World War was lapping into the quadrangle, into the nooks and crannies of the old place in a less dramatic way, creeping paralysis rather than a seizure, for the very influx of boys that summer slowed them down, sometimes to a virtual standstill. Seemingly the reverse of the 1931 slump was at work in the minds of parents, particularly those living in Greater London, and the threatened southeastern areas. Younger brothers arrived out of nowhere, often at short notice, so that the waiting-list, that had always had to be nursed, shook itself out well ahead of time as people remembered the relative immunity of the plateau.
In addition to their own swollen complement of four hundred and seventeen, there was an increase in Carter’s contingent. ‘Minimals’ Barnaby called them, a play of their school’s official name, St. Magnus, and Carter was very jealous of their identity, keeping them within their perimeter, which was just as well in view of the chronic shortage of dormitory, classroom and playing field space. There were now over sixty Minimals, living like a dependant and slightly disreputable tribe under the lee of the planty, where two more Nissen huts were erected to serve as dining-room, kitchen, and communal classroom. Carter managed them with one assistant master, an elderly man called Badger, said to be an amateur archaeologist, with extravagant theories about Middlemoor being the real site of Arthur’s Camelot.
They lost Molyneux towards the end of term. It seemed that he, too, heard the call of duty, in the form of a muted ‘Marseillaise’, played by the exiled de Gaulle. He was not a Frenchman but had many Gallic friends and one of them, a certain Capitaine d’Orley, appeared in uniform one morning and talked him into joining the nucleus of the French Resistance Group as an official interpreter.
He went off gaily, despite David’s indignant protests. He had never really integrated into the school but his work was first-class, and David was reluctant to lose him. He said, by way of valediction, ‘I’ve been stuck here fifteen years, P.J., and I’ve never had any fun. I’m nearly forty now, and if I turn this down I’ll marry a local peasant and grow a turnip for a head. Time I moved on, but it took a thing like this to shake me loose. Never had enough initiative, but d’Orley tells me there’s a prospect of seeing the world once we get properly organised. It was that that decided me.’
He was replaced, almost at once, by an elderly Belgian refugee, a Monsieur Oujardier, a name that the boys instantly converted into ‘Oojah’, without waiting for Barnaby’s cue. In some ways the Belgian reminded David of the long-dead Bat Ferguson, in that he was excitable and very voluble, but he showed promise of being adequate, and at least qualified as an eccentric, an honour that Molyneux had never achieved, notwithstanding his middle name, Aloysius, and that awful Australian uncle who looked like a Colonial pretending to be Bernard Shaw.
Then, in the final week of term, when he was in the throes of making arrangements to house an additional fifty boys for the holidays, on the lines of the Sunsetters, a much heavier blow fell on him. A grim-faced Boyer invited him and Chris down to the cottage for tea one baking Sunday afternoon, and announced in the momentary absence of Alison, that he was enlisting in the merchant navy as soon as their second child was born, and that it was no good trying to talk him out of it because he had been to Plymouth and signed on the previous Saturday.
In the last twenty-odd years there had been many occasions when Boyer had exasperated him but never more so than now. He said, explosively, ‘But that’s absolutely crazy, Chad! The merchant navy! Good God, what the hell do you know about the sea? It’s no more than a Quixotic gesture. Why don’t you borrow a suit of armour while you’re at it, and charge Man Bullivant’s bloody windmill at Bamfylde Halt?’
Chris said, ‘Keep your voice down, Davy. Maybe he hasn’t told Alison,’ and Boyer said, calmly, ‘Yes, I have, and she’s behind me, odd as it may seem. Or not so odd, perhaps. Her kid brother, Hamish, went down on the Jervis Bay last winter. She was very fond of Hamish. He was only seventeen.’
‘I never heard that,’ said David, checked somewhat. ‘She kept it very much to herself, didn’t she?’
‘She isn’t a song and dance artist, Pow-Wow, but it left a scar. I was scared of admitting how I felt about things, but when I did she saw my point of view, particularly as I’ve every hope of training as a gunner, although my real duties will be steward.’
‘Steward!’ David growled, warming up again, ‘Steward, with a good degree and a reserved occupation!’ but Chris intervened again, saying, ‘Do stop erupting, Davy. Let Chad explain if he wants to.’
‘He already has. He came to me when the phoney war was still on, mumbling about missing out, but I thought I’d talked him out of it. Damn it, I could understand it if you were in the Sixth, or still up at university. But thirty-five, with one toddler and another expected in October!’
Chad said, addressing Chris, ‘The trouble with Pow-Wow is that he won’t accept the end product of his own gospel. He’s like an apostle of the early Christian Church who gets cold feet and urges his converts to pay homage to Nero the minute he hears the lion roar,’ and Chris said, laughing, ‘That’s a pretty good analogy, Chad. Go on.’
‘I don’t know whether or not you realise it, Pow-Wow, but all these years, ever since you walked into Big School with the shakes on you before that last show ended, you’ve been preaching tolerance, equality of opportunity, the true essence of democracy, small “l” liberalism, and British standards of equity and fair play. Everything, in fact, that places like Bamfylde are supposed to stand for. All that red flag flapping never fooled me, and it never fooled anyone else except that idiot Alcock. Even Sir Rufus Creighton saw through it the moment he put his glasses on and that’s what got you the job. We almost nicknamed you “Bolshie” your first term but if we had it would have been ironic. You’re no more than a Tory, slightly left of centre, and as a rebel Welshman you’re a damned fraud. Bamfylde took you over body and soul and did it in a matter of weeks. It beats me why you haven’t admitted as much to yourself.’
‘I don’t see what my political outlook has to do with you throwing up a responsible job and risking your life in order to bring the skipper a mug of cocoa at six bells.’
‘Tell him, Chad,’ Chris said, ‘you’re doing fine so far.’
‘Well, the fact is, all your own chickens, and those you inherited from Algy, are coming home to roost. God knows we’ve had proof of that lately. For years and years you’ve been jawing about the struggle of the British tribes to hammer themselves into a unit qualified to make a contribution to real civilisation and you seem to have done a pretty good job one way and another. On my reckoning we’ve already got around sixty Old Boys in the scrap, all squaring up to that bastard and his thugs, and pretty sure to make mincemeat of ‘em given time and equipment. Fifteen slipped the collar at Dunkirk and lived to fight another day, and three, four if you count Christopherson, who was too quick off the mark, have already died for what you and they believe in. Well, you have to take some of the responsibility for that, and for any more chaps who go west before it’s over. But would you be any more pleased with your work if nobody stepped forward? What would you have done then? Taken to recruiting, I wonder, or gone back yourself to take a second crack at Jerry? Pour him some more tea, Chris, and call up to Alison to bring Robbie down. If he sleeps any longer he’ll keep us awake all night.’
So there it was, his philosophy, his ultimate responsibilities, fed back to him, spoonful by spoonful, by one of his own converts, and there was no alternative but to open his mouth and swallow it. The flavour was sharp at the time. Within a month its bitterness set his teeth on edge.
The tempest rushed down on them again about the time a majority were leaving for the summer holiday. Radio bulletins told of massed air attacks on Channel shipping, on port installations, on fighter airfields, and finally on the Port of London itself, so that the Armageddon everyone had looked for on that clear September day almost a year ago was here now, and the more thoughtful among them began to understand why the R.A.F. had made s
uch a modest showing over the beaches at Dunkirk. Defence squadrons had clearly been held in reserve, against just such a contingency as this.
They saw nothing of the air battles, of the twisting vapour trails in the clear blue sky to the south-east (the summer seemed endless that year) but the B.B.C. soon evolved a cricket score technique concerning the state of play, and it caught on at once, after he had installed their most powerful radio in Big School, so that no one missed any bulletins, and they could use the blackboard for a score board. Even the rump of the Cradlers, and the junior Sunsetters, were given permission to stay until the last bulletin of the day.
The damage inflicted on the attackers was astounding if true. Squadron after squadron decimated between the Normandy airfields and the Home Counties, where a junkyard of Luftwaffe hardware was said to be building up in fields and coppices of Sussex, Kent and Essex.
There was a price to pay, of course, but it seemed, to most onlookers, a modest one, again if the bulletins were true. For every Spitfire or Hurricane lost Goering had to sacrifice three aircraft, and the R.A.F., fighting over its home ground, had the advantage as regards pilots parachuting to safety.
But again, as snippets of news filtered on to his desk, he began to feel more and more like Algy Herries during the Somme and Passchendaele offensives of 1916 and 1917. The price might be modest in terms of men and machines, but it was terribly high to him, and mounting week by week, for the Junior Service seemed to have attracted a swarm of Bamfeldians, mostly the younger ones who had been here as recently as 1938 and 1939, and were now, unbelievably, among those spearheading the battle.
News had reached him via telephone in late July that Hislop had been shot down off Folkestone. Hislop, who had once stood in this very room, and told the Stoic the truth concerning his exploits as school bookmaker, and had then disappeared from their midst, to reappear more than a year later, with his sights set on a commission in the R.A.F.
Mrs Hislop rang late one night, when he was wrestling with the September timetable. She was extraordinarily resigned, he thought, but he pitied her from the bottom of his heart when she said. ‘He was something of an ace, P.J. I had that from one of his squadron, who brought me the news. He shot down three M.E.s in France, and was credited with five certainties over here, one Heinkel, one Dornier and three Junkers, I think they said. I haven’t told his father yet. He’s away up North, attending a relative’s funeral, but I had to talk to someone tonight.’
David said, ‘He was everything I hoped in the end, Mrs Hislop, and I’ll never cease to be grateful to you for letting him return here. It turned out splendidly. He was one of the best seniors we ever had. But what comfort is that to you now?’
She said, quietly, ‘Some comfort. More than you’d think, maybe. I’m proud of him, and his father should be. I hope so, anyway, for it’s all he’ll have to hang on to. I keep telling myself that if it hadn’t been for trained pilots like him we’d be finished by now. You think that too, don’t you?’
‘I’ve thought it ever since Dunkirk,’ he said, fervently. ‘The Services didn’t get much of a show before the war. People thought of them as old hat I suppose, but it’s a damned good job some youngsters opted for them.’
‘Will you pass it around among his old friends?’ she concluded and he said he would, and thanked her for ringing. ‘Don’t thank me,’ she said. ‘He “went a bundle” as they say, on you, and on that place of yours. In spite of that silly business with Alcock. Good night, P.J.’
‘Good night, Mrs Hislop.’
He replaced the receiver, with no stomach to return to the madly complicated timetable. Hislop’s death made four certainties in less than a year. The list was lengthening. All one could do was pray it wouldn’t be as long as the one on the cross outside before they blew the Cease-Fire.
He thought about prayer for a moment. Almost nothing remained of the conventional faith of his Valley upbringing, the chapel-based certainty of a glorious resurrection, that had proved such a rock of comfort to his mother. He supposed himself an agnostic, like old Howarth, but he wasn’t even sure of this. The outlines of his earthly beliefs were well-defined, but he had never exercised his mind to fill the spiritual vacuum, created by his first few weeks in the trenches. There might be something, he supposed, some vague creative force, impossible to define in words, or even contemplate in solitude. Prayer would be a help now, he imagined, but the best he could do was rally on what he thought of as the Abu Ben Adam philosophy, the substitution of faith in one’s fellow man as a workaday equivalent for faith in God. Given there was a God.
He turned off the desk light and went out into the passage, passing through the door leading to Big School passage, then out on to the playing field.
A harvest moon hung over the moor. He could see the dark line of the planty all the way from the spot where it turned a right angle to run the full length of the crest as far as the cricket pitches. Below it, fifty yards or so nearer the school, was the stark silhouette of Algy’s thinking post, and he bent his steps there, lighting a cigarette, leaning against its brittle bark, and remembering not only Hislop, who had once hit a stupendous six about here, but other moments he associated with this spot. It soothed him somehow, so that he could find some kind of anchorage for his confused thoughts. He was by no means sure about a God but he acknowledged the clear difference between good and evil, and according to Chris there had never been a war in which the options were so clear. That ought to help, and might, perhaps, as time went on, and you could see a pinpoint of light at the end of the tunnel. But so far evil seemed to be winning hands down, with a Continent enslaved, and Britain hanging on to the coat-tails of a few thousand boys like Hislop. There was only so much they could do and they had already achieved far more than he, and all the other anti-militarists of the ‘twenties, had the right to expect. He thought, bitterly, ‘By God, we’ve got a lot to answer for – not just the politicians but all of us, Left, Right and Centre, from Versailles onwards. I saw the red light before the majority, but I wouldn’t have if Chris hadn’t had the moral courage to point it out, and bring me evidence in the person of that kid Meyer. It’s our fault the odds are so long up there. Who the hell am I to put the responsibility for Hislop’s death on politicians?’
Prayer was denied him but there was its equivalent, a mute appeal to the ageing ghosts of all those names on the memorial, and the newcomers to Valhalla, like Briarley, Christopherson, Graves-Jones, Hislop and old Preacher Skidmore, and he made that plea, now, standing in a flood of moonlight, his back against Algy’s thinking post. ‘Get us out of this somehow. Show us the way. Give us the guts and stamina, but don’t be too greedy for company…’
One of the planty owls hooted, perhaps with derision at his naivety, but he felt a sense of release, as though the soft night breeze, gusting down from the moor, carried the hopes of all Bamfeldians who had stood at this spot across four generations and seen below a sprawl of buildings that was something more than a seat of elementary learning, a place where, in their brief span hereabouts, they had imbibed a little of the ethos of the island, and its struggle over twenty centuries to fashion apparatus capable of accommodating free will with justice and human dignity.
He extinguished his cigarette and went down the slope to the fives court, round the promontory of the Bog and through the flagged court that led, via Outram’s and the Third Forms, to the quad. Everyone was asleep but him, moonlight reflecting on the windows of the Sunsetters’ dormitory, and the steep, tiled roof of the new labs. The place looked washed clean in this strong, bluish light, looked as if nobody had ever trodden the asphalt circuit about the Founder’s statue, and as he passed it, on his way to his own back door, he gave it a new boy’s bob. For tonight he felt more defenceless than Endsleigh Minor, youngest of last term’s Cradlers.
Three
* * *
1
AND THAT WAS REALLY NO MORE THAN THE BEGINNING. THE end of the beginning, as Churchill would later describe it.
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On through an endless succession of blazing summer days the battle continued, rising to three screaming crescendos on August 13th, August 18th and September 15th, the day school reassembled for the start of another year. On that day alone, Buck Suttram, the West Indian Sunsetter, who had been keeping score, chalked up a total of fifty-six German aircraft destroyed.
On through the full month of October it continued to rage, when Suttram, reduced to keeping a private record after Big School blackboard had been restored to normal use, told David that the R.A.F. and anti-aircraft defences had accounted for just over two thousand enemy aircraft between July 10th and the last day of October. The figure was duly entered up in the records and Suttram wasn’t so far out at that. Years later, when official figures were reissued after the capture of Luftwaffe documents, it was seen that, between the dates quoted, an admitted total of German planes destroyed was one thousand, seven hundred and thirty-three, with a further six hundred and forty-three damaged.
Suttram had not kept tally of R.A.F. losses but David had, in terms of lives if not machines. Of the one thousand, four hundred and ninety-five R.A.F. personnel killed, four, including Hislop, were Bamfeldians. A fifth, Crispin, was so badly burned over the Thames estuary, that he was in Halton Hospital for months and left it on crutches.
Alone among those who stayed on at school throughout that unforgettable seven weeks, David was unable to share the Test Match excitement prevailing in Big School around the Sunsetters’ radio. How could he? The impersonal announcements, relevant to the cost of victory, were translated, figure by figure, into a sombre parade of faces recalled over recent years, all linked in his mind to some quirk, nickname or exploit, attaching itself to every boy who had mooched about the quad, or added his quota to the changing-room cacophony attending the end of every rugby game.
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