The moon clouded over momentarily and he waited, drawing on a cigarette, until it rode out again, clear and white above the indistinct blur of the planty.
Improbably, in this subdued light, it recalled the winter landscape of 1916–17 in Flanders when the future, as now, had seemed dismal and unpredictable. They wouldn’t invade now, he supposed, and that might mean they had missed the bus after all, but that, in itself, decided nothing. Sooner or later they would have to be invaded, thrown down and flattened, and how was this possible, with jackboots already planted from the Pyrenees to the Carpathians, from Narvik to Benghazi? It wasn’t, or not in the foreseeable future, and yet… could such an obscene tyranny endure indefinitely, with one offshore island holding out under a nonstop bombardment?
This time he looked back across the centuries for his sign, ranging eras as far distant as those of Alfred, Hereward the Wake and the bloody chaos of Stephen’s reign. Things must have seemed pretty hopeless then for those holding the short end of the stick, for the poor and landless, for what Masefield would call the man hemmed in by spears. But something gainful had emerged from it. Magna Carta; Simon de Montfort’s so-called Parliament; centralised government, and a rule of law under Edward I and later Henry VII. Nothing much, perhaps, or not until Cromwell and his successors won a constitution from their overlords, and city merchants held backsliding kings to ransom. It was always a long, pitiless haul, with any number of backward lurches, but finally, inch by inch, democracy had been dragged onward and upward, and he wondered, fitfully, who did most of the heaving when it came down to bedrock. It wasn’t the privileged and the wealthy, and it wasn’t the masses, thrusting upward from below, for almost all their efforts had been swiftly neutralised by reaction. If he was asked to name a class to which most of the credit was due it would be that section of the community he had once affected to despise, the petty bourgeoisie, and who were the petty bourgeoisie when you thought about it – thought about it really hard? They were the kind of Englishmen, Scotsmen and Welshmen who were neither rich nor poor, intellectual nor illiterate, well-endowed or down-and-out, the section who sent their sons here, to a place like Bamfylde, to acquire, through books, example and, above all, a mingling and sharing of ideas, a creed of common sense and tolerance. They were the end products of all the Briarleys, the Christophersons, the Hislops, the Winterbournes and that long-shanked, open-faced stripling, playing ‘Oh, Susannah’, in Big Hall at this very moment, himself the product of a few minutes’ exchange of affection between a rather gallant woman like Julia Sprockman, and a three-hundred-a-year schoolmaster, both in search of a momentary escape from loneliness.
The temperature was hovering a degree or two above freezing but he did not feel cold. He seldom did up here, for in peacetime the scatter of friendly lights lower down the slope had warmed his heart, a fire to go home to whenever he needed one. He had need of it now for suddenly, out here in the frosted silence, he felt not cold but frightened. The moonlight held on long enough for him to stride down to within ten yards of the fives court and then, just as it clouded over again, he saw Chris, muffled to the ears, move into the fleeting patch of light. She called, ‘Davy? Is that you, Davy?’ and, when he answered, ‘Anything wrong?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘just popped out to blow the cobwebs away,’ and sought her hand.
‘I told them you wouldn’t mind them staying up to see the New Year in. Is that all right?’
‘Yes, it’s fine. They’ll do it anyway, and we might as well join them. But how about some tea first?’
‘I’ll make some.’ Then, as they moved round the bulk of the new wing to the forecourt, ‘You’ll be glad to wave goodbye to this one, Davy. The next can only be for the better can’t it?’
‘Yes,’ he said, with certainty, ‘it’ll be that all right.’
He spun her round as she went up the two steps and kissed her mouth, finding her lips as warm and reassuring as her hand.
‘This won’t do at all, sir,’ she said, laughing. ‘Not in front of the children,’ and steered him into the hall, slamming the door before she reached for the light switch. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, offhandedly, ‘I saw to the blackout on the way through,’ but somewhere, probably in old Rigby’s kitchen, there was a window open for faintly, carried on the downdraught in that funnel of a passage, came the sound of the Sunsetters, singing to Buck’s accordion. He was leading them in an old community favourite, ‘Shenandoah’, and the sound had within it comfort and continuity.
3
It was inconceivable as well as unforgivable that he had completely forgotten his appointment with Earnshaw at eleven on New Year’s Day.
He had just popped down to the cottage to wish Alison a happy new year and was walking back when he spied Buck Suttram scudding across the rimed football pitch towards the field gate. Buck gestured urgently, and changed direction, arriving out of breath, and saying, ‘Someone waiting, sir – been waiting half an hour. Said he had an appointment. Mrs Powlett-Jones said I was to find you and tell you to hurry.’
He remembered then. Earnshaw was a twenty-four-year-old, whom he was interviewing as a possible replacement for Boyer, and he bent his steps to the forecourt where Chris was standing on the steps, looking a little fussed. ‘He seemed put out you weren’t here, Davy. Said the agency told him you fixed the appointment yourself.’
‘So I did,’ he said, ‘but it completely slipped my memory. I must be going senile,’ and he hurried into the study, Chris calling after him to say the visitor had been given coffee on arrival.
He had expected a very different kind of man. The agency had described him as keen, ex-service, and interested in games, so that he had pictured an extrovert like Irvine. The youngster sitting on the window-seat was small-boned, haggard and emaciated, as though he had walked here on short rations, and his blue suit looked, not soiled exactly, but threadbare, as though it had been pressed and cleaned for the interview. In spite of this, however, the unsmiling face that glanced up as he entered was at odds with Earnshaw’s general appearance. It was an intense face, with strong features that were emphasised, if anything, by a broad expanse of scar tissue, reaching from the right temple all the way down to the long jawline. The eyes were blue, deeply socketed, unwavering and a little challenging, as though the mind behind them was acclimatised to rebuffs. David said, shaking hands, ‘I’m most terribly sorry. I do apologise. I’ve been swamped in work this holiday and your appointment got buried under an avalanche of forms and correspondence. At least, that’s the only excuse I can offer. Please sit down. You’ve had coffee, I understand,’ and surprisingly the eyes smiled, softening the rather grim expression, and the small, taut body relaxed as Earnshaw said, ‘Mrs Powlett-Jones was very kind, Headmaster. She seemed to think you were on the premises somewhere. Please don’t apologise. I’m sure you’re busy.’
‘I oughtn’t to be too busy to remember an appointment with someone who has come all the way from town. You are a Londoner, I believe?’
‘No, but I’ve been based there since I got my ticket. I’m Lancastrian. Burnley.’
‘And ex-service. The infantry, wasn’t it?’
‘Ordnance Corps. I was invalided in early November. I’d only been in just over a year.’
It was the word ‘invalided’ that did the trick. He had a curious sensation then of looking at himself in a time mirror, a jittery twenty-one-year-old, fighting the battle of his life to stave off a fit of the shakes in this same room half a lifetime ago, with Algy Herries prowling about behind this same desk searching for a means to put him at ease. He said, ‘You got knocked about pretty badly, Earnshaw?’ and Earnshaw said, flatly, ‘A Stuka divebombed the lorry I was driving, south of Lille. I was sprayed with petrol. I don’t remember a damned thing about it until I came round on the Red Cross ferry. They were still running then. It was less than a week after the breakthrough. But I’m fit now. Or fit enough.’
It was very curious, the speed with which he assembled the bridge between t
hem, almost as though the agency had given him all the facts in advance and he had pondered them overnight. He said, ‘I was going to treat myself to something to keep the cold out. You’ll join me?’ and without waiting for an answer he rose and opened the door, calling to Rigby to bring two glasses, the whisky decanter and the siphon.
When he turned back Earnshaw was smiling. ‘You didn’t have to do that, Headmaster. I’m nervous right enough, but it’s nothing to do with this,’ and he raised his right hand to the scar. ‘I would have been nervous in any case. An inferiority complex, they’d call it, I imagine. The fact is, I’ve only read about places like this. I’d never visited one, much less worked in one.’
‘That puts us on a level footing. When I came here, straight from hospital in March, 1918, I thought of all schools like this as a cross between Eton and
Borstal. An upper-crust Borstal,’ and he was relieved to see Earnshaw’s smile widen, embracing the reluctant part of his face that a grafter, somewhere, probably thought of as the best of a bad job. It encouraged him to add, ‘As a matter of fact, you’ve got the edge on me. Your application says you had a year’s pupil teaching before the war. I’d never faced a class in my life.’
The news must have surprised Earnshaw for he blinked rapidly and began, ‘But surely…’ and then Rigby doddered in with the whisky and he subsided until the butler had gone and David was busy with the drinks. ‘You’re saying you worked for your degree after coming here?’
‘Years after. They were so short of manpower in 1918 they had to put up with it. I got an external degree. Not a very brilliant one, either.’
‘But Bamfylde is a big school. And quite well known, isn’t it?’
‘It’s big, but it’s always been second grade. Academically and socially, that is. Not in any other way.’
It served to banish the last trace of Earnshaw’s nervousness. He said, ‘That makes it a lot easier. I’d intended working for a degree anyway. There never was much chance of a varsity place. My father works in a mill when there’s work about, and my mother keeps a corner shop to help out. I got a scholarship in ‘thirty-seven but I couldn’t take it up. There was no way of making up the grant, so I took a course at a teachers’ training college and a year’s practical. I was going to complete the course when war broke out and would have qualified by now but I couldn’t have hoped for anything like this. Frankly I was amazed when the agency put me up. They must be pretty hard pressed.’
He took the whisky but didn’t sip it.
‘What attracted you to teaching in the first place?’ and Earnshaw replied, after a moment’s hesitation, ‘The subject itself. History. I could never get enough of it. I’ve hardly read anything but history since I was a kid.’
‘Were you going to specialise in any period?’
‘Eventually, or so I hoped. Military history. But I’m not so sure now. The real thing dulls the appetite, doesn’t it?’
‘No, you only think it does. Then you read and talk yourself to the point where you’re convinced you could win a war on your own if they gave you the chance and why not? We couldn’t make a worse botch of it than your lot or mine, could we?’
‘You won yours eventually.’
‘We don’t seem to have.’ Then, impulsively, ‘You were there when it happened. How does it look now?’
Earnshaw took his time answering. Then he said, with conviction, ‘A lot better than it looked then.’
‘Because of the Battle of Britain?’
‘Not entirely. Mainly for quite another reason. We’re on our own now. It’s up to us, all of us, not a gaggle of generals, who don’t seem to have learned much since your show. And not cluttered by Allies either. That always affords a better field of fire. You’re a history man, aren’t you, Headmaster?’ and when David nodded, ‘I keep making comparisons. The performances we put up against even bigger odds at places like Crecy and Agincourt. And later against Spain, in the sixteenth century. Allies slow us down, somehow. Politics keep coming into it and we lose unity, sense of purpose and direction. We’ll win all right. Handsomely, I’d say.’
He realised he had taken an immense liking to the boy – he could only think of him as someone a little senior to, say, Boyer about the time he had beguiled the Lower Fourth with his fit, or Winterbourne, when he appeared out of the storm to steer him down to that cave beside the torrent. There was real substance here, plus a quiet, deadly kind of confidence in himself and his world, and it had a tremendously bracing effect on the spirit. ‘We’ll win all right…’; he had heard it, or its equivalent, so often in the last few months, but the expression of confidence had never carried Earnshaw’s quiet conviction, a conviction based, he assumed, on experience rather than yesterday’s newspaper headlines. It was a tonic, too, at such a time, with so much confusion and rumour and propaganda lapping across the country.
He heard himself say, echoing old Algy Herries, ‘No need to go back if you don’t have to… we can put you up in the President’s room… we always keep a room for the Old Boys’ President, that’s his privilege… I can lend you some pyjamas and we’ll root out a toothbrush…’ an old, old record, playing a tune that was able to inject him with confidence of a kind he had never been able to find in this room, not even in his most tranquil days, when Armageddon was only a dire possibility.
He jumped up and called through to Chris, ‘Mr Earnshaw will be staying to lunch and dinner, Chris. Will you tell Rigby? He’s out front somewhere…’
And then, like the final touch of an artist’s brush completing the picture, the bell began to clang as Gibson, deputising for Killerton, the official bell-ringer in term time, summoned the Sunsetters to lunch, and they came clattering down from the library where they were having what Buck Suttram called ‘a jam session’. The scrape of their boots passing along the quad arcade reminded him of the touchline supporters who had witnessed Nicolson’s surprise victory in the 1918 house final. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Earnshaw’s surprised look and thought, ‘I daresay he’s wondering what the hell he has let himself in for but he’ll soon find out, and live to thank his stars maybe, as I did once, but had stopped doing lately…’
The President’s room was still on the top storey of the head’s house, above the old sanatorium, and he left Earnshaw there, telling him he would call up the stairwell when lunch was ready.
It was some time since he had been up here and he stopped on the landing to take in the south-eastern aspect of the moor, glittering under hoar frost as far as the copses climbing the western slopes above Bamfylde Bridge. It was a view he remembered from his very earliest days, the short end of the Lent term, 1918. It framed the sense of renewal and continuity Earnshaw had stimulated.
Almost everything that he had experienced over the last twenty-two years was compressed into the scene. The early runs, whipping in laggards like Dobson, Letherett and Driscoe; the coming of Beth and the twins; that tiny blur of white under Stone Cross that was Boyer’s cottage; state funerals of veterans like Bat Ferguson and Judy Cordwainer; the materialisation of Chris, with Ulrich Meyer in tow; the Sunday pilgrimages of a thousand gourmets to Ma Midden’s window for pies and pasties; and away to the left, where the smooth fold of the hillside narrowed to the goyle, that idyllic scene played by Blades and a woman who had brought him a son he could never acknowledge, save in his heart.
Peace, of a kind that had eluded him for sixteen dismal months, stole over him, ironing out the stresses of wartime turmoil, easing the smart of wounds caused by the sacrifice of boys like Briarley, Skidmore, Christopherson, Graves-Jones, Hislop, Churchill and little Keithley. The winter sun, red as a cider apple, set the plateau aglow, picking up the quartz in the scatter of boulders up there, full of muted promise somehow, that the new year would be different, more positive, signposting a road back to sanity and ultimate fulfilment.
He drank it all in thankfully, his thinning hair lifting in the strong draught that searched these landings at this time of year. Then, turning back t
o the stairhead, he stepped briskly down to ground level, remembering that sixteen days from now the unnatural quiet of the sprawl of buildings would be shattered by the clamour of his enormous family, drawn back to him from what he had come to think of, in his years up here, as the ends of the earth.
Reading Group Guide
* * *
1. After surviving three years in the trenches, David is shell-shocked and removed from the world, a mere husk of flesh and bone. What are some of the things that contribute to his rediscovery of identity and purpose? Are there other things that could have helped? What recalls a human being to life after so much pain?
2. David doesn’t immediately go home to visit his family when he returns from the front because he says he needs privacy. Was that the only reason? What would going home have done for his condition?
3. There are numerous moments of quiet contemplation and small moments of kindness that help define characters in the book. One such event is the stationmaster who called David ‘lad’ while he was on his way up to his interview at Bamfylde. Another was Algy’s story of the Bamfylde boys helping the baby on the train. What other stories can you think of that demonstrate the sense of community around Bamfylde?
4. What makes David such a good teacher? What most endears him to his students?
5. How would you describe the educational philosophy at Bamfylde? Is it typical or radical? Does it sound like a place you would like to send your children? Why or why not?
6. Herries describes David as a bridge between the older teachers and the students. Compare each generation, from Herries to David to Boyer, taking into account their historical place and influences. Is one any more naïve than the other? Is each successive generation smarter or better informed? What kind of progress do you see?
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