R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  There was a lively reception back at the school, and the rowdy send-off he would expect in the forecourt as the short afternoon died, and the couple drove off to catch their train to Taunton and Paddington. The finality of the event did not strike him at the time, for so many old friends hung about the place until late that night, and there was the usual end-of-term tumult at first light the following morning.

  ‘Have a good hols, sir…!’ ‘Don’t join up while we’re gone, sir…!’ and the inevitable sober note, this time from Vicary, head boy and due to join the Royal Marines in the new year – ‘I’ll keep in touch, sir… Might even be handy for a spell. They tell me there’s an R.M. training camp at Lympstone, just south of Exeter.’

  He stood on the steps and watched the last of them go, and it was then that he missed Grace most keenly, and was glad that she was likely to be back for a spell, at least until Sax found out where he was posted, and could wangle a living-out pass near the camp. He would miss her secretarial work too, for the post did not get any lighter, and Chris couldn’t help him much, with her Cradle at full muster, and Ian at the toddling stage. Chad Boyer nudged him, collar turned up against the biting north-easterly and said, ‘How about a coffee, Pow-Wow?’ in a way that suggested a confidence of some kind, so he went back into the house and told Rigby to bring coffee into the study, where a mountain of work awaited him. Chad said, when the door had shut on the old man, ‘Are all those letters from Old Boys overseas, Pow-Wow?’

  ‘Most of them. Care to read some? There are several from chaps here in your time.’

  ‘Not in my present mood,’ Chad said, and when David asked what was amiss he said, gloomily, ‘I don’t know. I feel out of it somehow. All the old crowd are doing something – Letherett, Dobson and even the Gosse brothers.’

  ‘A lot of the older bunch made a career of the services, Chad. It’s no more than their job. Yours is right here, especially with Alison, one boy, and a second child on the way.’

  ‘Sure, sure but… I don’t know… I still feel out of it. Is that so crazy?’

  ‘I think it is. You’re not much younger than I am, and from all I hear they can’t cope with more men at the moment. Nothing seems to be happening, does it? Sometimes I see it as a kind of mime, a ritual squaring up to one another that will end in a compromise.’

  ‘Does Chris see it that way?’

  ‘No. She says it’ll get going in the spring, but she could be wrong. Frankly, I never imagined anything like this. The last war started off at a rare gallop. Mons was twenty days after declaration and I was in action three months later. Do you really want my advice?’

  ‘I don’t. Alison does.’

  ‘Well, for God’s sake go back and tell her I said don’t do any enlisting until it’s absolutely necessary. For one thing I’d find it damned hard to replace you. For another you’ve got her and the kids to consider. But quite apart from all that, I think you’d find it difficult to land anything but a stooge job, in one or another of these new ministries. You’d be making a far better contribution here than getting bogged down at a desk.’

  Chad said moodily, ‘You were under eighteen when you signed up,’ and he snapped, ‘I was a bloody fool and lived to regret it. Besides, nobody knew a damned thing about war in those days.’

  He foraged among the incoming mail and found a single-sheet letter. It was from Gilbert, the Tory M.P.’s son, a contemporary of Boyer’s and postmarked Tiree, in the Hebrides. ‘Listen to this. It illustrates my point.

  Dear Pow-Wow,

  You’ll note from the above address the Governor managed to get me into the R.A.F. after all. You need a lot of influence to get in, I can tell you. I tried half a dozen things off my own bat up to the end of October, but they didn’t want to know. I couldn’t even get into a line regiment as a ranker, and as for Cert ‘A’, nobody seemed to have heard of it. They probably regard it as a passout at the archery butts, or the Bamfylde certificate of proficiency for pike-drill. I was chuffed when I made it to O.C.T.U., but I might just as well have stayed put. I was failed aircrew on account of age (!) and given an admin. job up here, and I’ve never been so brassed off in my natural. All I do is look at the sea, sign chits for crafty weekends, and churn out daily returns that nobody reads. Believe me, it’s all a big-scale hoax. Drop me a line if you’ve time, and tell me how my lot are making out. And tell old Barnaby, preferably in Latin, that the pen is not only mightier than the sword, it’s a hell of a sight more universal in this man’s army.

  Warmest regards,

  R.S. Gilbert

  He was relieved to look up from the letter and see Chad grinning. ‘You’re wasted as a schoolmaster, Pow-Wow,’ he said. ‘You ought to have been one of those barristers who sit waiting for hopeless briefs handed down from the Bench. If ever I fall foul of the law I’ll engage you. You’d come up with something proving I had a damned good reason for having the spoons in my pocket.’

  Two

  * * *

  1

  CHRIS WAS RIGHT, AS USUAL.

  In April, Chamberlain was talking about Hitler missing the bus. A fortnight later Denmark and Norway had fallen, and the summer term was less than a month old when Rotterdam was reduced to rubble and the distracted French Government had scuttled off to Bordeaux. The river of steel poured unchecked through the Low Countries, leaving in its wake a Maginot Line as obsolete as Martello towers, built to resist invasion in 1805. It was too late to do anything but run for cover, if cover was to be found.

  The speed, and horrid finality of the onrush, stunned a man conditioned to think of an offensive’s territorial gains in terms of yards, and those yards won at a cost of a hundred thousand casualties. It was an entirely new concept of war. He could think of no historical equivalent. The Napoleonic swoop on Ulm, culminating in Austerlitz, and the encirclement of Sedan, in 1870, were measured manoeuvres compared to this. At a stroke, huge French armies were dispersed and isolated, and the B.E.F., pushed back on three Channel ports, was reckoned lost.

  He could not remember feeling so desolate since they brought him news of the accident on Quarry Hill. Catastrophes fell one upon the other like the subsiding storeys of a row of tall houses, overwhelmed by a hurricane. Belgium surrendered, then France, whereas over here all was confusion and dismay, even after Churchill had ousted Chamberlain, and thundered defiance in cadences that struck the ear like parodies of Henry V’s oration before Harfleur. Soon long-range shells were falling on Folkestone, road blocks were set up, even down here in the wilderness, and a local L.D.V. force, armed with rook rifles, old army Webleys and farmers’ shotguns, patrolled the moors and coastal sectors. There was a sense of unreality and lack of purpose about everything one did, as if the ordinary processes of life, governed for so long by bells, by the school calendar, by arrivals and departures at the beginning and end of each new term, had lost their significance, were mere gestures in a compulsive ritual initiated long, long ago and persisted in from habit. A terrible sense of urgency, seen on the faces of adults, spread downwards to the Middle and Lower Schools, where he found himself the target of repeated questions for which he had no kind of answers.

  ‘Will they invade, sir?’

  ‘How about the navy, sir?’

  ‘Is it true they’re dropping paratroopers disguised as nuns, sir?’

  ‘Will France fight in North Africa, sir?’

  ‘Can’t we join the L.D.V.s? There are rifles in the armoury, aren’t there, sir?’

  At least he could answer that one truthfully. There were no rifles in the armoury, not even the much-derided dummies, issued to the very youngest recruits in the Corps in their first month of training. Only a week ago a detachment of Terriers had arrived in a lorry, and carted them all away, together with what small arms ammunition was available. By now, he assumed, those same rifles, that had been humped up and down the playing fields since the days when Carter had been Corps Commander, were in the hands of half-trained men drawing army pay, awaiting the first shock waves o
f German invaders behind the beaches of Sussex and Hampshire, and in the hopfields of the Kentish Weald.

  But then, like a blessed spate of silence after an earsplitting cacophony, came whispers of a fleet of small ships, and the lifting of 360,000 castaways from the littered beaches of Dunkirk. No more than a rumour at first, but a persistent one, that presently emerged as a fact, a kind of massive lifeboat snatch from a foundering vessel, surrounded by bobbing heads and upraised arms, and after it a vast wave of thankfulness, followed by a mood of buoyancy not unlike the first stage of intoxication. Apparently it was not the end of everything, or not quite, so that, like everybody about him, he plucked up heart and took up the threads of authority again, snatching a moment here and there to collate the snippets of news that found their way to his desk via post and telephone, and the occasional appearance in his parlour of a harassed parent, past or present. It seemed a miracle that, of the score of Bamfeldians serving with the B.E.F., fourteen were already reported safe and well, and one or two had actually rung through while on survivors’ leave. He conceived the idea then of posting a list of them on the quad notice board, announcing details within minutes of receiving his stream of messages, then squinting through the window of Algy’s Mount Olympus, where he could see them crowding round the slip of paper hanging there, relaying the news to the outer fringes of the crowd.

  More and more news filtered in, almost all of it good. Gilbert, last heard of looking out at sea, and signing chits on a lonely Hebridean Isle, was spirited from a French beach by an amateur yachtsman, and confirmed as much in person, writing cheerfully from Newhaven where he was set ashore. Kassava II, he who had clung to the guttering of the blazing Havelock dorm until his brother knocked him senseless, showed far more initiative at Calais, hiding in a partially collapsed slit trench until it was dark, then making his way along the tideline to the nearest evacuation point, where he was taken off by the boat’s crew of a destroyer.

  Through the blazing summer days the list lengthened until it ran off the page and was replaced by a larger, more comprehensive one, with notes beside every name. Daffy Jones, Nipper Shaw, Gage and Stilts Rhodes rescued by destroyers, and set ashore at Dover; Bummy Bristow, whose elder brother had been Bamfylde’s last casualty in the First World War, having more luck than his brother, this time off Bordeaux, where he got off in the Lancastrian, went down with it, but bobbed up and was hauled aboard a trawler and carried into Falmouth; Johnston, the indirect cause of Winterbourne’s flight in 1925 (he had told him his mother’s divorce was all over the Sunday papers) taken prisoner at St. Malo but dodging the column (Johnston was always a bit of a column dodger, David reflected) and making his way to Brest, where he caught the last refugee boat out of the harbour; Maxton, third official bell-ringer in David’s recollection, together with Heffling and Keith Blades, rescued by the navy at Dunkirk; Parker and Morgan-Smith carried home on a paddle steamer that had once plied for hire from the Isle of Wight; Cookson, whose father had once shamed him by appearing on Sports Day in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, using more plebian transport and landing, black as the Ace of Spades, from a collier at Newport, Monmouthshire. Some fifteen in all, the last being Driscoe who had partnered Beth and Phyl Irvine as the third of the three little maids in the 1920 Mikado, reported safe a week after having been listed a P.O.W. Driscoe, it seemed, had made it all the way to Marseilles in an elderly Citroen, found by the roadside near Abbeville, paying his way with cigarettes, looted from an abandoned N.A.A.F.I.

  And after that a lull, while David was seeking, and getting, confirmation of their two known casualties, a sad pair to anyone’s way of thinking. For Briarley, serving as a captain in the Calais garrison, was killed some thirty miles from the river Lys, where his father had died in the Big Push of 1918. Details concerning Skidmore’s death were more confused but it looked as if he had achieved a kind of martyrdom after all. Serving in the B.E.F. as a Methodist padre, he had remained behind to tend to the wounded and was now reported missing, believed killed.

  The day he got confirmation of Briarley’s death he went out across the forecourt to the big cedar beside the tennis court, sitting near the spot where he had talked to the boy twenty-two years before, after Ellie Herries had sent him out to offer what comfort he could. He wondered if Briarley’s mother was still alive, and if she was, how would she take this second blow? Bitterly, he would say, for Briarley Senior had died in what was reckoned a war to end war, and Briarley Junior, he recalled, was an only son.

  The boy’s voice seemed to speak to him over the years – ‘Didn’t see a great deal of him, sir… when I was small he was mostly in India or Ireland…’ and a later question, ‘Would it have been quick, sir? I mean, you’d know…’

  He sat there in the blinding heat, biting his lip and silently cursing the fools who had let things drift and drift until they had reached an impasse where the only hope of a future rested on the wanton sacrifice of boys like Briarley, boys with guts and imagination, now called upon to go out and do their fathers’ work all over again. The bell rang for lunch but he did not hear it and later Chris found him there, staring into the heat haze shimmering on the western slopes of Middlemoor.

  She said, quietly, ‘What is it, Davy?’ and he told her of all three Briarleys, father, thirteen-year-old son who had sat here beside him, and thirty-five-year-old regular, left behind in Calais to stop Panzers with hand grenades and a standard issue revolver.

  She said, taking his hand, ‘All in all, we’ve been lucky, Davy. In two ways if you can bring yourself to see it in that light. Fifteen out of seventeen saved by a miracle, or a string of miracles. But that isn’t what I mean.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘God knows, I’ve never seen you or myself as people subscribing to those platitudes about the nobility of sacrifice – pro patria mori, and so on. I never was entranced by Kipling, or that chap Newbolt, who wrote that slosh about the voice of the schoolboy rallying ranks. But this is different, utterly different. I think it’s important you should face up to it now, for it looks to me as if there’s worse to come.’

  ‘How is it different? Briarley, father and son, died in the same war, on the same ground, fighting the same enemy. What’s different about it?’

  ‘I don’t think I have to go over that again. I made it clear five years ago, when I backed down on every principle I ever held. This time it isn’t a question of dying for king and country, for the flag, for honour and glory and all that rubbish.’

  ‘It never was,’ he said, ‘for the chaps called upon to do it.’

  ‘But it was for the people who weren’t, people like me standing on the touchline. Only now there isn’t any touchline. We’re all in it, right up to our necks, and that’s a point in our favour, I’d say. At least, there’s no more bloody hypocrisy, no more do-your-bit-son, no more white feathers and promises of homes fit for heroes to live in. This is total war, with nothing but survival as the prize-money. More muddle if we win, a living death if we don’t. It’s worth dying for if that much is clear. Briarley was killed at Calais, you say?’

  ‘Left to his fate, back to the sea. Bombed from above, fired on by God knows how many tanks.’

  ‘But if it hadn’t been for Calais, what would have happened up the coast at Dunkirk?’

  ‘I’m damned if I know and I don’t see how you could know.’

  ‘It so happens I do,’ she said, ‘for Bradshawe told me. He plied one of those small boats, and that’s something else you should put on your little list before you draw a line under it. Don’t look so outraged – Bradshawe was here and I tried to find you but you were over at Challacombe at the L.D.V. conference. He couldn’t wait. He was on his way to Plymouth to join the navy.’

  ‘What exactly did Bradshawe tell you?’

  ‘A lot they didn’t print about Dunkirk. More than he’s told anybody, I’d say. I have a very special relationship with Bradshawe.’

  She had too, beginning that day during her first term here, a month or so af
ter they were married, when Howarth, the old fox, had persuaded her to mediate between Bradshawe, then fifteen, and his parents, plaguing him with their respective versions of the family divorce. ‘He picked nine out of the water, close inshore. I didn’t know he was a yachtsman, did you?’

  ‘No,’ he said, the weight beginning to lift from his shoulders, ‘but I settled years ago for learning something new about every damned one of them every day I make contact. Both during and after their time here.’

  He stood up. ‘That’s not such a bad idea, either – adding Bradshawe to the list, I mean. He only left in ‘thirty-eight, and there’ll be quite a number here who remember him. They’ll be excited to hear we had someone who took part in that crazy armada.’

  He made no excuse for his sudden change of mood and she watched him move with long strides across the sunlit tennis court, over the forecourt and through Big School arch to the quad. He already had his fountain pen unscrewed and she thought ‘He’s no more than a Briarley or a Bradshawe himself some days. But, just occasionally, he’s as old as God. That’s the way of it in his job, I imagine… my job, too, now, if I’m honest with myself…’

  She got up, smoothed her skirt and walked thoughtfully across the sunbaked lawn to the steps, meaning to pass straight through into the kitchen and warm his untouched lunch, but tempted, en route, to use his Judas window in the lavatory. She was in time to see him repin the notice and stand back to let the first quad loungers read the addendum.

  2

  She had promised him worse and he had learned to trust her judgment in these things, yet the summer blazed on tranquilly enough, with plenty of bustle, and a steady bombardment of officialdom certainly, but as yet no cataclysmic sequel to the epic of Dunkirk.