‘Damn it,’ he complained to Chris, soon after the start of term, ‘it’s like preparing for a siege, with the place full of peasants fleeing from the surrounding countryside,’ and she said that that was what it amounted to, although the anticlimax of those early autumn days did not confirm her view. Nothing seemed to be happening in the Maginot Line, so that he wondered whether there might not have been some substance in that War Office man’s comment about Hitler’s diatribes being bluff, and even relayed the possibility to Chris, whom he had come to regard as an oracle since the day she had appeared with little Ulrich Meyer in tow. And thinking of Meyer, he remembered to tell her that he had promoted the German boy to the rank of sergeant-major of the Corps. Ulrich was eighteen now, and in line for a prefecture if he stayed on.
‘Can’t help laughing when I think of his transformation,’ he told her, describing Meyer’s first parade, north of the cricket pitch. ‘He was a weedy little beggar when you dropped him off but the traditional Prussian in him has begun to emerge. Adolf missed a good thing when he forced that boy into exile. There’s Potsdam in his ancestry somewhere. He regards drill as poetry, and his voice, hectoring the awkward squad, carries farther than the bell. Scares the living daylights out of some of the recruits.’
There were unexpected departures, as well as a flood of new arrivals. Five of the Upper Sixth, scheduled to stay on until March, did not return, among them, Crispin, handbell-ringer and stealer of toffee bars. And after Crispin, Keithley, the tiny Mancunian who had the honour of being the first new boy David had welcomed as headmaster in January, 1932. And after that Lackaknacker Briggs, still secretive and evasive about his alleged kidnapping. Crispin and Keithley, both members of a gliding club, went straight into the R.A.F. Lackaknacker took up a commission, wangled for him by an obliging uncle at the War Office, sailing the day after he had passed out to join Wavell’s army in the Near East.
Among the newcomers that term was somebody he had forgotten in the rush of events. Julia Darbyshire’s boy, Charles Sprockman, of whom both he and Chris instantly approved, a tall, confident youngster, likely to be popular, despite his transatlantic drawl, that won him the overnight nickname of ‘Clark’, Clark Gable being the current favourite among Bamfylde’s many cinema addicts. Julia had sent a letter with him, that went some way towards explaining why she had taken the momentous step of sending her son east, when everybody who could afford it was shipping his children out of harm’s way. ‘He’s half-English,’ she wrote, ‘and I’m sure his father would have approved. I think he ought to be in on anything that happens, and not dodging the column, likes scores of Britishers I’m meeting over here, all busy explaining they’re over here on official business.’ He thought it worth while to mention this eccentric approach to young Sprockman and discovered that he had already discussed it with his mother and endorsed her view. ‘I was looking forward to coming, sir,’ he said, ‘and I can’t see what the fuss is all about. It won’t last all that long, will it?’
‘I don’t know about that,’ David said, with a glance over Sprockman’s shoulder at the rehung photograph of Algy’s 1913 Rugby Fifteen. ‘The last war was supposed to be over by Christmas and it lasted more than four years. My guess is we’ll be lucky to settle Hitler’s hash, in less.’ Then, as the boy looked puzzled, ‘I’ve fought Jerry, lad, and he’s tough. Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking he’ll cave in quickly, the way the Italians will, if they’re crazy enough to get mixed up in it,’ and the boy said, ‘No, sir. Guess I won’t,’ and politely excused himself.
But then somebody appeared who succeeded in putting his manifold problems out of mind for a day or so. One wet and windy November afternoon Sax Hoskins knocked on his study door and said, with rather less than his usual assurance, ‘Er… have you time for a word, Pow-Wow? Kinder personal?’
Since taking up a professional career among musicians, and playing so much blues music, Sax had dropped into the habit of using American idioms and sounded, David thought, more American than Sprockman. He said, ‘You know I’ve always time for you, Sax. What’s your problem?’
‘Well, I guess it could be yours as well,’ Sax said, smiling uncertainly. ‘Grace and me… well, we figured on getting married before Christmas. Providing you’ll wear it, that is.’
David opened his mouth, closed it again, and ran his hand through his greying hair.
‘Married? You and Grace? Christmas, you say?’
‘You mean you didn’t figure on it? Not ever?’
‘Well, no… that is… I had some sort of idea that when she did marry… if she married, it would be you or Spats Winterbourne – I never could decide which. But good God, Sax, she’s only nineteen…’
‘She tells me her mother was nineteen when she married you, Pow-Wow.’
He hardly knew what to say. He had always liked Sax, and he knew that Grace had been very devoted to him since that far-off day in 1926 when, as a lad of fifteen or so, he had marched into Havelock’s and asked if he could teach Grace some of the latest dance steps, partly to boost her morale, partly to supplement the exercises she had been doing at that time. Now that he came to think about it he would have said Sax didn’t stand much chance while Winterbourne was in the offing, and Spats had never ceased to be in the offing, since leaving Bamfylde almost nine years ago. Winterbourne had a lot to offer, not because he was the only son of a rich man but because he was more serious-minded than Sax, who was reckoned a bit of a gadabout, not the kind of chap likely to clutter himself with a wife, unless there were bonuses of one sort of another. He was a rover, too, here today, up north tomorrow, and playing a date in a Continental resort the day after. He just couldn’t imagine Grace opting for that kind of life. She had always seemed so wedded to Exmoor.
Sax said, amiably, ‘If you’ve got any objections you’d better spill ‘em, Pow-Wow. I’ve always had a hell of a lot of time for you, and nobody could kid me you don’t top the bill with Grace. So if you put your foot down we’d wait until we could see further ahead. The point is,’ he continued, ‘it’s not really as simple as that. I’m starting my A.G. course at Jurby, Isle of Man, on Monday, but there, I haven’t told you I’m in the R.A.F. have I?’
‘No, you haven’t, and while you’re at it, what the devil is an A.G. when he’s at home?’
‘Air Gunner. I was lucky to get signed on aircrew at my age. I’m twenty-six, Pow-Wow.’
‘You don’t have to tell me how old you are,’ David said, still trying to absorb the situation, ‘but if you’re already in the services why are you wearing civvies?’
‘Oh, that? Well, my rig doesn’t fit. The tunic makes me look like Joan of Arc and I’m having it tailored.’
‘But why is twenty-six reckoned old for flying? There must be pilots and observers older than that in the regular service?’
‘Oh, there are,’ Sax said, ‘but they qualified on long, peacetime courses. Our A.G. course is only six weeks, and there are scores of kids queueing for it, some of ‘em with the cradle marks still on their backside. I had to use a drop of the old palm oil with a recruiting sergeant and he put me down as twenty-three. Cost me a fiver as a matter of fact.’
He gestured, hopelessly, ‘Look, sit down, Sax… give me a minute or two. Where is Grace right now? Listening outside the door, as they do in Victorian novels?’ and she said, laughing, ‘Yes, I am,’ and then to Sax, ‘You might have closed it properly. Prefects are always using this passage as a short out to the linen room. I had to head one off or your proposition would be all over the school by now.’
She slipped inside, looking, he thought, as pretty as he had ever seen her, in her new blue two-piece, bought, he guessed, with a honeymoon in mind on her last trip to town just before term began. She said, casually, ‘I didn’t hear everything. Daddy isn’t making a song and dance about it, is he?’ and Sax said, ‘Not really, though he has mentioned your age, just as you said he would,’ and David thought, ‘My God, there must have been some odd conversations in this room over t
he last seventy years but never one quite like this…’ But then, right on cue, the bell began to clang in the quad and he said, shutting the door, ‘I’ve no objections at all in principle. You must know I haven’t, the pair of you. But why all the rush? I mean, you’ll be home-based for some time, won’t you, even if you pass out. And talking of passing it would be the first time you ever did pass an examination.’
‘Oh, I’ll walk this,’ Sax said. ‘Piece of cake. I’m genned up on it,’ and years later David realised that this was the first time he ever heard the new R.A.F. slang, that was to pass into the language in a matter of months. Grace said, ‘It’s like this, Daddy. Once he’s passed he gets a week’s leave, but after that he could be sent absolutely anywhere, couldn’t you, Sax? I mean, it might be years, and we couldn’t wait that long, not when we don’t have to. We’re in love, Daddy, and he’s too bashful to tell you. I daresay we would have been married in the spring, anyway, if there hadn’t been a war. Isn’t that so, Sax?’
The way she kept referring everything back to him robbed her of maturity somehow, so that he saw her, not as a woman of nineteen, but as a seven-year-old, skipping round the Havelock parlour with the gangling Sax, to the strains of ‘ ‘Bye, ‘Bye, Blackbird’, played on his portable gramophone. Sax had gone red in the face, shamed by her forthrightness, but he stood his ground, just the way he had that night in Big School, when he owned up to finding Alcock’s pipe-smashing ceremony very funny. ‘It’s true,’ he said, doggedly. ‘There’s never been any other Judy for me, Pow-Wow. How about it, then?’
‘Well, you’ll suit yourselves, I suppose, for it’s clear you’ve made up your minds anyway. Coming here was a formality. Will you be getting married in church?’
‘Good Lord, yes,’ Sax said, as though someone had questioned his integrity. ‘We’d like to be married at Stone Cross. Grace would like that, and I think it’s a bit of a lark, I mean, getting married where I’ve sat through so much jaw. How about the seventeenth? That’s the day after I complete the course.’
‘And the last full day of term,’ Grace added, ‘so everyone can come who cares to.’
He got out his day-book and marked the date, and as he did it struck him that Grace and Sax had almost certainly taken instruction from someone on how to play this rather old-fashioned scene. ‘That could only be Chris,’ he thought, ‘and they aren’t going to get off scot-free and write me off as a dimwit,’ and he said, artfully, ‘Why don’t we go in and get Chris up to date? She’ll be so surprised she’ll probably drop the baby.’
He had his small revenge. They both looked a little outfaced and then Grace said, ‘Er… she won’t, Daddy… be surprised, I mean. She might pretend to, but the fact is we talked it over with her an hour ago. She took it very calmly.’
‘She was flat out for it, as a matter of fact,’ admitted Sax, ‘so let’s go back into the parlour and drink on it. You’ve got Scotch in there. You can’t oil a prospective son-in-law with Old Boys’ sherry.’
They were going to bed about midnight before he made his first direct reference to the query uppermost in his mind. ‘I always thought it would be Spats Winterbourne if it was anyone. I would have bet on it, wouldn’t you?’
She didn’t answer for a moment, tugging at a knot in her hair, with her head on one side, so that he could see three aspects of her face in the three-sided mirror and reflect, idly, how young she had looked since coming home with that baby, as though she had just won first prize in the Irish sweepstake. Then she laid aside the comb, pivoted slowly on the stool and looked him over carefully and judiciously. ‘Your trouble is you have a surfeit of males and male psychology, Davy. No, I wasn’t in the least surprised to discover it was Sax. In fact, I would have been very surprised to learn it was Winterbourne, poor devil.’
‘Oh, he’ll get over it at his age. They all do.’
‘It’ll take him longer than most.’
‘If he was so keen why didn’t he put up a fight for her?’
‘How do you know he didn’t?’
‘I don’t know. He was here on a flying visit in the summer. Come to think of it he went off without saying goodbye, and hasn’t been near us since.’
‘Well, that isn’t hard to explain. That would be the day Grace told him the score.’
‘You mean that she was always in love with Sax?’
‘Rather more, I suspect. That Sax needed her more than he did, and Grace is a woman who has to be needed. Keith Winterbourne is a sensitive, civilised human being, and he would have made her a good husband. But Grace wanted more than that. She wanted someone to spoil and that disqualifies anyone as self-sufficient as Winterbourne.’
He thought about this and then about her, how wise she was in so many ways, how well endowed to operate at a far wider range than he, whose talents were confined to handling males between the age of about thirteen and eighteen. He said, ‘I think Grace is damned lucky. She not only had a stable to pick from when it comes to a husband, she got a Grade A stepmother for good measure.’
‘I don’t take much credit for that. Anyone could get along with Grace.’
‘Anyone couldn’t.’
‘Well, anyone you picked for her stepmother could.’
She got up and moved between him and the dressing-table light, so that the lines of her figure – the figure of a girl athlete he sometimes thought it – were displayed through the flimsy material of her nightdress. It struck him then what a tremendous part she had played in keeping him young in heart, warding off the fossilisation that threatened all men in his profession after more than ten years on the job. ‘You don’t look much older than Grace in that get-up,’ he said, and she replied, switching off the light, ‘I know a lot more about men. Notwithstanding the head-start she’s had over most of her sex.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. It follows you probably know what I’m thinking.’
‘I knew before you did. Wedding talk always makes men randy. Women, too, sometimes. Me, for instance.’
She stood still in the darkness for a moment, out of immediate reach but close enough for him to hear the soft rustle of her nightdress as she shrugged herself out of it.
3
Twice during that winter of war that was not war the battle flared, two live coals in an otherwise dead fire. H.M.S. Royal Oak, at anchor in Scapa Flow, was torpedoed by a U-Boat and sank at dead of night, taking with her Lieutenant Graves-Jones, who had served in the Navy since leaving the plateau in the mid-twenties. Beth would have remembered him well, for he had been the least shy guest at her first new boys’ party in 1919, acknowledging her hospitality with a Prussian heel-click when saying goodbye in the garden of the cottage. Always a bit of a ladies’ man, Graves-Jones, but a credit to Bamfylde, for he was naval cadet of the year when he passed out at Dartmouth. But David recalled him for another reason, seeing him as a self-assured senior standing on the threshold of Havelock’s parlour the night they buried Beth and Joan up at Stone Cross, holding a bunch of flowers he had intended laying on the grave and suggesting they went instead to Grace, lying trussed in hospital at Challacombe. ‘She won’t see them, sir, but maybe she could smell them. The freesia has a lovely scent…’
He wrote his name, achievements and dates in the rearward section of his day-book, on a page that was blank save for the name of Christopherson, killed in Spain two years earlier, and as he made the entry he shuddered at the prospect of seeing the page studded with names. But records would have to be kept. Already letters were beginning to trickle in from all over the world, so that he found himself stuck with his old job of O.B.A. Secretary, a task he had cheerfully surrendered to Howarth but did not care to entrust to anyone else these days. Not even Barnaby who, with the best will in the world, would be likely to revere the dead of Thermopylae and Salamis above those doing battle in aircraft and tanks. Bamfylde’s naval minority had it very much their own way that season. Letherett was aboard one of the destroyers that pursued the Graf Spee, and Ruby Bickford, surely tailored for th
e role, was aboard Cossack when she intercepted the prison ship Altmark in such dashing style, the boarding party leaping on deck like Elizabethans capturing a Spanish treasure galleon off Panama.
Then, for the first time since any of them could recall, there was a school wedding at Stone Cross, almost a fairy-tale wedding it seemed to him, when he came in by the west door with Grace on his arm, and moved up the aisle to join Sax Hoskins, in R.A.F. uniform, with sergeant’s stripes up, evidence of promotion that had astonished him until Sax explained ‘Aircrew get their third automatically… Can’t have A.G. plonks flying kites, can you, Pow-Wow?’ Sax was good enough to offer a free translation of this jargon for the benefit of those who did not yet speak the strange new language, a language that was already invading civilian sectors.
Algy Herries married them, and besides a full congregation of staff and boys there were one or two former cronies present, down to give Sax moral support. Massa Heilbron was one of them, the West Indian Sunsetter, over here on a gunnery course. Rowlandson was another, who might have remembered upsetting the teapot at the new boys’ party, in 1924. David kept hoping to spot Winterbourne but he did not, and when he asked around nobody seemed to have news of him.
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