R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  Affectionately,

  Julia Sprockman (née Darbyshire in case you’ve forgotten all about me!)

  He poured himself a whisky and sat at his desk, trying to imagine what she looked like now, what her son and daughters were like. He had no snapshot of her and could only recall, at this distance, that she was pretty, broad-featured, and had once had luxuriant hair, tresses she used to torment poor Blades, down in the goyle that summer day so long ago. Yet, although his memory of her was vague, erased perhaps by Beth and Chris, he found the prospect of Charles Sprockman coming here a pleasing one, partly because Sprockman had seemed so English somehow, and recalling this there came to him the American’s quote from one of Rupert Brooke’s letters: ‘There walk, as yet, no ghosts in Canadian lanes… at a pinch one can do without gods, but one misses the dead…’ One did miss the dead and he wondered if he should go and look at Howarth, but he did not feel equal to it. The boys would have to be notified officially, and he supposed he would have to make an announcement in the morning, but there would be no service at Stone Cross. Howarth had left explicit instructions concerning that, and had asked to be cremated. He heard the quad door bang and Grace’s footsteps on the flags and rose quickly, suddenly glad of her company.

  4

  He told them at breakfast, letting the house prefects know in advance that he would ask for a moment’s silence in Big Hall, so that the moment he mounted the dais every face turned to him expectantly. He said, once they had resumed their seats, ‘You will have heard that Mr Howarth died yesterday. At his own request we won’t be having a special service. Everyone who remembers him, before he was taken ill, will recall how much he disliked fuss and ceremony. But I should like to say a word or two about him, and how much he meant to the school. He was a very good friend to me, ever since I came here as a young man, before any of you were born. Hardly a day passed when he didn’t give me the benefit of his experience, and when I became head I couldn’t have managed without him. Bamfylde owes him a very great deal. He was a first-class teacher, and I suppose those of you who didn’t have time to know him well were sometimes a little scared of him. I know all the new boys were, but the Upper School, and even some of the Middle School, soon realised how wonderfully kind he was. I could give you many instances of his kindness but he would have hated that. I see no reason why I shouldn’t tell you, however, that he left everything he had to Bamfylde. Perhaps we should acknowledge his great love of the school by standing in silence for a moment.’

  The house prefects took their cue from him and stood, more or less in unison, so that upwards of four hundred heads bobbed up, and upwards of four hundred pairs of eyes studied porridge plates for what seemed to him a long sixty seconds. Then he stepped back and they sat again, subdued and a little embarrassed, so that it occurred to him that he might have chosen the wrong moment. Barnaby disposed of the doubt at once. Leaning forward he said, quietly, ‘Thank you, P.J. That was just right, I think. He wouldn’t have approved, of course, but we owed it to him, anyway.’

  Immediately below, the continuous murmur rose steadily, falling short of its usual breakfast crescendo, a low buzz of conversation against a sustained rattle of china and cutlery. A very Bamfylde sound at this time of day. Some of them, he supposed, might be exchanging comments not on Howarth but on the arrival of Chris’s boy at Challacombe, for that, too, would be common knowledge by now. Howarth had often voiced his respect for the speed and deadly efficiency of the Bamfylde bush-telegram. ‘Bulletins, I am persuaded, are issued regularly on the hot-water pipes. The way they circulate in gaol,’ he had said, and David, remembering this old joke, discovered to his surprise that he could already think of Howarth, not as he had seen him twenty-four hours ago, sick and ravaged, but as Bamfylde would always see him in the future, irascible, frigid and occasionally frightening, but underneath all that as soft as thistledown.

  That wasn’t quite the end of it, however.

  At the Old Boys’ annual dinner in London not long afterwards, Masterson, that year’s president, paid a warm if jocular tribute to Howarth in his speech, making gentle fun of his acidity, and even giving an excellent imitation of one of Howarth’s quiet eruptions in class. It was well received, for the three hundred assembled here recalled Howarth in his prime and not, as David’s audience would remember him, as a tired, ageing man, racked by ‘that bloody cough’. But Gilmour, a plump, rosy man in his mid thirties, sitting at the far end of table ‘D’, had a sobering surprise for everyone when he rose to reply to the last speech of the evening. He said, half-apologetically, ‘The president referred to Mr Howarth and I should like to add something to that, something I never felt free to tell anyone until now, for had I done so Howarth would never have forgiven me. Back in 1923, when I was sixteen, and in the Lower Fifth, my father died suddenly, and in tragic circumstances. I won’t bore you with details but I have to tell you this. There wasn’t much money to go round at the time, and my mother at once gave notice that I would be withdrawn at the end of term. Howarth wrote my mother a letter and, having heard of his death in October, I looked it out and brought it with me. It’s short, and like all Howarth’s letters, very much to the point. Have I your permission to read it, sir?’ He had everybody’s attention now and waited for the murmur of assent to die down.

  Dear Mrs Gilmour,

  I heard of your loss from the headmaster, and write at once to express my sympathy. In the meantime I take the liberty of expressing an opinion that you would be ill-advised to remove your son before he qualifies to sit the Cambridge Senior examination. In my view he has every chance of achieving a creditable result, particularly in English subjects, and I am given to understand, again by Mr Herries, that the reason you are removing him is financial. If I am wrong, please ignore this letter. If I am right, may I make a suggestion? I would take it very kindly if you permitted me to contribute one half of Gilmour’s fees until he arrives in the Sixth, and I do not advance this somewhat impertinent offer in what some people would regard as a spirit of charity. Gilmour has ability, of the kind that I regard as rare, at least in one respect. He can express himself simply and clearly and if, as I understand was your intention, he enters the Civil Service on leaving here, that facility alone should stand him in good stead, and benefit us all. Please let me know if this is acceptable,

  Sincerely,

  Ian Howarth

  The effect of this letter upon the audience reminded David of the reception accorded Algy Herries’s speech at his farewell supper. No after-dinner speech that he had heard on these convivial occasions had been received so spontaneously and Gilmour, flushing, was obliged to wait for the clamour to subside. He concluded, ‘My mother accepted that offer. I stayed on another two years, and it cost Howarth three hundred pounds, or one year’s assistant master’s salary at that time. Like everyone here there are times when I feel I owe Bamfylde a good deal. But looking back on what happened at that time I think I owe Howarth more.’

  Gilmour sat down amid tremendous applause and was further embarrassed by a standing ovation, something no one had ever previously witnessed at an O.B.A. dinner, usually no more than a beery get-together. But the ovation, David realised, wasn’t for Gilmour at all. It was for Howarth and, to his way of thinking, not only deserved but years overdue. As they crowded round Gilmour at the bar afterwards he remembered Barnaby’s almost obligatory quotation the day after he told him he had scattered Howarth’s ashes on the Bamfylde preserve at Stone Cross. Something from Horace, Livy or Plautus, he had forgotten which: ‘Love is very fruitful, both of honey and gall.’ Like most of Barnaby’s quotations it was extraordinarily apt.

  Part Nine

  * * *

  RE-RUN

  One

  * * *

  1

  PRAGUE OCCUPIED, ALBANIA OVERRUN. A SENSE EVERYWHERE of living on borrowed time and yet, for him more than anyone on the plateau that spring, there was still an inner fortress into which he could retreat, slamming the door on the babel outside with
a finality never quite achieved in the tranquil days, before he was head and before Alcock walked among them. And this, he supposed, stemmed more from her and the child and Grace, than from his own convictions, or from a persistent hope that somewhere something would happen to arrest the movement of the long creeping shadow over the Western World.

  There were moments when he could even see himself, half-humorously, as a Victorian paterfamilias, presiding over a complaisant household comprised of dutiful wife, young girl in the first bloom of womanhood, baby with powerful lungs and a phenomenal appetite, and creaking manservant, as though, in unspoken agreement one with the other, all five of them had agreed to enact a charade that had, as its keywords, felicity and domesticity.

  The child had this effect on her, a very surprising one to any who had known her in her electioneering days, so that sometimes he wondered if she wasn’t overdoing it a little, or perhaps conserving her nervous energy for some tremendous challenge that lay in the future. The question teased him so persistently that one evening, shortly after the opening of the summer term, he said, watching her powder the baby after his bath, ‘Am I right about you? Has that child taken over the Chris Forster of the barnstorming days?’ and she threw him a saucy look over her shoulder and replied, ‘If he has are you complaining, Davyboy?’ and he admitted cheerfully that he wasn’t but that it surprised him none the less. With everybody finally convinced that Armageddon was just over the hill he would have looked for a little crowing on her part, or at least an occasional comment on the day’s headlines.

  She said, dumping a drowsy Ian into his cot, ‘Maybe I am crowing inside. I’ve been wrong so often it’s a rare pleasure to be right for once. But don’t misunderstand me. I’m not blind to what’s going on. It’s just that none of us can do a damned thing about it at this stage but sit and wait. And hope, maybe.’

  ‘Hope?’

  ‘That’s what I said. I did my best to stir ‘em up, and they are beginning to stir a little. A possible Polish guarantee, evacuation plans and air-raid trenches in Hyde Park establish that, if nothing else. You’ve done your bit, too, in a different way right here, on your home ground. I imagine you’ll go right ahead doing it while there’s breath in your body.’

  ‘I still don’t see that as grounds for hope,’ he said, remembering Christopherson II on his way to Spain.

  ‘You will, Davy, when it happens. Read your Froude again, that chapter on the early summer of 1588. Or read Churchill and L.G. come to that, writing of what they call the last summer of the old world, in June–July 1914,’ but he was not to be fobbed off so easily.

  ‘We left it until five minutes to twelve on both those occasions, and we had a hell of a lot of luck into the bargain. This time it only wants about thirty seconds to midnight and that little bastard will pick his own time, won’t he?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, philosophically, ‘it’s not for me to remind you of that old jingo nostrum about England losing every battle but the last. You have a chat to the Sixth and Fifth, and then come back and convince me that Hitler and Musso are going to push us around indefinitely.’

  After that she wouldn’t be drawn. Indeed, once a reliable nanny had been found in the village, and she could return to her beloved Cradle, and their halting readings of Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, he did not see very much of her, for he still had his hands very full, with a muster of four hundred and two boys, and a record number of thirty-eight new arrivals down for September.

  He did take her advice, however, and raised the subject with the two Sixth forms and three Fifth forms. Nobody seemed to share his lack of confidence. All appeared to regard an ultimate confrontation with Hitler as a certainty, but the prospect of squaring up to his enormous army and air force, with dubious allies, and a totally inadequate armament, did not seem to daunt them. Perhaps their forefathers had won too many battles. Or perhaps, like Fleet Street, they fell for all those tales about Hitler’s cardboard tanks and dummy submarines.

  He was taking no chances, however, and that summer the Corps had a lively time of it, with new exercises on open warfare, Lewis gun and grenade training, and a concentrated programme of long-range shooting down at the Bamfylde Halt butts. Anything he could teach them he taught them well, and they seemed to respond to his zeal, sometimes calling him a slave-driver with the wind up, but doing their best, none the less. A young and rather foppish War Office captain, down for the Certificate ‘A’ pass out that year, complimented him on their keenness and turnout, saying, over a farewell gin, ‘Heard you were in France for four years, Headmaster. Maybe that accounts for the high morale of the chaps,’ and David, suddenly seeing himself as a kind of Blimp, mumbled that he had served three years in the line but left it vowing he would never be caught in khaki again.

  The young officer looked a little outraged. ‘But you’re the official C.O. of the outfit, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ he growled, ‘for I’ve since come to the conclusion that if some of us don’t make a stand soon it’ll be all over bar the Sieg Heils.’ The War Office man, who would have been about five years old when Passchendaele was fought, raised an eyebrow. ‘You mean you don’t think that chap’s ravin’ is four-fifths bluff?’

  ‘Do you? After Munich?’

  The officer shrugged. ‘Never meddle in politics. Just get on with the job. It’s done one thing for us, I will say. The Territorials are up to strength for the first time since I left Sandhurst,’ and he excused himself with a nod, leaving David with the impression that Whitehall could still count on its Haigs and Robertsons.

  A week later, however, he had unexpected proof of the man’s claim concerning the sudden popularity of the Terriers. Spats Winterbourne turned up in uniform, on his way to summer camp on Bodmin Moor, a trim, uncharacteristically subdued young man, who looked very smart in his uniform, but reminded David poignantly of youngsters like Nick Austen and Robin Barnes, killed on the Somme. He said, apologising for what he called his fancy dress, ‘Had to do something, Pow-Wow. If it does come there’ll be conscription, and a chap might as well get in on the ground floor. I’m ack-ack, actually. Is Grace around?’

  Grace was around and they went off together in Winterbourne’s rakish car. Late that night he heard the car roar into the forecourt and then Grace’s hurried footsteps on the stairs, but she didn’t look in to say good night. Neither did Spats, for the usual nightcap, a circumstance he thought little of at the time but was to remember a few months later, when he had occasion to put two and two together.

  The term seemed to pass very quickly, with no improvement in the situation, so that he abandoned a half-formed plan to park Ian with the Boyers for a fortnight, and take Chris across to the Continent to make his own soundings, and went instead on day-trips into Cornwall and South Devon. It was as well he stayed home. News came of the Russo-German pact, and on its heels renewed outcry about the Polish Corridor, so that he wasn’t much surprised to hear Carter’s voice on the phone one morning in late August, suggesting they met before the new school year began and finalised the evacuation plan, agreeing to meet in London on Saturday, September 22nd.

  In the last week of August he interviewed Howarth’s replacement, a cheerful, thirty-two-year-old Cornishman, called Heathcott, who seemed by far the best of the bunch, even though he had been slightly crippled in a road accident, leaving him with a limp that reminded David of Grace’s handicap before her determination (plus Sax Hoskins’s unconventional exercises) had strengthened the damaged muscles of her leg. Heathcott had been teaching at a grammar school in South London and wanted to get away to the country, chiefly on account of his wife’s health, for she had spent some months in a tubercular clinic. ‘The doctors say it will do her all the good in the world to live up here,’ he said, enthusiastically, as soon as he knew he had been accepted.

  ‘They told me the same thing when I was discharged from the army in 1918,’ David said, ‘and they were right. But she might find it deadly dull after a place lik
e Croydon.’

  They had dinner together and David decided he was going to like the talkative, freckled young man – he had begun to think of everyone under forty as young – and they chatted far into the night, discovering that they shared many old favourites, among them Gray, Goldsmith, the Restoration poets and even Tennyson, whom David would have thought a chap like Heathcott would regard as old hat. Heathcott was interested in history, too, and had made an amateur study of the early Plantagenets. His clear favourites were the obscure Henry III and his more popular son, Edward I. ‘They each gave the country something lasting,’ he said. ‘Henry built most of the best cathedrals, and I always see Edward as the real originator of our legal system.’

  ‘What did you make of Heathcott?’ he asked Chris when they were going to bed, and she replied, predictably, ‘Liked him. If his wife is half as intelligent they’re going to be assets. I had a word with him on politics when you were talking to the bursar, and discovered that he’s an old-fashioned Liberal. Thinks the balloon will go up in a year or so, unless we decide to get in first, and I can’t see that happening.’

  Heathcott was over-optimistic. He drove off to collect his wife and arrange his move, but four days later the school radios crackled with news of Hitler’s onslaught on Poland. It was here again, two months short of the twenty-first anniversary of the night he and Howarth had escaped from the Armistice celebration concert in Big Hall and sat under the fives court, discussing the poet Heine.

  2

  It fell upon them like a cataract, days before the twin drives were jammed with cars bringing boys back for the opening term, such a coming and going as nobody at Bamfylde could recall, even at Whitsuntide reunions in the halcyon days. Carter’s contingent of fifty arrived, sleeping rough in classrooms until they could be sorted out and organised as a separate unit, with headquarters in a couple of Nissen huts erected just short of the Junior rugby pitch. Official forms arrived in a steady stream, ‘a flood-tide of bumf’, the overworked bursar called it, and David sympathised with him, cowering under the Whitehall bombardment concerning rationing, blackouts and emergency regulations. And then, while they were still in a hopeless muddle, the term began, and what had seemed confusion slipped into chaos, with a new timetable to be drawn up, extra domestic staff signed on, the workshop set busy making trestle tables and forms and a miniature farmyard established down by the piggeries, with a nucleus of a hundred White Leghorns, and a dozen ravenous Saddlebacks.