Cradle.’

  Surprisingly, and to her great relief, he grinned. Davy was right about him. He really was an original, and the grin encouraged her to gamble again. She opened her handbag and extracted his grubby little note. ‘The head said I was to give you this. He’s read it but he thinks you ought to stick it out a while longer, and so do I.’

  He took the note wordlessly and stuffed it in his pocket. Then, as a clamour rose from the quad, he said, ‘That’s tea parade. May I go now, miss?’

  ‘Yes, of course, but be here before first bell tomorrow. We’re doing nature study and there’s a lot to give out.’

  He nodded and hurried out and a moment later she heard the duty prefect’s command, ‘Paraaade… shun! Dismiss!’ and the prolonged scrape of boots as the four contingents turned left and fell out. She took a closer look at Gosse’s map, deciphering three blurred crosses, marking the treasure. The crosses were not scratched in green but in red, almost certainly in blood. Meadowes’s blood, probably, for Gosse would see him as the obvious donor. She thought, ‘Davy’s always said adults learn more than they teach in a place like this and, by God, he’s so right!’

  2

  Despite his admitted experience, despite his sly Celtic trick of winning most people round to his point of view in the end, she did not wholly trust him with the Hookhams. It was very different, however, in the Middle and Upper Schools, where she would sometimes watch him at work.

  He was, she decided, uniquely tailored for the job and once they were through the Upper Third, and beginning to notice such things, a majority of boys acknowledged this as freely as she did. This was particularly true in the Sixth, where he was able to step outside his tutorial role and move among them as a kind of group leader, appointed by popular ballot. She realised this one October afternoon when all the Cradlers were down on the lower pitch, practising for the Sevens Competition, and he invited her to attend a current affairs period on the dominant issue of the day, Mussolini’s defiance of The League of Nations and invasion of Abyssinia.

  Ordinarily, she said, she should have stood in the punishing wind on the touchline, pretending to take a professional interest in Lower School frolics in the mud, but she could never arouse more than a casual interest in their interminable games, and had, indeed, questioned the emphasis placed on them.

  Up to a point he shared her view but added, on this occasion, ‘You’ll find they grow on you. They did on me, after a year or so, but, strictly for your ear alone, I can still take ‘em or leave ‘em. Cross-country running excepted, that is, for that offers a change of scene. If you’re at a loose end this afternoon, why don’t you sit in on a Sixth Form current affairs? We often have the occasional visitor.’

  The Sixth subjected her to the half-amused appraisal that Beth and Phyl Irvine had received at their first Saturday dance, and he didn’t fail to notice it, thinking, ‘It’s good to have a pretty woman about the place again. Sweetens the atmosphere somehow,’ but took good care to ignore her during the discussion until Venn, with a brisk show of gallantry, turned to her and said, ‘What do you think?’ and she looked apprehensively at Davy and then quickly away, for he was grinning. She said, ‘Coxe made a good point just now. Sanctions won’t stop Mussolini. He’ll be in Addis Ababa by the new year.’

  ‘But Coxe said we should have gone to war over it.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have come to war. Bluff would have done the trick. We should have sent the fleet to Suez, and the whole thing would have fizzled out. As it is, who knows where it could lead?’

  They were impressed, every last one of them, and Coxe, finding his minority views supported, was encouraged to prompt. ‘Could you say where, ma’am? To another World War?’

  ‘It might. Mussolini isn’t the only braggart on the rampage. There are plenty of others throwing their weight about in Berlin and Tokyo. How can they be anything but encouraged by the way he’s getting away with it?’

  After that she was embroiled and they went at it, cut and thrust, until the bell rang. It was not until after lock-up, when they were having their final cup of tea by the fire, that she glanced across at him and remembered how effortlessly he had chaired that lively discussion and how, in the end, every boy in the room turned to him, not to her, for the summing-up. She said, ‘It was very stimulating. But I won’t come again if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Why not? I thought you made out a pretty good case for military sanctions.’

  ‘So did I but they didn’t think so. They were just being polite. Now if you told them the moon was made of blue cheese, they’d accept it as gospel, and that’s victory, Davy. You’re coming down the straight now, whether you realise it or not,’ but he said, seriously. ‘It’s a damned long straight.’

  ‘Then, deep down, you’re as scared as I am, especially since Mussolini got away with it. You’re scared for boys like Venn and Coxe. And even for some of the younger ones. If it ever did come to the crunch, how would you regard them having to go through what you went through?’

  He was a long time answering. It was something he had thought about very deeply. That much was obvious by his concentrated expression and the deliberati
on of his answer. He said, finally, ‘I’d feel like you, that I’d been right all along. Oh, not about politics, or the way things have drifted from bad to worse since Versailles. I’m not pretending to have foreseen that, or anything like it. All along the line you’ve been the only Socialist prophet of doom I’ve met, and every day’s newspaper headline keeps reminding me of the fact. I’m talking about something different, more general, if you like.’

  ‘Could anything be more “general” than another World War?’

  ‘For me it could. Our approach to it, if and when it came. Looking back, that’s what I’ve been working on ever since I settled in here, and saw things through adolescent eyes. But it’s late for amateur metaphysics, love.’

  He was getting up but she stopped him. ‘Tell me, Davy. It’s important.’

  He said, ‘I remember a story Algy told us to illustrate the same point years ago. The night of his farewell supper, it was, and it made a terrific impact on everyone at the time. They gave him a cheer for it. Loudest cheer I ever heard in Big Hall and won’t hear a better, not if I’m here in my dotage.’

  He told her the story of Petherick, O.B.E. and ‘Chuff’ Rodgers, killed at First Ypres, of the train ride they shared with Algy over to Barcombe, the baby who was sick, and how Chuff had mopped up mother and baby with his handkerchief. It had always stayed in his mind so that gradually, over the years, it had become a kind of slide rule he applied to the potential of every boy he taught. There were the Pethericks, who went on to become presidents of insurance companies, who had their names in the Honours Lists, and there were the Chuffs, a majority he liked to think, although sometimes he wasn’t sure.

  ‘It’s a good story,’ she said, ‘and very relevant. But shocking to my way of thinking.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What you’re really saying is that you accept the fact that the Chuffs will be sacrificed and the Pethericks, who stay put, will make a pile, grow fat and die in their beds.’

  ‘That’s the way it usually goes.’

  ‘But it’s too awful to contemplate, Davy. We ought to try and change it.’

  ‘You saw how difficult it is to change. The only consolation is that it seems to work and if I don’t know who should? I came here absolutely convinced that every Chuff in the world had gone west, but they hadn’t. They seed themselves somehow. I’ve got a good many of them here at this moment, nearly twenty years after they blew half-time out there.’

  ‘But that’s what I mean, Davy, you’re accepting it passively and that’s as wrongheaded as that ostrich attitude that drove me out of politics.’

  ‘Not really. Neither is Howarth, Barnaby or any of the others who believe in what they’re about. My job, yours too now, is to encourage the Chuffs and slap down the embryo insurance presidents, while grabbing their parents’ money with both hands. The more we can swing our way the better our chance of survival, if it ever does come to another showdown.’

  3

  There had been a time when his personal fortunes had seemed to run a parallel course with the roller-coaster ride of the world outside, a world where quarrelsome tribes continued to collide with one another all the way from Manchuria to Madrid. But things were different now. All about him, if the newspapers and radio bulletins were to be believed, was conflict and disarray, but here on the plateau it was sometimes difficult for a man, busy from rising-bell to lockup, to think of himself as involved in the ferment beyond bounds, and this despite the fact that he shared bed and board with a woman who was half-convinced they were all riding an express to perdition.

  His own objectivity stemmed from several sources. His splendid health was one, and her presence was another, for sometimes, immersed like him in the come-day-go-day trivia of successive terms, she too could join him in looking at the outside world through the wrong end of a telescope. Her restored confidence and her new tendency to value the smaller bonuses of life, governed her moods so that for weeks together she could join him in forgetting what was going on outside.

  She was made aware of this, and even acknowledged it with a private chuckle, when George V died a day or so after the Lent term began in 1936, and the boys put on their black ties and marched to Stone Cross Church for the memorial service. Everyone had liked harmless old George, whom they saw as a country squire, and everyone was sorry for Mary, but there was nothing personal about their regrets. Somewhere, two hundred miles to the east, a seventy-year-old stranger had died but that was less immediate than the Corps’ attempt to play ‘The Dead March from Saul’ over the last two hundred yards of the journey to Stone Cross.

  Now and again, of course, she was jolted out of her complacency and so, to a degree, were David and a few of the Seniors. As the months spent themselves in a succession of regularised assemblies and dispersals, in sports fixtures, Choral Society concerts, examinations, O.T.C. field days and the climactic event of the Christmas term, with Algy Herries as yet another Ko-Ko (‘Seventy-five, by the Lord Harry, and still capable of warbling “Tit-Willow” to Katisha!’) the malaise of the world across the Channel would cross boundaries, and the Owl Society would debate the Popular Front in France, Mussolini’s rape of Ethiopia, Hitler’s re-occupation of the Rhineland and purges in Moscow. But as soon as the bell rang the inner rhythm of the place would reassert itself, and it would require something as immediate as the abdication of Edward VIII to turn Bamfylde eyes outward. But even then not for long. When a school had spent four months rehearsing The Mikado, even someone like Mrs Simpson has to wait her turn.

  Occasionally something would occur on the plateau that would make them aware that there was still abysses to be crossed on frail rope-bridges and usually they would cross in convoy, as in the case of young Driscoe’s miry flirtation with death, in December.

  Driscoe II was the youngest brother of the Driscoe who sang treble in the 1919 Mikado, when he was the third little maid from school, partnering Beth and Phyl Irvine. At the London dinner in January he reminded David that his kid brother would be arriving at Bamfylde in the summer term, and added, ‘Kid’s a bit of a weed. As the youngest of five he’s been spoiled to hell, particularly by the old lady, but he’s okay upstairs. Might even pass an exam or two, and that’s something I never did, did I, Pow-Wow?’

  ‘You had compensating distinctions as far as I was concerned,’ David told him, and reminded him of his appearance on stage before an audience of four hundred beside an obviously pregnant Yum-Yum, but when Driscoe said, ‘Will you keep a special eye on the kid, Pow-Wow? Mater’s orders, I’m afraid,’ he added, drily, ‘Hang it, I’m paid to keep an eye on all of them, but you can tell your mother I shall regard him as special if it’s likely to stop her worrying.’

  But Driscoe II was seen to be something of a special case when he presented himself the following April, a morose little boy, light as a feather, with glasses, a slight stutter and exceptionally knobbly knees. It was those knees, singular enough to earn Driscoe II a lot of ragging, that encouraged David to put him straight into the Upper Third. Upper Third boys had discarded short pants and the boy’s entrance exam paper justified a flying start. Moreover, it did not look as if Driscoe was likely to distinguish himself outside a classroom.

  One could not always prejudge these things, however. Driscoe II, far too frail for rugby, showed unexpected promise as a cross country runner, astonishing Outram’s shield-holding team by averaging nine points in the first three runs of the season. Nine wasn’t many, set against the impressive total of Outram’s longstriding house-captain, Parker, but it was reckoned good for a shortsighted, knock-kneed first-termer, and Parker, a fanatic in this field, selected the boy as his fag, partly with the object of encouraging him when he was doing odd jobs about the study.

  The result was predictable. Driscoe became fired with a desire to develop his unlikely talent to a pitch where the splendid Parker, an all-round sportsman, and in line for the house prefectship, regarded him as an asset to the house. When the run-in started from the crest of Middlemoo
r, the final run of the term, the new boy went off like a fugitive slave a few yards ahead of the bloodhounds.

  He had no luck. At a gap in the hedge, dividing Man Dixon’s sheep pasture from the marshy river bottom, he fell flat on his face and lost his glasses. Groping for them in inches of Exmoor mud he was trodden flat by a succession of runners determined to keep up with the leaders, and in a momentary lull between his involuntary prostration he decided to continue without them and return to recover them before first bell in the morning.

  It was a reckless decision. Badly winded, and quite unfamiliar with the route, he ran far wide of the track, reaching the soggy floor of the valley at a point where the river bank was approached by a broad area of marsh, screened by a fringe of last year’s sedge and partitioned off from firmer ground by a fence of two-by-four palings.

  Any country-bred boy would have realised that a crossing here was impassable and that there was a very good reason for fencing out here on the open moor, but Driscoe had lived the whole of his life in Golders Green, and even his summer holidays had been spent with a doting aunt in Worthing. He made nothing of the flimsy barrier, scrambled over and plunged waist-deep into a slough as thick as black treacle.

  He had time to yell and somebody heard him.

  Gosse, maker of treasure maps, was passing the gap higher up the slope, moving at a deliberately leisurely pace, with the object of evading the whippers-in at the next belt of timber and making for Ma Midden’s farm, where he could exchange a sixpence (carefully wrapped in his handkerchief) for two hot pasties, one for him, one for his crony, Meadowes.

  Gosse, his curiosity aroused, changed direction, descended the steep field and stopped short at the barrier, appalled by what he saw on the far side. It was no more than half of Driscoe, who looked like the stump of a small tree hammered into soft ground.