Three
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1
IN HIS RELAXED MOODS HE COULD STILL THINK OF HIMSELF AS ruling an island in a stream, protected to some extent, from lethal flotsam that coasted by on either side, touching shore here and there, probing, fussing, worrying, but finally moving on round the bend in the river. But latterly lodgments were made, and unexpected pressures exerted, so that a certain amount of erosion was evident, fissures showing in his defences. Whenever this happened he was troubled, for they always appeared at places where he thought himself buttressed against adversity. Such a case was Christopherson’s in the spring of ‘37.
There had been a time when Bamfylde’s remoteness made nonsense of faraway commotions but latterly, as the decade sped along, there had been dramatic improvements in communications. In the early ‘twenties their newspapers had arrived almost a day late, while only the odd crackpot thought of wireless as anything more than an amusing toy. Today newspapers were delivered in bulk, and were distributed to classrooms before first period bell. There were also half a dozen wireless sets on the premises, some of them complicated-looking pieces of apparatus, and their stream of bulletins kept everyone informed of what was happening elsewhere. It made a difference, as his encounter with Christopherson II proved.
Christopherson, thought to be enjoying his first year up at Oxford, appeared on a motorbike in the middle of the Easter holidays and said, over a glass of Old Boys’ sherry, ‘Glad I caught you, Pow-Wow. Had a feeling you might have taken Mrs Powlett-Jones away for Easter. Should’ve rung, of course, but there wasn’t time. I’m hellishly pressed as it is,’ and when David enquired where he was going, he replied, ‘You’ll probably think I want my head examined. I know my people do, and so does my tutor, but there it is, a chap has to make his own decisions as regards fundamentals. I made mine in the new year. I’m off to Spain.’
If it had been someone like Hislop, or a natural belligerent like, say, Paddy McNaughton, or Ruby Bickford, he might have been surprised, but not dumbfounded. He remembered Christopherson II as the most convinced pacifist they had ever had in the Sixth, a boy who supported Canon Dick Shepard’s Peace Pledge Union, and God alone knew how many other pressure groups. Chris would remember him that way too, as the boy who took the unpopular pacifist line at that current affairs discussion a year or so back, when he insisted that confrontation with Mussolini would mean another World War and that this was unthinkable. Yet here he was, appearing out of the blue on an old Douglas motorcycle, announcing that he was about to embroil himself in the bloodiest civil war of the century.
‘You’re going as an ambulance driver, Chris?’
‘No, Pow-Wow, to fight. To hell with turning the other cheek.’
‘Then I don’t wonder your people think you’re crazy, quite apart from the fact that Spain is Spain’s business, whatever we may think of the rights and wrongs of what’s going on there. You’ve only just started at Oxford and from all I hear likely to do well up there. What the devil do you imagine you can achieve singlehanded in Spain?’ but before Christopherson could reply Christine came in, with an armful of daffodils and narcissi cut from the forecourt beds, and said, sharply, ‘Are you on your way to Spain?’ and Christopherson, leaping up so quickly that he spilled his sherry, replied, smiling, ‘I always did think you were quick on the uptake, Mrs P.J. I’m travelling overland to Bilbao, providing that old crank of mine outside stays the course. If it doesn’t I’ll flog it and push on by train!’ and she said, fervently, ‘Good for you. You won’t get his blessing but you can count on mine. Give him another sherry, Davy. He’s spilled most of that being polite.’
He took Christopherson’s glass and moved over to the decanter, frowning at his reflection in the sideboard mirror and thinking, ‘She’s already guessed his motives but I’m hanged if I can. That International Brigade everyone’s yammering about will be full of starry-eyed amateurs like him, and the professional Communists will take full advantage of them if I know ‘em!’ He refilled the glass and came back to where the pair of them were talking in the window bay, saying, ‘You can’t wonder I take a dim view of it. You were a pacifist when you left here, just over a year ago. Would it be too much to ask how pacifism fits in with what’s going on over there?’
‘He’s asked for his card back and got it,’ Christine said, ‘and I think he’s done the right thing. I wish to God more of Dick Shepard’s converts had his moral courage,’ but Christopherson said, ‘Don’t rub the salt in, Mrs P.J. He had his basinful on the Western Front and I can understand his point of view.’ He turned back to David. ‘You don’t think anything can be solved by war, do you, Pow-Wow? Or that was my impression after I got into Upper School.’
‘Then it was a wrongheaded one. I’m all for standing up to those bastards, and she’ll tell you the same, but this is a local quarrel. Spain is still living in Philip II’s time, and you won’t be long finding that out. If you feel so strongly about it you would have done better to enlist in your college O.T.C. That way you’d be preparing yourself for the real show-down if and when it comes.’
‘ “If “ is the operative word, Pow-Wow. Do you believe we’ll ever have one?’
‘Oddly enough, he does,’ Christine said, ‘he believes we’ll wake up with the Fire Brigade on the doorstep and we’ve had any number of arguments about it. But I’m on your side. With Chamberlain and his set in Number Ten you’ll be too old to fight by the time our people realise what’s happening. So good luck to you, and anyone else who takes a crack at Franco. Even P.J. will drink to that, won’t you, Davy?’
He drank to it, but without enthusiasm. It was all very well for people like her and Christopherson, who saw everything in black and white, but you couldn’t read history and teach history for thirty years without coming to a conclusion that almost every cause, from the Punic Wars onward, came in a shade of grey.
They gave him lunch and watched him chug away down the east drive on his elderly Douglas, trailing a cloud of blue exhaust, and signalling his departure with a series of sharp explosions, that reminded David unpleasantly of a machine gun sweeping a traverse. They never saw him again. Before Christmas news came that he had been killed at Teruel and that night, sitting alone in his study, he realised how Algy Herries must have felt when an early casualty list of the First World War had included Monson, killed at Chateau Thierry, in August, 1914. There was a difference, however. Christopherson, gallant idiot that he was, did not qualify for a place on the memorial outside. He died in what most people would think of as a foreign cause, and at a time when politicians were mouthing the newly fashionable phrase, Non-Intervention. But that did not make his death easier to bear. Not for him, who had always seen
Christopherson as a warm, wise and lovable boy, and not for Christine, who wept when he showed her the letter from Christopherson’s parents.
2
That was the very beginning as he saw it, the first major breach in his island defences, but thereafter, right through that year, the strength of the current increased to a point where it was impossible to stand off, in the manner of his early days as head, and leave the brawlers to get on with it. The war in Spain divided everybody, scoring a demarcation line not only through Westminster and Fleet Street, but through the Owl Society, solemnly debating the issue on an Exmoor plateau.
‘Does Guernica mean battleships are out of date, sir?’
‘The News Chronicle says Franco is relying on Moors, Eyeties and Germans!’
‘The Times says the Reds are shooting nuns. Is it propaganda, sir?’
Questions fired at him not only by the Sixth and the Fifth, but the Fourth, so that he had to give them all a warning regarding the confusing references to the protagonists, variously styled Loyalists, Nationalists, Communists, Falangists, Reds, Fascists and even Liberators, according to the individual prejudices of correspondents and editors.
And, as if this was not enough, there was the occasional maverick like Hotchkiss, who subscribed, if you please,
to the Left Book Club, and pressed Koestler’s Spanish Testament upon him, declaring it made everything crystal clear. He obliged Hotchkiss on this occasion, and was shocked by Koestler’s revelations, but the book did not rid him of a sour belief that Spain was a country full of gloomy bigots and that the Moorish streak in the Spaniard seemed to put a premium on acts of savagery.
Neither was Spain the only battleground. Some of the sharper ones had their eye on Paris, Rome, Vienna, and even Manchuria.
‘Sir, is there any chance of us forming a Popular Front, like the French?’
‘What about the Anschluss, sir? Is it true all the Austrian Jews are jumping out of windows?’
‘Does Japan’s new invasion mean the Chinese Government and the Reds will join up, sir?’
He envied Chris, who seemed to have some kind of answers to these questions. For himself, it was getting a little above him, particularly as he had so much on his plate that summer.
He was still building, still encroaching bit by bit on their elbow room up here, and yet another Old Boy’s legacy, enabling a sizeable reduction in the bank overdraft, encouraged him to push on after completion of the new wing that now comprised concert hall, classrooms, a new laboratory, seven studies, a gymnasium and a sports locker-room.
The familiar silhouette of the huddle of buildings, seen against the backdrop of a sunset, began to change, the looming bulk of the hall and classroom block rose only a few yards north of the last east drive beech, and what had been the old covered playground, once seen as a dip in the rooftop line, now straggled as far as the fives court on the northern boundary. The new buildings were, as Algy had predicted, mellowing rapidly, but there was still, in his mind at least, need for expansion since they were now aiming at a target figure of four hundred plus. The Cradlers were still without adequate quarters of their own but that, he decided, was less imperative than the provision of a real library, replacing what he regarded as a jumble of tattered books, mostly of the kind one might come across in an under-endowed convalescent home.
He put up a scheme to the Governors and they approved it at a single session. He had very little trouble with the Governors these days. Old Sir Rufus, still looking like a shrivelled walnut, continued to preside, and Briggy Cooper never missed a meeting. Between them they could always swing the waverers into line, so that he thought, ‘Next year will be my twentieth anniversary up here. I’ll make myself a birthday present of that library,’ and the work was put in hand, the builder giving his completion date as August of next year.
Then, dramatically, other matters engaged his attention. Christine came to him with the news that she was pregnant again, and seemed cheerful and resolute about it, saying she intended to spoil herself throughout the spring, and would take no chances at all while on a course of tablets prescribed by the Bristol gynaecologist Willoughby had called in. She had no intention, however, of surrendering the Cradlers, now averaging twenty-five a term.
‘They take very little out of me,’ she told him. ‘In fact, they’ll keep me from worrying. This is the brightest bunch I’ve ever had, and I actually find myself looking forward to Monday, which is more than you can say of others. Yourself, included, on occasion.’
But suddenly he found he had almost more than he could handle. Howarth went sick again, this time with pneumonia, necessitating a longish spell in hospital, and in his prolonged absence he was lumbered with Upper School English, and obliged to hand over his few Lower School periods to Boyer.
He did not mind the extra chore, despite the considerable pressures it exerted on his time. It was a pleasure, sometimes, to scamp the correspondence, letting Grace answer letters, guided by a pencil scrawl at the foot of the page, and spend an hour or two with his old favourites, Swift, George Eliot, Gray, Cowper, John Donne and even the war poets Owen and Sassoon, whom he had neglected lately.
He tried the Upper Fifth with Shaw’s Man of Destiny, and found that they enjoyed it immensely, and this encouraged him to try John Bull’s Other Island, when he heard himself recounting the story of Paddy McNaughton and his rusty revolver. He was still inclined to be a drifter in class and the boys knew it, and took shameless advantage of it, but that didn’t bother him overmuch. He had never seen any specific subject as watertight, so that his English had often spilled over into history, geography and even divinity, and sometimes, when the bell went, he would again remind himself he had learned more than he had imparted.
There was a price to be paid for this diversion, however, and it arrived on his desk one morning in the Lent term, in the form of an almost illegible letter from Howarth, asking him to drive over to the Challacombe Hospital, where he was convalescing. He went at once and was shocked, on being shown into a private ward, to note that Howarth was still a very sick man. He had lost a great deal of weight, and under his heavy woollen dressing gown he looked as shrivelled as Sir Rufus. He said, the moment they were alone, ‘You might as well have it straight, P.J. I’m finished. They can make as many cooing noises as they like, but it’s a fact. I thought it only fair to tell you before the Easter break, so that you can start looking round for someone.’ Then, with some difficulty, ‘That isn’t the real reason I got you here. I’m asking a favour, and I daresay you’ll regard it as a big one when you hear it.’
‘You don’t have to ask me to keep the job open, I’d do that in any case. I can cope. Grace does most of my correspondence, and Boyer has taken over my odd periods. As a matter of fact, I’m enjoying your work with the Fifth and Sixth,’ but Howarth made one of his irritable gestures. ‘I’m not talking about the job. I’m talking about dying, man.’
‘Dying?’
‘That’s what I said, so don’t let any damned quack fob you off with anything different.’
‘But, good God, you’re more or less over it, aren’t you? A summer in the south, the kind of sun-soak you always promised yourself and never took…’
‘I left it too late,’ He looked at David very carefully, as though he had been an enterprising boy in Middle School, who had just presented him with an outrageous excuse for a scamped essay. ‘I finally got the truth out of them. I have about six months. Cancer, here,’ and he tapped his chest.
It was particularly surprising. For a year or so Howarth’s booming cough had been as much a part of Bamfylde’s background as the iron notes of the bell. Howarth had even made jokes about it calling it his forerunner. ‘Not the John the Baptist variety. Hairy John promised eternal life, didn’t he? Mine tells me they’ll soon be burning a pile of rubbish somewhere.’
It might be rooted, David supposed, in Howarth’s lifelong addiction to tobacco, and he said feebly, ‘If you cut out cigarettes…’ but at this Howarth snarled, ‘Don’t give me that, P.J.! I’ve already given ‘em up, or they think I have. But if I had done it when it meant anything I should have been carted away from that barn frothing at the mouth years ago. Tobacco is an absent-minded habit with most people. It never was so with me. It was a source of enormous comfort to know that, the minute that bloody bell went, I could light up, and there it is. Some take to drink, and some can’t get by without women. I liked my gin, yes, but it was never important to me. Neither was I ever in your category, with my eyes on the stars. You’re fortunate to be committed to a job and I hope you’ve sense enough to realise it.’
‘What was the favour, Howarth?’
‘An eccentric one and you’ll have to bend rules to grant it. I’m not scared of dying but I’m scared to hell of dying here, among the sick, sorry and senile. I want to die where I belong, within scent and earshot of familiar smells and sounds. If I discharge myself, can I come back to my own quarters? I’ve plenty of money to pay for a day and a night nurse later on and I wouldn’t be a bother. You and Barnaby would be handy for a chat, and all the latest scandal. Is that asking too much? Because if it is, say so and be damned to you.’
‘I daresay it can be arranged, so long as you don’t tell anyone else what you’ve just told me. If that got out we should all
be in trouble.’
Howarth relaxed and said, ‘I’m much obliged to you, P.J.,’ and then, with a twitch of a smile, ‘Wouldn’t be the first rule we’ve bent, eh?’
He left him feeling absolutely desolate. Ever since that first exchange of conversation in the common room twenty years ago, he had leaned heavily on Howarth, more so since he had taken Alcock’s place. The man’s enormous experience, and his deep love of Bamfylde that he was always at such pains to conceal, had proved rallying points time and again over the years. If it had been difficult to picture Bamfylde without Algy it was impossible to imagine it without Howarth. He never had believed that story of his about scuttling off to the Riviera the moment he was pensioned. ‘You can’t love bricks and mortar,’ had been one of Howarth’s favourite maxims but he had belied it every time a fresh crisis blew up, and here he was begging to be allowed to die on the premises. He drove back to Bamfylde very slowly, coming to terms not only with the fact but with his decision to confide in nobody, not even Chris.
3
Howarth installed himself in his old quarters, just before the summer term opened and seemed to rally, shuffling out and about on sunny days, and sometimes making his way as far as the nets, where he would sit on the roller, his rimless glasses flashing in the sun, as he drew carefully on a forbidden cigarette, holding it under his hand, like a Fourth Former in one or other of the smokers’ hideouts about the place. David and Chris spent a good deal of time with him, and so did Barnaby, who probably guessed the truth, but he must have fooled most of the others, for every now and again the bursar, or one of the junior staff, would refer to his impending return to work with phrases like, ‘When Howarth is fit…’ or ‘Just until Howarth is back on the job.’
But then, in the latest flare-up over the Sudetenland dispute, and the sordid scuttling to and from Bad Godesberg, Berchtesgaden and finally Munich, even Howarth was all but forgotten; and the writing on the wall became so stark and clear that sometimes, reading the latest headlines, he felt physically sick, as though he had eaten an indigestible meal. Possibly he had. It was not pleasant to see the sons and daughters of the men who had stormed Vimy Ridge squealing with glee over the human sacrifice of Czechoslovakia.
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