R. Delderfield & R. F. Delderfield

by To Serve Them All My Days

  News of Towers’s death, for instance, received the same week as that informing him of Crispin’s terrible injuries, touched him almost as deeply as the loss of Hislop and Briarley. For he saw it as an ironic adjustment in the balance sheet of life, recalling how once – long ago it seemed now – Crispin, alone and friendless, had worshipped Towers from afar, and had stolen a bar of Mackintosh’s toffee from the village shop simply in order to register with his hero. Now they were level pegs, or almost so. Towers, shot down over Maidstone, was dead. Crispin, trapped in blazing debris at a satellite field in Sussex, was half-dead, ‘cooked’ they would say, in their pitiless new slang, and in the hands of the skin-grafters for months to come.

  He wrote to both boys’ parents and Crispin’s mother replied at once, promising to keep him informed on her son’s progress. But then, for a brief spell, his attention was switched to more personal concerns. Grace, who had been living with them since she returned from her honeymoon, was whisked away at a day’s notice by Sax Hoskins, now commissioned and stationed in Yorkshire, on a basis that enabled him to live out of camp.

  He had a few minutes’ garbled conversation with his son-in-law, due to begin yet another course the following day, and nervous of missing his connection if the London termini were blitzed. Sax was developing a variety of new skills in his wartime profession, even showing marked proficiency in maths, something that would have astounded his Bamfylde mentors. Gunnery was behind him now and he was moving on to qualify as a navigator.

  ‘Will it keep you out of harm’s way for a few months?’ David asked anxiously, and Sax replied gaily that it would, for the R.A.F. did not yet possess the means to mount a sizeable bombing offensive on Germany.

  ‘We won’t start dishing it out on their scale for a year or so,’ he said, ‘but when we do, oh boy! Hamburg, here I come!’ David gathered there was a certain amount of rivalry between the men who flew bombers and those who flew fighter aircraft. Sax said, ‘So far the Spits and Hurrys have had all the glam but the war won’t be won by the Brylcreem boys. We’ve got to go over and sort ‘em out on their own ground, and we’ve got some real beauts on the assembly lines.’ Then, less breezily, ‘You don’t mind me taking Grace off your hands, do you? The way I see it we might as well spend what time we can together. It won’t be all that much, with me genning up like a bloody boffin.’

  He said his next farewell, in early November, to Boyer, off on the first stage of his Quixotic odyssey, an odyssey that was to take him, in the next few years, all over the world. Chad’s second child, a daughter, had been born in early October, and his place at the little cottage had been filled, to some extent, by a landgirl who lodged there. ‘I was chuffed to get her,’ Chad said, ‘for she’s another Scots girl, and will be great company for Alison. But you’ll keep an eye on her, won’t you, Pow-Wow? And I’ll keep in touch wherever I am, whatever I’m doing.’

  Everybody but himself, it seemed, was either dying or tearing about the country in a prodigious hurry, and his very rootedness made him feel his age. Boyer, had he stayed on, would have become housemaster of Nicolson’s in place of Howarth. As it was, he made do with the new man, Heathcott, and judged himself lucky to have him, for Heathcott, like his wife, was not strong and unlikely to disappear into the blue like so many others. He came to like Mrs Heathcott, whose health improved as soon as she settled on the plateau, so that Heathcott said, ‘Gladys and I are a couple of creaking doors, I’m afraid, P.J., but these days that’s insurance.’

  It was at that, as he found himself thinking when he had final confirmation of two more casualties, Churchill and Keithley, both reported missing earlier in the term. He thought of them as hardly more than babies. Churchill had been one of the very earliest Cradlers, whose name had occurred to him when he and Chris were motoring back from their honeymoon in 1934, and had stopped to picnic near the spot where the Duke of Monmouth was hauled from a ditch and carted off to London to die on Tower Hill. It was Chris who reminded him of this when he relayed the dismal news. ‘I always thought of Churchill as my trumpeter,’ she said, sadly. ‘It was mention of his name that made you suggest I started the Cradle. How old would that make him, Davy?’ and he said Churchill was still under twenty, for he had only left them at the end of the Lent term, in 1939.

  He had even more poignant memories of Keithley, remembering him as the tiny, heavily mufflered figure, mousing his way into the parlour carrying an attaché case and a plaid rug, the very first new boy he had ever greeted as headmaster. Keithley, he recalled, had been very scared at the time, but had plucked up heart when he had congratulated him on travelling all the way from Manchester unaccompanied. ‘Change at Bristol,’ Keithley had piped on that occasion, before Grace whisked him away to warm himself and have tea, and try as he might, David could not see Keithley as more than twelve, although his records told him he would be coming up to his twenty-first birthday.

  But not all the news was depressing. Word came from Venn, serving with a New Zealand contingent in Ethiopia, telling of a surprise encounter in an Eritrean camp with old Lackaknacker Briggs, who had just been recommended for a gong, as they called decorations these days. Briggs, it appeared, was still a loner and had put up a sensational one-man show near Adowa, bluffing a column of about seventy Italians into surrender, and somehow persuading them to lay down their arms and accompany him back to base.

  And then, towards the end of a cheerless term, Chris told him she was pregnant again, and it gave the usual upward twist to her spirits, for she had been saying lately that it was time Ian had some competition before he was spoiled by everyone about the place. ‘Not many children are as unspoilable as Grace,’ she said, ‘and this time I hope it’s a girl. Something has to be done about the frightful imbalance of the sexes up here.’

  He had never admired her more than he did these days. She shared his personal grief over the sacrifice of the Churchills and Keithleys, but her sense of mission, that had carried her through the entire holocaust since the end of the phoney war, buoyed her up in a way he envied. More and more she saw the war as a crusade against unspeakable barbarism, and everyone actively engaged in it as a crusader. He did not doubt her courage or her sincerity but he wondered, sometimes, if her faith would have sustained her to the same degree if she had been subjected to nonstop air attack, in the way Londoners were, or had her son been old enough to take his place among the elite. Perhaps, he thought, but then, unlike him she had not suffered the disenchantment of the years following the Armistice and neither, for that matter, had any of them, except a few old war-horses like Barnaby, Carter and Algy Herries, now seldom seen this side of the moor, for he was getting feeble and transport was difficult.

  He stood on the steps as usual the last morning of term and saw them off, only a very few departing in cars this time, for petrol was strictly rationed, but in other respects it did not seem to differ much from the tri-annual exodus of earlier years. The war had not blighted their spirits, as it had his, and there were the same old quips and promises as they shook hands.

  ‘Have a good hols, sir!…’ ‘I’ll keep in touch, sir!…’ ‘Don’t forget that live wire in the Christmas tree decorations, sir…’ and so on, until the last of them were lost to sight in the grey trailers of morning mist eddying about the trunks of the beech trees lining the east drive.

  2

  The bulk of the Christmas mail was late arriving, owing to iced-up roads down by Bamfylde Bridge Halt, and on both westerly approaches. But on the last day of the old year a bumper delivery appeared, two dozen welcome food parcels for the Sunsetters, and a shoal of Christmas cards and overseas mail.

  He took his into the study while Chris and Mrs Heathcott, Barnaby and others were superintending the second stage of an uproarious New Year’s Eve party, staged by the Sunsetters in Big Hall, where the blackouts were manageable owing to the narrowness of the windows.

  There was a good deal of Old Boys’ news, cheerful for a change. Briggy’s son, Major Cooper, was now a
lieutenant-colonel. Lackaknacker wrote in his own account of his Roman triumph, with his seventy Eyetie prisoners in tow, but played it down, Bamfylde fashion, saying it was all a bit of a spoof really, for the Eyeties were ‘brassed off and bloody well starving, and flocked round me as if they expected me to go through the loaves-and-fishes routine.’

  There was a long-overdue letter from Spats Winterbourne, serving in a Scottish infantry regiment, and about to start a commando course in the Highlands. He made an oblique reference to Grace’s wedding, asking for Sax Hoskins’s latest address, so that he could write about a belated wedding present, but this must have nerved him to be more explicit for he concluded:

  I never did bring myself to wire them congratulations, Pow-Wow, but at least I went out and bought a present. It’s still at my mother’s old place in town (if it hasn’t gone up in smoke), and if Sax or Grace are in London any time they could call in for it, for I don’t expect to come south for several months.

  That was all, except to ask for any Bamfylde news and David, reading between the lines, concluded that the loss of Grace had hit him terribly hard and he was still, after a year, trying to adjust to it.

  The last letter in the pile was a thick, much-franked package, postmarked ‘Santa Barbara, Calif.’, and he recognised the handwriting of Julia Sprockman. He opened it reluctantly, for it occurred to him that she was having second thoughts about exposing her son to the bombing and was sending instructions to put him on the first available ship for the States. But when he opened the envelope he found it enclosed another, addressed to himself, with an underscored note in block capitals, reading, ‘In the event of this not reaching David Powlett-Jones personally return unopened to the address below.’ The address was that of a firm of attorneys-at-law, in Los Angeles.

  He slit the letter carefully and drew out several sheets, written in what looked like a laboured hand. Automatically he glanced up at the address and was shocked to find it was the Galilean Hospital, in a coastal town north of Los Angeles. He settled back in his chair and read.

  My Dearest David,

  This is probably the last letter you will receive from me and the last I will write unless, by what could be a miracle, I come through the next op. and get my reprieve. In that unlikely event I’ll write to Charles myself. I was in here just over a year ago for breast cancer, and they thought they had caught it in time, but they were wrong. Doctors are even more fallible than your lot when it comes to the crunch. Well, it’s tough at forty-odd, I guess, but I’m not bitching. I’ve had it pretty good since I came over here, and the kids won’t have any financial worries from here on. I should have liked to have seen Charles again, and the old country too, although I’ve had far more luck here than I ever had there, except running into two nice men, you and Hiram. Three, if you count Keith Blades, whom I’ve never forgotten, or regretted for that matter.

  However, writing isn’t all that easy in these circumstances, so I’d best come to the point, or rather points, of this mysterious letter. First, if what I expect to happen does happen, I’ve arranged with my attorney to notify you at once, and you’ll be saddled with the job of telling Charles. I’m sorry about that, David, but it can’t be helped, and I imagine you’ve had to do that kind of thing before in your time and done it very tactfully. In any event, though, as soon as you can bring yourself to do it, will you drop him the hint and prepare him in some way, so that it will prove less of a shock for a lad of his age. I realise that this is putting a lot on you but I’ve a right to ask. Which brings me to my next point.

  He put the letter down there, leaning forward on his elbows and reassessing her courage and fortitude, characteristics he had noticed at their first encounter, when he had marched up into her room over the quad arch to discuss Blades, demanding an explanation for that extraordinary scene he had witnessed in the goyle behind the planty. In her way, he thought, she was as singular as Beth and Chris, and it was a privilege to have held her in his arms all that time ago. And yet, acknowledging this, and even remembering it vividly, the next paragraph had the power to shock him as he had never been shocked.

  I’ve had a long, long debate with myself about the wisdom or unwisdom of telling you this, particularly as you seem to have made another happy marriage after all, and taking into consideration the fact that Charles is well provided for, and you don’t owe him anything in the material sense. But the truth is, of course, he’s your boy, and the real reason why I married Hiram in such a rush that time. It wasn’t that I gave a damn at the time – for myself that is – but I had an absolute conviction that it would land you in a series of complications, both emotional and practical. It wouldn’t have most men – they would have thought themselves off the hook – but not you, with that Celtic conscience you’re lumbered with. So I took Hiram up on his standing offer and I don’t regret that either for I’m confident he never once suspected Charles wasn’t his son. He was always very proud of him, and they had a nice relationship from the very beginning.

  I could see you in Charles to some extent when he began to shoot up, and he has at least two of your characteristics, namely patience, and a rare disposition to stand on his own feet, and take a crack at things. Maybe you’ve already noticed this. I kind of gathered as much, from your latest school report.

  The point is, I see no advantage at all in telling him and for his sake more than yours. Your wife can’t very well hold it against you, for it all happened years before you met her, but adolescents have enough problems these days without adding to them by presenting them with a choice of loyalties. In the final instance, I leave it to you, of course, whether you tell your wife or not, but the best course would seem to be to leave it right where it is and just – well, keep a fatherly eye on him, something that will come naturally to you, David. That’s about it except to say goodbye and good luck always. I still think I did the right thing in refusing to marry you. You never would have made it, David, with me in tow. I’m not the domestic type, and I would have vegetated down there and might even have degenerated into a nag, but that isn’t to say I haven’t thought of you often, and always, always, with great affection.

  My love to you both,

  Julia

  He sat there a long time with her letter held lightly in his hand, thinking of the dark, slender boy, at this moment joining in popular choruses with all the other Sunsetters in Big Hall, trying hard to see him as something more personal than a unit in the long, long procession of youngsters who had passed through his hands in the last twenty-two years. He found himself quite unable to do this, although, now that he came to think of it, the boy had always had something of the look of his brother Huw about him, the seventeen-year-old who had gone down the pit with his father and elder brother that May morning in 1913, and never surfaced again. But his immediate concern was not with young Sprockman but with the woman who lay dying – was probably dead by now – six thousand miles away, across an ocean and a continent, and he saw her as he recalled her that morning when she had awakened him with a breakfast tray in her Camden Town flat, a final courtesy after what he had never ceased to regard as a gesture of rare generosity. He had a curious sense then, of being almost the last survivor of his generation, a stubborn piece of flotsam that had somehow managed to weather the nonstop buffeting of the years, embracing as they had two World Wars, linked by a long period of slump and uncertainty. He knew he would follow her advice, leaving both Charles and Chris in ignorance of the relationship. It would do the boy no good, and although Chris would almost surely take a tolerant view of it, she might see it as a circumstance that down-graded her own son, the boy she had been at such pains to have, and largely, he suspected, on his account.

  He got up and went into the quad, then down the draughty stone passage to Big Hall, where the concert was still in full swing. Buck Suttram, inheritor of the Sax Hoskins mantle, was leading community singing with what his cronies called Buck’s squeeze-box, an ungainly piano accordion. They were singing, ‘Roll out the Barre
l’ at the tops of their voices, and he caught a sidelong glimpse of Chris, joining in the chorus and smiling up at the stage. Then, as the song came to an end, somebody shouted, ‘There’ll Always be an England’, and there was an immediate howl of dissent. He was glad about that. Like him they would consider that a blushmaking number, out of tune with the national mood that was now, thank God, one of stark realism. Somebody else shouted, ‘Get Clark! Get Clark and his banjo!’ and it was not until Charles Sprockman was pushed forward that he remembered ‘Clark’ was the nickname they applied to his own son, turned thirteen now, and tall for his age.

  He had not known until then that Charles Sprockman was a dab hand with the banjo, specialising in Western ballads. He mounted the dais with an engaging grin and began to strum ‘Oh, Susannah’, a ditty they all seemed to know.

  He withdrew to the passage, pausing a moment to listen to the rollicking chorus:

  Oh, Susannah!

  Don’t you cry for me,

  I’m going back to the Oregon

  With the banjo on my knee…

  His eyes pricked a little, standing there in the strong draught, and he gathered his gown about him and sought the solitude of the quad, finding that a sickle moon had come out from behind the belt of blue black clouds, and was riding high across Middlemoor. There was just enough light to make his way round past Outram’s and the fives court, then diagonally across the field to his compulsive anchorage, Algy’s thinking post.

  In the flare of a match he saw that it wanted ninety minutes to midnight when the year, surely the most momentous year in history, would be dead and done with, except for the history books. He was glad to see it go. It had brought a reprieve certainly, but at what he could never cease to regard as a prohibitive price, with a lot more owing, he wouldn’t wonder. But that was the way of things, even up here, where the setting never changed and the stream of life flowed on and on, over rapids and through occasional green pastures.